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ks08lv
|
How do sockets work?
|
If I have a fan plugged in to a socket and the socket’s switch is flipped on but the fan is not, is there still an electric current? And if the fan is switched on and put to a high speed would the electricity current be more than it would be on low speed?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gid5ahp"
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"text": [
"you could imagine it like a water pipe. the wall socket is a tap and so is the switch on the fan. if it’s a two speed fan then the tap on the fan can open to let a small flow of water through or a larger amount. no water actually flows anywhere unless both taps are open. the current is the amount of water flowing."
],
"score": [
3
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"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
] |
ks0a10
|
How is it that the wavelength that we see as red is so much longer than violet when violet has red in it?
|
My very poor understanding of color is this: If we line up colors we see according to their wavelength, we get the ROYGBV rainbow with reds having the longest wavelengths, violets having the shortest. Our sensitivity to light/color is determined by the cones and rods within the eye, with cones being considerably less sensitive to light itself, but has high visual clarity and the widest range of color vision. Rods, while more sensitive to light, cannot determine the full range of visible color as well as cones, with rods being close to unable to see red, despite still being sensitive to blue/violet. When mixing pigments, you can clearly see that combing red and blue makes violet. How is it that mixing pigments that reflect long wavelengths with pigments that reflect short wavelengths ends up creating a pigment that reflects wavelengths even shorter than blue, one of the initial mixing colors?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gid57ay",
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],
"text": [
"Violet is very much its own distinct colour. From a wavelength perspective, it isn't a mixture of red and blue, but the colour that comes between blue and invisible ultraviolet light. The colour has no red 'component', so to speak. It is merely that, due to our imprecise way of perceiving colour, we see violet to be a mixture of two other colours. Our eyes detect colour in a fashion similar to the way screens display it: we have three different types of cones. S-cones are most sensitive to blue light, M-cones are most sensitive to green light, and L-cones are most sensitive to red light. It isn't that red and blue form to make violet, it's that violet wavelengths just happens to trigger both the S [blue] and L [red] cones. Meaning, that when violet light hits our eyes, it looks bluish-red, because those are the cones it activates. If we had a wider range of cones each sensitive to a smaller range of wavelengths, then violet would look like an entirely new colour, because it would set off unique cones. Likewise, if you have a violet pigment, that *is* a mix of red and blue light. But, the red light activates the red cones and the blue light activates the blue cones, so... you still see an amalgam of blue and red. Ie, violet. The only difference is one is being caused by two cones being activated by two wavelengths and the other is one wavelength activating those same two cones. TL:DR: We have different types of cones that are sensitive to red, green, and blue. Red and blue mixtures will activate the red and blue cones, creating a bluish-red appearance. But, violet light just so happens to also activate these red and blue cones, meaning it also appears bluish-red - despite being a unique colour, electromagnetically speaking.",
"First thing to understand is that colored light and colored pigment don’t work the same way. As something of an oversimplification, light sources emit light of a given wavelength - whether it’s from the heat of a metal filament subjected to electric current, chemicals reacting with one another to generate light, or what have you. Plain white light is actually a fairly balanced mix of all visible wavelengths, we’re just not able to separate them by sight alone. Pigments, on the other hand *reflect* light of specific wavelengths - more to the point, pigments *absorb* a given range of wavelengths, which is also why a colored cloth looks very different in colored lighting. So when you mix that red and blue, it’s not that they create violet - a shorter wavelength - but rather that they absorb almost all the visible wavelengths of the spectrum, from red and up. In the same manner, say, green pigment (mix of blue and yellow) doesn’t emit green light, but absorbs the non-green wavelengths and reflects just the green."
],
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3
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[
"url"
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[
"url"
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ks0sq5
|
what is the difference between bat echolocation and dolphin echolocation?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gidfhj4",
"gid7x8a"
],
"text": [
"Bats fly. Dolphins swim. Now, I know that seems incredibly obvious, but you need to understand that sound moves differently in different \"mediums\" (air vs water). Therefore the mechanisms to make the noise and how to interpret the noise vary vastly.",
"Dolphins rely on a specific organ in place of their nose for echolocation and it can detect the swim bladder of fish with ease Bats rely on their echolocation for hunting insects but have issues discerning between prey or other flying creatures so they have the tendency to collide with each other echolocation travels better underwater than on land"
],
"score": [
11,
5
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks0w3t
|
How come we don't use carbon capture at the exhaust towers of power plants to directly capture co2 before it enters the atmosphere and put it back into greenhouses or store as rock?
|
Climeworks is already doing this passively but why not on power plant exhaust towers? Surely it makes sense, there is enough heat and power available to run the carbon capture devices and its been proven that we can store co2 as rock underground [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 ) Or be pumped as a gas into large greenhouses to be used by trees Wouldn't this reduce emissions by a lot or is there something I'm missing?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gid799e",
"gid7zud",
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],
"text": [
"Because it can't be done just anywhere and requires power, meaning it would probanly decrease the efficiency of a traditional power plant. It also needs water and the right kind of rock (basalt) to filter it through. This location was specifically chosen for this technology: \"Iceland is one of several places on Earth offering the ideal conditions for this process. Its volcanic origin makes the country one of the world’s most potent geothermal regions. The particularly high geothermal energy means that the Earth’s heat can be converted to electricity cost-effectively and virtually CO2 neutrally. Furthermore, the rock in Iceland has the ideal composition for storing large amounts of CO2.\"",
"Because a generic 600 MW coal power plant produces more then 340x the CO2 this captures. 340g CO2 per kWh from this source: [ URL_0 ]( URL_1 )",
"Capturing CO2 is quite expensive. Both to build the infrastructure required but more importantly it takes a lot of energy. The reason Climeworks is building their facilities on Iceland is because they have an excess of renewable power in the form of geothermal and hydroelectric power plants. If you build it at for example a gas power plant you would have to produce extra electricity to run the scrubbers which generates more CO2 to capture. Not quite as efficient as building renewable power plants. Another issue is that we do not have any good place to store the gas. If you use the captured CO2 in greenhouses to grow big trees then these trees will release the CO2 once they die and rots. We are researching the ability to store CO2 is old natural gas reservoirs. However the technology we have is designed to pump gas out of these reservoirs and not gas into them. There are also quite a lot of chemical and physical processes that might take place which we need to have control over. In addition to this the CO2 is about three times as much as the gas we used to make it. So you would need three reservoirs to fill the exhausts from just one of them."
],
"score": [
23,
5,
5
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"text_urls": [
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[
"https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/index\\_e.php",
"https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/index_e.php"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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ks12wc
|
Why is the moon so reflective?
|
It's just a dusty rock.
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gid7run",
"gid81td",
"gid84af",
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"text": [
"It’s not that reflective compared to other celestial bodies. It just looks that way because it’s close Check this out URL_0",
"Its not particularly reflective, only about 12% in fact. Snow and ice is close to 100% reflective. (Saturn's moon Enceladus, which is covered in ice and snow is 99%)",
"The Moon is not very reflective. Its color can most accurately be described as that of fresh asphalt. However when we see the Moon it is usually at night when the Moon is in bright sunshine. The contrasts are therefore quite big making it look very reflective. However if you see it during the day it is much fainter and very hard to see.",
"It's not that reflective. Scientists quantify \"reflectiveness\" with something called albedo, measured on a scale of 0 to 1. The moon has an albedo of about 12 to 14%. That's quite a bit less than every other planet and moon in our solar system except perhaps Mercury (depending how you measure it). It's more reflective than the ocean, but less reflective than typical Earth soil. The fact that the moon isn't that reflective really is testament to how bright the sun is."
],
"score": [
22,
11,
7,
3
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"text_urls": [
[
"https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/mobile/2015/08/06/why-is-the-moon-so-bright/"
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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ks1y1v
|
What is a ROM header?
|
When I patch my videogame ROMs, sometimes they talk about something like "header" or "headerless"... I just bruteforce it tbh, if one patch doesn't work I just use the other one so, what Is a header?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gidijjs"
],
"text": [
"So, in the computing world, a \"header\" is a block of data that comes before (at the **head** of) the actual desired data (being stored or transmitted) that basically provides information either necessary for the desired data (payload) to run, or information regarding the properties of the payload. It is a **supplement** to the payload. I found [this]( URL_0 ) comment on /r/nes explaining what a header precisely is in regards to your question. Basically, the header tells the emulator the size of the ROM, the region the game is in, what console it's for etc. So when a patch doesn't work because it is missing a header, it's because the emulator doesn't know the details about the ROM needed to run the game. I.e. the emulator saying: *Is this a NES game? GameCube? Wii? How big is it? I don't know, so I cant run it*"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/nes/comments/6jcimf/what_the_difference_between_header_and_no_header/djdpp99/"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ks25k8
|
What's that feeling when you're for example laying in bed at night and suddenly it feels as if you're going extremely fast, but in your head?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gidlpgd",
"gidgcpz"
],
"text": [
"It could potentially be vertigo? Sometimes I experienced a feeling where I'd like down in bed but it would feel like only my head/mind is moving, not the rest of my body. Could be to do with your vestibular system (that's responsible for balance).",
"[Hypnic jerk]( URL_0 ), perhaps? > A hypnic jerk [...] is a brief and sudden involuntary contraction of the muscles of the body which occurs when a person is beginning to fall asleep, often causing the person to jump and awaken suddenly for a moment. [...] > Physically, hypnic jerks resemble the \"jump\" experienced by a person when startled, sometimes accompanied by a falling sensation. Hypnic jerks are associated with a rapid heartbeat, quickened breathing, sweat, and sometimes \"a peculiar sensory feeling of 'shock' or 'falling into the void'\"."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnic_jerk"
]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks2cpy
|
25th Amendment
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gidhd9e",
"gidihat",
"gidht42"
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"text": [
"The Vice President and at least 8 of the 15 cabinet members must declare in writing to congress that the president is unable to fulfill his duties. The VP takes over as president at that time. Congress then must meet within 48 hours to consider the declaration, and vote on it within 21 days. If 2/3 of each house vote yes, the removed president stays removed. Otherwise he is reinstated.",
"First of all a disclaimer: I'm not a specialist in american law, I'm a lawyer in Brazil, and our legal systems are really different, so take my text with a grain of salt. The 25th amendment regulates how should the president of the United States be replaced when he is incapable or dead. It is divided in four sections: The first explains that, if he dies during his term, the vice president will be elevated to president. The second section describes that, if there's no vice president, for any reason, the president eill point a replacement, that needs to be approved by voth houses of congress. Third section talks about when the president sends a written declaration stating that he is in no condition of keeping up with his duties, situation where the vice president will become acting president, until the president says otherwise and returns to office Fourth section describes how should the powers be taken away from the president and given to his vice president, when the president is unable to continue and doesn't/can't send his written declarations as states in section 3. I hope I am correct in my assessment. If anyone knows better, feel free to correct me.",
"The 25th Amendment deals with how to handle a situation where the President or Vice President can no longer fullfill their role (who takes over, how that works, etc.). This ensures (in theory) a clean and orderly transfer of power if a President or VP quits, is incapacitated, dies, etc. and prevents a lot of finger pointing and yelling about who's in charge. It's most commonly used when a president is going into surgery and won't be able to discharge the duties of President while under anesthesia. In the current context, the 25th Amendment can \\*theoretically\\* be used by the VP and cabinet to strip power from the President. This has never actually happened (as of this writing)."
],
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5,
3
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
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|
ks2sws
|
what's on the outside of the leg that makes EpiPens more effective?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gidjn2y"
],
"text": [
"There's a big chunk of muscle there which is hard to miss. Administering epinephrine to muscle provides faster action that administering it subcutaneously (just anywhere under the skin), and an intravenous injection (directly into a vein) is hard to do for untrained personnel in a medical emergency."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks2ys4
|
Why does pain “throb” like it’s a living thing? Is it because of our blood being pumped?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gidkpyv"
],
"text": [
"When you receive an injury your blood flows faster toward the site to help with recovery. This is also combined with a much more sensitive sensation as nerves are racing to signal that you are hurt and it makes you more aware of your pulse."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks30s3
|
How did scientists prove that entangled particle show the same properties even when light-years away from eachother? How can they detect the spin of a particle with such precision across insane distances. Or is it all theoretical proof?
|
And can they even actually measure the instantaneous change in spin in particles in the same room?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gidosrx",
"gie5q78"
],
"text": [
"So believe it or not, quantum entanglement isn't a far-off mystery -- it's actually really well accounted for, both theoretically and experimentally. So well, in fact, that it already served as the *solid basic foundation* of the experimental methods that led to the [2008 Nobel Prize]( URL_0 ). That's an indication of how well supported entanglement already is. Now, as for the other part of the question: entanglement is *not* a robust persistent connection between particles. It's only a correlation that shows up in the statistics of correlated state variables which takes us slightly beyond ELI5. But the main point is this: as soon as one of the entangled particles experiences a particle interaction that affects the correlated state, that entanglement is lost. So I mean we can surely *imagine* a state-entangled particle traveling for a light year before interacting. But in the end, it makes no difference. It can be mathematically proved that there's no physical information or physical transport through entanglement. Only statistics of the correlated state.",
"Entanglement is really simple, it's just the quantum physics around it that's weird. If you have two billiard balls that collide, then one will bounce off in the other direction, if you close your eyes at the moment of collision, and hear them hit, but don't see how, you can still guess that they'll have a certain relationship, going off in different ways, because of how billiard balls hit. I use that as an example because all the normal physical laws we know, like conservation of momentum, energy, newton's laws etc. we know these things are still true for quantum systems, (there's a few cheats, but they're small scale or for small amounts of time, and the end result is the same). So they're connected because they follow the same physical laws we are familiar with. The only thing that makes this weird is the stubborn way that quantum systems sometimes refuse to answer questions, \"I'm going over there\" \"ok but where are you\" \"I could be anywhere in this region\" \"that doesn't help me\" when quantum systems avoid having set values for certain things, they still nevertheless follow the normal rules of physics. So if an atom emits an electron in a particular direction, and it's spherically symmetric, so the electron could basically go in any direction, then the system can for a while avoid having an answer to which way that electron actually went, but you know that the recoil of emitting it moved the atom in the other direction. So entanglement is another way of saying that those ways that quantum physics avoids answering questions and seems to be random, still don't stop it following certain logical rules. If particles collide, they still bounce off one another, even if you don't know exactly which way they went, and when you do the statistics, you'll always find that they were correlated as you'd expect, if one goes one way, the other goes the other. In a way, this has to be true, because without it, when we zoomed out from the quantum scale, everything would be random, and we would never have been able to work out the rules for collisions in the first place. Breaking entanglement is when you make it not really matter what one system was up to, like both balls hitting a load of other balls along the way so that the particular details of all the collisions they did no longer matter, or holding the atom in place with lasers so that it has something to push off when it sends the electron away. Once you make their shared history together no longer matter, then there's no entanglement. So the real quantum mystery is not entanglement but the ways that quantum systems can avoid answering questions, and sometimes have to avoid answering those questions to be able to answer others."
],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ks35kf
|
Do mirrors make our eyes focus further away?
|
The 20/20/20 rule can help reduce stress on your eyes when looking at screens: every twenty minutes, look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds. This is supposed to help keep the eyes from being overly injured from staring at a close screen. However, if I look in a mirror that’s 5 feet away and at the wall 10 feet behind me, would that count as looking twenty feet away? Would me eyes be focusing the equivalent of twenty feet, or would that only really be five feet?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gidpv0j",
"gidq3yl"
],
"text": [
"Your eyes are focussing on the virtual image which is 15 feet beyond the mirror, so yes you are correct. I’d suggest physically moving though, even if that just means turning your head. That will cause you to adjust your posture etc.",
"Credit to Warrior4894 \"When you look through a mirror, your eyes are not focused on the surface of the mirror, rather they are focused at a distance \"in\" the mirror.\" Here's a link to the original post where it is explained in more depth URL_0"
],
"score": [
12,
4
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"text_urls": [
[],
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5fs37c/eli5_i_am_shortsighted_if_i_look_in_a_mirror/"
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ks3b3o
|
How does surface tension kill you when you jump off a bridge--why can't you just dive like at the Olympics?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gidnuv8",
"gidq1r6",
"gidycxq",
"gidnayy"
],
"text": [
"Water has density and inertia, you have to move it out of the way to go into it. It doesn't compress at all. The faster you are moving when you start to do this, the more it resists, to a degree. Olympic divers dive from a low enough height to avoid injury. You can look on youtube, there's a guy who did the world high dive thing a while back, like 200 feet or something. He had bubblers in the landing area to lower the density of the water and to put some air in that would compress a bit and cushion the landing a bit. He landed right at the edge of the bubble area, and because of that got injured, I wanna say a hip dislocation or a knee thing, or both.",
"As mentioned by /u/twohedwlf, it is not surface tension, it is water inertia. Secondly, it is simply about height. Olympic diving platform is about 10 meters high. URL_0 The world record for high diving (non-Olympic sport) is 59 meters URL_1 Golden gate bridge, where lots of people jump for suicide has is 67 meters from water at high tide, and even higher at low tide. So the simple answer is, too tall.",
"Ever put your hand in front of a strong water hose? Notice how you have to push against it to keep your hand there? It's a really small stream of water pushing against your hand. Now make that stream of water the size of your whole body going the same speed. It will push you out of the way. Now instead of a large stream of water, you are falling with gravity and now you cant be pushed out of the way. Splat",
"It doesn't. Surface tension is a very weak force, it has no significant effect when hitting water at the velocity you would in this \"Jumping off a bridge\" scenario. What will kill you is water's inertia. It has a lot of mass and if you hit it fast it takes a lot of force to quickly move it out of your way quickly."
],
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50,
20,
11,
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"text_urls": [
[],
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_(sport)#Governance",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_diving#World_record_high_dives"
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[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks3i5a
|
Why do medical professionals say not to use Aspirin as a pain killer? What is better to use?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gidonil",
"gidor8o"
],
"text": [
"I know there are some painkillers that are bad for different parts of your body when you use them often. Like Tylenol *destroys* your liver with consistent use. Aspirin specifically is also a blood thinner. I know people chew aspirin up when they think they’re having a heart attack. Edit: My family uses Ibuprofen and advil.",
"Aspirine is one of the WHO essential medications and is approved for mild to medium pain treatment, as fever reducer, blood thinner etc. If medical professionals didn’t approve it for that use it wouldn’t be marketed as such. But, in certain cases, just like with any other drug, there risks and could be reasons to use other, better indicated drugs - sensitivity to salicylic acid, ulcers or other conditions that can increase the risk of bleeding, children under 12 in cases of fever etc."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks43yd
|
Why (or why not) do the stars we see at night change through the seasons?
|
First I'd like to say that my real question is do we see the same stars in any given day of the year? Okay, so forgive me for my ignorance, but I have observed that I don't see the same set of stars throughout the year. For example, I can only see Orion (hourglass) during the Ber months and it is the brightest during December. And as per my common sense, the Earth rotates the Sun, so we are facing different sides of the Universe throughout the year. And just now, I found out that the whole solar system rotates the center of the galaxy. Man I didn't know galactic years exist! That's like the first amazing thing I learned this 2021. With this information, surely we are seeing different set of stars throughout the year...right? So anyway, I'm asking this question because a few years back, I had a brief argument with my senior at work while doing a little bit of stargazing during our fieldwork. He said that we see the same set of stars everyday, they don't change. And I quickly said, no we don't. But he was pretty sure of his claims so I stopped arguing. So, can you guys enlighten me on this matter? Thank you.
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gidxwxv"
],
"text": [
"> With this information, surely we are seeing different set of stars throughout the year...right? Yes, this is correct. As you rightly point out, the earth orbits around the Sun; as it does, our position relative to the (relatively) unmoving stars changes, and we see different collections of them at night, which give rise to the constellations. As an example, if you were to look at a chart of the solar system, and find Earth's position on March 21st (the spring equinox) and draw a line from there through the Sun, you'd land (roughly) in Pisces. This means that, at that time, you can't see Pisces at night, because it's \"hidden behind the Sun\" during the day."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ks4vjj
|
Is there a difference between liver damage caused by bad food and liver damage caused by medication such as painkillers?
|
Could a healthy diet mitigate or nullify liver damage in a human who is taking medication which damages their liver?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gie15h9"
],
"text": [
"Yes and no. Liver damage from bad food is called NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease). It means your liver is full of fat and fat is bad. When it’s full of fat your liver can get damaged and eventually scar. A scarred liver works poorly so it works harder which causes more scars. It’s similar with drugs and alcohol except the liver doesn’t necessarily get fatty, it just gets damaged and when eventually scarred."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ks4zm1
|
why copying a software project is called forking?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gie032w"
],
"text": [
"Think of it as a \"fork in the road.\" When you make a copy, you can make changes that aren't in the original. Anyone else that makes a copy can do the same, so mapping out where each copy came from creates something like a family tree. You could call it \"branching\" instead of forking, but branching already has a meaning in programming, so we call it forking to avoid confusion."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks5sk4
|
How come forward motion helps keep you upright on a bicycle?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giea3fy",
"gie4pvp",
"gieam6b",
"gieaf0d",
"giebr2x"
],
"text": [
"The gyroscope explanation is not what really keeps you upright on a bicycle. It certainly can play a part, but it is not THE reason. When you ride a bike you are steering the front wheel in order to keep upright. If you are falling to the left, you steer left to put the bike back underneath you. Gyroscopic precession is not required. You need to be moving forward for the steering to have any effect. An example is those small Razor type scooters. They have very tiny wheels with virtually no gyroscopic force - yet you can ride them as long as you are moving forward in order to steer the front wheel and keep it underneath the rider.",
"A rotating wheel acts like a gyroscope; it has a property called *rigidity in space* that makes it resist any attempt to make it turn around another axis. The faster the wheels are turning, the stronger this effect is. When the bike is stationary, this effect goes away and we feel how tippy a bike can be. You can experience this pretty directly if you take a wheel off a bike, and hold it out in front of you with one hand on either end of the axle. Get somebody to give the wheel a spin, then try to give the wheel a yaw or a roll. You'll feel how hard the wheel fights you. That's rigidity in space, aka gyroscopic effect. It's one of the ways momentum manifests itself in a spinning object.",
"Gyroscopic stability will stabilize a bike at high speeds. But even little kids can balance a bike that's baaaaarely crawling forward with no measurable gyroscopic effect. Steering is the key to balancing at low speeds. It turns out that a bike's stability involves very clever geometry of the bike construction: the positioning of the wheel axis and steering axis. The front wheel will tend to *steer toward the direction of tipping*, to restore the center of gravity into a balanced position, so that even uncoordinated kids can stay up without much skill. Come to a total stop, though, and the steering effect disappears. Kids flop over.",
"Angle of the front-wheel forks. As you start to fall over one way or the other the angle of the forks cause the bike to steer in the direction you are falling causing the bike to stand up straighter. This is why you can ride no hands and still steer by leaning into corners.",
"The main reason is that you steer to stay upright, making minor adjustments as you go, to keep the bike below you. Obviously you can't do that when you are stationary. The gyroscopic effect helps a bit, by slowing down how fast you tip over, but it doesn't help bring the bike back upright once it has tipped a bit. You correct the angle of the bike by steering it back under your centre of gravity. The design of the fork helps, especially when you ride \"no-hands\", because you can tilt the bike with your hips and that will cause the wheel to steer towards the side you are tilting towards. So if you feel like you are starting to tip, you lean the bike, and the wheel turns to correct the lean."
],
"score": [
20,
15,
9,
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks6ap8
|
if you’re in a really dark room, why can you see the outline of objects better from the corner of your eye as opposed to looking directly at them?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gie7mcu",
"gie8au4"
],
"text": [
"Your low light receptors are more dense outside your central vision (central is very dense in color receptors). When you look away you put the image on part of your retina with better dark vision.",
"Your eyes have 2 kinds of receptors, cones and rods. Cones allow you to see in color, while Rods in black and white. Rods work better than Cones in low light, which is why things in the dark appear more grey scale than in color. The concentration of rods is also higher on the outer edge of your eye while cones are more common in the center. This why your peripheral vision sometimes picks up things your forward vision doesn't in the dark."
],
"score": [
8,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks73nt
|
In movies, when a character gets shot, why does the bullet need to be removed?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giedavb",
"gief969",
"giehav8"
],
"text": [
"In real life-it often doesn’t. Depending on location, like if it’s lodged near a joint or somewhere obvious like your eye- a Dr. would prefer to leave it rather than risk surgery. Of course there are a lot of different circumstances to consider, whether the bullet ricocheted or lodged pieces of your clothing inside your tissue along with it. But overall, there are people walking around with bullets inside them all over the world and they are just fine.",
"In movies, it gives the show a means to highlight the doctor character (maybe a romantic interest) or to show how heroic the person is and how they can fight through injuries and pain. In real life, not the case. The first thing is typically to assess and staunch bleeding which results in death fairly quickly if not done. Most people will not undergo field surgery for removing the bullet, it is dangerous, will cause even more damage and prone to infection etc etc. Unless it is really trivial, no one will be running and fighting very much after being shot. Muscles and organs take a long time to heal and running around almost certainly leads to a quick death due to bleeding out. Plus, if one loses a lot of blood, unconsciousness and lack of ability to think very clearly is almost certain.",
"Plot device to add more drama. Is a common TV trope that doesn't happens often on real life. ([ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ))"
],
"score": [
14,
9,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeHaveToGetTheBulletOut"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks7cka
|
What is shitposting and why do young people find it funny?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giefta8"
],
"text": [
"I'm 42 and I can't understand why someone my age wouldn't understand it. It's just satire, irony and irreverent humour. It's something we grew up with as kids. Spitting Image, Monty Python, The Young Ones, Whoops Apocalypse!, Brass Eye, Have I got News For You, Monkey Dust, Screenwipe, South Park, Viz, Oink! etc as well as dozens of famous comedians such as Rik Mayall, George Carlin, Rowan Atkinson, Bill Hicks, Andy Kaufman, David Baddiel, Doug Stanhope, Harry Enfield, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce etc. Go back a bit more and you can see the long history of political cartoons in newspapers, Shakespeare, Chaucer and so on. It isn't even modern, it's actually very old. It's just the method of delivery that has changed."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks844n
|
How can i create my own ".com"?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giejcj3"
],
"text": [
"There's too much for me to explain. Here's a page that should tell you what you need to know. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.straightdope.com/21342911/in-internet-addresses-what-do-com-org-net-etc-mean-and-who-assigns-them"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks986h
|
for cases of tourettes that manifest in cursing, why and how does the brain target the most obscene words, as opposed to just spouting out any random word?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gieqetj",
"gieqljd"
],
"text": [
"I don't believe there is a definite answer, but the brain does treat obscene words differently to regular language. For example, yelling obscene words when hurt is a universal phenomenon because it actually reduces pain more than yelling regular, acceptable words. Presumably, it is more about the catharsis of saying something you're usually unable to say than the word itself.",
"I don't have this - I've just read about it. They say it's a problem with inhibition in the 'emotion centre', the amygdala. It's like they have a buildup of emotion, or aggression, and the only way to let it out is to say something emotionally charged that will either express some anger/shock, or make people around them feel anger/shock. So in that state, saying 'saltine crackers' won't do anything because those words don't carry any emotion. Swearing, which lots of people do almost involuntarily when they're mad, gives kind of a sense of release. Screaming racial slurs, especially if a bunch of people hear it and get startled and shocked, does the same thing. So they're in a terrible situation where the things they most want to say are the things that will horrify and piss off other people the most."
],
"score": [
17,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks992v
|
what is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy?
|
what type of patient is the treatment suitable for and how does it work?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giepk8q"
],
"text": [
"Have a counselor that did this with me. Basically, when you’re in a certain stage of sleep, your eyes are making rapid movements, and your brain is processing information. EMDR therapy mimics this. When you go through trauma and haven’t processed it correctly, EMDR can help. I was told to think of a memory that stood out to me as traumatizing and let my brain free associate from there. So whatever memory I thought about, I’d just let my mind wander while my therapist moved her fingers and my eyes would follow. Then she’d stop and ask me on which thought I ended up. Then she’d start again. It’s supposed to help your brain process through that traumatic event so that the event itself doesn’t necessarily bother you anymore."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ks9frk
|
Why cant our body repair eyesight?
|
when we get a bruise or break a bone the body will naturally repair the damage. so why wont our body just naturaly repair eyesight when it gets worse?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giffomw",
"gierjal",
"gifslbj",
"gige8dj"
],
"text": [
"Bad eyesight most often comes because the eye is not in perfect geometrical shape - even if all the cells are healthy and happy you still can see badly - because your eyeballs are in \"squished\" shape. and body cant really correct the shape of it. for example when you break a bone, you need something external to keep the broken parts aligned to heal properly",
"when we get a bruise or other injury the body does it's best to naturally repair the damage. but it's not perfect. the older we get the less perfect the fix is. when it comes to eyesight even though old or bad tissue that occurs around old age - is being replaced - it's being replaced with something that's less than perfect. And ofcourse the eye needs to be very close to perfect inorder to see properly.",
"This was answered a while ago here: [ URL_0 ]( URL_1 ) Basically, most common occurences of loss of eyesight aren't due to any damage that can be repaired by our bodies. It usually boils down to mishaped eyes, deteriorated lens in the eye, or, more severly, unrepairable nerve damage. Non of which your body can repair like a cut or bruise. However if the eye is phycially damaged it can heal itself like any other wound",
"Can anyone tell me if keratoconus, a rare stigmatism has any new advancements to help it. I was told 5yrs ago by a leading ophthalmologist that my only option would be a corneal transplant, or continue wearing hard lenses for life. Honestly, at this point I'm considering the transplant because I hate the hard lenses. But I'm also a little nervous because theres a 20% failure rate. Anyone know anything about this. Willing to travel anywhere in the world if it gives me perfect vision again"
],
"score": [
62,
14,
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qsq8w/eli5\\_why\\_cant\\_our\\_body\\_heal\\_our\\_eyesight/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qsq8w/eli5_why_cant_our_body_heal_our_eyesight/"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ks9kv4
|
Why when we look at or say a particular word too much in a short amount of time do we think it “looks” or “sounds” wrong or has no meaning?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gier370",
"gier2av"
],
"text": [
"A cognitive phenomenon called semantic satiation causes this. Basically what we think happens is that in the brain, there are specific patterns of neutron activity linked to recognising the meanings of words. If you repeat the word over and over (or, interestingly, read the word over and over) the brain starts seeing the constant reaction of this same pattern over and over again as strange, and 'turns it down' so to speak. The brain is good at this, it doesn't want your cognitive processes to get 'hung up' on a certain pattern or stimulus like a computer with a frozen program, so it will naturally turn them down if they are repeated. The result is that with the pattern that recognises meaning temporarily suppressed you start hearing/reading the sound rather than the meaning.",
"This phenomenon is called 'semantic satiation.' As far as we can tell, this happens because of an inhibitive effect which happens in our brain cells associated with language, when they fire repeatedly and rapidly. It's almost like the cells responsible for connecting words to meanings, get tired out with repeated use and become more reluctant to fire again until they've had some time to rest."
],
"score": [
85,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ks9rl2
|
how does the tinted car mirror work when you fold it at a different angle
|
As title explains, some car mirrors can fold down a tiny bit giving you a more dimm or tinted perspective, how does this work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gietzfa",
"gieu836"
],
"text": [
"Here’s what my driver’s ed teacher told us.... When the mirror is angled normally, the light seen by the driver is coming from the mirror’s silver backing. At the same time, a tiny amount of light is also reflecting off of the front face of the glass but at a different enough angle so that this light hits either the chest or the ceiling. When the mirror is angled away from normal, the light coming from the silver backing is now hitting the chest or ceiling, and the tiny amount of light coming from the front face of the glass is now hitting the drivers eyes. The front glass’s light is only about 1/20th the power of the silver backing’s light.",
"There are two reflective surfaces. The surface of the glass (glare), and the mirrored surface on the other side of the glass. The glass is wedge-shaped, so if one of these surfaces reflects out the back of the car, the other either reflects the roof or the back seat. During normal driving, you have it angled so that the fully mirrored side of the glass reflects out of the back of the car. This gives you full visibility out the back, with a very dim image of the car's back seat overlaid on top. If the light hits just right, you can see this image. When you flip the mirror, it is probably dark outside, and even darker *inside* the car. Even if the image from the 'stronger' mirrored surface is much stronger, it is still very dim because the roof of the car is very dark. However, the glare from the glass produces a sufficient image."
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ks9uwf
|
How can a phone/instrument make various voltages 'come out'?
|
If I play a tone on my phone and measure the output with an oscilloscope, I can see a voltage signal going up and down. But how does it make more or less voltage 'come out', what has really changed? Thanks :)
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gietzmq"
],
"text": [
"You may be asking two different questions. In a phone's case, the voltage is produced from a saved file. For something like an electric guitar, the voltage is produced more organically. For the phone, you're asking about a DAC. A device which turns a digital signal into an analog one. A DAC converts some combination of binary signals into a single voltage, or even unary signals. This would probably require their own ELI5 if you wanted to understand how a DAC works. You can think of it like a bunch of switches inside of the machine opening or closing, adjusting the voltage at the output. As for something like an electric guitar, the changing voltage is generated by an actual moving thing. In the guitar, it is the strings next to the pickup. As they move, they produce voltages which oscillate. In a theramin, there is an electrical 'vibration' wherein electrons basically bounce from side to side. This produces an oscillating voltage."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ks9zjv
|
wth just happened in the US
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giesaco",
"giesyxx",
"giestjm"
],
"text": [
"Today (oops - yesterday, now) was the day the House of Representatives and Senate were supposed to finalize the election in favor of Biden/Harris. Supporters of Donald Trump didn't want that to happen so they stormed the Capitol building and disrupted the proceedings. One demonstrator was shot and killed, and three others died from 'medical emergencies', which I would guess were heart attacks or asthma attacks brought on by tear gas, but they haven't said for sure. After order was restored, they finalized the election anyway.",
"Racists are sad they didn’t get their way, so they tried to stage a coup but really it was just a dumb photo op and opportunity to flex their white privilege while making our capitol look like a joke.",
"In the most studiously neutral manner I can muster to answer the question Our president has been contesting the results of the November elections, becoming increasingly strident about it in the lead up to the congressional certification of the election results. Despite allegations he and his campaign have made of fraud, 60+ court cases, including one resolved yesterday, found no merit in the allegations. This is normally a very pro-forma process, our congress only gets a say when no candidates obtains the required number of electoral votes. This morning, the president held a rally of supporters in Washington as part of his last ditch efforts to contest the election, and following the end of that rally, many went on to protest outside the capitol building. In the course of this protest, things became agitated as the congress began officially certifying the vote (done state by state) and the protesters overran the barricades and/or were allowed past them and broke into the capitol building itself, forcing a delay, the evacuation of Congress to elsewhere, and for incidents of violence and looting resulting in (at present) 4 killed."
],
"score": [
11,
10,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksa0ta
|
why Japan become one of the two main centres of the video game industry.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gieunv9"
],
"text": [
"It has a lot to do with why they also became a major technology power - a.k.a. the Postwar Economic Miracle. During the post-WWII years, Japan received heavy western investment, especially from the US. Combined with Japan not being involved in major conflicts directly and clothe ability for large businesses to take off and maintain stable directions, Japan was able to turn around quickly and develop new technology for home use. Further, the US was directly involved in this rebuilding, so many ideas were shared between the two. In fact, Sega, aka Service Games, created one of the first arcade games under American leadership. Because of the ability to develop consumer technology so quickly without war interfering and this exchange of ideas with other major video game producer, Japan was able to develop a video game industry that outpaced most other nations, save perhaps the US."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksa3n8
|
Where do trees get their strength to lift sidewalks and break concrete?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gietxru"
],
"text": [
"They don't really apply strenght in the way a human or animal would (muscels) - instead tiny roots grow into existing cracks - and then by taking in water slightly swell. Then it is a long cycle of growing and swelling - but the preassure build up this way is massive. & #x200B; The very same princible was used for millenia in quarries: you push a piece of dry wood into a crack in the stone (existing or made with hammer and chinsel) and then pour water on it. After a while the preassure of the swelling wood will crack the stone."
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksa8cv
|
If i scramble a 3x3 rubiks cube 10 times, will they all be the same difficulty?
|
Lets say i scramble it and then flip it around so im not just spinning the same place, will it be the same difficulty every time or are there harder scrambles in some way?
|
Mathematics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gietr6z"
],
"text": [
"If a move consists of rotating one slice, and you can rotate it 90, 180 or 270 degrees, then I think there are...27 possible moves? x1, x2, x3, y1, y2, y3, z1, z2 and z3, and three amounts of rotation for each. So a dumb estimate would be that there are 27^(10) move combinations you could apply. The catch is that many of these are equivalent, or could cancel out. Turning a slice 90 degrees, and then turning it 270 more degrees (or -90 degrees) results in no change to the cube state. And there are other combinations, like turning the middle slice 90 right and then the bottom slice 90 right is equivalent to just turning the top slice 90 left. So if you applied 10 random moves, in some cases you might get a bunch of moves that cancel each other, and that could result in a cube that's closer to solved. It may not be *obvious* that it's closer to solved, unless you have a lot of experience, but definitely some random scrambles would seem to do more than others."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksabwg
|
What are feelings and how are they able to physically affect us?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gieueam",
"gif8miz"
],
"text": [
"Your brain is a predictive simulation machine. When you see something going on it will predict what will happen next instead of waiting for stimulation and then responding. It still responds to stimulation, just not as reliant on it as we think. When you feel something like anxiety or anger, that’s your brain comparing a lot of past situations and predicting that this feeling is beneficial for the moment. I can’t accurately say more so I’ll suggest a book called How Emotions are Made by Lisa Barret.",
"Feelings are what kept us alive. They're basically there to give you information about situations that are good or bad for you (they were made for a different life so sometimes they may missfire but not as much as people think). You get rewarded when you eat and punished when you attack a member of your group. Emotions basically tell your body what to do, if you're scared, blood goes from vital organs to legs, so you can run away for example. They do that by triggering our nervous system through neurotransmitters (dopamine, seratonin...). Think of them as system settings. They give our lives meaning and keep us alive."
],
"score": [
7,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksagcq
|
When labels for poisonous substances state “if swallowed, do not induce vomiting”, why is that?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gieudvs",
"giex48m",
"gif96xv"
],
"text": [
"Those substances are corrosive. They burn your throat on the way down, and if you vomit they'll burn you again on the way up. That's extra-serious because chemical burns can make your throat lining swell up, and cut off your breathing. (Secondarily, I think vomiting with burns in your throat would hurt like a bastard.) Your stomach has a corrosion-resistant lining to protect it from your stomach acid, so *probably* your stomach can tolerate the material while they get you to a hospital. Then they'll either suction the stuff out through a tube, so it doesn't touch your throat again, or they'll give you something to neutralize it.",
"If a substance will burn your mouth and esophagus going down it will going up. Inducing vomiting means risk of additional burning to throat and mouth. Also, there is a chance to aspirate (having poison/vomit) go down the wrong tube into the lungs causing worse damage. Usually a tube will be inserted in the throat and activated charcoal will be placed down that tube to neutralize and absorb the poison substance.",
"In general, it's been found that vomiting doesn't help much after ingesting poison. This is why it's hard to find ipecac on the market anymore (the OTC stuff that induced vomiting). They prefer activated charcoal to absorb the poison even when it's something like an acetaminophen overdose."
],
"score": [
258,
39,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksah5s
|
Why does water taste different at different temperatures?
|
Why does the same glass of water that was refreshing when I poured it taste different once it comes to room temp?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gifgp3t"
],
"text": [
"You have taste buds for water itself, as well as for the other stuff that is in water, like salts, and acids (the linked answer mentions CO2, which when dissolved forms an acid, although at really low amounts in non-carbonated water). Also, as with everything else, sense of smell plays a big part in how things taste. The warmer the water, the faster the molecules in it are moving. Which means more likely to hit your taste buds and odor receptors, giving it a different taste than colder water"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksaybl
|
How did technology grow so fast only in the last 200 years? And especially enormously in the last 40 years? Did humans become more intelligent?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giewxic",
"gieyrou",
"giexs5c",
"giexamf",
"giewowr",
"giex44e",
"giey3ca",
"gif7sfq",
"giexa26",
"gif44f8",
"gifxowp",
"gifwr8b"
],
"text": [
"Science builds upon itself. The scientific method itself is fairly recent, once we had a framework for using empirical data to create theories which we then test against more data we were able to get a much better understanding of the world. There were also some major breakthroughs which really let technology take off, Maxwells equations and the theory of electromagnetism allowing us to generate and use electricity was a major innovation. After that the development of quantum mechanics lead to most of our most advanced technologies today by allowing us to create nanoscale transistors which are the technology behind computers.",
"People didn't become more intelligent, they became better connected and simply greater in numbers. In the old days before mass communication or anything, if somebody made a minor improvement to something in some art of the world, like a different way to make pottery or tools or domesticated crops, it would take generations for that improvement to filter though all the way to the other side of the world. If then somebody on the far side of the connected world makes an improvement based on that improvement it will take a long time for that to filter all the way back to the origin. When during the enlightenment people started sending letters back and forth and were able to build on each others ideas with only a few weeks of delay despite being in different parts of Europe that accelerated things quite a lot. Today people can communicated in real time with email and phone and publishing things on the net. Furthermore there are a lot more people around today. so thanks to modern technology the number of people who work on anything and the speed at which they can improve on each other ideas is greatly improved. If one of the things they work on is faster and better collaboration technologies this means exponential growth for the overall speed of progress.",
"2 words: Exponential growth. And the beauty of it is that it only requires one circumstance: the rate of change (=progress) depends on the amount of stuff already there. The more you know, the better you can generate new knowledge. The more tech already exists, the easier it is to build better.",
"Automation and capitalism helped too. One dude figures out you can build carriages that don’t need horses. He calls them cars and sells them to people. Next guy figures out you can make a machine to build the cars for you. He can then sell more cars. People copy his ideas in other markets. Things become more automated. Machines do the work faster than people do and in larger quantities. That means less time is spent doing labor and more time spent thinking about stuff and thinking about how to sell it. Yes I’m oversimplifying but I hope you get the idea.",
"The scientific method. It sorts ideas from myths through observation, speculation, trial and error, and analysis. It's an incredibly effective tool for advancing technology.",
"We've developed machines to be smart for us. Nowadays there is no need to calculate things by hand, computers do it. With all that new found mental processing power people can focus more on creativity and innovation than on making already existing technology function",
"It is about food. Throughout history most people have been working in industries related to food production. Most people were farmers but people were also dedicating their lives to make farm equipment, transporting food and goods and cooking. This was very time consuming manual jobs. People were barely able to produce enough to have food on the table and a warm place to stay. Even most educated people were dedicating their lives to the administration of communities so that people had food on their table. There were very few people who could actually work with improving sociaty in a lasting way. This did however change in the late 1700s and early 1800s. There are a number of inventions and discoveries that might have triggered it. There were new crops from America improving crop yields by a lot, ships were reliably crossing huge oceans, printing presses meant information could more easily be distributed and more people learned to read, our understanding of mechanical engineering became advanced enough to make mechanised factories and eventually we got steam engines as an easy way to power these machines, there were also a number of huge improvements within agriculture and food processing happening at this time. Different people argue about which one were the most important and which came because of the other. But the end result was that a large number of the population became redundant. There were indeed huge protests and riots in many country by people who had just lost jobs to machines. However sociaty were then able to feed people in other industries then food production. The initial change might not have been very big but it meant that the people who were now out of a job had to come up with some other way of being productive to sociaty. And a lot of them were able to come up with new inventions and discoveries that further reduced the labor demand. So from living in a sociaty where 70-80% were farmers and many of the rest were working in related industries we now live in a sociaty where only about 2% are farmers. And we are still seeing that manual jobs and other routine jobs are being phased out in favor of jobs which have a more lasting impact on the world.",
"Technology snowballs. There's that phrase \"standing on the shoulders of giants\". When you get an education today, you're enjoying thousands of years of discovery, scientific inquiry, experimentation, and education. And when you're done with your education, you can start with all that knowledge in your back pocket. On top of that, there are literally more brains in the world today than there used to be. There are about 6 billion human minds on Earth today. A hundred years ago that was only about 1.5 billion human minds. Five hundred years ago, less than half a billion human minds. If you go back 100.000 years, you're looking at a relatively tiny number of humans. Humans were preoccupied with surviving their environment, finding food, and getting through the seasons. They had limited means for invention and when inventions were made, they had limited means for passing that knowledge on. It would take another 90.000 years or so before people progressed enough that they started to figure out how they could use agriculture to ensure greater food security. Compare that to the tools, knowledge, security and other advantages today and it's no surprise progress is made more quickly.",
"Knowledge aggregation. Basically, the more people there are and the more we are able to share ideas the more insights and discoveries we make. This leads to greater sharing and more people, leading to a circle of this with ever increasing speed. Each large shift that has led to either greater knowledge sharing or increased population has led to leaps forward.",
"One of the biggest contributors to the increasingly rapid pace of scientific advancement was the invention of the printing press and the advent of mass literacy. More people being able to read about new ideas and try them out themselves increased the rate at which new technologies were invented and spread. In earlier times a civilization in the Middle East could have vastly superior knowledge of science and mathematics than one a few hundred miles away in Europe, and it would stay that way for a hundred years or more. With mass literacy and cheap books and pamphlets via the printing press, the rate at which knowledge could spread greatly increased. With that came improvements in technology that further sped up the rate of knowledge transfer, such as faster, more reliable ships, better roads, railways, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, and finally the internet. Now someone can discover something new in China and American, European and African scientists can know about it and begin trying to replicate the findings within a day of publication, within hours even. Thousands of scientists and engineers and hobbyists, millions even, all over the world can share information with almost no delay.",
"A lot of things happened, but three big ones I can think of are Adam Smith's \"Wealth of Nations\", the move from burning wood - which required huge amounts of wood and manpower - to coal, and of course the development of modern farming. With more leisure time and a wealthier population, there was more time for education and intellectual pursuits.",
"The population of Earth approximately doubled from 1750 to 1900 to about 1.5 billion people. It is now 5 times that 120 years later. That many people and that many minds at work creates the situation for rapid advancement. Every downfall of civilization had a corresponding drop in the population. We haven't had a significant drop in the human population in the last 270 years."
],
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[
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ksb50x
|
how does our body sense heat and cold as pain?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"It doesn't always. You can feel warm and cool without pain. But when there is too much of either it's dangerous for us so our brain gives us a signal to stop touching that thing."
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3
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[
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[
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ksb6ew
|
What makes milk go bad outside of the fridge while a cow's body is warm?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"giey228",
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"text": [
"Food goes \"bad\" because organisms from outside start to make it their home. This is how fridges and freezers work, by creating an environment that's difficult or nearly impossible (respectively) for these critters to take hold. & #x200B; Food, or in this case milk, doesn't go 'bad' inside the cows body because these organisms can't get to it there. There are \\*other\\* bad things that can get to it there, which is why we tend to pasteurise milk as part of the whole milking-bottling-getting-it-to-a-shop process - this involves applying high heat to it to kill off any critters inside. From this point on, though, it's only a matter of time before new critters get in from the outside. The colder it is, the less chance there is of this happening, thus we put it in the fridge.",
"Aside from what others have said. Milk certainly does go bad in the cow's udders. Especially in a dairy farm, the farmers work to prevent mastitis which is a bacterial infection of the milk ducts. Modern dairy cows have unnaturally large udders and pretty much only get up to eat or get milked otherwise they lay down. Laying in bedding that has feces in it is a major contributor to infections. The bigger issue is even though they clean the udders before milking, some bacteria get sucked into the milking equipment and combined with the milk of hundreds of other cows, even if it's pasteurized, some bacteria might have survived. Plus when you open the milk jug, air containing bacteria falls in. Refrigerators only slow bacterial growth. Warmth just speeds things up.",
"Because it's supposed to go straight from the udder into the calf's mouth. And it can go bad inside a cow. Mastitis is actually a common issue on dairy farms. u/Pizza_Low gave a nice, short explanation about that.",
"Because it isn't the heat causing the milk to go bad, it is the presence of the microorganisms that do. Those organisms are in the air, and they are not in the cow."
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[
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|
ksbkoh
|
Why is that when a phone's battery is old or damaged, it displays different battery percentage when it is switched on and when it is switched off?
|
I have a fairly old phone whose battery is in serious need of replacement and I've observed that when the phone is switched off, it shows a certain battery percentage, and when it is powered on, it shows a much higher percentage and drains away kuch faster too. Why is the battery showing different values when it's on and when it's off? Do they use different methods to evaluate the remaining battery?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"Over time the batteries deteriorate and lose capacity, that's what your seeing, phone is trying to determine battery percentage and the battery isn't at the capacity it used to be. Someone else probably has a much more fantastic way of explaining this, but I'm pretty sure this is it",
"Your power bar isn't a direct measurement of what's left in the battery. It's a measurement of the battery plus a whole lot of programming logic to try to determine how long it will last on a scale of 1-100. It seems the programming may be a bit optimistic when the phone is first turned on, and then it adjusts the percentage as it starts seeing what sorry shape the battery is in."
],
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3
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[
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kscdbm
|
Why do TV signals seem to move?
|
We have an antenna. Why is it that one day we can have a great signal, and the next day that channel can be basically non-existent?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gif5jaf",
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"text": [
"Weather more than likely. Rain, Clouds, even increased solar activity can interfere with the signal.",
"Weather mostly. Air pressure and humidity can bend the broadcasted signal away from your location. All the little water drops in the air can bend the TV signals like when rain makes rainbows. Some days the signal might be loud enough for your TV to understand. On others you might be in a dead spot like a dark area under a cloud."
],
"score": [
5,
3
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|
[
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[
"url"
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ksckc6
|
how does the internet live forever and what would it take to completely shut it down and lose all archives of it
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"the internet is the set of connections between various computers. compare it to the network of roads in your country. you can block all roads leading to one specific city (\"Facebook-town\", \"Google-city\", whatever), but simply blocking one or two will generally only make that destination a bit harder to reach but not remove it from the map. to completely shutdown all roads/the internet you'd need to cut all connections and in the case of the internet thats not just cables but also wireless (satellite) connections, making it virtually impossible to really shut it down 100%. but in both cases cutting of some high-traffic/central destinations will lead to chaos and upheaval. to lose ALL archives you'd need to destroy all harddrives connected to the internet, but a lot of stuff is just on a few harddrives, so if you destroyed 20% of all harddrives something like 10% of all content could be lost forever.",
"internet is a network. Contrary to what some people seem to think of it, it's not \"in one place\". It's the grouping of many computer working together. And when I say computer, I don't mean \"a dozen computer placed around the world\", I mean literally every computer that is connected to it become a part of it. Internet is the biggest network of all. The one biggest network that regroup the majority of computer devices. To shut it down, you would need to either completely remove or destroy the infrastructure that allow computer to work together. The archives on the internet are not somewhere, they're everywhere. Every computer hold some information that belong to it. Wikipedia has its own server that hold whatever is on wikipedia, facebook has its own server that own these info etc etc. Cutting them from the internet wouldn't make you \"lose the archive\", but rather they would be unavailable through the internet.",
"While what people are saying here is correct, the vast, vast majority of the internet is simply consuming content rather than hosting it. And things are getting more and more centralized by the day. So even though it is effectively impossible to \"shut down\" the entire internet, taking down a few data centers owned by Amazon, Microsoft and Google is going to have a massive impact, so much so that it will effectively be dead for the average user. There is also a bit of nuance between definitions of the internet and \"the web\", and I suspect you are mostly talking about the latter.",
"Slightly less technical - but still true! If a large Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) hit earth, it has the potential to knock out the internet and all radio and other electrical transmission lines for a prolonged period of time. The last time this happened was 1859, and then it only took out telegram transmissions as that was all that existed. If it happened now it would be catastrophic. A strong CME occurred in 2012, but luckily the earth was not in the right location to be effected. If the CME had happened 9 days later it would have hit us. Some scientists hypothesize that it could have taken out the internet worldwide for 12-18 months."
],
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179,
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4
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"url"
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[
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|
kscv4i
|
How come some banks require you to make a certain number of transactions in order to achieve a higher variable interest rate for a savings account?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gif6hbs"
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"text": [
"They want you invested in them so you don't go anywhere else. Ingraining their \"brand\" through repetition. Bringing in new households and new money is key. Keeping the customer and their money is key."
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5
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ksd2a3
|
How does IQ test actually work?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"it compares how well you do on a specific set of puzzles compared to the average of people the same age as you. these tests are constantly re-calibrated, for example kids these days are pretty good at some of those compared to kids a hundred years ago, so using the old tests kids would now score something like 110 or 120 on average. a score > 100 means you're better at these puzzles than the average person from your generation, a score < 100 means you're worse than them. but since the puzzles are often pretty similar between tests, you can actually practice this kind of sequence completion and increase your score this way",
"Brief background, I am a PhD researcher in psychology and I have published papers on intelligence, and particularly the Flynn effect which is the increase in measured intelligence found in most countries. This is long so I'm putting the most important thing first: your IQ is not your worth. People have an inherent dignity that is equal and inviolable regardless of how smart you are. Albert Einstein does not have more value as a person than someone who is incapable of tying their own shoelaces. I think people get really defensive about IQ and intelligence because our society values intelligence to an extraordinary degree. If IQ tests do what they purport then (1) people are not equal on this valuable trait and (2) we can objectively determine who does and does not have more or less of this valuable trait. People then start to think that we have a test that we might try using to determine someone's worth, but your IQ *does not determine your worth.* Your IQ determines your value as a person as much as your height does, which is not at all. IQ tests today are typically either something like Ravens progressive matrices, which are a series of pictorial puzzles of increasing difficulty, or they are somewhat more traditional tests that include a variety of problems centered broadly around \"reasoning\". Modern tests are highly sophisticated instruments subjected to very rigorous statistical methods to ensure a few things (1) that the measure what they say they measure (2) that they do so in an unbiased way and (3) that they do so accurately. \"How do IQ tests actually work?\" Well, after the test is developed you take the test, the test is scored (this can be either a simple summary, or for more sophisticated tests, a score that takes into account the difficulty of the specific questions you answered correctly, how well they tend to distinguish high from low IQ individuals, how well they measure IQ etc.). This score is then compared to some \"norm\". A norm is simply the distribution of scores for some group of people (say 20-30 year olds, measured in 2020). Your score lies somewhere in that distribution and we tell you where you stand compared to everyone else. Usually this score is adjusted so that the average person has a score of 100 and the standard deviation (kind of like the average difference from the average) is usually either 15 or 16 points. How do we decide that the tests measure intelligence? Well, do they predict outcomes that we would expect to occur based on differences in intelligence? For example, if you have a job that requires a \"smart person\" do people who have high IQ's tend to do better in that job? (The answer is yes.) IQ tests are predictive of a number of things that we tend to associate with \"intelligence\" as a concept. Higher IQ is generally predictive of higher levels of education (i.e., *before you get the education you have a higher IQ*). Higher IQ is generally predictive of better job performance in jobs that require critical thinking and an ability to solve complex problems. It is predictive of maintaining your health better, etc. *This is not to say that IQ is the only predictor of these things*. However, IQ is one of the best psychological predictors of these things, generally speaking the only other psychological construct that comes close to having the same kind of predictive ability is Conscientiousness (which is, roughly, your ability to act in a way that is considerate of others). IQ is also predictive *above and beyond* things that people commonly raise as being what IQ really measures (particularly socieoconomic status). You're going to get a lot of comments to the effect of \"we don't really know what IQ tests measure\" or \"IQ tests don't really predict anything.\" That's pretty much categorically false, and not a position held by the vast majority of intelligence researchers. It's a fairly anti-science position, bluntly. Most of it appears to come from Stephen Gould's \"The mismeasure of man.\" That book was pretty widely criticized by pretty much the entire community of intelligence researchers. The issues he raised were either (1) his own misunderstandings of the science, (2) out of date, or (3) flatly wrong. You will see a lot of people say \"well you take a standardized test with multiple choice answers, but life doesn't have multiple choice answers, so really that's meaningless.\" No, it's not. The tests are designed to test your ability to use information and solve problems, that you can choose from a variety of answers doesn't change that you're solving the problem, it's just far more convenient from a test creation perspective. Again though, because I can't say it enough, these tests do not, will not, and cannot, determine your worth as a person. A smart person can be a monster, and a dumb person can be a saint, which one you are really doesn't depend on how smart you are.",
"I think other people have explained it deeper than me, but I’ll give it a shot anyways. We *assume* recognizing patterns means that you are smart. We then create a series of patterns with 1 picture missing and ask you to fill it in. If you can recognize the pattern, you are smart. If you cannot recognize the pattern, you are not smart. Keep in mind, as everyone will tell you, IQ doesn’t necessarily mean smart, and **certainly** doesn’t mean smart in every sense of the word.",
"I'm going try a real \"explain like I'm 5\" answer. A more adult-level (and accurate) response is given by /u/pgok15 below. I'm also a PhD researcher in educational measurement. How does an IQ test actually work? There's a lot to think about with that simple question! I'm going to start with something more familiar, and that's a scale for measuring weight. Imagine you're way back in the past and you have to invent a scale from scratch. You want to know, for example, how much a sack of potatoes weighs at the market so that you know how much to pay a farmer. You can tell just by lifting that one sack is heavier than another sack, but that's about it. So at some point people figured out a balance scale - like a seesaw that you can put things on either end of. If both ends weight the same, the scale is balanced. If one side is heavier, it tips toward that side. This is great, because now we can compare our sack of potatoes to a \"standard\" measure. We can, for example, keep weighing a bunch of stones against one another, chipping a little here and there, until we get a whole bunch of stones that all weigh the same as one another (our balance scale is really good at telling us when things are of equal weight). Now we can say this sack of potatoes weighs as much as 4 stones, and that sack of potatoes weighs the same as 6 stones. Progress! So now we have a \"test\" that can tell us how much something weighs, by comparing it to other things that we already know the weight of. I'll point out here that we don't have to have a deep scientific knowledge of what weight actually means. In fact, our ideas about why things have weight at all has changed a lot over the centuries. But all during that time, famers still managed to use scales to figure out weight without knowing exactly what weight mean. All they cared about was how to use weight to get some business done. Now we've got a similar problem trying to figure out \"intelligence\", except intelligence is a little more complicated than \"weight.\" It's a little like talking about the \"yumminess\" of a meal - ice cream can be yummy, but so can pancakes, and so can a hot dog. They all taste different, and you probably don't want hot dogs for dessert and ice cream for breakfast (maybe you do?), but you can definitely tell \"yummy\" food from \"yucky\" food. Overall, when you ask for food, you want yummy food, not yucky food, and it would be great if the person making your meal understood the difference. Wiith intelligence, we can see with our own eyes that some people are more clever than others at certain things. One person might be awesome at setting snares to catch rabbits, another person is really great at composing songs, while someone else can figure how how many potatoes we need to plant for the winter without wasting any. Each of these demonstrate some sort of intelligence. They may look like very different jobs, but underneath we can tell when something is \"intelligently\" or \"stupidly\" done. And in general, when we ask someone to do something for us, we want them to do it intelligently, not stupidly. So how do we measure intelligence? It's like the problem of weighing potatoes - we need a standard. So we come up with a standard set of tasks for someone to do - solve mazes, talk about patterns in a picture, copy complicated shapes with tiles, or explain some complicated text. What we then notice is that people who are good at, say, copying a complicated shape with tiles - these people also tend to be really good at figuring out how to plan a harvest or design a building. The people who can read and explain complicated text also tend to be good at composing songs or understanding how other people feel. When we find tasks that tend to go along with other skills that we care about we treat those tasks like the stones we use to weigh potatoes. After all, we don't really care how well someone can solve a maze puzzle - what we care about is what being good at solving maze puzzles predicts about other performance. Like the potato example, we can be a little fuzzy on the concept of what intelligence actually \\*is\\*. That is, I don't know what weight \\*is\\* the same way a physicist does, but I know how to \\*use\\* weight in my day-to-day life, and I care a lot about getting an accurate number on my scale. I don't know what intelligence \\*is\\* deep down, but I do care that when I ask someone to figure out where to build a hospital, or how much to plant for the next season, or to help negotiate a treaty with the next tribe, that I want someone who is skillful at these tasks. That's the key concept here - we've come up with this sort of shortcut concept called \"intelligence\" to stand in for skillfulness on a variety or tasks, just like we haver \"yumminess\" as a rough measure of the quality of food, whether it's ice cream or a hot dog. IQ tests have their origins in trying to figure out who will be good at doing what sorts of tasks, without taking months or years to actually watch them try out all these tasks. Instead, we found a bunch of short puzzles that tend to predict how well people do things we actually care about. So here's your answer: once we agree on what we mean by \"intelligence\" (and different groups of people may have slightly different definitions), and how we can describe \"intelligent\" vs \"stupid\" ways of doing things, we look for shortcuts that give us a rough idea how well a person might do on future tasks. Because over time these shortcut puzzles have worked well for predicting real-world performance, we've come to believe they describe some hidden quality of a person called \"intelligence\". Again, I don't know what weight is deep down inside, I just know how it matters in the world. Same with intelligence - I don't know what it really \\*is\\* at a fundamental level, but usually we can agree on when we see it or now. (I've got to run and cut this short - I may come back to edit).",
"I’m a preschool level school psychologist. I regularly give IQ tests to five year olds. In case anyone is curious, here is how I actually explain IQ tests to five year olds... We’re gonna play some games that will tell me how your brain works. Some people’s brains think best with pictures, some with words, some with sounds. Everyone’s brain is different and that is what makes us special. We are going to see how your brain works best so we can make it easier for you to learn at school. All you need to do is just try your best. Do you have any questions?",
"Source: I've actually taken an IQ test. Functionally, you're asked to perform a variety of tasks that test various abilities: general knowledge (through questions), hand-to-eye coordination, short and long-term memory, language...among other things. There were generally two tests per area.. One test I remember involved the examiner giving you two words,at which point you were asked to point out the commonalities between both of them (eg 'blue' and 'red' are both colors). An IQ test takes about 1-2 hours to complete; AFAIK your results are used to compute a score for each tested ability, which are then used to find an overall IQ score. One thing I will point out: as a society we've grown to see IQ tests as not much more than a tool used for gloating, as a way to measure intelligence in some for or another. The reality is that IQ tests are important medical tools which can be used to find out and quantify developmental issues in people: \"intelligence\" may be a debatable concept, short term memory is not.",
"Alright, a lot of good explanations, but not a lot of \"explaining like I'm 5\". The most popular IQ test is the WISC V. Usually, these tests are conducted in a 1 on 1 setting over the course of about 1-2 hours. There are multiple subtests which measure \"intelligence\" in 5 different ways. Visual Spatial (Ex. manipulating blocks to match a pattern), Processing Speed (Ex. Figure out a code with a symbol key), Verbal Comprehension (Ex. Vocab knowledge) Fluid Reasoning (Deductive reasoning skills), and Working Memory (Remembering numbers). Based on your score from all the subtests, you \"add\" them all up to make a Full Scale IQ. Full Scales IQ's have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Meaning that most of the population lies between a score of 85 and 115. Like many people have said, an IQ test is not a representation of someones complete intelligence. For instance, someone could be a complete genius in painting or music, and the IQ test would never pick that up. However, the IQ test does measure abilities that are correlated with being able to navigate the modern world with success. Source: Am a School Psychologist and give IQ tests for a living.",
"Its a series of easy logic puzzles, like completing a series of numbers or shapes( like 1 2 4 8 _ ). You got a fixed time to solve as many as possible and get some amount of \"points\" for each. The same test is done with many people and then the average result is calculated and defined as 100IQ points. Its important to mention that IQ test dont measure what we normaly call intelligence, because we dont realy understand what that even is.",
"does the test measure anything aside from how good you are at the test itself? i mean, is there any scientific basis that these puzzles are decent proxies for other aspects of cognition?",
"Alot of good answers here, but I think the key to keep in mind is to ask the question, \"What is intelligence?\" If intelligence is how well or how efficiently you can solve certain puzzles or problems then our current method for testing and measurement makes sense. But in reality, intelligence is far more complex than that, and thus our manner of measurement is not all that accurate. There's still debate as to how we define intelligence and how we therefore measure it. At the end of the day, we don't have a better solution to this problem so our current IQ testing is the best we have, but there are some interesting arguments being made for new ways of defining and measuring IQ.",
"An IQ tests asks you to answer questions. Those questions aren't supposed to require knowledge (stuff you've learned), but should be things that you can figure out. They will be things like trying to figure out patterns so you can predict what comes next in a list, figuring out how many shapes are in a picture, etc. Sometimes there's a time component too - how fast can you solve the puzzles. Like a quiz, you get a score, and they compare that score to other people that have taken the same test. They adjust the scores so that they can be compared between other IQ tests. A score of 100 means that you got the average. The scores are adjusted so that 68% of people have a score between 85 and 115, and 95% of people have a score between 70 and 130. Higher numbers mean more intelligent, and lower numbers, less intelligent. It turns out that it's really hard to make a test that doesn't require any knowledge, and some puzzles are similar to things some people have seen before while other haven't (experience). So it's REALLY hard to come up with problems so that you can compare test scores across groups of people with very different backgrounds.",
"The only thing IQ tests have in common by definition is that they are scored on the same bell curve. So the average IQ is always 100. The tests themselves can therefore vary a lot. But they are usually based on puzzles as this does not require much language skills or other prior knowledge. So the tests will be better at capturing the true intelligence of a person rather then their skills and knowledge. There are however some issues with this approach. Some people might be highly intelligent but still suck at the types of puzzles found in IQ tests. It is also possible to train on the types of puzzles you get in these tests. So these types of tests is best suited for mass if you want to get a rough idea of the intelligence of a large number of people in a simple way. However they rarely give any good indication of the intelligence of individuals within that group.",
"*ELI5 version first.* It doesn't work. You can't figure out intelligence this way, because there are so many different kinds of people that come from different places. It's like asking 'which is the fruitiest, apples or watermelons or grapes?' So why are IQ tests important in the first place? What are the results of the test for? In our country, they're mostly used to keep people who aren't White out of colleges, and that's not fair. *ELI a mature person version.* It doesn't. It also has extremely racist origins and continued negative repercussions for non-Whites to this day. The pseudoscience of eugenics gained popularity early in the United States' history and led to 'race-purifying' legal restrictions, like outlawing interracial marriage and forcing sterilization of non-Whites (in the early 1900s, 30 states had laws requiring sterilization of 'low grade' people. Eugenicists were unable to find a 'sciency' way to 'prove' their assertions that White people were superior to all other races until 1909, when Alfred Binet came up with an intelligence scale (the precursor to the Stanford-Binet IQ Test) and standardized methods to quantify people's brainpower. Nazi Germany snatched it up as a tool in its own campaign to sterilize under-performing individuals. Bottom line, virtually every application of IQ tests is problematic, Binet himself said it was an insufficient method, and walking away from it forever would be a very positive thing to do.",
"There’s a lot of good stuff in here by @pgok15 and @toysmith. Each explaining different parts of IQ and psychometrics and the idea that we are as a collective humanity share an experience, need to put a word to it, and then use it to distinguish and categorize. Like they have both said, it’s controversial and tying personal value to it is common and destructive. However, IQ is commonly tested and used in so many different contexts. Companies use it in the hiring process (wonderlic) universities use it for admittance (ACT,SAT, GRE, LSAT, etc), the NFL even uses it to test at the combine. As they have both mentioned, it’s positively correlated (as General Intelligence goes up, so do these variables) with income, grades, education, and job performance, ranging from small correlations in things like factory work, to very strong correlations in things like law, medicine, leadership, more complex tasks. Additionally, which neither of them have covered, there is a ton of research on its relationship with race. It was commonly used in darwinsitic and eugenic arguments about the reasons white people are better. As an off the cuff benchmark, generally African Americans score 1 SD (15 points) below white people, Hispanics score 1/2 SD below whites, and Asians typically score 1/2 above whites. Additionally, women score 1/4 SD above men. There are hundreds of reasons why, and contradictory to what others have said, this is being studied and is still being extensively studied today. Additionally, where G comes from in terms of heritability, learned, shared experiences, and school is still being studied often using twin studies. For example, your parents income can predict around 20% of your G score. This is because your parents income determines the funding your schools get, the quality of food you have growing up, the quality of childcare you receive, the quality of language and goals set by your parents, and myriad of other things. There are so many problematic things with they way we not only test intelligence but also judge others by it. And yet, as seen throughout this thread, there is no clear definition on what it actually measures. An example: The NFL has reduced the gap between races by removing words and creating a visual test. The creators of IQ tests are generally white educated and often male, their language is soaked into these tests. By removing the language we can reduce the barriers others may have present in their scores. Additionally, there are thousands of sources on this coming out ever year. A good researcher to start with is James L Outtz, and using key terms like intelligence and adverse impact will gain you more traction on any research you do on your own."
],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksdbx8
|
Why is sunrise for my sister's in Florida only 7 min later but Sunset is about 80 min later?
|
Hey someone that can answer this or better to point me in a direction to learn and understand too? My nuclear faimly lives in New Port Richey (30 min or so from Tampa) Sunrise is only about 7 mins after mine near Hartford, CT but there sunset is about 1hr:17min later why is this the case? I do understand time zones are separated by 15° longitude per hour and closer to the next one I presume would create time difference in times like sunset. (I could be wrong) The part that eludes me and confuses me is how are the Sunrise and Sunset times are so different.
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gifbh31",
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],
"text": [
"If you go south in (northern) winter, the days get longer (sunrise earlier, sunset later). If you go west, the sun rises *and* sets later. So if you go in the right south-west direction, the sunrise stays the same, but sunrise happens much later.",
"As you go from north to south, the days get longer or shorter. As you go from east to west, sunrise gets later in the day. If you combine these two, you can go north enough that the day is an hour shorter, but also east enough that sunrise is an hour earlier. Your sunset will be an hour earlier as a result."
],
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25,
5
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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ksf0vg
|
Why is baking soda used in most home remedies?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gifovsj",
"gifip8h"
],
"text": [
"Because an acidic pH is an indicator of inflammation, using baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) would (in theory) help reduce this inflammation by increasing the pH.",
"Because baking soda ( a base) mixed with most any liquid that is somewhat acidic (lemon juice, vinegar, etc) makes it get all foamy, and foam equals ACTION. It's a cheap way to trick gullible people into think they are getting something out of it. I'm not exactly sure what \"home remedies\" you're referring to. As part of the chemical reaction between acid and base, some energy is released, and that can potentially help with cleaning surfaces, but otherwise it's all just hogwash."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksf49b
|
Why are video file sizes so small?
|
A normal image stored on a phone is around 5 mb, if you calculate that way, a 1080p 60 fps video should be 60 frames X 5 mb X 600 seconds = 180000 MB= 180GB. But if you check a file size of an actual 10 minute video, it is only around 1GB. How can it be so small?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"Video compression. The video file doesn’t store every frame, it just stores what changes between frames. Periodically there will be a full frame, called a “key frame”, just to reset everything but most of the “frames” in the file are just a small list of changes from the prior frame. Unless there’s a jump cut, there is usually very little difference between adjacent frames. Basically, the video file isn’t the video, it’s instructions to the software on how to recreate the video in real time.",
"Here's a Tom Scott video that's great at explaining and demonstrating video compression [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"Videos generally don't store every single frame. Since most frames in a video are only a little different from the one before it (either colours changing slightly or pixels moving slightly), you can instead include instructions on how to draw the next frame based on changing the previous one. This is a much smaller amount of data.",
"Multiple reasons. A 5MB JPEG (compressed) image is probably 20 megapixels in resolution. While even 4K video is equivalent to an 8 megapixel image size. That's automatically 2.5 times smaller of you choose, for want of a better common ground, the same 'compression rate' or loss of image quality. But you actually can have different levels of compression and image quality. Also, video doesn't store individual frames for the whole le gth of the clip. The largest part of a video file is recording movements, and therefore almost no information is required for parts of the image that don't move.",
"The short ELI5 answer is the difference between 'i frames' and 'p frames'. So, in a common compression algorithm, you would ideally want fewer 'i frames'. An 'i frame' is the whole picture, the 'p frame' is the difference between the original 'i frame' and whatever event is unfolding. For example, say (and this was me one job ago) you have a surveillance camera pointed at a road with little traffic on it. The i frame will capture the scene, each subsequent i frame will be very small. A video file with this scene will be very small. Now, put some traffic on that road, each car represents more difference from the original i frame, so the p frames will be larger. So, busy scenes = bigger file size, sedate scenes = smaller file size. When the video is 'finished', once all the editing is done, the compression algorithm can compress most of the P frames because the same data is found in the i frame. This will make the file size noticeably smaller. I frames cannot be compressed in this manner since they are the reference frame and, by definition, has all the bits needed to recreate the scene. So, depending on how you compress, you are trying to hold down the number of i frames that are in the finished product. An editor or IT guy will really never think about this unless we are charged with storing all this video data, as I had to. Otherwise, we are just content to say 'compression works and it is basically lossless.'",
"Compression between frames When you take a picture your phone compresses it before saving it, but it only has the data in that one frame to work with. A picture of a deer running in front of a forest will get compressed really well in the area showing a clear blue sky but can't be compressed as much (without losing too much quality) in the detail rich areas showing the forest and the grass Videos are compressed first *between frames* then within the frame. Take a video of a deer running in front of a forest, how many times should you save the data showing the blue sky at the top? Just once. Compression between frames gives wayyyy better results because things tend to stay in roughly the same place in a video or just get shifted so you can just store \"take block 17, move 5 pixels left\" rather than having to store the entirety of block 17 for every single frame. Ever encounter a GIF that's massive but the GIFV is really small? That's because GIFs are compressed frame by frame, but have no compression between frames, they're effectively a series of full images like you're thinking of and can't benefit from the pixels staying the same over time which is why a GIF can be 10x bigger than the same file saved as a video"
],
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7
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[],
[]
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksfgs9
|
Why when we sleep do we not feel pain?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gifm3ju",
"gifqcum",
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],
"text": [
"You do, but you experience it differently. Your conscious mind that thinks about and acknowledges the pain is turned off more or less, but the pain is still there. If something hurts enough it will wake you up and say “ow”",
"You definitely still hurt when you sleep. My husband has a chronic pain condition and he whimpers in his sleep from pain frequently. Eventually it wakes him up because it gets too bad.",
"You just don't wake up until your pain threshold is reached. I wake up in pain every day. I can go to sleep easily (avg 30 seconds), staying asleep is the problem. If I take pain meds at bed time, I might make it six hours total. Even then I usually wake and have to change position to get back to sleep. You still hurt when you sleep.",
"You definitely still do. I know I've certainly awoken a few times either from sore back and stuff, or being bit by something. Usually whatever it was was in my dream as well IE: If my back hurt I would be having a dream that I was having back surgery. If you are instead referring to why we don't feel pain when we are \"asleep,\" for surgery, that's a little different. The drugs used to anesthetize patients don't actually put you to sleep, but instead induce a state that *looks* like sleep, but is in fact our nervous system being shut down to various degrees."
],
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37,
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksfnjy
|
Why can’t we breathe normally after vomiting?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gifnp3t"
],
"text": [
"Throat is irritated. Vomit is comprised of what you eat or drink recently alongside gastric acid (the juice inside you that disolve food). When you vomit, some of that acid make its way through your throat that is not coated in a special protection to handle it like your stomach is. Throat get irritated and irritation usually also cause swelling. Swelling in the throat make breathing slightly harder."
],
"score": [
52
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksfwzd
|
how do singularities’ mass work?
|
It is assumed that the most probable answer to the singularity is an infinitely massive single point in space, from what i understand. But from what else i know, every collection of mass has a different volume/density as the tipping point for becoming a singularity, like if the earth were compressed to the size of a grain of sand, or likely if the sun implodes (the word to define this escapes me). But what exactly does that radius mean in regards to the characteristics of a singularity? We can clearly see some black holes are more massive than others, so a singularity must then not be singular in volume, based on that and the previous mass of the body it formed from? This thought also brings questions regarding the how the strength of a singularity’s gravitational pull increases with it’s mass. Is it a simple slope, or is it logarithmic? Exponential? I have many more questions that I can’t remember atm, but i’ll add them in edits under here. Thanks in advance!
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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],
"text": [
"It's infinitely dense. It is however FINITELY massive. Density = mass/size Finite mass/infinitesimal size = infinite density. As you get closer to a heavy object, you need to go faster to escape. When talking about a black hole, usually the radius is how close you can get before the speed you need to escape is the speed of light. A heavier black hole will have a larger radius. Gravity is exponentially stronger as you get closer.",
"Basically, we don't really know what's inside a singularity--that's really what makes it one. The absolute densest material we know can exist is what's in a neutron star, which is literally neutrons compressed together with no spaces in between--but a black hole is somehow denser even than that, and we don't have a physical explanation for how that works. Doesn't help that the singularity itself is hidden behind the event horizon, which means no information can ever reach the outside as to what's in there."
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksfxfk
|
- Why is it that space is dark? If we send a shuttle into space and it sends images back, it is always dark. But the sun is able to provide daylight to Earth. So where is that sunlight going in space?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gifo596",
"gifo8j4",
"gifo3y9",
"gifpka0",
"gigba06",
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"text": [
"You only see things on earth because the sunlight bounces off objects and into your eyes. In space, there's not a lot for the light to bounce off of, so the light keeps going.",
"Space is really, really big. We see light only when it's reflected off something back at us. The light from the sun is emitting into the void of space, where there is very little in the way of things to reflect that light back at us.",
"It's actually because of the sunlight that the background of the pictures is so dark. The sunlight reflecting off the Earth below (which is generally visible in Shuttle pictures) requires the camera to step down its aperture so much in order to get a decent picture that stars just get washed out entirely.",
"We have days as we know on Earth because we have an atmosphere. When sunlight reaches the atmosphere it suffers all sorts of scattering and difraction and other optics stuff. This makes the sky appear blue and 'lit'. Plus we have eyes and a brain that evolved to interpret these conditions as natural, so we can see really well at daylight, opposed to say a cat which sees much better at night.",
"You can see light on earth because it has something to bounce off of, in space you can't see light unless it's hitting an astroid or planet that's why laser tag arenas are filled with fog so you can see the lasers",
"the sun actually glows the entire spectrum but just like how when you turn in your light the air in the room doesn't turn opaque bright, the light spectrum our eyes are seeing with can only see light ones it's been absorbed by an object and the remaining light reflects leaving you with a lit object of whatever color left over that's within your ability to see the subs light actually shines way out of the galaxy, in space the same thing applies. if you were somehow able to see light in itself it'd be worthless because you'd always be blind either by the light turning everything around you an opaque glow or darkness which still for the most part still does \"shine\" but only on infrared."
],
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4,
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3
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksfyx1
|
How did they just walk on into the US capitol?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gifoquh",
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],
"text": [
"Actually, one of the ELI5 rules is not to discuss recent or current events. I'm not a mod, but I don't think this question will stay here for long enough. Anyway, many representatives are calling for an investigation on exactly this.",
"> Is security just a front? It is when the cops are either ordered not to interfere, or sympathize with the rioters. Capital police basically just put up a short show then fucked off. They made no serious attempt to prevent rioters from breaking into the Capital.",
"well the police either didnt want/didnt dare/was told not to interfere (probably a mixture of those). there was very little police presence, compared to the police during the BLM protests these guys werent wearing riot gear but looked more like your average street cops/security guards, so they'd probably be in much more danger than properly equipped policemen. and then there's all those pics of cops taking selfies with the protesters, opening gates and doors for them... so yeah I'd say a mixture of the 3 aspects initially mentioned"
],
"score": [
5,
3,
3
],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksg9hk
|
Why do some companies (like telemarketing related) need to "buy" phone numbers for potential clients? Couldn't they just try all numbers, (like 555-0001, then 555-0002, etc)?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gig0ug4",
"gifq98f"
],
"text": [
"They do, it is called Robotic dialing or robocall and it is illegal in. The USA if a person has registered on the do not call list. The largest fine was over a million dollars. Non-legit companies do it all the time. URL_0",
"If they can get a list of supposedly \"good\" numbers with real people attached, it could save a lot of false calls, get faster results than auto-dialing all possible numbers sequentially. Sadly, asking to be taken off their list doesn't work. Even if they do take you off (which I suspect they don't), the people they bought the list from don't get that notice.",
"That is known as 'auto-dialing' and (at least in the US) it is illegal. You are not allowed to just start dialing numbers at random hoping someone will pick up. The lists of phone numbers are people who have opted-in to marketing from some other website/company, and thus it is legal for those numbers to be sold and used for marketing purposes."
],
"score": [
13,
9,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/do-not-call-registry/enforcement"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksgce5
|
what does "depending upon which definition is used" refers to in this statement "The sex ratio for the entire world population is 101 males to 100 females (2018 est.). Depending upon which definition is used, between 0.018% and 1.7% of live births are intersex."
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gifqrqc",
"gigcips",
"gifr1zc"
],
"text": [
"Some words or terms are defined in different ways. \"Depending upon which definition is used\" is a more compact way of saying \"if you think the definition of this is X, then it's [...]. If you think the definition of this is Y, then it's [...]\". In your particular example, look at [this abstract]( URL_0 ): > Anne Fausto-Sterling s suggestion that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7% has attracted wide attention in both the scholarly press and the popular media. Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%.",
"Intersex conditions can be defined in a number of ways. Are they intersex if they don't have any clear sex scientifically? If they don't have any sex at all (as compared to, say, a sex which is somewhere between male and female or indeed both?)? If they are genetically one sex, but physically display as another? Or if their sex is ambiguous and can't be defined? Sex is a far more complicated subject than your school biology lessons with XX and XY. There's a great breakdown on this Twitter thread here: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) Basically, it depends on how you define sex itself, and what you consider intersex to mean (do you mean genetically? chromosomally? hormonally? physically?) and where you distinguish between, say, hermaphroditic (someone who is both sexes), asexual and intersex. It's basically an argument between different medical systems as to what \"intersex\" actually means. A bit like \"autism\" isn't universally defined... it's a spectrum upon which you can be a little, or a lot, and we have things like Asperger's which feature upon it. But there's no universal boundary at which we say someone is autistic or not, different countries use different definitions and it's by no means \"measurable\" anyway. Given the information in the thread above, how \"male\" are you? Give me a percentage. How you do know? And what percentage \"male\" do you have to be to be classed as intersex and not just \"male\"? There is no one right answer.",
"The .018 only counts genital mutations, while the 1.7 includes chromosome differences and hormone differences. These may not be noticeable without being tested."
],
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"text_urls": [
[
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],
[
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],
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksh9u9
|
Why are we so protective of our social security #s but give personal checks to anyone which shows all our bank info?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gifwjt6",
"gifwn1g"
],
"text": [
"Because when you have a check the money has to go somewhere (another bank account) or be ID verified before cashing and usually the transaction can be tracked and reversed. Someone committing check or ETF fraud might as well be putting up signs outside their house saying \"POLICE LOOK HERE!\". It's not like having an ATM card number and a PIN where you can pull out cash and walk away with the criminal having to be tracked down through investigative means.",
"Because the maximum loss you could theoretically sustain from that information being stolen is whatever amount of money is in your checking account- which shouldn't be that much if you manage it correctly. There's also a lot of security measures that would have to be defeated. In contrast, your social security number could allow an identity thief to open lines of credit, bank accounts, and loans under your name, which can do far worse and longer lasting damage to your financial health."
],
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3,
3
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
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|
ksi3f1
|
Why are avalanches deadly wouldn’t you just move along with it?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"Snow is heavy. Even if you manage to \"swim\" to the top of the avalanche (which is not a guarantee because, as I say, snow is heavy,) the avalanche could be carrying boulders and trees along with it. It could slam you into an obstacle. You could wind up buried, and either get crushed to death or suffocate.",
"I think the main danger is getting buried at the bottom of a snow drift. Compacted snow would be very hard to dig out of when it’s all around you. Also I believe it’s very common to go into shock from the sudden temperature change of being surrounded by snow.",
"avalanches move a LOT faster than you. unless you are *super lucky,* an avalanche will just crash down on top of you.",
"In addition to the other comments, avalanches can move up to 200 mph. So you have a several tons of snow hitting you at 200 mph. You're pretty much guaranteed to \"move along with it\" but you won't enjoy the ride (for very long).",
"Small particles of material tend to act like a liquid when agitated with a lot of air; in videos like [swimming in sand]( URL_0 ). With more and more snow piling on top of you and the potential to sink in it like a liquid greatly increases the chances of being buried.",
"It moves like a liquid, but solidifies once it stops. That's why it's hard to get out if you're buried by it."
],
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6,
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[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksibuq
|
how come humans cover their faces when they laugh, cry or get shocked?
|
This doesn’t apply to everyone obviously but it happens a lot.
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gigerfs",
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],
"text": [
"I noticed this on a show that was set in Japan. The women would cover their mouths if they smiled, laughed or, talked, but the men didn't. I think it's very culturally dependent.",
"When we laugh or cry we make absurd faces. We are vulnerable. People don't like being vulnerable and all one can do in that situation is cover their faces.",
"People who are insecure about their teeth or smile tend to cover their mouths when laughing, crying or when they get shocked. It's a sub-conscious reaction. That's my assumption anyway.",
"It's considered rude to show your open mouth in some circles, it's why we're told to cover our mouths when we yawn. In short nobody wants to look into your orifice in polite society, this trickles down as people imitate those they look up to/respect/aspire to be like, including parents and friends. We also protect our mouths instincively at something unexpected/disgusting nearby, see also the reflex where someone about to be hit by a car throws up their hands to cover their faces. As for the smile, many people are self conscious about their smile (shows too many teeth, looks thin or insincere, they think it makes them look goofy etc.) In short, it's a bunch of different learned behaviours and instincts, some are cultural, some are universal. Human body language is fascinating and well worth learning about!",
"I personaly think it's more about a learnt attitude. When kids cry, they don't cover their face, instead they just cry expressing their emotions. When we grow up we see each other covering their faces, or in films and stuff or we end up thinking that cryings is ugly and we cover ourself."
],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksidm2
|
How do beats per minute or the tempo of music affect your workout.
|
I have noticed that there are some pop songs that have a really fast beat and my heart rate increases first because of the music and when I am walking or working out to it I suddenly feel more energetic and I can do higher intensity workouts easily.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gig3kui",
"gig8g86",
"gigq900",
"gig80dz",
"gih01fg"
],
"text": [
"It’s a mental thing. Scientists aren’t even sure the exact reason we Like music, but we know it definitely impacts us, from starting to tap your foot to the beat to feeling emotional from the song. So a fast beat high energy song can definitely give you a sort of mental boost as your working out, as your brain wants to match the pace of the song.",
"Hi! Im a personal fitness trainer and actually they told me the answer to your question when I was studying. If you listen music with high tempo and high volume your brain takes it as a signal of danger. This is because in the past, high sounds could only mean danger (thunders, rocks falling, etc) so the body becomes more efficient. In fitness, we use that as a tool to either motivate someone to do high intensity training or to help someone calm and release stress.",
"When running, I’ll subconsciously match my step to the music. I usually prefer music with a high BPM. For strength workouts, not so much. I just zone out and do my thing.",
"A faster tempo song increases your heart rate, I think by the release of some adrenaline. That adrenaline will help you work out.",
"Former music therapist here! Your heartrate and breathing will actually change in response to the bpm of the music. Music therapists use this effect, called entrainment, to adjust the heart rate and breathing of patients in the hospital to appropriate levels (even while sleeping!) It is also much easier to move to a beat when you are making a repetitive movement. This comes into play in dancing and marching chants. Its \"less effort\" for the brain to coordinate and send those repeated signals to your muscles when its receiving a repeated prompt to act. Strangely enough, I had a friend who, after a traumatic injury to the nerves in his foot, lost all concious control of his left toes (couldnt raise his toes, or tap his foot). However, later in life he discovered that when listening to some songs he would find his foot tapping on it's own to the beat. And would stop just after he noticed it. Wild how music affects the brain..."
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksinn0
|
How does hacking work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gig7500",
"gig8g5z"
],
"text": [
"Most hacking takes the form of social engineering--\"Hi this is the password compliance department, could you please tell me your password so I can check it for weakness?\" Usually it's more subtle than that, but you'd be amazed at how many people will just tell you their password (or use the same username and password on some stupid web game that they use on their bank account; if you use the same password on your Reddit or ANY OTHER ACCOUNT as on banking and financial websites, change them now). When it comes to actual software vulnerabilities it often comes down to looking at the specification for some procedure and identifying assumptions that the specification makes (or that someone implementing the software could have made) and seeing what happens if you break that assumption. As an example, there was a vulnerability known as \"heartbleed\" where there's a bit of communication with servers to check that they're online. That communication involves a person's computer sending them a message that essentially says \"If you're alive, encrypt the following 11-character message and send it back: \"Hello world!\" The assumption here is that the message that's sent will be the same length as is claimed. In one widespread implementation of that algorithm there was no check that that assumption was accurate, so you could do things like asking as server to encrypt the 1000-character message \"Hello World!\". In response the server would encrypt those 11 characters and the next 989 characters that it finds in memory (which could include sensitive data). Another example was the \"spectre\" and \"meltdown\" family of attacks that made waves more recently. These vulnerabilities work off of a technology known as \"speculative execution.\" Sometimes a computer has to wait on a check that is going to take a long time to complete. Rather than just sit there and wait the computer will charge ahead, assuming that the check has succeeded or failed based on what it has observed in the past for that check. If it turns out that the processor guessed right then it's ahead of the game. If it got things wrong then it undoes all the work it had speculatively completed. The assumption here is that undoing all of that work makes it impossible for information to escape from that branch--it should be like it never happened. That assumption turned out to be false because you can trick a processor into speculatively executing commands that load illegal-to-access information into cache (extremely fast memory). You can then figure out what information was loaded into cache by checking how long it takes to access the information.",
"Hacking is exploiting oversights, mistakes, or just bugs in computer system. For example hacker can send a request for a computer to do something, that does something the developer didnt think somebody would try, and didnt \"prepare\" his program for it. One very common tactic is \"overflowing\" with is sending instructions longer than intended, the computer tries to put then in its memory, but its too big and overflows overriting the code next to it. if the hacker knows what it will overflow, he can put his own code there that will do something he wants, for example delete a file, send something etc. im no expert but thats approximately how i understand it works"
],
"score": [
15,
4
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"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksje0g
|
Why do birds chirp in the morning?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gigb32v",
"gigfpj0",
"gigohdh",
"gigmnj4",
"gigmdk6",
"giglvbd",
"gigmmu3",
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],
"text": [
"They're basically advertising. What you're hearing is mostly male birds and what they're saying is more or less: > I survived the night because I'm a tough lad. Hear the power of my song, and that's on an empty stomach at the start of the day! Wanna get laid? Step right up ladies. Boys? Check your shit before I wreck your shit, this is my tree and I'm the branch manager!",
"Birds chirp all the time when they are awake. It's how they communicate a lot of things. According to this article they wake up but the light is still too dark to do any flying around and eating so they have nothing better to do. [ URL_0 ]( URL_1 ).",
"Birds chirp for all sorts of reasons. At dawn or dusk there will be a lot of singing, and some of them get very creative in their musicality. Other times they might be having conversations about who knows what. The idea that birds chirp just to advertise themselves is just a simple answer humans have made up. Certainly they use their voice to attract mates, and creatively so, just like us. But that's just one of many things going on in bird life. Birds are intelligent, creative and very aware. They will probably chirp for all the reasons we like to make sounds. I'm not a bird scientist or anything. But I spend a good amount of time in nature, and I love listening to birdsong. I love to just lie down in my tent and listen to their song in the evening/morning. I also love to sit on a rock and listen to their conversations during the day. If a human attracts another human with their guitar playing, is mating the reason they're playing the guitar? Maybe they sing at dusk to say goodbye to the sun and maybe they are welcoming it back at dawn? Or maybe it's both social and ritualistic? Personally, I like to think these birds are sun worshippers.",
"From what I've read, the dawn chorus, as it's called, is heard in most avian environments. However, there are shifts in the timing and frequency of bird songs and calls in urban/human-centric environments. This is likely due to the fact that the bird sounds have less human-induced competition for air space during the morning hours. Birds are especially good at finding environmental niches, including acoustic niches. Note: this is not the sole reason for birds calling in the morning, just in addition to the other comments/explanations already posted.",
"There is a science radio show in Canada called Quirks and Quarks, and they had someone on to talk about this. (I don’t remember the episode unfortunately.) Basically they said that a bird’s song can be very complicated so for the first few hours of being awake a bird will be warming up much like an opera singer before a performance. The songs start relatively simple and get more and more complicated as the day goes on, as usually the more complicated the song the more attractive it is to the opposite sex.",
"You mean sing birds chirp all day long. They use cooler temps of the morning to do this. Which means fewer cold blooded predators and more time to forage during the daylight hours when prey is active.",
"Because sound travels farther in colder air (which happens early in the morning). Earlier in the morning the cooler the air, and the longer your voice travels. This allows their mating calls (or any other calls) to travel farther and to more \"ears\". & #x200B; For those interested: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"When I saw this post at first it was right above the post of the birds playing volleyball and I was hella confused thinking that was the explanation."
],
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"https://www.wired.com/2014/03/birds-sing-morning/#:\\~:text=and%20establishing%20territories.-,You%20may%20have%20noticed%20a%20cacophony%20of%20birdsong%20in%20the,%2C%20livelier%2C%20and%20more%20frequent",
"https://www.wired.com/2014/03/birds-sing-morning/#:~:text=and%20establishing%20territories.-,You%20may%20have%20noticed%20a%20cacophony%20of%20birdsong%20in%20the,%2C%20livelier%2C%20and%20more%20frequent"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Je4kpqv1g4"
],
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kskaql
|
Why do some public bathrooms have blue lighting?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gigfjsx",
"gigfs3y",
"gigr53i",
"giglvmj"
],
"text": [
"It's meant to prevent drug addicts from seeing their veins when they try to go in the bathroom to inject drugs but it's actually not a good idea. In [study]( URL_0 ) on blue lights, published in 2013 in the Harm Reduction Journal, researchers concluded that \"Blue lights are unlikely to deter injection drugs use in public washrooms, and may increase drug use-related harms.\"",
"From what I understand is that it makes it much harder for intravenous drug users to find veins in their arms. The wavelength of blue light doesn’t highlight the blue of the veins on your body.",
"Human veins are shown as blue due to it reflecting the shorter blue wavelength light. By drowning the room in blue light it makes it almost impossible to distinguish blue colored things thus making it hard to distinguish veins. This deters people from doing drugs in public bathrooms as they cant see their veins.",
"Blue lights are dim and make it more difficult to see surface veins, discouraging people from injecting drugs in that bathroom."
],
"score": [
263,
29,
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5
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"text_urls": [
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"https://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1477-7517-10-22"
],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kskgz7
|
Why are numbers on a telephone keypad set out differently to a calculator keypad?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giglr58",
"gigkflq",
"gigvl7o"
],
"text": [
"So back in the 50s, AT & T swapped from rotary to touch tone phones and they needed a pattern for the new keys. So they ran a study and tested 15 different layouts. Oddly enough, people preferred the telephone layout over the calculator layout. So that's what they went with. Further reading (including pictures of the extra patterns) -- [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"AT & T did some research a long time ago to design the keypad to speed up dialing times and found that ascending numbers from top to bottom was the most intuitive",
"Warning: slightly off topic. I was watching several YouTube videos about mechanical calculator and adders (such as Comptometer), so don't treat me as an expert in this field. Anyway, those devices have a common layout that was somehow forced by the design principles that they were using. There are separate sets of keys 1 to 9 for units, tenths, hundreds etc., but the common pattern of arranging keys was bottom-up (1s are closest to the user). Early models with single set of digits (0 to 9) used a layout that we're familiar with."
],
"score": [
149,
12,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/12/31/heres-why-telephones-and-calculators-use-different-numeric-keypads/"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kskhb7
|
why is water not super explosive and instead puts out a match?
|
So hydrogen lights really well and catches fire and explodes and oxygen is needed for fire, why is water not explosive? Could it be made explosive?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giggu6t",
"gigh01c",
"giggp2m"
],
"text": [
"\"Catching fire\" is a chemical reaction that means combining with oxygen (why fire needs oxygen). If you burn hydrogen, you are creating hydrogen oxide, i.e. water. In other words you can't burn water because it's already burned.",
"The reason hydrogen combusts so hard is because it bonds woth oxygen reeeaaal tight. Super hard, super stable bonds. The amount of energy released when you brun hydrogen is the amout of energy needed to tear apart that much water. That shit is STRONK",
"In short: water is the product of the combustion of hydrogen in the presence of oxygen. The process of decomposing water back into hydrogen/oxygen gassed and then reacting the two wouldn't put out more energy than you put in"
],
"score": [
8,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
kskyos
|
Theoretically, what would happen if every tree was to suddenly disappear from from the planet? What would the long term and immediate impact be on humans?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gigp50k",
"gigsoej"
],
"text": [
"The empty space where the roots were would cause massive sinkholes in addition to all of the longer term things being mentioned.",
"Trees: Help the soil absorb water, having none will contribute to flooding, and especially flash flooding Prevent erosion, and desertification. Our waterways will be filled with topsoil and nutrients causing algae blooms, creating hypoxic deadzones and killing aquatic life literally produce rain by releasing terpenes and bacteria in the air so water molecules can bind to them in the sky until they become heavy enough to fall back down as rain provide habitat and food indirectly or directly for the vast majority of wildlife regulate the temperature of earth through transpiration, and through thermal mass (preventing huge temperature swings between day and night) Filter the air from a wide range of harmful gasses (nitrox oxide, CO2, and many more) Plus many more."
],
"score": [
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksl26o
|
How do people find out who the richest person in the world is?
|
It's not like they have access to their banking information so how would they know?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giglhei",
"gigm4sg"
],
"text": [
"Bank accounts are not a significant portion of any of these people's wealth. What IS public record is who owns publicly traded companies. If I own a million shares of company X and shares are being sold for $1000 each, then I am worth $1 billion. That said, of course not everything is public, and stock prices change literally from minute to minute, so net worth is always just approximate.",
"Rich people, for the most part, don’t have their money sitting in bank accounts. Instead they own things. Properties, companies, investments, etc. For the most part, that ownership is all public knowledge, and so you can get decent estimates of a person’s personal wealth if you know what they own and how much those things are worth. They are, however, estimates, and some people’s wealth is more amenable to being estimated like this than others. Vladimir Putin, for instance, is widely considered to plausibly one of the wealthiest people on the planet, but good luck figuring out where all of his wealth is or how much he is actually worth, personally. These lists tend to skew towards business leaders who have most of their wealth in stock as that makes for a very easy asset to put a concrete number to. It’s important to keep that in mind when you see these sorts of headlines."
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksljoh
|
How anger inhibits pain and decisions.
|
As an example, it is common for people to punch a wall when angry. They know punching the wall will hurt, especially if its a solid concrete wall, but they do it anyway and don't seem to feel the effects until after calming down. What causes the anger to overpower them knowing the pain it will cause?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gigoc3b"
],
"text": [
"Mostly due to adrenaline release. From wikipedia: [...]This increase in adrenal output raises the physical strength and endurance levels of the person and sharpens their senses, while dulling the sensation of pain. High levels of adrenaline impair memory. Temporal perspective is also affected: people in a rage have described experiencing events in slow-motion.[...] Link: URL_0"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(emotion)"
]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
kslus3
|
what do your organs do after surgery? Like the ones that get removed, what happens with that space?
|
After an organ, maybe a kidney or something, is removed, what do the organs do? Does the surgeon rearrange them or do they just sit where they were? Would the organs move themselves back into that space?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gigq851"
],
"text": [
"All your organs are stuffed in you pretty tightly. After removing one, your other organs just kinda fill up the negative space. Picture winning a stuffed toy out of a claw machine."
],
"score": [
19
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
kslv9h
|
What are stocks how do they work and are they a good way to earn long term money
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gigq1my",
"gigq2tt"
],
"text": [
"A stock is basically a small part of a company that is traded at a stock exchange. Their price is determined by people willing to sell their stocks and people willing to buy them. Both parties tell the stock exchange the price they are willing to trade on and if a match is found the trade happens. The displayed stock price is basically the average prive over the last few minutes. Investing longterm in a healthy stock is usually a good idea, but you need to know what you are investing in, because not every stock is healthy, If you want longterm investment tips, I'd suggest ETFs. They are a collection of stocks, so they are much more stable. When one goes down, another might go up and balance the whole thing out, so your risk is much lower.",
"Stocks represent partial ownership of a company. They're given to executives and early employees as part of their compensation, and companies will occasionally sell shares to venture capitalists or to the public to raise money. There's three ways to make money with stocks: 1. Some (but not all) stocks pay out money to all of the shareholders every quarter, called dividends. 2. If the company is sold, all the shareholders are paid, often in a combination of cash and the new company's stock. 3. And the most common one is to sell the stock to someone else for more than you paid for it. When you buy stock, you usually aren't buying it directly from the company, you're buying it from another person. If you think that people in the future will be willing to pay more for the stock than the current price, buying the stock now and selling it later is a good idea."
],
"score": [
5,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kslvig
|
Why is special relativity still valid if it doesn't include gravity?
|
If there is no such thing as zero gravity in our universe, then why are the findings of special relativity such as the relativity of simultaneity still considered valid when it doesn't take into account gravity like general relativity does?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gih3ego"
],
"text": [
"The Theory of General Relativity generalizes the results of Special Relativity to curved spacetime. Thus, the limitations of special relativity can be overcome – when needed – by using General Relativity. That is, Special Relativity is the limit of General Relativity for flat spacetime. In many cases, however, such as when doing particle physics on Earth , gravity is negligible. Therefore Special Relativity is still useful."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksmx3b
|
Why does everything sting in the cold?
|
I feel silly having to ask this. Every winter when I have to go outside to put the garbage out, get in the car, etc. life things, I occasionally bang my hand on an object. It hurts like hell more than it ever would in the summer. You get the signature cold sting that you would from your hand being in ice or snow, but instead it's caused just from being hit or pinched by an object when out in the cold. For frame of reference, it is usually less than 32F during the winter where I'm at.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gigy2lo"
],
"text": [
"When it's cold out, our veins constrict to reduce the blood flow to our extremities, so we can keep more blood and heat by our organs. This makes the skin on our hands and feet and such tighten up, which causes pressure on our skin. It also causes the soft tissue in our body to swell, adding tension to joints and making us stiff. This pressure, tension, and stiffness, combined with the fact that our nerves are already super sensitive in the cold, makes any ding, bang, snap, and sting hurt a lot more than it would when we're warm."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
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]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksnejp
|
How do large retail chains handle their banking?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gih4753",
"gihzgob"
],
"text": [
"It can vary by company but very generally speaking they have one main account that cash goes into and disbursements (bills, payroll) are made from. A company like target has a central office (HQ) that handles all of the finances, payments etc., the individual stores don't do that so there is no need for multiple regional accounts. Now, how they manage that money varies. Some companies might move excess cash into short or long term investment holdings rather than just let it sit. Some companies might move all their cash the rr and rely on lines of credit for daily operations, this can make sense when the borrowing rate is cheaper than the return rate on investing money. But at the end of the day they still use bank accounts the way everyone else, tho in most cases FDIC won't apply. The armored cars are just for moving the cash to the bank for deposit or vice versa. There are other cases where large companies might have franchise operations ( McDonald's for instance). In those cases, an individual franchise handles it's own cash, it doesn't get sent to head office, but the principles are the same.",
"I work in cash transit picking up from customers. We go into the locations and take their money. They make sure to put a deposit slip in the bag that tells us which bank to send the money to. It’s brought back to base where it’s scanned and sorted again according to the bank it goes to. It’s then either loaded onto another truck to be delivered to the local hub banks or kept in the vault depending on who the customer has as a bank. Their money is protected by several layers of physical barriers, armed security, surveillance equipment and sensors. We don’t pickup credit cards only cash and checks. Credit cards as far as I know are all digital. Edit: we also pick up from banks and deliver their cash ( which is cash from stores and customers) to the federal reserve bank. We then pickup more cash and coin to ship out to customers. It makes a big circle that keeps money moving all the time."
],
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3
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksnlbe
|
25th amendment
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gih25ph",
"gigzzaq"
],
"text": [
"It essentially means if the president is physically or mentally incapable of carrying out their duties, dies in office, or resigns, the vice president (or, if they cannot succeed them, the Speaker or the House of Representatives and so on and so on) succeeds them. In the simplest form, this is the current line of succession: 1. VP 2. Speaker 3. President pro tempore of the Senate 4. Sec of State 5. Sec of Treasury 6. Sec of Defense 7. Attorney General 8. Sec of Interior 9. Sec of Agriculture 10. Sec of Commerce 11. Sec of Labor 12. Sec of Health/Human Services 13. Sec of Housing and Urban Dev. 14. Sec of Transportation 15. Sec of Energy 16. Sec of Education 17. Sec of Veterans Affairs 18. Sec of Homeland Security It came into effect most likely in response to the Kennedy assassination in 1963. However, there have been numerous successions in this fashion before 1967 when the amendment was ratified into the Constitution by the Johnson administration: 1. William Henry Harrison was succeeded by John Tyler after dying in office due to illness (it's debatable as to exactly _what_ he died from, but many people speculate it was pneumonia). 2. Zachary Taylor was succeeded by Millard Fillmore after succumbing to cholera. 3. Abraham Lincoln was succeeded by Andrew Johnson after being assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. 4. James Garfield was succeeded by Chester Arthur after being assassinated by Charles J. Guiteau. 5. William McKinley was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt after succumbing to his wounds inflicted by assassin Leon Czolgosz. 6. Warren G. Harding was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge after dying from a heart attack. 7. Franklin Roosevelt was succeeded by Harry Truman after dying from a stroke. 8. John F. Kennedy was succeeded by Lyndon B. Johnson after being assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. 9. Richard Nixon was succeeded by Gerald Ford after resigning from office from due to his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Before 1967, I'm pretty sure they just pointed to the VP and said \"it's your job now\"",
"The 25th Amendment allows the VP and Cabinet to temporarily relieve the President of his/her powers in the case that the President becomes unable to fulfill the duties of President. (Temporarily without Congress approval, if I remember correctly, they get like 48 hours before Congress has to get to the issue, and 20ish days before they have to have voted on it, otherwise the president goes back to power). It's been used in times when the President has gone under anesthesia for surgery, and can in theory be used when the President is deemed a safety hazard."
],
"score": [
7,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksohz0
|
Why do clouds turn gray/black when it’s stormy?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gih5qrq",
"gihcpx2"
],
"text": [
"Ok, all of the water makes it turn grey, like when you put water on a sidewalk or something",
"The whiteness of clouds comes from sunlight scattered from small droplets of water (or in colder atmospheric temperatures, ice) of a [certain microscopic physical size]( URL_1 ). Although some sources will say that the darkness of rainclouds is due to the density of water droplets blocking sunlight from passing through, this isn't true, as can be seen when the sun-facing side of a raincloud is totally gray. It comes down to the physical dimensions of the water droplets and the physics of how much light is actually scattered back for your eyes to see, as in this comparison of Mie scattering: URL_0"
],
"score": [
7,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/blusky.html#c3",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mie_scattering"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksoqw0
|
How are different octane fuels made? And why is it important to have different gasoline types?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gih9l0q",
"gih743c"
],
"text": [
"When we pump oil out of the ground it is a mix of different hydrocarbons. You get everything from natural gas through very light gasoline and all the way to heavy tar all mixed together. Then we send it to a refinery where we separate them in a big column with the heaviest oil on the bottom and the lightest oil on the top. You can then extract the oil that you want from the column. Light oils burns very easy while heavier oil do not burn as easy. It is a bit more complicated with things like cracking and fuel additives which change its property but this is the basics of it. In an Otto cycle engine (gas engine) the fuel is ignited by a spark plug. However it is also possible that the heat and pressure in the engine can ignite the fuel before intended. This is called knocking and makes the engine less efficient and also damages the engine over time. However running the car at higher pressures increases its efficiency but also makes the engines wear out faster. This is why racing engines are built for very high pressures as they want the most power out of them as possible. However this creates a problem for them because the fuel will ignite before intended. So they use fuel which have been extracted from a bit further down the column at the refinery. This will have a higher octane rating and be a bit harder to accidentally ignite. The reason you might have fuels of different octane ratings at the gas station however is because not all engines are the same. Cars used to have lower octane rating then today because it was hard to build engines that could withstand the pressures. You also have some sports car that are built with higher compression that requires higher octane fuel. It is possible to run a car on a higher octane fuel then it was designed for but there is no benefit from it. It just tends to be a bit more expensive. In fact some cars might have issues getting the fuel to burn properly if it is too high octane and it will not be as efficient as with the correct fuel. It is not possible to change the compression ratio in an engine without replacing some of its core components.",
"Engines work by exploding fuel and air at precise moments in an engines rotation. There’s a phenomenon called pre-ignition which causes fuel/air mix to ignite and explode too early, causing uneven stresses and wear on the engine and loss of power. Excessive or repeated pre-ignition can even kill an engine entirely. Higher octane fuels resist pre-ignition better than low octane fuels. Performance cars have engines that make lots of power, the physical makeup of high output engines means they are even more prone to pre-ignition and need high octane fuel much more than a low power engine."
],
"score": [
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksq0p2
|
When we have a headache, what's actually sore? Since the brain itself is (I think) incapable of feeling pain directly.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gihg83t"
],
"text": [
"You're correct, the brain can't feel pain. Its usually your meninges that feel headaches. Its a couple layers of fleshy bits that cover the brain and spinal cord; they can feel pain just fine. If you're dehydrated or if they're irritated in some other manner that will cause a headache."
],
"score": [
30
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksqavy
|
Why is it that you get drunk faster with soda as a mixer than with juice? Alternatively, why do you feel worse after drinking juice as a mixer rather than soda?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gihkfix",
"giiluhz"
],
"text": [
"Drunk faster - the carbonation in the soda irritates the lining of the stomach, causing faster absorption of the booze. Feel worse - depends on what juice you're drinking vs what soda, but normally the more sugar, the worse the hangover. Allow me to suggest seltzer as a mixer. Benefits of the bubbles with ~~nine~~ none of the sugar. And if you do need some sweetness, maybe a splash of juice.",
"Sugar dehydrates you, as does alcohol. So sugary drinks like soda will make you more dehydrated than say beer, and you will feel worse the next day. Most of a hangover is caused by dehydration really"
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksqn8n
|
Respiration in one cell
|
I’m familiar with facilitated diffusion and glucose transporters, but I was wondering, how many molecules of glucose can one single cell use at a time for cellular respiration? Maybe it depends on the specific receptor on a cell? Not sure.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giirdgv"
],
"text": [
"The way respiration works, the cell takes in glucose and breaks it down in its cytoplasm to then transport the breakdown products into the mitochondria where specific enzymes oxidize them to form atp. The capacity of the cell depends largely on receptors and hormone levels. Insulin increases the ability of the cell to absorb glucose, glucagon does the opposite. Then the specific enzymes used to break down glucose are the next limiting factor: too little enzymes and you create a traffic jam of glucose. Then the broken down glucose needs transported into the mitochondria, so the pumps there also influence the ability to do respiration. And then the special enzymes to oxidize them and make atp can also create a bottleneck. So essentially it depends on each cell:type of cell really. Some cells do a lot of respiration (like muscle cells that consume a lot of atp), other do much less (like cartilage cells that just kind of sit there and don’t need a lot of energy)"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksreyf
|
How does a company determine how many shares it will have?
|
Also what determines the starting share price?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gihos3v",
"gihsbri"
],
"text": [
"The number of shares * price of shares = valuation of the company. The valuation of the company is tied to how much assets it has and how much profit it can make in the future, companies generally can make a pretty good ballpark guess as to what this number is. But the determining factor in how many shares a company should have is share price. Company valuation and desired share price are known numbers, if you are a company \"going public\" you can calculate how many shares should be created this way. Ideally you want each share price to be reasonably small for the average person to buy without it being a too big of a purchase but not small enough that it dips too low where pennies start being an issue. The ideal range is probably gonna be somewhere between 7 and 200 dollars, though getting into the hundreds and as low as 3 dollars isn't that bad. Do note that most exchanges really do not like stocks being below 1 dollar and have hard requirements that they must be above a dollar. If a stock rises too high, this typically isn't a problem, a stock split is accomplished to fix this, you just declare that each share that people have is now worth 5 shares or something. Percent ownership of a company doesn't change, you don't lose anything, there are 5 times as many shares in the wild and each share is worth a fifth of the original share, no value is lost. If a stock goes too low, you need a reverse stock split, combine 5 shares into 1. This is a bit more problematic and preferably should be avoided, because this forces the sale of shares of people that do not have a multiple of 5 shares. This is also why inflated companies often will not do stock splits, they fear that they might have to reverse split in the future once the valuation comes down to \"reasonable levels.\" When a company \"goes public,\" they have an initial public offering, where they have to choose how many shares there are and what price the company itself will sell them at. After these shares are bought at the IPO, the buyers sell the shares to other buyers and that determines the future stock market price, but at IPO, the share price is fixed.",
"issuing share is about cutting the pizza slices. the company decides how many slices it wants to cut. the pizza is still the entire pizza but 1 share is just how small the slice is. you don't want it too small or trading prices will be too low. you also don't want it too high or investors won't want to buy a share. e.g. 1 share of Berkshire Hathaway A is $350,089.00 . a bit too expensive for anyone to buy 1 share. although with fractional shares now it becomes less of a barrier."
],
"score": [
10,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksrgkn
|
How do we store information in our brain?
|
I know that what we sense are converted into electric impulse that are then transported to the brain but how is it stored? Also, is this process similar to the one being used in electronics?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gihpfe4",
"gihtzsl"
],
"text": [
"I'm not even sure if that's something that's even discovered. Staying in hopes for an answer",
"It's really tricky to wrap your head around, we don't actually store data in its entirety. Essentially what little data we retain activates a specific set of neurons which our brains then rebuild the entirety of the memory. Essentially a set of neurons trigger when a specific stimuli presents itself. It's why recalling something requires a trigger. Memories are kinda like compressed files, it's likely one of the reasons false memories can occur. That said, how that headmeat in our skull translates electrochemical pulses into a reaction to specific stimuli is still something people are still tackling."
],
"score": [
5,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
kssnti
|
- Salt and pepper packets, why is there enough salt for a whole family to use in one packet, but only enough pepper for a single bite on a packet?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gii1uu5",
"giiaiu7",
"giidmsu",
"giihsa8",
"giie5n6",
"giihqti",
"giii70o"
],
"text": [
"As common as it is, black pepper is one of the more expensive spices at $3US per pound, and is imported from India and Vietnam. Table salt is far more common and is less than a third of the cost of pepper, and its available from seawater via evaporation.",
"Can I also ask about ketchup packets? Who eats just one ketchup packet?!",
"Something else I haven't seen mentioned yet - the primary spice components in black pepper are volatile and degrade over time. Preground black pepper is going to be much less pungent than freshly-ground. An equivalent amount of freshly ground black pepper would probably season your food a lot better.",
"I wouldn’t necessarily say that there’s enough salt in one packet for the whole family, I sometimes use one just for myself",
"Like someone already said, pepper is more expensive. It's also a lot more flavorful than salt, generally speaking. A little pepper goes a long when adding it to a dish but, a lot of people will put twice that much salt in.",
"Why is the ice cream tub with cookie dough so ridiculously tiny?",
"The manufacturing process to fill the joined paper packets is the reason for the mismatch in product. Gravity fed product lines will have hoppers over the press that seals the product within the paper prior to seal it, and both the salt and pepper are filled at the same time. Salt flowing straight down goes faster than ground pepper. They are filled by amount of time the gravity is allowed to fill the sachets before they’re sealed closed."
],
"score": [
827,
80,
42,
7,
5,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksstsi
|
why did a bunch of civilizations decide in the number 12 to divide whole measurements, and why did they used 12 but a different amount of times? (12*2 hours/day, *3 degrees in an circle, *1 in a year and in an musical octave, etc)
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gihwu23",
"gii1ynq"
],
"text": [
"Twelve has many more factors than 10. 1x12, 2x6, 3x4. Base 10 probably only came into being because we happen to have ten fingers.",
"12 is a “highly composite number”, this means it has a greater number of integer divisors than any smaller number. It can be divided by 6,4,3 and 2. This makes it useful for a lot of easy math, particularly if you do yourself some favors in what you want to divide. Also, if you’re counting using your finger segments, using your thumb to count, then you can count to 12 on one hand. Use the other hand to count 12s and you can count to 60 with both hands. 60 is another highly composite number, that’s also handy for working in base 10. 60 is a bit of a small number for dividing up a circle, but 360, also a highly composite number, and also a multiple of 12, is very handy. Lots of easy integer divisors. For dividing up the smallest unit in any given system you’ll often see the number system move to 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 etc. This is handy as it’s very easy to divide many things into two, and then divide them by two again to get quarters, and then again to get eights and so on."
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kstfa9
|
when you turn a cars engine on the speedometer and the rpm reader go all the way to the highest number, why?
|
A question is a question why tf are you downvoting
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gii0yee"
],
"text": [
"It’s a self test. It proves the gauges work. Same reason almost all the lights come on. It would suck for your engine to explode from no oil because the low oil pressure light was burned out. It’s a common feature on airplanes too. That’s why there’s a “master caution” light that comes on if any other light is supposed to come on. The odds Of both bulbs burning out at the same time is pretty low."
],
"score": [
10
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
kstvh3
|
Why are snowflakes shaped like ❄️?
|
Magnified snowflakes look really beautiful but how do they get that particular shape?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gii74w9",
"giiab59"
],
"text": [
"The molecules in ice crystals join together in a hexagonal structure. It’s the most efficient way for them to join together",
"Water molecules are shaped like little macaroni noodles. The ends of each molecule are positively charged, and the bent elbow in the middle is negatively charged. So the ends of each molecule are attracted to the elbows of other molecules and vice versa. When you try to stack them all up into a solid structure (to form ice), they end up forming hexagons as [shown in this diagram]( URL_0 ). As that hexagon structure grows larger, it starts looking like a classic snowflake."
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ice_Ih_Crystal_Lattice.png"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksty12
|
How would a second impeachment have a different result than the first time, in regards to current events?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gii3znm",
"gii478n",
"gii4zup"
],
"text": [
"By the time the Articles of Impeachment reach the Senate it will be controlled by Democrats. So “Too late. Why bother. He’s already out of office.” Ah, but if successfully impeached and convicted (the Senate holds a trial) then Trump can not legally run for any elected office (in America). Goodbye Trump 2024.",
"The senate might be more willing to actually hear the case. Not sure we’d get a conviction however.",
"Federal pardons do not apply to cases of impeachment. So if he is impeached, and they keep the impeachment going past the end of his presidency, he cannot pardon himself for actions he is being impeached for. Not sure if there is any criminal laws broken by him yesterday, but they should impeach him for tax evasion, paying porn stars for sex and colluding with Russia."
],
"score": [
24,
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksu08o
|
Why are skirts and dresses still considered feminine clothes since they are more coherent with male anatomy than female genitals?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gii51qe",
"gii7a0w",
"gii5m06",
"giie56b",
"gii7k89",
"giia5ja",
"giigg7l",
"gijjk08"
],
"text": [
"Nothing about fashion and the fashion expectations of gender are about biological facts. Men commonly wear/wore dresses or skirts in plenty of places and times. Western men commonly wear pants now, but that's not universal.",
"Culture. In Myanmar outside of the cities the majority of men still wear longyis. I have one and I fucking love it. A lot of Pacific islanders wear lavalavas as well, especially to church.",
"From a male standpoint, I can understand why it may be more comfortable to wear a dress if it was an ankle length one; however, it’s not very appropriate for someone to spread their legs if it’s anything shorter than that. People can say what they want, but men need more room to sit comfortably than women do. Why? They have dicks. Another thing. Men don’t like their junk flopping around and we need to be able to hide random erections. Wearing a dress does neither of those. A nice pair of jeans does a pretty good job at supporting the package and an okay job at concealing that random erection.",
"Why do women go to work with skin showing and complain that its cold, and men go with 3 layers and complain that its hot? Because fashion is stupid and people are stupid.",
"The current standard “men wear pants, women wear skirts” was not always so, as men have worn skirt-like garments throughout cultures and centuries (and women pants or pant-like garments as well. European styles (and their subsequent taking over of much of the globe) have dominated, placing things are we understand them today. A women’s “sexual revolution” in the mid-twentieth century challenged established gender norms, including the stigma over women wearing pants. However, a stigma against men wearing skirts has yet to fully realize (likely for a number of reasons). Ideas of masculinity favor “strength” and standing apart from women so as to define themselves apart from women. The thought of wearing a skirt (or skirt-like equivalent like the Scottish kilt) have just not become as acceptable to ideas of masculinity in our society as the equivalent has for the opposite sex.",
"I imagine it's a lot easier for a woman to pop a squat and pee by hiking her skirt up than it would be to wrestle with pants. Maybe that's why? Speaking from a historical perspective (imagining women on the move like nomads or the old West, etc).",
"[Dhoti]( URL_0 ), [Lungi/Longyi]( URL_1 ), are still worn in the Indian Subcontinent and part of South East Asia.",
"Neither social norms nor fashion standards are rational. They just *are*. Once upon a time, pink was a manly-man's power color while blue was a delicate feminine color. Then, pink was for girls, and blue was for boys. Now, it's mostly \"who the hell cares, wear the color you like\". Why? Well...just because."
],
"score": [
44,
24,
10,
9,
8,
4,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhoti",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lungi"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksu22a
|
Why are my feet freezing cold even though I am covered in a blanket up to my chin?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gii4qjr",
"gii6ng8",
"gii4sne"
],
"text": [
"Your extremities are always the last parts of your body to warm up, as the blood is diverted to your major organs first, to keep them warm.",
"With the physylogical issues addressed by others, no one seems to say how to fix the problem - \"If your feet are cold, put on a hat.\" Works a treat.",
"Poor circulation Bloods not warming your hands and feet as well as the main body, which houses the main organs. The extremities (hands and feet) feet blood last but you feel it in your feet more because it’s easier to just tuck your hands under your chin or another body part and warm them manually."
],
"score": [
10,
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksunec
|
If Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun why is Venus the hottest?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gijkvwd",
"gijl00t",
"gijl96e",
"gijlfge"
],
"text": [
"Because of something called the \"Greenhouse Effect\". Venus has a thick atmosphere that traps heat.",
"Atmosphere. Mercury doesn't have much of one so most of the Sun's energy escapes back into space. Venus has a dense atmosphere of greenhouse gases that retains a ton of energy, keeping the surface quite hot.",
"Think of atmospheres as coats: Mercury isn’t wearing one so half of it’s cold facing away from the sun and the other half is hot facing the sun. Venus is wearing 15 fur jackets, so it gets hot and stays hot.",
"Same reason the dude standing near a summer bonfire in shorts and a t-shirt is likely more comfortable than someone further away wearing snow pants, a winter coat, and a hat. Or why a building with no A/C is probably hotter than just being outside. Or why a towel in more comfortable in a sauna than street clothes. These things keep the heat from dispersing."
],
"score": [
11,
6,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksunkd
|
Why does the Catholic Church own so many hospitals?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gii9twb",
"giiarbu"
],
"text": [
"For a very long time there were very few secular hospitals. Individual doctors made house calls and the only organization with the money to build places to care for people who probably couldn't pay well for medicine was the Church. Secular hospitals became more common when modern liberal ideals spread the idea that the gov't has a responsibility to care for citizens. Still, the religious sense of duty to care for the sick is strong. It's also probably fantastic PR for the Church to be the org that you go to when you're sick or hurt.",
"The hospital as a concept and and institution has its origins in church history; religious sisters from Europe have been nursing the poor / founding schools and hospitals in North America since the 1700s. [Here is a good summary; US info starts on p5]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
10,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1660&context=honorsprojects"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksuzna
|
How does the "good bacteria" that live in our gut or anywhere else inside our body, get there?
|
Title pretty much explains it. I'm curious as to how this pretty specific, highly useful set of bacteria finds its way into every human being, considering the huge variety of diets between different cultures and geographies. Edit : wording
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giianaf",
"giib3z6"
],
"text": [
"It's not the same from person to person. Your initial gut bacteria come from your mother; you're exposed to them during birth (which is, uh, not a very clean process) and immediately afterwards. Over time it's influenced by your diet and by your body (which has some control over the gut environment).",
"> considering the huge variety of diets between different cultures and geographies. I think you are assuming that everyone from different cultures and geography have the same group of good bacteria. The truth is that everyone bacteria population is unique, like a finger print. I might have bacteria that you don't have, and vice versa. I might have a huge quantity of bacteria A, while you only have a little. Even within families living together (with huge overlap of geography, culture, diets, and genetics), every single family member would have a unique population. URL_0 IDK on how it gets there though. I think some are transferred during childbirth."
],
"score": [
7,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200824131803.htm"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksv7f0
|
why does semen look the same after you've had a vasectomy.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giic83g",
"giic88k"
],
"text": [
"Semen is the vehicle to deliver the sperm. The vasectomy only stops the sperm, not the semen. End result? You still get to shoot loads, they’re just ghost-loads",
"Sperm only makes up a tiny percentage of semen, and the sperm duct known as the *vas deferens* (hence *vas*-ectomy) is pretty far \"upstream\" in the male reproductive tract. The vast majority of semen is fluids secreted by the seminal vesicles & prostate, both \"downstream\" from the vas deferens."
],
"score": [
27,
11
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksv9gg
|
Why does your body often make cracking/popping noises when you move?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giifcbn"
],
"text": [
"A number of joints have capsules with fluid inside of them that lubricate and nourish the joint, and gas can build up in these spaces over time. Moving the joints displaces or releases the gas and causes the cracking and popping sounds (this is painless, by the way). The sound can also be from your ligaments sliding over bony prominences. As long as these sounds are not accompanied by pain or impeded function, you don't need to be alarmed."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksviem
|
How does Helium dilute Oxygen?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giigbd8"
],
"text": [
"The same way that adding water to your tea dilutes it. It displaces the oxygen and back fills with helium. Assuming a constant pressure."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksvmia
|
why can‘t watter (or liquid) be compressed?
|
EDIT: *water
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gijkyor"
],
"text": [
"Water can be compressed. It just requires much *much* higher pressures to produce a significant reduction in volume, compared to say a gas, so here on Earth treating it as incompressible is a useful approximation. Put a drop of water inside a diamond anvil and hit it with an explosion, though, and you can produce over a dozen different forms of ice by compressing it."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksvocs
|
Why do you cry when you're sad.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giifs71"
],
"text": [
"Now I may off base here, so forgive me, but this is what I understand: The human body always wants to be balanced (homeostasis). This allows the body to work the best without issues. When we become stressed and/or sad, we cry. The tears produced in this fashion hold chemical transmitters (hormones). The act of crying is the bodies way of getting rid of these in order to keep the body balanced. The same would be true for laughing so hard that you cry. The happy signal (dopamine) is too strong for the body, so it attempts to flush it out through crying."
],
"score": [
22
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksw6vv
|
So what is energy? In simplest terms please. (science definition)
|
So what is energy? In simplest terms please. I find what is most helpful if you explain it like I'm 5 years old, then explain it like i am 12. then explain it like i am an adult. History shows that is the fastest way for me to learn.
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giii6li",
"giil64r",
"giixvbe"
],
"text": [
"Energy is the capacity to do work. It may exist in potential, kinetic, thermal, electrical, chemical, nuclear, or other various forms. There are, moreover, heat and work—i.e., energy in the process of transfer from one body to another. After it has been transferred, energy is always designated according to its nature. Hence, heat transferred may become thermal energy, while work done may manifest itself in the form of mechanical energy. ( like a gasoline car engine, for example ) URL_0",
"Energy is everywhere. You can't destroy it, just move it from one form to another. Everytime something happens energy changes from one form to another. Without energy nothing would happen at all. Another description of energy would be \"potential things to happen\". Energy also doesn't like to be piled up, but to dissipate evenly into it's surroundings, if that is possible. If you put a ball onto a mountain you give it loads of energy by putting it into a high place. It doesn't like that and wants to loose the high amount of energy by rolling down. You can put barriers up to stop it, or let it roll. When you let it roll, it converts the energy into movement and friction heat as long as it can. To \"domesticate\" energy and use it, we use things with a high energy potential and channel this energy to our use. This is primarily done with electricity, we burn things to create heat, that energy transerfs to pressure in water. The pressure goes into a turbine and becomes movement, which then gets turned into electricity with a generator. The easiest way for electricity to dissipate is along our cables into your home, where we funnel it into a motor for a kitchen appliance or the heating coils of an oven.",
"Imagine you throw a ball vertically into the air. First it has high speed. Then, it slows doen until it comes to a stop for a moment. Then it falls down, gaining speed again. So the higher the ball is at any moment, the slower it is. It seems like there is some exchange between \"highness\" and \"speedyness\" going on. Now think about driving in a car and slamming the brakes. As the car becomes slower, the brakes get hotter. As if there was some sort of exchange between \"speedyness\" and \"hotness\". In the engine of a car, some other interesting thing is going on: By burning gas, you create heat, but it is not an infinite source of heat. One gallon of gas just burns into a specific amount of heat. So there is another exchange of some sort going on. The engine itself than exchanges that \"hotness\" into \"speedyness\". As people discovered more and more such exchanges, they started to think of \"that stuff that gets exchanged\" as its own concept and called it \"energy\". You cannot touch it, and it cannot exist on its own, it's always a property of other things. It turns out that if you assign numbers to this \"energy\" in certain ways, (e.g. you define \"highness\" as mass\\*height\\*gravitational acceleration, and \"speedyness\" as mass\\*speed²/2), then this number never changes in these exchanges. So you can transform transform \"potential energy\" into \"kinetic energy\", \"thermal energy\", \"chemical energy\", etc., but the total amount of energy will always be the same."
],
"score": [
4,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.britannica.com/science/energy"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
kswmpg
|
why do neatly folded clothes take up less space?
|
When I am going on a trip, I pack all my clothes neatly in my suitcase. When I am ready to go back home, my clothes are usually dirty, so I don’t fold them that neatly. Assuming that my clothes have the same mass and volume, as when I left, why do they take up more space when not folded neatly
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giilaue"
],
"text": [
"Picture a ream of paper. It's as long and as wide as a sheet of paper, and about two inches thick. Now picture what would happen if you took those five hundred sheets, crumpled them into balls one by one and threw them in a bin. Takes up more space, doesn't it? The trick to packing things tightly is to lay broad, flat surfaces against one another. Wherever that *isn't* possible, there's a crack or a gap that takes up space. The thing that makes folding clothes neat is that you lay it flat, and when you fold it in half, flat lies against flat, with no gap in between. When clothes are rumpled, there are all these ridges and scrunches that keep the cloth from fitting against itself."
],
"score": [
10
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
kswqep
|
Gentrification
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giimv3y",
"giim0b5"
],
"text": [
"It refers to when land and property values go up so the people who live there can't afford the cost of living in their own neighborhoods anymore. It usually refers to when areas with high numbers of low income black, Hispanic, or other minority residents start having an influx of more affluent white residents. To ELI5, imagine you grew up in Youville. You make $30,000 a year, most of the houses cost $100,000 to $150,000, and the apartments cost about $400 a month. Dinner out in Youville costs about $15 per person. But there's another town called Themville. In Themville, they make $70,000 a year but the houses cost $1,000,000 or more, the apartments cost $2,000 a month, and dinner out in Themville costs about $50 per person. If someone working in Themville could buy a house in Youville, they could get all the benefit of their higher Themville income *and* all the benefit of the lower Youville prices. They'll live like kings. But now, the housing developers in Youville start realizing they could sell the same house you would pay $150,000 for to a Themvillian for $350,000, which they'll gladly pay because it's so much cheaper than $1,000,000 and they make enough to easily afford it. Now there's enough Themvillians moving in that all the houses start going for $350,000. What's more, the Themvillians still have enough disposable income left over to pay the $50 per person they're used to for dinner, and the restaurateurs all start realizing that it's far more profitable to get a slice of that than it is to corner the cheaper market, so the diner you go to for lunch becomes a gastropub that sells stuff with avocado in it for many times as much as the sandwich you used to get there, and the family restaurant you took your family to on Saturday evenings reopens as a bistro selling fusion cuisine for many times as much as the London broils and hot turkey plates you used to get there. So now you're sitting there still making your $30k a year, but you can't afford any of the houses in Youville, you can't afford to go out to eat anymore, and what's worse is that the Themvillians who all moved to Youville have spent so much money on upgrading their houses and demand much more extensive services from the town that you can't even afford the property taxes on your shitty old $100,000 house you owned from before. But you could get $200,000 for it so you do, and everyone who buys these houses spends $50,000 upgrading them and then resells them for $400,000, and so do enough other people that soon there are no Youvillians living in Youville anymore. They all had to go somewhere cheaper, but because every Youville wants to be a Themville, they find they can't buy houses anywhere, but if they go far enough away at least they can afford to rent an apartment. So now instead of owning a home, working at a job in your town, and having weekends out, you rent an apartment and have to drove an hour each way just to get to and from work, and you still can't afford to go out anymore. The people who never owned homes in the first place didn't even get that little payout at the beginning and are especially screwed. As soon as their parents sell, they're never going to be able to live in Youville despite having lived there their whole lives. You drive into Youville and you see that people like you aren't around anymore. That's gentrification.",
"There's a bad, run down part of town. Because it is so bad and run down, property values are very cheap. Property developers buy up the cheap property and start trying to build it up so that more eclectic people want to visit or eventually move there. That happens, so property values go up. This is great for those that own property in the area. This sucks for the single mom working two minimum wage jobs to provide for her kids since she doesn't own property, she is renting. Her rent goes up every year and she can't afford it any more. She can no longer live in that part of town and must move out. A wealthier tenant moves in and pays more rent. This brings higher class businesses. This increases the land value further causing rent to rise more. This cycle is gentrification."
],
"score": [
41,
13
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksxe2w
|
What's gamergate?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giiw54o"
],
"text": [
"It happened a few years ago, and depending on who you ask, it was either: * A group of investigative journalists that uncovered deep-reaching problems in the ethics of gaming journalism or: * A bunch of misygonistic man-babies who could not stand the existence of women in gaming journalism, and doxxed/threatened them & #x200B; Since gamergate was a huge thing, done by a lot of different people who acted independently from each other, there was definitly truth to both claims, depending on which subsection of the gamergaters you were talking about. But most people were absolutely convinced that only one of these claims is true, and that the other claim was only valid for a few outliers at best. The whole thing was a prime example on how the filter bubbles of the modern world can affect your perception of reality. It also showed that a label like \"gamergate\" that does not belong to some sort of organisation can be claimed by anyone, and will therefore quickly lose all meaning. Or at least that was what I got out of that whole mess."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ksxgs6
|
how was the universe created if there was once nothing?
|
Right now we have stars, asteroids, and planets including Earth. I’m sat at a table and typing on my phone. I’m alive, and so are 7 billion other humans. The universe was created by the Big Bang...right, ok then. But how did the Big Bang even happen if there was nothing before it? Was there even space before it? I also don’t get how space can not exist inside something else, and that inside something else. When ever I try to find my answers it all gets very complicated and I give up. So please, would somebody tell me how it is that I’m here, avoiding work, on this planet and in this universe. But I’m stupid, so make it easy 🙏
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giipkeu",
"giiy2or",
"giirprt",
"gijl7gy",
"gijlrqm",
"gik89ln"
],
"text": [
"We don’t know. We can only barely explain what happened in the early early universe, but why it happened, or what was happening “before”, what “before” even is, how to interpret any of it. We just simply don’t know. Sorry for the unsatisfying answer, but it’s the truth, maybe it’s some sort of cosmic coincidence, maybe there’s a god, maybe we’re in a simulation, or maybe our Big Bang hypothesis is wrong and we are somehow completely most understanding the universe and how it operates, Which is still totally possible considering our current biggest scientific mystery just kind of gets the name “dark matter” slapped on it. We’re very young in terms of studying the universe, less than a few hundred years ago we though the universe revolves around us, a few thousand years ago and we were barely using metal tools. We’ve probably still got a whole lot to learn.",
"> How was the universe created? We don't know > The universe was created by the big bang No, the Big Bang is a theory that explains how the universe has expanded, and the state of our observable universe billions of years ago. It doesn't explains how (and if) our universe has been created.",
"Everything was condensed. We don't know what happened before that though.. it wasn't literally nothing. It was not something we can really describe. Our world is more space than matter. What would pure matter/energy even look like?",
"We don't even know if there ever was \"nothing\". We don't know if the universe was created. The alternative is that it always existed in some form. This makes the most sense to me.",
"This is a slight misunderstanding of the Big Bang theory. Big Bang doesn't say there was \"nothing\". We know there was a singularity that greatly expanded into the universe we have today. This expansion is the Big Bang. Think of it this way: if you have a firecracker that blows up, the explosion is the Big Bang. However, the firecracker existed. Unfortunately, a lot of this is beyond our knowledge right now and it's possible we'll never know. However, there wasn't a \"nothing\".",
"Due to the nature of the big bang we cannot know what if anything was before it. There are numerous theories that could explain it but as you can imagine it's really hard to collect observations or to make tests. Also some of these theories may only push the question back further. A theory I quite like is based on the fact that vaccumes are unstable. If you have nothing something will pop into existence to fill it ( this causes problems for gravity wave dectors and atomic scale machines and causes black holes to evaporate). So given nothing something could have just appeared that turned into our universe. There are a lot of fundamental constants that define how our universe works that are perfectly tuned so our universe can exist as it does and no reason as to why this is the case. Other then if it wasn't then we wouldn't be here to notice how perfect it is. There are a lot more possible universes that would instantly collapse in on itself or not allow stars to form then would become something today. The Big Bang should have produced matter and anti matter is equal quantities and they should have completely anhililated each other leaving nothing behinds. For an unknown reason about 1 in every billion particles of matter survived forming our universe. So there could have been many many other universes before ours which came and went in an instant before ours came about which allowed stars and planets with us and coffee to form. The unfortunate truth is that being inside the universe we may never be able to know everything about the universe. In a few trillion years all traces of the big bang and the expanding universe will be gone. Any one asking the same questions you have will have even less to go on. It's a scary thought that for most of the life of the universe there will be no evidence of its birth. Our brains evolving for millions of years in Africa have enough trouble with modern society so it can be forgiven for having trouble with the fundamental nature of the universe. It's one of those things where the less you think about it the easier it is. Mathematicians working in 12 dimensional space have no problems as long as they don't try to imagine it. Knowing that something can come about from nothing makes sense to me as long as I don't think too hard on the nothing."
],
"score": [
29,
6,
5,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksxi0g
|
why do kids of immigrant parents change accents depending on who they’re talking to?
|
not long ago i was with my friends, and i have just a standard australian accent, one that you’d expect to hear normally. however, when i was talking on the phone with my parents (who are immigrants with strong accents) my friends said that my accent became stronger on the phone. i’ve never noticed any difference between when i talk to my parents vs when i talk to others, nor have my parents. two of my other friends, who are lebanese and filipina, have accents that get thicker too, and i was wondering why. is it a phsychological thing, or something else?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giiqpo1",
"giirqhj"
],
"text": [
"It’s called code-switching and everyone does it to a certain extent. Everyone changes the way they speak and behave subtly depending on who they’re around. For example, you probably speak differently to your boss than you do to your friends. Or a newscaster might speak more casually at home than they do on camera. With regard to accents, you tend to have a stronger one when you’re around your family or talking to other people from your own culture. When you’re talking to non-Aussies, you’re probably subconsciously adjusting your speech so that you’ll be better understood. It’s even common for non-immigrants when accents reflect class or ethnic differences. It’s a really common thing among black Americans, who might speak in thick AAVE at home but get more “formal” and less casual when they’re at work, or speaking publicly, or, uh... dealing with the cops. It shouldn’t have to be this way of course, but you often gain or lose respect based on how you talk. ETA: a really cool movie about this is *Sorry To Bother You*, which is about a black guy who works in a call center and discovers he makes more sales when he speaks in his “white voice”... which in the movie is dubbed in by David Cross, a white actor.",
"The codeswitching answer is good. I'd also just point out that you probably DO talking different to your parents and friends. And even differently depending on the friend group. Think of your different tones, topics, slang, vocal inflections, manners, power dynamics etc.... We're a little bit different in every group we're in and thats totally normal. We don't tell people at work that we love them. We avoid talking about sex with our parents. We all talk different laying in bed with our significant other. We all have a polite style of speaking we use with servers, cashiers, ETC"
],
"score": [
17,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ksxj5h
|
Why do you lose all your strenght and energy when trying to hold on to a virbating object
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"giipxkd"
],
"text": [
"Your muscles are trying to stabilize you. They will compensate the best they can and this requires energy. Now your energy won’t exactly drain, what you’re experiencing is more like fatigue. For lack of a better word, your nerves get “tired” of firing."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
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