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l2vbh0
|
What makes Google search results better than Bing or DuckDuckGo?
|
I've been toying with other search engines for the past week or so. DuckDuckGo, Bing, Ecosia... The one thing I notice is that no matter what, my results on Google are just \*better\*. I'm wondering why that is. Is it just because they've been tracking me my entire life so they know how to curate my search results properly? Or is their algorithm just better? And in that case, why can't other search engines just copy their algorithm?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"I want to add to the discussion that duckduckgo is actually Bing. All they do is take your query, make it anonymous and then give it to Bing in order to return the results generate by Bing to you.",
"Algorithms can be copywritten, not to mention the money that Alphabet can afford to give companies for incentive that some companies just don't. in the case of Bing, Microsoft doesn't treat Bing like Alphabet treats Google search",
"> Is it just because they've been tracking me my entire life so they know how to curate my search results properly? Or is their algorithm just better? Both. Google personalize results based on location, and they probably use other data have about you although it's really hard to know. But they also have so much more money to invest into making the search algorithms really good. > why can't other search engines just copy their algorithm? Making a search engine is incredibly difficult. So difficult that only Google, and maybe Bing, have been successful at it. Duckduckgo and Ecosia both license results from Bing. Google and Bing keep the details of their search algorithms very secret, so you can't copy it, although many have tried."
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14,
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3
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[
"url"
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[
"url"
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l2vj6p
|
How can you buy options for a small fractional percent of what they're valued?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gk8az68",
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"text": [
"Yeah... but the option is just that: its a right to buy the share in question at a fixed price at some point in the future. You still have to buy the share itself. PLUS, the risk in the option is what if the share price goes the other way. Lets say you get an option to buy STK at $10/share. STK currently trades at $8.95, and what you're HOPING is that a year from now when you _vest_ your option the price is > $10. The difference between the actual share price and your option strike price is how much you just gained miraculously out of thin air. So you pay $0.60 for the option to buy STK at $10. Later on its time to vest. IF STK is higher than $10.60 you've made money. If its lower than, you've lost money. When your employer grants you stock options as part of your compensation, its (in theory at least) an incentive for you to work hard so the company does well so the stock price goes up (in your case, above the strike price specified in your option.)",
"So GME is a REALLY bad example here. I am guessing that you bought those options a day or two ago. and literally just today GME has rocketed up. It has literally been the most volatile day in GME history and the stock was literally forced to stop trading. Don't expect to make those calls all the time, or for that to happen all the time. But let's just look at the current price. The cost of 1 option is $11.95 and they expire today. So if you wanted to buy an option you would have to pay 11.95, for an option to buy GME at $60 a share TODAY. That may seem like a great deal given the current price of $68. But it may not be. Your total cost (if you bought the option and exercised it) would be $71.95, while the current share price is only $68.78. That means if you decided to buy options right now, you would lose money if the price stayed the same. By buying the $60 option right now, you are betting that the price when the option is exercised is at least going to be $71.95, so you would be betting that the stock would rise even more. The reason your return is so high is that 2 days ago, literally NO ONE expected GME to be anywhere near $60, so the options were really risky. If you made that bet on almost any other stock, you would have lost the money."
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3,
3
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[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
l2vrdo
|
What causes that tingling in the spine during orgasm?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk8mar6",
"gk8vovg"
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"text": [
"Wait you get a tingle in your spine?",
"I would guess that it is related to the general increase in brain activity, blood flow, and involuntary muscle contractions that accompany orgasm. Like how your skin feels tingly when you are scared/excited."
],
"score": [
14,
3
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[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
l2vyqc
|
Why is it harder to cook rice or pasta on higher altitudes?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gk8f14u",
"gk8filz"
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"text": [
"It’s not harder per se but since altitude is higher, air pressure is lower, and thus water boils at a lower temperature, this must be taken into account with regards to water evaporation and cook time.",
"Because the water's not as hot. There's less air pressure at high elevation, which means the boiling point of water is lower— so even if you get a pot of water as hot as possible, it's only 204°, instead of 212° (F). It's not a *huge* difference, but it's there."
],
"score": [
5,
4
],
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[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
l2waaf
|
Why do brokers allow people to short stocks, what’s in it for them?
|
I understand what shorting a stock is and how a person can benefit if they get it right, but why would a broker let me borrow their share? What happens if I make a loss and can’t buy back the share for the broker?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk8ifi0"
],
"text": [
"They charge you for the privilege of shorting their stock. That is what is in it for them. If you make a loss, they expect you to pay for it. They will limit how many shares they allow you to borrow based on how much they feel you can pay back."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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l2wfp9
|
Why are complex numbers so important?
|
Mathematics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gk8ldtd",
"gk8rkk3",
"gk97bel",
"gk8m9g9",
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"text": [
"Complex numbers are the combination of regular (real) numbers and imaginary numbers. Quick primer: imaginary numbers themselves are just a place holder for something being multiplied by the square root of -1. So, instead of 5, you get 5i . By themselves, they're alright, but what they can represent makes them important. The cool thing about complex numbers is because they have both real (regular) parts and imaginary parts, they have lots of really convinient properties. For example, if you want to write an equation for a cirle, you can use lots of awkward hyberbolic trigonometry gobbeldy-gook, or you can very easily compress all of that info into a neat little expression of the form e^(i\\*pi\\*2). Complex numbers also allow engineers and mathematicians to more easily represent things like electricity, radio waves, digital information, and stuff that repeats (think springs or swings). TL;DR - Complex numbers make math more concise and easier to deal with.",
"Complex numbers are algebraically closed. Let me explain what this means by going through the sets of numbers up to complex and showing how solutions to equations constructed with those numbers behave. A construction of these sets is far beyond an ELI5, so I'll skip those. Lets look at natural numbers. If we make an algebraic equation using only natural numbers, can we guarantee that our solution won't take us out of the realm of natural numbers? Lets look at a few: x+10 = 14, x = 4. Hey, we're still in the realm of naturals! x+6=4. Nope. no natural number satisfies this. Ok this isn't fun. Whatever realm of numbers we pick, we want our equations to not take us out of that realm. Lets go beyond naturals to integers! 2x-6 = 12, x = 9 still an integer! 5x +10 = -40, x= = -10, still an integer! yaaaay! 2x=7. Nope, no integer works for this. Lets extend again, lets head to rational numbers! 8x + 2 = 22, x= 2.5 still a rational number. x^2 + 2x - 8, solutions are x = 2, x = -4. Both are rational numbers. x^2 = 2. As discovered by the ancient greeks, no rational number satisfies this. All righty, we've had to keep extending, Lets go to real numbers now. x^2 = 2, x=sqrt(2) or -sqrt(2). Now lets try x^2 = -9 . No real number satisfies this. Let's extend again, to complex numbers. Now this is what I mean by algebraically closed. If you construct any algebraic equation using complex numbers, your solution will not be outside of that realm. Your solutions will all be complex numbers.",
"There are lots of different ways to answer this question! ---- Here's a **math** answer. It's all about [closure]( URL_0 ). For a long time, one way math has discovered new kinds of numbers is by starting with a known set (beginning with the natural numbers) and finding an operation that stays within that set for *some* values but not for others. What does this mean? For instance, if you *add* two natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, ...), you always get another natural number; but if you *subtract,* you might need the negative numbers too. We say that the naturals are *closed* under addition, but not subtraction; their *closure* under subtraction forms the integers (..., -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ...) The integers are closed under addition and subtraction, but not division; for that, you need the rational numbers (integers and fractions). The rationals are closed under division (well ... except zero), but not over geometric operations; the closure here forms the real numbers (including things like √2 and π, which were discovered through geometry). But even though √2 is a real number, the reals aren't closed under taking square (or higher) roots, because √-1 *isn't* a real number. And in this case, the closure forms the complex numbers. (The word \"closure\" means a lot of different things in math, logic, CS, psychology, and many other fields. That's just how words work, kind of like how \"organic\" in chemistry means \"carbon chains\" but in agriculture it means \"no synthetic pesticides or fertilizers\" and in search engines it means \"the 'real' search results, not ads\".) ---- Here's a **physics** answer. The real and imaginary parts of complex numbers work together in a way that accurately describes electromagnetism and a lot of other physical phenomena. What's even better than complex numbers though? Tensors! ---- Here's an **engineering** answer. Because of the physics answer, we need complex numbers to describe thing such as electric circuits. Once there is any capacitance or inductance involved (and there always is, at least a little bit), complex numbers are involved.",
"There are certain problems that can only be solved with imaginary numbers. Imagine somebody who only knows whole numbers - they can handle multiplication/addition/subtraction fine, but once they hit division suddenly the result of 3/2 doesn't make sense.",
"we live in a 3 dimensional world. The number line is a 1 dimensional line. Complex numbers bring numbers into the 2nd and 3rd dimension. and the 4th dimension! Theres a great series on youtube about complex numbers. URL_0 its 13 short videos. i recommend watching them all. it gives you a much better understanding than a classroom gives you."
],
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
l2wg9u
|
What exactly is bias in research? And what are your thoughts on it?
|
I don't entirely understand the said topic lol
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"There's lots of biases that can show up when researching something. I'll give an example of one \"confirmation bias\" Imagine you're studying coin flips. Except you have the hypothesis that a coin shows heads 2/3s of the time rather than 1/2. Your experiment can then be done by flipping your coin 3 times. If it comes up heads twice, you hypothesis seems confirmed. Except, we all know this is wrong, and that the result is just *biased* through small sample size. There isn't much else to do than recognize the different types of bias, minimize them in your methods, and account for the kinds that can't be completely done away with.",
"Bias is bad. However, eliminating bias is very, very difficult. When doing an experiment, there are many, many variables. Scientists control for some of them, and ignore some of them. When they do this perfectly, they can produce unbiased results, but perfection is infrequent. An example, you're doing experiments in test tubes, lots and lots of test tubes. You carefully control the chemicals you use, and assure that thay are uniform. You get the test tubes from the supply room, because that's cheaper. Almost all the time, who made the test tube makes absolutely no difference to the result. However, in one case it might turn out that the bottom of the test tubes from company A are a little rougher than the ones from company B. This causes nucleation points that reduces the boiling point of some liquid and changes the results. The test tube manufacturer has unintentionally biased your results in a way that's very hard to find, but it makes it impossible for other scientists to reproduce your results. It might be years before the effect is identified, and then you have to redo all that work to get the right answers. This example was an accident, but many other choices made by researchers, like who to include in the study or where to conduct it can have subtle effects. That's why it's not great to react to the first \"amazing\" study you read about. Let's see if 3-4 groups can reproduce the results, then it's likely true. Alas, this will take years, and the popular media never want to wait that long before they launch the clickbait headlines."
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3
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[
"url"
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[
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l2xrlo
|
Why is there an expiration date on bottled water?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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],
"text": [
"The FDA requires *every* item that it regulates to have an expiration date of no more than 2 years from the date of production. Companies can put a longer expiration date on the item if they can prove that the product lasts longer than that, but doing so is expensive and the only companies that go through the process to do that produce frieze dried food that is intended to last for decades. That's it. The FDA just has a blanket rule that says any item it regulates needs to have an expiration date, bottled water is a regulated item, and there is no exception to that rule for bottled water. The plastic breaking down/cover your ass/whatever arguments that people have come up with to justify the expiration dates are just speculation from people who don't understand FDA labelling requirements. The plastic used to bottle the water will not break down or leach chemicals under *normal* conditions. If you store a plastic bottle of water under the types of extreme conditions that will cause the plastic to break down, the water will become undrinkable within a few weeks, not within a few years. Putting an expiration date on an item offers a company no legal protection if the item turns out to expire. Again, every similar argument has absolutely no basis. **The only reason that bottled water has an expiration date is because the FDA has a blanket rule on expiration dates that covers it. Properly stored, bottled water stays good essentially forever.**",
"A little big legal CYA (cover your ass)... I mean water doesn't really go bad, and if the bottle started to go bad we're talking a long time.... but mostly they use it as a batch number for recall purposes. If, for whatever reason, they had to recall a batch because Mildred dropped her Xanax perscription into a run of Evian, they couild just say \"All Evian sold within < region > with an expiration date of < whatever the incident + typical expiry date stamped > is to be recalled.\""
],
"score": [
200,
7
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[
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[
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l2xv1u
|
- Foods with the same calorie content not giving us the same level of “fullness”
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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],
"text": [
"\"Fullness\" is what you feel when your stomach is physically full, whether or not that food has calories in it. Calories don't come into play until you're talking about energy use and weight gain/loss. You can feel full after drinking a pint of water, without gaining any calories. You can also eat a few teaspoons of sugar and still feel ravenous, even though you've ingested a bunch of calories (3 teaspoons of sugar is about 90 calories)."
],
"score": [
3
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[
"url"
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[
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|
l2y6ee
|
Why do artists still sign with record labels and not put songs onto youtube or spotify themselves?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"I mean, plenty of artists do, mostly because a label won't sign them. A label will promote you, market you, open doors for you, get you live venues, and basically give you credibility with everyone else in the industry. The value to the artist is immense.",
"Labels can market you effectively and have all the contacts you need to get radio play, TV spots, etc. They also know how to get you performing at festivals or opening for other big acts. Much of the charting music charts because the record labels push it - not because it's 'good'. It's very much a 'who you know' industry.",
"Because in the music it’s about *who* you know, not *what* you know. If it was an option back then, even The Beatles would have never got anywhere by publishing themselves, even with their talent. It’s about being connected and having connections, having people to get you in the right places to be heard. Bear in mind that YouTube and Spotify work on algorithms and once your algorithm is set then you get the same things suggested to you. If you’re independent you’re never going to get in somebody’s algorithm because they’re not looking for you"
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8,
3
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[
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|
l2y8oj
|
how babies breathe before and after being born
|
How is it possible that babies breathe while submerged in water in mother's belly and then after being born immediately breathe 'normally'? Before birth, aren't our lungs filled with liquid? How do we 'empty' them after being born?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gk8zcgq",
"gk9pe44"
],
"text": [
"A baby does not breathe before it is born. While in the womb, a baby takes oxygen and nourishment from the mother’s blood system through the placenta. The placenta is special organ that grows alongside the baby in the womb and connects the baby to the mother. The placenta allows the mother’s circulatory system and the baby’s circulatory system to get close enough to each other to exchange chemicals dissolved in the blood but without actually mixing the blood. A baby takes its first breath only after it has left the womb. The mouth and nose of a newborn baby are filled with mucus which often has to be loosened or removed before the baby can take its first breath.",
"In addition to what everyone is saying: if you do some research into fetal to neonatal transition, babies are prompted to take their first breaths once born due to a decrease of oxygen, increase of carbon dioxide, and a few other factors. That stimulates some part of their brain into drawing their first breath. In terms of the fluid in their lungs, this [article]( URL_0 ) explains under the second subtitle that some the fluid gets squeezed out during birth, some of it gets coughed up, and the rest gets absorbed into the body.",
"Babies don't breathe before being born--they get all their oxygen via the placenta. Their lungs don't have fluid in them--the trachea prevents that. they start breathing when they're born by instinct, just like so many other animals.",
"The fetus starts to take 'practice breaths' in the womb around the 32 week onward. They're breathing in amniotic fluid that doesn't harm the lungs. They'll do so every so often for around 10 seconds about once and hour or more. As other people have said, they're getting oxygen through the umbilical cord. The fetus is just practicing. [Check out this video of a fetus taking practice breaths in the womb.]( URL_0 ) The color doppler is turned on so that fluid moving towards the top of the screen shows in red and fluid moving down shows blue. The redblue flashes in the bottom right is the heart. If a pregnancy is at heighten risk (due to hypertension in the mom for example), doctors may order an ultrasound to check for certain activity to see if the baby is doing alright, and watching for practice breathing is one of the indications that everything is progressing normally. If the baby isn't taking practice breaths or moving around much, it's a worrying sign that may make the doctor decide to induce delivery early to save the baby."
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6,
4,
4
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|
[
"url"
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[
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l2yahj
|
Why is it that computers apparently can't run Crysis? Can they run it now?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk8ztuk"
],
"text": [
"Modern machines generally wouldn't have trouble running Crysis. When the game was released in 2007, however, it was incredibly demanding and only high-end machines could run it well. So, for quite a while 'can it run Crysis?' became a shorthand for whether a machine was a quality gaming machine. If it could run Crysis, it could run basically anything."
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"score": [
13
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[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
l2yvry
|
How do astronauts deal with health emergencies while in the ISS?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk94ua5"
],
"text": [
"There's a number of medical supplies on board the station to deal with basic things from illness and injury. Astronauts also have a degree of basic healthcare training. The astronauts have telehealth support from the ground that can help guide them through diagnostics and tests to figure out what's wrong. But if it's serious enough they have to come home. Which also means anyone else assigned to their space craft will also have to leave the station because the space craft doubles as the only escape pod."
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"score": [
11
],
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
l2zciw
|
Why do things turn black when you burn them?
|
Wondering why things turn black when they’re burnt, or generally get darker in color?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk97rlk",
"gk980sh"
],
"text": [
"When an object is burned, such as wood, chicken, etc., the object turns black because of the carbon residue left behind. Organic materials are largely made of hydrocarbons which, When subjected to a high energy source, split apart into their counterparts.",
"Not all things do. However, carbon-containing materials tend to leave the carbon behind as they burn. It forms a dust in the smoke. Elemental carbon, stropped of hydrogen and oxygen, is *very* black."
],
"score": [
7,
3
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[
"url"
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[
"url"
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l2zr9s
|
the saying- "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
|
Can somebody explain how this phrase makes sense? If you supposedly go to hell for bad behaviour, how can good intentions lead you there?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"It's often used to mean that people *intend* to do good things, but end up doing nothing beneficial - so it's sort of used as a reminder to actually do good instead of just enjoying the idea or the intention of it. But more commonly, it's used to mean that good intentions can lead to people doing bad things. Almost nobody thinks that they're a \"bad guy.\" Most of us will have an excuse for a bad choice that makes it seem good to us, or some reason why the bad thing we did isn't so bad. Or that we meant well, but messed up somewhere along the way. Many of the horrible, brutal leaders of history had intentions that, to them, were good - protecting their people, spreading their way of life, etc. - but which caused a lot of suffering or injustice in the world to the people that they were set against. No matter the intentions, it's the action and the consequences that matter. That's what that aphorism has always meant to me.",
"An alternative form is \"Hell is full of good meanings, but heaven is full of good works\" In plain language it means \"Results matter, intentions don't\"",
"Usually it means that people have a good goal in mind, but the way they go about it and the side effects are bad. An example would be someone in government who suggests that anyone who gives birth needs to prove they have a safe home in which to raise the child. If they can’t prove that, they don’t get to keep their baby. Depending on how they define a safe home, it’s likely that a lot of poor or disabled people would have their babies forcibly taken from them. If the majority of poor people in the area are the same ethnicity, then the government will end up taking the children of one race and giving them to a different race. All of a sudden, this government person who wanted to protect children is responsible for a eugenics program. That’s how you get to hell by trying to do something that seems good",
"For me, it is particularly a caution against using self-righteousness to justify actions. Crusaders and witch-burners thought they were doing good and godly deeds for example. Many evil things have been promoted through “good intentions.”",
"Answer: Intentions alone don't solve anything. If you're only willing to do good but don't ever do anything, what good did you do? It's similar to \"actions speak louder than words\" Also, it's usually people's excuse when they screw something up. \"I tried to fix your sink with good intentions\" but it's more broken now than before.",
"This phrase is more of a warning about how one achieves a result. It is not difficult to get caught up in bad actions when you are working towards a good goal. For example, suppose you want to donate money to your favorite charity. The only problem is you don’t have any money to donate. So instead of working more hours or cutting back your expenses, you decide to rob a gas station. While robbing the gas station, you have to shoot the cashier. You have committed two crimes (bad actions) just so you could help out your favorite charity (good intention).",
"It means you can create bad outcome with good intentions. Like give someone a fish and they can eat one day, teach them how to fish and they can eat every day. When you wanna help someone you might do it for the short term but your help can be counterproductive for long term recovery."
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l30tzs
|
Why do we pee a lot in winter or cold atmosphere?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"Your body needs to spend energy on keeping urine from crystallization. Eliminating the urine helps your body conserve energy for heat.",
"I doubt this is the only reason, but in the winter you sweat less and have more water to expel. Therefore: you pee more.",
"cold diuresis. When you're cold, your capillaries constrict to keep your heat closer to the center of your body. This in turn increases your blood pressure which forces your kidneys to filter faster in order to lower it. Where does the water your kidneys filter go? That's right, your bladder."
],
"score": [
6,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l30y8r
|
Why is plastic bad for the environment?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk9njm6",
"gk9jy3m",
"gk9muwe",
"gk9l147",
"gk9zqcs"
],
"text": [
"Animals ingest plastic believing it to be something else. For example, sea turtles think plastic bags look a lot like jellyfish. Once ingested, the plastic can't be digested so it just takes up space in their guts without providing any nutritional value. Because they can't break it down, it can often get lodged in their guts for a long time, slowly starving them. This is especially dangerous with microplastics, which are tiny, often microscopic pieces of plastic released into the environment as large pieces grind down and erode. Filter feeders looking for plankton ingest the microplastics and can't do anything to get rid of them, so they accumulate them in their tissues. Then those get eaten by bigger predators, and the same thing happens, and so on. The plastic can break down into toxic byproducts that slowly poison the organisms, especially when it pollutes a waterway. Killing the bottom level of the food web, like the plankton in an aquatic environment, collapses the whole food web. Some plastics become habitat for organisms that shouldn't have it. Plankton species in the open ocean use microplastics as habitat to attach to, and other species are using plastics as places to lay eggs. This creates a different problem in the food web, because those species that shouldn't be as populous suddenly drastically increase in population, which means they consume resources that other species need to thrive. Those species fail and die, further disrupting the food web. And plastics *just don't go away*. They last for decades, so environments disrupted by plastics can't recover. If you dumped thousands of gallons of bleach into the ocean, that particular part of the ocean would get really messed up. But, within weeks the bleach would break down and dissipate, so that area could begin recovering very quickly. Plastics take longer to affect the environment, but since they never go away they just keep going.",
"So so much of it is produced it piles up and ends up everywhere and is harmful for wildlife. It's made from fossil fuels, toxic chemicals leech out into the ground and drinking water.",
"plastic doesn't break down, or, at least it takes too long to. It isn't safe to ingest, so it kills animals who eat too much of it.",
"There is a garbage island the size of Texas in the ocean. And much more plastic litter in every corner of the earth.",
"Its not very biodegradable so when it gets in the ocean it floats until something eats it or it sinks to the bottom. Either way disrupting marine life. It's made from (sometimes toxic) chemicals and not good to ingest. Also when you burn it it releases toxic fumes."
],
"score": [
15,
6,
5,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l313h0
|
Why does water feel colder when it’s splashed than when you’re just sitting in it ?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk9mo69"
],
"text": [
"When you're sitting in water, you gradually warm a thin layer of water against your skin that will act as a buffer against your body and the colder water, slowing down heat loss. When you're splashed, your skin goes from normal to covered in a very effective heat conductor that pulls heat out of your skin in a localized way, which is felt much more strongly."
],
"score": [
14
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l31c0h
|
When shot in the head, what is it that actually causes you to die instantly?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk9nd2t",
"gk9nwj6",
"gk9vkrg"
],
"text": [
"Your brain is responsible for keeping all of your vital organs running. Your heart keeps on beating and your lungs take breaths without your involvement, and your brain is responsible for that. When your brain is so badly injured that it can't keep your vital organs running anymore, then you die. If the brain is offline because of the gunshot, the heart isn't pumping, and the lungs aren't inhaling, that's it. That's what it means to be dead. A gunshot to the head doesn't always cause instant death. People can survive if the brain wasn't damaged badly enough to cause vital organ failure.",
"It's part of the definition of \"dead\". When the definition of death became \"no brain waves\" then using the brain to absorb the energy of a bullet mostly disconnects the brain's circuits and kills you.",
"It depends on where in the head. Often getting shot in the head does not cause you to die instantly. I have been to several gunshot wounds to the head where the person still had a pulse and spontaneous respiration. Often they’re able to be kept “alive” to donate organs if the family so chooses."
],
"score": [
13,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l31f4m
|
Where did polio and other viral illnesses come from? Why did the world exist fine, and then suddenly that came to be?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gka0tvj"
],
"text": [
"Generally these diseases were passed on to the human race from ones that were able to jump from other animals, as we came in contact with them. This is known as \"Zoonosis.\" They may also be a result of mutations to pathogens which have been endemic in hominids and other great apes for our entire evolutionary history. The human louse for example, may drink blood from other animals, however it is not known to lay eggs on species other than humans. So it's likely been with us for as long as Homo sapiens have been around. Poliovirus in particular, likely evolved from the *Cocksakie A* group of viruses which cause a number of usually mild diseases including Hand-Foot-and-Mouth Disease. These viruses can also rarely cause meningitis. Some viruses in this group can infect other great apes aside from humans, although research in this realm is scant. There's evidence of symptoms of polio in Egyptiann and Sumerian writings so it's likely been around a very long time. Before recorded history at least. Poliovirus itself does not cause paralysis, rather an acute immune response causes damage to the peripheral nerves and spinal cord in a minority of cases, This is due to inflammation caused by white blood cells attacking those tissues. Most cases of polio do not cause permanent paralysis. This is a rather unfortunate and unusal quirk of the disease that is extremely rare in other Cocksakieviruses. Poliovirus seems to prefer to infect certain cells found in motor nerves. The ancestor of Covid-19 was likely found in certain Asian bat species. It's exact origin is unclear but it may have escaped containment from samples contained in a virology lab. It may also have spread from clandestine markets selling live bats. Smallpox almost certainly came as a result of a mutation of the cowpoxviruses that infect cattle. In cattle these cause few if any symptoms. Snallpox likely emerged between 5000 and 10000 years ago in northern Africa."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l31l3z
|
Why does soap only burn your eyes while they're open?
|
You're in the shower and you get soap/shampoo in your eyes. The pain is immediate - but when you close your eyes for relief, the pain vanishes entirely only to return when you reopen your eyes. Why?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk9sdwk"
],
"text": [
"You are continually producing tears. Close your eyes and there is virtually no space between lid and eyeball, that can be flushed with soap-free tears very quickly. The eyelids themselves act as scrapers across the eyeball. Open them again and soapy water can be dragged back across from the outside."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l31o6h
|
Can someone explain to me what’s happening with GameStop’s stock
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk9qfot"
],
"text": [
"An investment company decided to sell a bunch of Gamestop stock, as they felt that the company wasn't doing so hot anymore. A bunch of Redditors tried to troll the company by buying that stock, to stop their plan of \"Sell and it and rebuy it again at a cheaper rate\" that a lot of companies do in this sort of situation. The investment company didn't actually want to lose the GameStop stock, they just wanted to make a quick buck by selling it short term. Enough redditors on WallStreetBets did this, that it turned out to be so successful that they convinced a bunch of other people that there must be some big reason why all of these internet guys are buying Gamestop stock, and so other folks tried buying it too, and the value of GameStop on the stock market has risen."
],
"score": [
54
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3205d
|
Is theoretically any device connected to the internet vulnerable to attacks from hackers?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gka5lh6",
"gk9vccz",
"gkaxb6c",
"gkax1nd",
"gkb1y5m"
],
"text": [
"Security researcher here: Theoretically? No. Practically, absolutely. If there's a device out there connected to the internet, it likely has some services running on it, and due to the complexity of software development/networking/much more, no one person knows everything a device is doing. This is where criminal hackers come into play, by applying common research techniques as well as reverse engineering skills, they are able to develop exploits that take advantage of flaws in software and services. The general rule in security is that \"everything can be hacked\"\\*, but the defensive idea is to make it so time consuming and not worthwhile for criminals to try and attack. No one wants to spend 2k hours trying to make your smart fridge warm(Well, at least most criminal hackers, I'd like to imagine(though I'm sure there's a few out there!)).",
"Yes, theoretically and practically any device connected to the internet can be hacked, whatever level of security you use there is always a higher level hacking method maybe not figured out yet.",
"My father once told me ' the only computer thats safe from hacking is one that runs on batteries and sits in the middle of a large desert. ' this was in '92.",
"This question makes me curious whether, conversely, it is possible in actual practice to 100% secure a device that is connected to the internet against hackers?",
"Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Yessssssssssssssss. But for real any device can be breached if there is access to it and a vulnerability. That could just be an exploit that hasnt been patched or even just a user doing something dumb like setting a password to \"password\". It extends beyond just internet connected devices. Open Bluetooth? If someone is in range they might get into it."
],
"score": [
57,
19,
6,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l320j1
|
How are non-contact thermometers able to determine temperature?
|
I just cannot understand how a device that does not come in contact with a object is able to determine the temperature of that object.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk9u6d5",
"gkalgox"
],
"text": [
"Because hot objects glow a colour that gives their temperature away. You can see that with red-hot metal, for example. If you could see in the infra-red, you could tell the temperature of cooler objects in the same way.",
"Everything radiates energy. A rock in outer space is radiating a small amount of energy. Non-contact thermometers work by measuring the amount of radiation coming off an object. That radiation is infrared light, the same thing that warms you when sitting by a fire. Some things will start to glow with visible light when getting very hot, like steel that is heated by a torch (red hot). However, a piece of aluminum heated by a torch to the same temperature will not glow at all. They both will will be radiating a lot of infrared light that we cannot see, but the sensor in the infrared thermometer can see it."
],
"score": [
9,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l320q0
|
Why is there such a thing as "Rules of War"? Isn't the entire point of wars to destroy your enemy? Why make rules to make what is acceptable or not? Wouldn't It be kind of hypocritical since they are already doing something that is not cool?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk9tvk0",
"gk9vdmy",
"gk9u807",
"gka8746",
"gk9y44m",
"gka9mm1"
],
"text": [
"So, think of it like getting in a fight after school with classmates. You know you're not supposed to do it, but there's an understanding of what is acceptable and what isn't. So like, if you show up ready to punch the guy, and he shows up with a gun, that wouldn't be cool, it'd be violating the understood rules of the fight. War is sort of the same way. Everyone agrees war shouldn't happen, but we also know that it will, and there's a sort of understanding that various countries have agreed to, which is basically \"If you agree not to do these really awful things, we also won't do these really awful things, so war won't be as terrible as it could be.\" And if a country breaks those rules, like attacking doctors or going out of their ways to mass murder civilians, after the war is over, the other countries will go \"Dude, you went WAY too far. None of us will sell anything to you, or buy anything from you, and because every country relies on trade to some extent, you've screwed your country over because you did really screwed up shit during the war.\"",
"No, the purpose of war is not to destroy your enemy. That's the purpose of genocide, and everybody is againft that. The purpose of war is to compel your adversary to act as you demand. Maybe that's to give you land or people, but usually it's to move some border or keep their people out of some region.",
"At some point you're going to want to negotiate, either a permanent peace, or a temporary truce. It helps if both sides are on the same page. For example, prisoners of war. If I think I'll be treated fairly, I'll give up. If I know I'll be tortured, I'll take as many of the enemy with me as I can. If every fight is a fight to the finish, both sides end up losing more people.",
"Basically because, contrary to what most people believe, soldiers are also human beings that can experience pain and suffering. And because the point of war is not to make your enemy as miserable as possible, certain tactics and weapons have been banned for being uneccessarily cruel. An example of this are plastic landmines that don't show up on mine detectors and x-rays. When a soldier gets hit by these, doctors will be unable to remove fragments because they don't show up on x-ray, and the soldier would die an uneccessarily painful death. And even when the war ends, the mines cannot be detected and may kill civilians. But a mine is an area denial weapon. Even if the enemy knows where it is, it would still be doing its job, because noone is gonna crawl onto a mine field. And taking care of a severely wounded soldier is also more expensive than a dead one. So there's no point in using these and we've all collectively decided we'd rather not, to avoid unnecessary suffering.",
"People decided a long time ago that some things were simply out of bounds if war was to remain somewhat under control. Some weapons are just too horrific to use and result in their equally horrific use by the other side. Some tactics are considered barbaric and dishonorable, such as spies using enemy uniforms behind enemy lines. Spies are generally protected and not killed upon discovery, but spies using the enemy's uniform to sneak around and cause trouble are hanged without recourse. You can think of it like this: The rules of war are there to protect both sides from going too far. Well, you say, war is going too far. Yes, it's not a very cool thing to do, going to war. But, if your country's leadership decides that it's necessary, then you can at least be assured that it won't degenerate into barbaric behavior on both sides. The rules of war ensure that the other side won't shoot your soldiers who surrender or are captured, but will simply take them as POWs and put them in camps to be traded back to the other side at a later date for POWs on the other side. War is a horrible thing, but it can be oh so very much worse if we didn't have rules of war to fall back on.",
"If you don’t both have rules to operate on, you are at risk of the other using things like white phosphorus, chemical/biological/nuclear weapons, attacking hospitals or medics, targeting civilian targets (which still happens all the time and always has)."
],
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26,
8,
5,
5,
3
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[],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l321w5
|
How does metronome work? To be precise, how does it maintain tempo over a long time, when it should lose energy with every swing?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk9vvoq",
"gk9uhz7"
],
"text": [
"> when it should lose energy with every swing It does. All metronomes do need a way of replacing that energy. The mechanical ones require the user to wind them up. The energy used to wind it is stored in a spring. From there just think of it as a wind up pocket watch, but one where you can adjust how quickly the seconds tick. If they are not mechanical like the ones we just talked about, then they use electrical energy to operate. They can get that from batteries, or a power plug if they have a transformer. From there just think of them as a digital watch, but one where, you guessed it, the speed of the seconds can be adjusted. There are variations, but the bottom line is your intuition was correct, they do require their energy to be restored in order to operate correctly.",
"The mechanism, called an escarpment, uses stored spring energy to overcome friction in a swinging pendulum. It's like a simple clock, with no hands."
],
"score": [
14,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l326c3
|
How/Why do sensory deprivation tanks cause hallucinations?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gk9w3g0",
"gkaz25a"
],
"text": [
"Long story short, when your brain has very little to no stimuli, it will make something up. Ever been in a really quiet room and you hear a high pitched ringing? Same concept, but with your eyes.",
"No one really knows. But it is a recognised phenomenon known as \"prisoner's cinema\" or \"trucker's cinema\". Basically in a dark place you will see lights with no source known as \"phosphenes\", simply the cells and nerves in your eyes working. With no external stimulus your mind holds on to these phosphenes and warps them into recognisable shapes like pictures and patterns as it tries to make sense of them, a phenomenon known as \"pareidolia\"."
],
"score": [
21,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l32u28
|
but why is it bad for usa to have an immigration policy but not other countries?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gka2j3u",
"gka3pmn"
],
"text": [
"It's not considered bad for the US to have an immigration policy, it's that many people feel that our specific immigration policy is based on racism, on not wanting people from certain parts of the world, not because of who they are, but because of the color of their skin. Likewise, many people feel that the American immigration policy is overly cruel on the Central American farmers who we depend on for our agriculture, as a lot of American farms use Central American laborers who don't have permission to be in the country, and we feel they should just have the permission to be here if they're already working here.",
"The people who say that Sweden's (and other's) success is due to their restrictive immigration policies are not, for the most part, the same people who want more permissive immigration rules in the United States. You have been hearing things from factions that disagree with one another, and you shouldn't be surprised that their ideas don't line up."
],
"score": [
13,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l336rp
|
When you are flying in a plane at night, why do all of the lights below you appear to be “twinkling”
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkd3lh4"
],
"text": [
"Atmospheric turbulence. Have you ever looked into water and notice things are distorted and shiny and such? Irs just not right, light moves in ways that it shouldn’t? It’s the *exact* same thing. The air may look like there’s nothing there but it’s actually a swirling turbulent mess moving all around just like water. It distorts everything you see. While this may not be that important day to day for you, it’s actually a huge thing for astronomers. You talked about looking down at lights, but the same concept works looking up at lights too...aka stars in the sky. As such you’ll find a cool thing, telescopes are often built on really high mountains (like in Hawaii at 10,000 feet) so they can be above as much of the nasty turbulent atmosphere that exists close to the ground in order to see the stars better with less distortion"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l339v2
|
how can there be conditions that make you not feel specifically pain or make you not have a gag reflex? Touch is such a broad sense that it seems strange for a defect to single out one aspect and not at least dampen ones sense of touch as a whole.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkaxmkz",
"gkb9z22"
],
"text": [
"We think of humans as having 5 senses, but this isn't strictly true. Humans have closer to 14 to 21 senses depending how you catergorise them. Touch is a very broad and simplistic way of categorizing human sense, in reality touch is several really complex systems that overlap. Damage one system and others can still be running.",
"Think of our perceptions of our physical world, our senses, as traveling along a bunch of different paths within our bodies to our brains to be recognized and understood by us. When we think of “touch” it’s a pretty broad term that is actually a little more complex. We really have a bunch of these sensory paths that relay information like pain, deep pressure, temperature, etc - that travel along some different and shared paths to be processed by the brain. So when you consider a condition, let’s think of it as a roadblock, along one of these paths. Depending on what sensation is affected, we can actually often figure out where this roadblock might be- based on what we know about how these paths travel to and from the brain. And so location of the roadblock would determine what lack of sense you might be experiencing. These roadblocks might be unique to specific senses and/or movements, and also unique to the part of the body they might affect! Neurology is a super interesting field, and there are so many interesting conditions out there. The gag reflex is actually a very interesting protective pathway involving a few famous nerves- one you might have heard of is the “Vagus nerve”. About 30% of people actually don’t have a gag reflex!"
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l33grx
|
this article -- "The Rise of Individual Securitization"
|
What is individual securitization? Does it give more control to the individual or does it give the *appearance* of control, while actually placing the reins in other people's (investors'?) hands? related articles: URL_0 URL_1
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkab3kk"
],
"text": [
"Lending is risky for lenders. One way you can reduce the risk is, instead of lending to one person and hoping they repay, you can bundle the right to the repayment of many different loans together and sell off bits of the income stream to anyone who wants it. If one person defaults, a bunch of lenders lose a little money instead of one lender losing a ton of money. This process is called securitization. On a separate note: Traditionally, loans are secured by collateral. That is, you have an asset that, if you can't pay off the loan, you can sell to pay your debt. However, and I would argue with the writers of these articles about how mainstream or even functional this is, many people are able to secure loans without assets based on their future income. Consider college loans. College students have basically no assets but are able to get loans against the value of their future income. What the authors are talking about is that the next step for these types of unsecured (i.e. without collateral) loans would be to securitize them. This would reduce the risk and make them more widely palatable to lenders. Consider the example listed in the Bloomberg article where, instead of paying tuition, a school asks for a share of its graduates future earnings. They take a risk that some graduates won't earn much. However, the risk is spread over many students who, on average, are likely to succeed. Offering a loan to one of these students for tuition would be risky. Investing in a school that earns income based on the future revenue of all of them is less so. Again, though, in my non-expert opinion, this is unlikely to happen. We've seen how securitization masked, but did not eliminate, risk in a market with secured assets (housing). It would probably be much worse in a market with unsecured debt. Securitization, in general, incentivizes making incredibly risky loans as the securities are often sold after being created, meaning the person originally lending the money doesn't care about the risk and the risk might be unclear to the person buying it. I mean, to put it bluntly, imagine 2008 but both lenders and borrowers are even more screwed then before. At least the lendersgot houses (even if they were worth way less than a few years before) and borrowers could declare bankruptcy then."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l34ipu
|
How do authorities track down someone using Wickr or other encryption chats?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkalq8m"
],
"text": [
"Answer: So security and encryption are only as good as the users who use it. In theory, if you never share any other personal details, no, you shouldn't be able to track someone. However, the more you share, the more likely you are to be found through other means. For instance, let's say you always show pictures of your lunch at a certain time, well, then we can narrow down your timezone based on where the time you share is likely around lunchtimes for people. Then you may say you work at a \"large software company\" and now maybe there are only a couple of those in your timezone. If you share other pictures, you may be able to reverse websearch those pictures and find them on a user's non-encrypted social media platforms (A lot of people will use the same selfies for everything). Even other details in pictures can be used to potentially track you such as landmarks or buildings in the background. If you say you graduated in X year, we can narrow down your age. Most of the time people are sharing way more than they think that they are, and a lot of small things that would never identify you individually, will identify you together."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l357sm
|
how does Bluetooth work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkaqh6w"
],
"text": [
"It’s just another wireless technology. A transmitter translates data into zeroes and ones, and pulses them out on a specific radio frequency. A receiver listening on that radio frequency catches the zeroes and ones, recompiles them into information, and passes the data onto the computer’s processor. Every wireless technology uses the same essential methodology, and then differs in frequency and encoding of the data."
],
"score": [
12
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l35s5g
|
Taste Bud Feels like it Popped
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkayuec",
"gkax5fc"
],
"text": [
"Transient Lingual Papillitis, also known as \"lie bumps.\" Google it for causes and symptoms.",
"Sounds like a canker sore, you can develop those from vitamin deficiencies or food sensitivities."
],
"score": [
29,
17
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l35tf5
|
The Beatles’ contribution to pop music/music in general
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkayly1"
],
"text": [
"One thing is the Beatles were the first major popular music stars to be viewed (and advertised/marketed) as a group, rather than as a leader with a backing band. This was a radical new idea in 1962/1963. George Martin wrote in his autobiography *All You Need Is Ears* that he gave a lot of thought to whether John or Paul should be presented in photographs and liner notes as the leader before he came around to the idea that they should be portrayed as a group instead."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l35x3z
|
Can someone explain what metaphysics and epistemology means? And with examples as well please.
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkb23bn",
"gkb3rdo"
],
"text": [
"In terms of branches of philosophy metaphysics deal with the most basic underlying questions we could ask about our existence. What is existence, what causes a thing to happen, does time exist, how can something be conscious etc. These are what most people think of when they think of the big deep questions that philosophy deals with. Pick anyone of them and argue for long enough and eventually someone will ask \"sure but how do you know that?\" Which is basically epistemology. The philosophy of knowledge, what is true. How do we know? These are some of the most basic branches of philosophy and in many ways they form the basis for the other often more practical branches ethics (what ought a person do?) And aesthetics (what constitutes beauty.)",
"Epistemology is just the study of 'how we know things.' An example might be something like if someone said \"The earth is flat. You can't prove it is round.\" His claim is both a claim about ONTOLOGY (how things actually are .. e.g., flat or round) as well as a claim about EPISTEMOLOGY (how we can know or prove something.. eg., 'you can't prove it!') Philosophers might argue about different theories of knowledge ... what does it mean to KNOW or BELIEVE something. What kind of beliefs constitute a justification for what we call 'knowledge.' Like, if I said I believe that Napoleon spit in a puddle in on January 10th, 1804, this might be true and I might be right... but this does not necessarily constitute true knowledge. So epistemology has to do with a lot of this kind of stuff."
],
"score": [
12,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3682w
|
What is the benefit to companies/organizations to adopt a highway?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkazhvh"
],
"text": [
"They get a tax break, an advertisement on the adopt a highway sign, and positive karma with the community."
],
"score": [
31
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l368so
|
Why is increasing corporate tax and income tax NOT bad?
|
The convincing argument I read against it says: Corporations and people pass the tax increase they face on as higher prices, which are even higher than the tax increase due to the sales tax consumers pay on the higher prices. And then because the wealthy spend less of their income than the poor, it impacts the poor more because they have nothing left to save. Can you explain why this is not the case? Or if it is the case, why tax increases are still good?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkb934x",
"gkazvzn",
"gkb0x2j",
"gkb0c2x"
],
"text": [
"Imagine I have a home and I need to pay $1000 a month to keep it, or I will be evicted, and my kids will have to sleep under a park bench. Now imagine that I have a job, and I drive to work. If my car fails to run, I will lose my job, and I won’t be able to pay that rent. Now imagine that my commute is very dangerous, and wrecking my car is quite likely. I get a job offer to work an hours drive away for more money - but the drive is now very dangerous and I am not willing to accept the risk of losing my car, so I put $10000 away as a self insurance. If I wreck my car, I will use the $10,000 to buy a new one - so now it is safe for me to take the new job. Now, imagine instead, I get 10 friends who all are in the same situation, and we each put $1000 away for a new car - if anyone is in an accident, our fund of 10x $1000 will buy that person a new car. By pooling our resources, we have all saved $9,0000 and got the same benefit. Now, imagine the government has 300,000,000 of us do that. And when we all have cheap affordable car insurance, we are all willing to take those better jobs that are an hour away, and the economy does better than it would if we each had to set aside $10,000. The point: Not all government spending is bad government spending. Some things are much cheaper and easier and work better when we all pool our resources. Imagine a road system, for instance, where we each have to build our own roads to get where we want to go and do not share. And some things, when provided by government, unleash the economy. (Good roads make it easier for private industry to ship goods, for example). The debate is not whether government spending, funded by taxes, is good or bad. It is very often good. The question is what we value. , what we want to pool resources on, and what types of services and products benefit from pooled resources. So is raising taxes good or bad - that depends on what you spend them on. Insurance works infinitely better as the number of people covered and pooling their resources increases. That we even allow home, car or medical insurance to be privately provided astonishes me. It is incredibly wasteful to have private healthcare or car insurance. On the other hand, something mostly made of direct labour, not so much - I don’t think it would serve any purpose to have the government provide cars or pizzas, for example. On the other hand, Anything requiring shared resources to be used, such as roads or parks, is going to work better and more efficiently pooled. Add into the equation debates about what the government should provide (ie, an environmentalist might object to public car insurance. A pro-life person might object to some of the things Medicare funds). So there is plenty of room for debate and discussion - but the notion that all government spending is bad spending is just simple minded. Think about the government like a club. Taxes are your dues. If you want lower dues, you will get fewer services. Maybe you do not need a guy to park your car for you, but do you want to be hauling clean towels back and forth to the club? Maybe towel service should be included in the club fees, but the guy in the monkey suit at the front door, he can be laid off.",
"The argument for higher corporate taxes is that they are at an all time low. Since the 1970's corporate taxes have kept getting lower through changes in the tax code and the abuse of loop holes. With some mega corporations paying virtually nothing in taxes. This is turn puts a burden on Joe taxpayer because those same corporations like Walmart and Amazon rely on programs like food stamps to keep wages low, so they are effectively subsidized by the very government they don't pay for. The problem is that only a handful of people (the share holders) really benefit from this. Lower corporate taxes are sold to voters using theories like trickle down economics which states that when the wealthy get more money, it trickles down to the workers with raises, benefits, and job creation while in reality it's nonsense. The rich don't spend their wealth they hoard it, while the poorest folks spend any extra money they get just to survive which in turn does more for the economy. Trickle down economics should be called trickle up, because lower corporate taxes causes tax dollars taken from lower and middle class workers and hands it to corporations which use it to maintain profitability rather than helping their workers. The problem with higher corporate taxes is that it affects the bottom line, and since big companies care more about their shareholders than their workers they'll likely increase prices and cut costs to keep the profitability as high as possible. If the pandemic has proven anything it's that the economy is more heavily impacted by working class people being out of work than rich people spending money.",
"They *don’t* pass it on as higher prices (within limits). That’s a corporate propaganda line. Corporations pay tax on their profit, not on their revenue. More importantly, pricing is determined by *value*, not cost. The pricing is pinned down by the market. If taxes go up, it comes out of the manufacturer’s side, not the purchasers’. Higher corporate taxes move money from corporate profit to the government, not from purchasers to the government.",
"So here is the reason why: in general sales taxes go only towards the local government, income and corporate taxes go to the federal government. With increased revenue at the federal level the federal government would be able to provide more infrastructure and welfare programs which benefit everyone. The past year has kind of disproven this argument, the economy started to collapse when the poor were unable to spend money rather than the rich cutting back their spending habits. As to increasing corporate taxes being a benefit, well right now there are a lot of loopholes that wealthy people exploit by incorporating themselves and then claiming income as profit in order to have it earmarked separately and taxed under a different rate."
],
"score": [
11,
10,
8,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l36iwp
|
. Why do we get earwax?
|
Why?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkb23hc"
],
"text": [
"Earwax is a lubricant that moves particles out of your ear to keep it clean. Sometimes some bodies malfunction and create too much of it, and it accumulates until it becomes bothersome."
],
"score": [
26
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l36kdy
|
Where does the energy we use in our body go?
|
I know that moving my arm requires energy, and energy is not created or destroyed. I know the energy isn’t just disappearing but I know it’s not in my body still because I can run out of energy. Where does the energy I lose go?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkb2o98",
"gkb2ouo",
"gkb2tl8"
],
"text": [
"If you’re moving your muscles, some of the energy goes into the thing you’re moving. Some goes into chemicals you synthesize in your body. And the vast majority ends up as heat which we dump to the environment.",
"Mostly heat. Moving your arms isn’t a ridiculous amount of energy but it does take some. It’s why eventually if you start moving too much you’ll start sweating. You’re body is trying to lost the heat it gained by the movement and friction. Another minor source is the friction you cause with the air when you move your arms through it. All the small actions transfer energy to other things . It’s not lost, just transferred.",
"Heat is the simplest answer to what you are trying to ask, the metabolic activities in your cells which are responsible for essentially everything you do all generate heat as a by product and that heat is then lost to the surrounding system allowing the overall energy to remain the same"
],
"score": [
15,
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l36nyb
|
Why do some banks operate regionally, someone in the north part of a state is told they can't open an account with a bank in the south of the state.
|
With the rise of on-line banks this may be obsolete but say the person can't do on-line banking.
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkedyjw",
"gkbei5g"
],
"text": [
"Banks are highly regulated. Specific conditions, especially at the state level, play a role here that can't be explained in a blanket manner. But, you can assume it probably has something to do with community banking and fair lending standards. Banks are required to do a certain amount of lending in all the communities they serve. If they aren't prepared to do lending in one part of the state, they can't open deposit accounts there. And as easy as it might sound to just do loans wherever, there are a lot of hoops to jump through to be able to do it legally, and of course then there's the question of whether or not it's profitable. Remember, banks don't make money off of your checking account. The sole purpose of offering that service is to be able to turn around and lend that money out and earn interest on it.",
"Like most asinine regulatory schemes, the concepts bank regs are based off of pre-date the internet, and don't make any sense when disruptive things like online banking show up. They will stick around until the banks themselves stop being a thing, which is probably soon. My bank and credit union are nothing more than sales floors now. Their service is non-existent unless you are trying to get a mortgage. They don't try to create a world that benefits you, they exist to maintain the structures that keep them profitable and powerful."
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l36qdu
|
What exactly are shadow men in sleep paralysis?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkb98n3",
"gkb5xan",
"gkb9fg0",
"gkbcjxq",
"gkb9y25",
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"text": [
"Have you heard of apophenia? It's the tendency for humans to see patterns where there are none. [ URL_1 ]( URL_1 ) Face pareidolia is a related phenomenon, the tendency to see faces in things that aren't faces, such as clouds, or wood swirls. [ URL_2 ]( URL_2 ) There is also something called, hypnagogia, or waking dreams. They are dreams that are perceived while half awake, but not fully awake. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) There are a few factors to consider. * Sleep paralysis is an alarming, stressful, experience, priming our brain's fear response. * The not fully awake brain generates imagery, but just like during regular dreams, these are not random flashes of light, but things you are conceptually familiar with. * Because people usually sleep in the dark, the room tends to be full of shadows. * Given the brain's tendency to recognize shapes as things, and recognize things as faces, the mind interprets the shadows as faces. If you think about, the most familiar, real, threat in most people's lives are other people, and we dream about people all the time. * In that fearful, semi-conscious state, the mind generates threatening people. Another factor is that the visual cortex does a lot of object recognition work before it reaches the level of consciousness. This makes it possible to, say, instantly pick out a person in a field, rather than needing to manually identify each line and color you're seeing and logically deducing if its shape likely represents a person. So, the brain has stored sort of archetypes of objects, generalized shapes of things like people. What does a silhouette of a person look like in the dark? A shadow person. So if your half awake, semi-dreaming brain is going to generate a silhouette of a generic threating person in the dark, it's going to look like a shadow person.",
"Brain deals out chemicals that make the body still. Brain then goes \"sike!\" and wakes up anyway, forgetting it released the still chems. Then your brain is like whoa?!?!??111!?!? What? Why am not move? fEaR!!! And then conjures up things to be scared of so it all makes sense without admitting it was the one that screwed up Edit: my pain meds went into effect during writing this.",
"If I remember correctly...your brain is trying to reconcile it's fight or flight response given that it also has you paralyzed you during sleep while you are simultaneously getting to the waking point.",
"Use your mind to ask them who they are, dont try to physically ask, just use your brain and be comfortable with not using your physical body, and dont freak out. This will normally kick you out of sleep paralysis and you might just back to sleep. When i do this i end up waking up normally remembering what happened. I almost always get my sleep paralysis in the early morning and i dont necessarily see shadow people but there is a sense of things being there, a lot of times its a cat or small mammal (i dont have pets) it was terrifying the first couple times it happened but then i figured out i could somewhat control it like a lucid dream.",
"And why is it always the same \"person\" standing over me and why is it always at 10.30pm. Every single time",
"I get these once in a while. You can't move so you yell to scare them off, but you can't form words. Then you start firing kicks. That's not the end, you wake up relieved it's a dream, then you go back to sleep and... Boom they return."
],
"score": [
71,
62,
8,
5,
3,
3
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"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia",
"https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/why-brain-programmed-see-faces-everyday-objects"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l36y6j
|
Why do catholics pray to saints?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkb7xeh",
"gkb6hm9"
],
"text": [
"This is a practice known as 'intercessory prayer'. Technically speaking, you do not pray TO the Saint, but pray THROUGH them. It's a practice that's done not only in the Catholic Church, but in the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox church as well. The most basic concept of it is that it is a prayer asking the Saint to pray for you - no different than asking a living family member or priest \"Hey, keep me in your prayers\". It's a little bit more complex than that from a theological perspective, but this is an ELI5. Now, the justification of this comes from the Apostle's Creed. The Apostle's Creed is VERY old and almost every Christian denomination holds it in high stock; towards the end, it lists the main pillars of the Christian faith. In this list of core tenets, it lists \"The Communion of Saints.\" The Communion of Saints as a concept has a large number of interpretations, but at it's core it is the belief that all Christians, living and dead are part of a singular community lead by Christ. Because of this, asking a dead Saint to pray for you is theologically no different than asking a living person to pray for you.",
"The official Catholic teaching is that you are praying to saints to pray to God on your behalf. Lots of people get it wrong though."
],
"score": [
13,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l37524
|
What's the difference between a "startup" and just a new company?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"It’s mostly branding these days but a start up is typically a tech company that is funded by investors and intends to lose money for a few years while doing something innovative, risky, and new. Often a start-up isn’t designed to be profitable ever but instead get purchased by a larger company. So, if you just open a store (online or not) selling t-shirts or candles or whatever, it’d be a small business. It’s not a new concept and you want to make a profit from day one. If you invent some cool new tech but the business model isn’t clear, you’d be more of a start up. An example of that might be if you came up with a new way to detect SPAM. Is it a business? Not really. But investors see it could have value if Google, Microsoft, etc. see the potential. So, it’s a start up. You (and your investors) eventually want to make money but maybe the end-game is being bought by a bigger company interested in your technology or patents rather than just selling a product to consumers. That being said, “start-up” became a trendy term and every company looking for investment said they were one. So, the distinction is blurry nowadays.",
"Start-ups are companies that are entering young or non-existent markets. They have the potential for enormous growth, but also a high chance of failure. Because of that they don't get capital investment the regular way, like bank loans, but instead use venture capital or crowdfunding. They usually start off very small, developing a product to sell in the first place. This period is the most difficult one, since they only run at a deficit and if they run out of capital or can't find new investors, before finishing the product the start-up fails. Examples are SpaceX, Rocket Labs or Virgin Galactic in the commercial space sector. This is a young market, merely a couple years old. They have to develop a lot of rocket technology, but will be worth billions if they succeed in the long term. Then there is creating new markets, like carbon capture. There is no viable solution to carbon capture at the moment, but many start-ups are trying to find one. The first one to do so, will be rewarded with a lot of contracts and money.",
"Yep, there's no strict definition, but \"startup\" is typically a tech-forward company focused on fast growth and disruption. Example. You love baking so you decide to open a bakery. You are starting up a bakery, that is a business, but no one would call that a startup. If, on the other hand, you found a company that buys a bunch of storefronts across different cities and then connects a bunch of cottage bakers in those areas using the Internet in order to stock those stores with bakery products, that's a startup.",
"The main difference is the possibility for rapid growth. That's about it. Everything else other people are mentioning are sort of side effects. There isn't any exact line here, but generally speaking, if you want to start a new coffee shop, that coffee shop probably can't grow 100% bigger every year, year over year, even under ideal conditions. Your shop can only fit so many customers before you have to get a bigger location or a second location, and that takes time to do. And once you have a second location, are you ready to double to 4 in the next year? double to 8? double to 16? Etc.. No, probably not. A startup company in theory can. Startups don't have to be tech companies, but being a tech company certainly makes it much easier to be able to grow that fast, because you're just selling more software. Even a coffee shop could in theory do it this way, it would just have to have an innovative plan and start from the beginning with the plan for rapid growth and expansion. Most ppl starting a coffee shop don't do it like this. Startups exit the startup phase once they've squeezed all they can out of that \"rapid growth\" period.",
"I'm late, but the best explanation I've read for the difference between the two is here: URL_0",
"Tmk a startup exists to be sold. It's end is to become just successful enough to be sold to a larger company then abandon it",
"While other responses are correct, no one is mentioning the **key** difference between startup and conventional fresh company (that also explains why most startups are tech related). *Potential* for growth, or in other words, potential market size. If you starting pizzeria, no matter how hard you try there is a hard limit on profits you're gonna get from it. There is limited number of people you can serve, it's just not feasible to drive couple hours just to eat **your** pizza. Sure, you can start in another location, but you need to rent it, hire new people - the costs increase linearly. The startup is the idea for a business where with roughly the same resources you can potentially serve millions of people. With online services it's just given (hardware is cheap and one server can *serve* thousands of people at the same time)."
],
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680,
33,
29,
5,
3,
3,
3
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"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://paulgraham.com/growth.html"
],
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[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l378ie
|
When soap breaks down the cellular membranes of cells why/how is it safe to use on our skin?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkbe1oc",
"gkbg89d",
"gkbco6u"
],
"text": [
"Our skin has a layer of dead cells on the top, as well as natural oils that form a somewhat protective barrier against certain things like soap. When your hands dry out after washing them a lot, that is your oil barrier being removed. Individual cells and viral particles pretty much don't have as thick of a lipid (lipids are fats/oils) layer as our entire skin surface does, so the soap degrades them more quickly. Our bodies are also able to produce much more oil to keep our skin healthy than each little particle can, so after our hands dry out some we still have living cells beneath the dried out dead ones that can generate more oil. However, not all pathogens are extremely susceptible to the killing effects of soap, which is why scrubbing and washing off vigorously for \\~20 seconds is so important: good soap in the right concentration actually forms small little bubbles called micelles which surround dirt, pathogens and other debris, and allow them to become much more water soluble. That slippery feeling is the soap working, so make sure you feel that before you finish scrubbing, and continue to scrub as you wash away with warm water!",
"Soap loves to attach to water at one end of the molecule, and fat at the other. Since the outer shell of cells are made out of fat, soap normally destroys cells upon contact. Skin cells are protected from mild soaps because they are reinforced with material called keratin. Keratin happens to be the same material that your nails and hair are made out of. Your skin cells use keratin as armour. The cells of your eyes, throat, lungs and oesophagus don't have this protection, which is why it is [a very, very bad idea to eat Tide Pods]( URL_0 ).",
"it's not strong enough to do that usually. That's why more powerful detergents should be used with gloves."
],
"score": [
48,
7,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmibYliBOsE"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l37dgi
|
Sometimes when I’m trying to sleep and even feel tired, I close my eyes to go to sleep but it feels like I’m forcing them closed, and if I relax they open. Why does that happen?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"The muscles that open your eyes and the muscles that close your eyes are both always turned on, pulling gently against each other. They are controlled by something like a set of scales. Whenever one set of muscles gets more active, the other set has to get less active. When you're wide awake, the \"open\" muscles are high on the scales. When you're asleep, the \"close\" muscles are high on the scale. When you're drowsy and your eyes are half open, the scales are balanced. Thing is, those scales move based on how awake or tired your *body* feels, not how your mind wants your body to feel. You can try to fight the scales, but if you stop paying attention, the scales slowly start to take back control. That's why, when you're trying to go to sleep, sometimes your eyes start to open all on their own: because whether or not you want to be tired, the parts of your brain and your body that you can't control just aren't quite tired enough to want to push your eyes closed yet. It's like when you're trying to stay awake, but your eyes keep falling shut no matter how much you try to keep them open. That's just the opposite of what you asked about.",
"I heard one day that the default position of our eyelids, using no muscles, is slightly open. On the opposite, having them wide open or completely shut require to activate sets of muscles. Therefore if you want to rest your eyelids, leave them slightly open. If I try it I can really feel the tension going away and coming back according to how much or little I open them. Sorry no source.",
"When you close your eyes you're actually flexing your eyelids to close them. There is a condition some people can experience called Bells Palsy in which parts of the face become paralyzed(its usually not permanent), and when this effects the eyes the individual has to tape their eye closed to prevent their eye from drying out because the relaxed position of your eyelids is open.",
"Sorry I cannot explain but similar for me... I sleep with my eyes slightly open. Or at least I go to sleep with my eyes slightly open. So unless I am more tired than a dog-tired dog, I need all sources of light to be off. Or, to save from being the annoying one, I sleep with a low-weight covering over my eyes.",
"No idea, but use a towel to cover your eyes, heavier than other fabrics and it is very comfortable, way better than those masks.",
"the same reason your fingers dont make a fist nor they are straight when you relax. one group of muscles straightens them when activated, and the opposute group curls them. even when muscles are relaxed, there is still some active tension, and equilibrium between these opposite tensions are the reason why fingers are slightly curled and eye lids are slightly opened. By the way muscle tension is why it is much easier to carry a living unconscious person rather than dead person, because dead person is completely relaxed and loose and is literarly like carying a sack of potatoes.",
"If it happens too often to you start Reverse Blinking, it's used for Lucid Dreaming as falling asleep technique. Basically instead of blinking for fraction of a second, open your eyes for that time and immediately close them. Repeat 20 times and they will stay shut.",
"I’ve tried explaining to people that this happens to me and they look at me like I’m insane. Thank you so much I finally know why!",
"This happens to me in the mri machine and i am terrified i will relax too much, my eyes will open and i will have to see how close the top is to my face",
"Just throw your elbow over your eyes like you're sneezing but from your eyes and lay there for about 5 minutes. You'll be asleep, and you didn't have to actively keep your eyes closed. One of the best tricks I ever figured out in the military."
],
"score": [
5720,
139,
34,
33,
16,
12,
7,
6,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l37dy9
|
How does RADAR work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkb9sw6",
"gkba1vm"
],
"text": [
"A radar antenna is both a transmitter and a receiver. First, it sends out a powerful directed beam of radio waves. Then, it waits for that beam to bounce off things (planes, ships, etc) and return. In short, it listens for an echo. The longer it takes for the echo to return, the farther away the thing causing the echo is. A computer uses the direction of the antenna and the delay of the echo to draw a map.",
"You shoot a radio wave at a certain frequency at a target or in a general direction. Based on when you get a \"return\" (from the wave hitting various objects and bouncing back), you can tell how far away it is. If you have multiple receivers, you can also do some trigonometry to find out what direction each \"return\" is coming from, based on when each receiver hears that \"return.\" If you do two quick pulses, you can calculate the change in the distance that each \"return\" generated in order to find the speed of an object."
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l37pq0
|
How do you not die of hunger in a coma?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkbchg5",
"gkbbsiw"
],
"text": [
"They stick a feeding tube up your nose, down your throat and into your stomach, then hang a bag of basically Ensure that drips into the tube and nourishes you. In my case they kept going into my intestines because any food in my stomach caused stomach acid, which caused pancreas damage. So, they skipped my stomach altogether. When I woke up I wanted to know how you poop! Since there is a catheter for urine but nothing for feces. The answer to that is gross, they put a potty pad under you and when you go the nurse cleans you up and gives you a new pad. They also brushed my teeth, put drops in my eyes and moved my limbs so I didn't atrophy. Nurses rule.",
"In the past? Yes, you'd die. In the modern age, they're able to insert a feeding tube to provide you with liquid nutrition, as well as intravenous saline injections to keep you hydrated."
],
"score": [
54,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l384k0
|
I know that genes control what proteins get synthesized by cells, but how does that determine the overall structure of an organism?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkbnx9e",
"gkdol14"
],
"text": [
"Proteins do a lot of different jobs within a cell while also being necessary for proper cell shape and rigidity. They help a cell do whatever a cell does. Different types of cells make different proteins. These different cells make up unique tissues (blood, brain, skin, stomach, etc.). These tissues develop alongside each other to form organs, and eventually, a mature organism.",
"It might be easier if you think about it like constructing a building. The genes are the blueprints for the building; without them how would you know what you're building? And really, the chromosomes are the blueprints for the building. The specific segments of code, or genes are the instructions to build a faucet or a lightbulb or the drains, or the cabinets or even the nobs on the cabinets. Each segment of code is different, producing different styles of structures: think a faucet and its components... you have a choice between two handles or one to turn it on to get the temperature of water to come out of the faucet, no matter what the intended purpose of the water. It could wash the dishes, the laundry or even be used to water the garden and provide water to the thirsty, or wash the dirt off the dog who got muddy after playing with the unruly kids in the neighborhood. It's not the genes job to tell you how to use the faucet, but how to design it to work. Sometimes things need replaced and we outgrow and outlive some older designs so to compensate, something called methalynation or epigenetic changes occur. Think of this as a contractor and his team renovating an old home, or even making changes to a new home after the owner realizes she didn't like her choices after living there for a few days, but couldn't bring herself to admit it immediately because she was very stuck in her ways... or like a deep rooted tree too close to the house, spreading its roots into the pipeline, after a seed was planted from a bird that took a shit too close to where the sidewalk was placed. The choice: move the sidewalk for the shitty tree or cut it the f down. These changes can completely change everything and its your choice who to hire to make these changes happen, either quickly or slowly, but realize, time is money! In the body, we can choose what foods we eat, what shows we watch, who we interact with, etc, and with a home its the same, who do you let in, who watches it when you're gone, how careful are you with what you have, and do you even know how it works at all? Insurance is a wonderful tool (crispr, vaccines, medication, education). If you don't learn about how to care for the home, how would you know it needs work? How do we make a building last forever? Ask the Mayans or the Egyptians... 😉🐶 So, great question! Also, remember ladies and gentlemen... posture. You can't have a strong home with a solid foundation with a frame that bows... stand up straight and shoulders back and the whole home feels warmer and stronger. Now, if cats can have emojis in the people section... dogs should too... 🙀"
],
"score": [
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l38mca
|
What was the reason the year 46 BC was 445 days and not 365 days? Why 90 days were added by Julius Caesar and Sosigenes of Alexandria?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkbpwxi",
"gke1c8e"
],
"text": [
"The Romans were planning to change to the Julian calendar. The original plan was for them to add a few leap months in the previous years. However, there were wars and other issues that distracted them, so they forgot to add some leap months. As result, they decided to add three months to the current year in order to compensate for the months they forgot to add, and complete the synchronisation.",
"As you pointed out, the standard Roman year was 355 days long. Every couple of years they added another intercalary month to February. The job of determining when to do this fell to the high priest (*pontifex maximus*). The problem was, either for political reasons, civil unrest, or what have you, they sometimes didn't. Caesar, during the Civil War, was himself *pontifex maximus*, and was a little busy. So the year had drifted quite badly. By 46BC the winter festivals were occuring in the Fall, the Fall festivals in the Summer, and so on. In order to get them back to the proper season, Caesar, as part of his calendar reforms, added days at the end of February, as well as before and after December."
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l395y3
|
why do toddlers almost universally hate vegetables, when they are so essential for our nutrition?
|
Why is it that almost all toddlers around the age of 2-3 have a tendency to just want carbs and hate vegetables? Especially green vegetables? I know that toddlers are fussy, like to control things, and are afraid of new foods. But why is it almost universally vegetables that they hate, when they're so essential for our nutrition?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkbygvv",
"gkc1bnz",
"gkc084c"
],
"text": [
"Evolutionarily speaking, we desire sugar and fat as they are quick energy sources. We want instant energy that can be used straight away. That being said, toddlers are fine with flavourless vegetable mush if they don't know any different. You should avoid exposing young children to excessive sugar, and intense favours until they are able to discern between healthy and unhealthy.",
"Our sense of taste changes as we age. Young children have a higher sensitivity for bitter taste, so children should be expected to have a different reaction Also, people tend to over cook or poorly prepare most veggies. So don't over cook your veggies and be prepared to include salt and butter (or olive oil)",
"I noticed it depends on how you introduce new food to them as well. My 6 year old, we didn’t do baby led weaning (meaning giving him our food to taste and try at 6 months old, we stuck to bottles with him to a year) He didn’t get the experience early on of different types of food and textures and until only last year, he wouldn’t even eat Mac and Cheese. He’s come far from then and now eats some veggies, but it’s still a challenge (I know Mac isn’t a vegetable) My 18 month old however, we baby led weaned. He will eat anything we put in front of him. From Avocado to broccoli, to greens. He likes it all."
],
"score": [
20,
10,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l39gaa
|
How do refrigerators work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkc4q4y"
],
"text": [
"Usually heat only wants to flow from a higher-temperature area to a lower-temperature area. But something neat happens to gases when they compress and expand. Compressing a gas makes its temperature rise. Letting a gas expand makes its temperature lower. So if you compress a gas, it will get hot. But what if you then take that hot, compressed gas, and let it cool down? Well, then , you have some cool, compressed gas. Now, if you let the gas expand again, it will get cold! Much colder than it was when you started. So the trick is, you compress the gas over here outside the to make it hot, and then let it radiate all that heat away through the grille on the back of the fridge. Then you bring that compressed gas back over there to the inside the fridge, and then let it expand, and it gets very cold, and the cold gas is warmed up when heat flows into it from, say, your vegetables. The fridge achieves all this by pumping the gas, called a refrigerant, through a closed circuit of pipes. (It's actually not always in the gas phase; usually it condenses into a liquid for part of the cycle, but that's not really important to the basic principle here. Refrigerants are generally fluids which boil and condense at just the right temperatures and pressures to make this process most efficient.)"
],
"score": [
13
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l39i3o
|
How do governments manage massive amounts of debt without going bankrupt or running out of money?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkcgtj4"
],
"text": [
"So people often think of government debt as being a sort of \"I borrowed $500 from my friend to make rent this month\" kind of situation, but it's very different. Most government debt is in the form of bonds (or similar notes). These are notes that say \"Buy me for $100 today, and cash me in for $130 in 10 years.\" When someone buys one, the government is now $30 deeper in debt: they added $100 to their wallet while putting a $130 IOU on their books. But they have 10 years in which they can use that money. So say they raise $2 billion from selling bonds, creating $600 million of debt. They spend part of that $2B on a program to eradicate pests nationwide, part on treating and preventing disabling illnesses, and part on building public schools. As a result, after 10 years, crop yields have gone up, workers have remained productive and healthy longer, and better-educated citizens have driven up wages and productivity. All of that means higher tax income for the government, long-term -- maybe it'll raise an extra $600M over what it would've been by the 10-year point, but it's okay if it takes longer. In the long run, it pays off. It would be analogous to an individual taking out student loans. Imagine going to university/college only for people to tell you \"You put yourself in $60,000 of debt and you don't even have a job while you're doing it, that's irresponsible.\" But you know it'll pay off eventually. But with the government, it's not just going to school to get one or two degrees. Opportunities arise every day of every year, endlessly. For a government, anything that significantly raises the productivity of the country overall is an investment that eventually pays off, and there are so many opportunities for that sort of investment, including many that are only really available to a government. To a government, an investment that takes 75 years to pay off can still be totally worthwhile, and paying to teach some random toddler to read can be worthwhile. If you see lots of opportunities you're highly confident about about, and you can borrow money in large amounts with relatively little interest, why *wouldn't* you borrow money to invest? And so the debt keeps growing for as long as people are willing to lend more and more money (buy more and more bonds). People are willing to buy more and more bonds because you consistently pay them back. If you frequently ask me \"lend me $10 and I'll give you $11 tomorrow\", and you keep your word every single time, day after day for 140 years, well then yeah, of course I'm gonna agree every time you ask. And you don't eventually run out of money because, when it comes time to pay me back, you've always found a way to turn $10 into $12."
],
"score": [
14
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l39zm6
|
Why do we have lips?
|
Why do we need lips? Why fon't we just have normal skin around our mouth?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkcdjzt"
],
"text": [
"There are no hair follicles or sweat glands on our lips, and the skin is generally thinner, but we actually don’t know the reason they’ve evolved this way. My theory is that it has something to do with speech, because I don’t think we could communicate as effectively with harder, thicker skin around our mouths. Edit: sweat not swear"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3a77t
|
How did ancient armies find each other before battles?
|
EDIT: A little background to the question for people saying scouting (and to clarify why I initially posted). This was my first thought as well, but in reading about Roman history, I’d found out that they were notoriously bad at scouting, as it was something that they felt was below them (and it cost them at Lake Trasimene). Thats when I realized I had no idea how these armies would actually find each other
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkcicjo",
"gkcjsej",
"gkdvkon",
"gkcsrdu",
"gkd41w3",
"gke7y9i"
],
"text": [
"Terrain and supply lines. Without modern machinery, everything moves by muscle power. It simply isn't possible to move hundreds or thousands of troops, supplies and arms across steep hills and slopes (don't be fooled by what a motorized vehicle can carry and climb - muscle power is very limited) In that sense, it isn't really possible to disguise where large groups of troops have to march. They follow level terrain where FOOD and WATER is available. (large troops on feet cannot march far in a day, and cannot carry weeks of food/water) Even if horses are available - horses are going to be limited in quantity and most of the support will be carried on carts and backs.",
"Normally the armies were marching to attempt to take a city so the opposing army used mounted scouts to find out which of the limited number of paths the other army was using to get to the city and then put their forces in the way, if this failed a siege of the target took place with the other army marching to relive the city.",
"Most major ancient battles were [pitched battles]( URL_0 ) where both sides had camped out along the battlefield for a couple of days before finally going at it. A lot of ancient tactics relied on tight formations so fighting your enemy in a dense forest because you just stumbled upon him was a non-starter because while his forces couldn't mount an effective defense, your forces can't mount an effective offense either. The armies would have scouts, often light cavalry ahead of them searching out the enemy army, maybe harassing their flanks or baggage train(which could be 2-3x the size of the army!) and keeping track of where the enemy army was headed. When they found a nice spot for a fight like a valley with a big open field in the middle then the army would set up an encampment (baby fort) on one of the hillsides and the other would come along and set up on the other slope, but if you picked a really unfair terrain place they just wouldn't set up camp and would keep on moving declining to engage you so if you thought you could beat them you would want to pick even terrain so they'd accept the challenge.",
"So, David the Great wants to take out the next country over, SallyLand. So where does David the Great go to invade and take over Sallyland? One answer and that is SallyCity which is the capital city. Control the SallyCity and I control Sallyland. Now to get from DavidLand to SallyCity there are only 1 or 2 or 3 routes. I want to avoid the mountains, and the rivers. This narrows down the routes to SallyCity. Along the way there are small towns and villages. When I pass by with my 5,000 troops this does not go unnoticed. All the villages send runners to the next village ahead. Word soon gets to SallyCity and they know where their enemy is. Pretty soon Sally the Magnificient gathers her troops, knows which way I am coming and comes out for battle. It comes down to geography and terrain.",
"You have scouts, and even if you don't a large group of people marching across the land eating everything in its path is hardly surreptitious and people talk. People can move faster than armies of thousands of people and so the information that the army is on its way ripples out in front of the advancing army in the manner of ripples in advance of a swimming swan.",
"Most battles were actually sieges. An invader gradually ended up outside the city walls with all previous battles leading up to that were running skirmishes. Spies in foreign courts would usually report hostilities, army composition, method and direction of travel etc then runners would be dispatched to deliver these reports. Finding and hunting down dispatch runners to retain the element of surprise was an important and dirty business. It was pretty rare that the fate of a nation was decided in the open field of a single battle but rather several battles culminating into a siege. As stated by others, travel routes were limited and heavily scouted. That’s why the Viking raids were so terrifying to defending states, the Viking longships were so versatile they could navigate deep water or shallow rivers bypassing heavy defences and traditional army routes while delivering large groups of men deep into enemy territory with no warning."
],
"score": [
42,
23,
14,
13,
5,
3
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"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitched_battle"
],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3aiiq
|
why chimps are able to easily rip off human arms and faces, despite only being around 1.5 times the strength of an average human
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkclkkb",
"gkco0p2"
],
"text": [
"It comes down to different types of muscle fibers. Our arms are mostly slow-twitch fiber muscle with more nerve endings that give us more precise control over our actions but less power where other primates have more fast-twitch muscle which gives them more power but less fine control.",
"An element that comes into factor is that when an animal goes into attack mode or defense mode, 100% of its energies, focus, and attention are on THAT exact moment and action. Animals don’t have the element of distraction that takes away some of our power/strength. We have so many distractions and so much in our minds at any given time we’re never absolutely committing every part of ourselves to a specific activity. When a chimp says it’s go time, he’s not thinking about taxes or if he’ll get arrested by the cops after he rips a human’s face off. He’s only thinking about how he’s feeling and what to do about it."
],
"score": [
12,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3azor
|
while we’re sleeping how do we know where our blanket is to cover ourselves when we are cold?
|
Another thing you see is people tucking in there legs when they’re cold but what tells them to? I just saw my sister do this, she was already wearing one but not properly covered for the cold room and then she covers herself putting her feet under the blanket and covering her head but she’s sleeping, how does she know?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkekfay"
],
"text": [
"When you're asleep you aren't dead. You still have functioning senses and depending on the stage of sleep different levels of awareness. You're aware enough to make small changes to your position for comfort. It might be more intuitive to think of it like this: When you're asleep, a fire alarm will (should) still wake you up because you are responding to extreme auditory stimulus. You are aware enought to respond to the external environment. Likewise, if you are cold, you respond enough to attempt to fix that problem."
],
"score": [
15
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3bkz0
|
Why is it that you can keep a house phone on it's charging dock for years and it doesn't destroy the battery where as a cellphone will eventually wither over just a couple years if you charge it for too long everyday?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkd50hy",
"gkd4mfh",
"gkd5eif"
],
"text": [
"Cell phone battery decays as each cell has its charge life and they die after a number of times it is charged. It's your assumption that house phone batteries do not get spoiled. They too get spoiled but probably the storage capacity of their batteries is larger and due to it the frequency of times you charge it is less compared to how you charge your cell phone. Hence the damage is not so quickly noticed.",
"Im guessing that the house phone’s battery would eventually wither too. but the device needs so little energy throughout the day that the battery comes under less strain overall so it ages slower",
"Short answer is, different battery chemistry. Not all batteries work the same way. Some batteries like to be fully discharged before recharging and recharging these types of batteries from halfway charged damages them. Others are damaged by being fully discharged. And all types of battery prefer to be trickle charged rather than fast charged. Cordless phone cradles are generally trickle chargers. Mobile phones use lithium batteries because they have high capacity at a very light weight. Lithium batteries hate being charged all the way from flat. It damages the battery quite a bit. But most people routinely let their phone get very flat before recharging. Moral of the story, recharging your phone too long isn't hurting the battery. Using it too much in between charges is why the battery fries itself. You should charge it all the way up and recharge it before it drops to 50%. If you are running it flat and then not fully charging it up because you are afraid to leave it on the charger too long, you aren't doing it about favours. Also, if you want to maximize battery life, charge it slowly. A charger that takes 10h to charge your phone is going to damage it much less than one that can do the job in 90 minutes. Even if you are charging from 50%, slow charging is much better fit the battery."
],
"score": [
5,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3bluo
|
What is the phantom sensation of a phone ringing in your pocket when it's not even there?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkd4fkz"
],
"text": [
"It's called [Phantom Vibration Syndrome]( URL_0 ) and it seems to happen because people are conditioned to feel their phones vibrating and the brain misinterprets another tactile signal as a phone vibration. Depending on the study, up to 9 out of 10 mobile phone users report experiencing PVS."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_vibration_syndrome"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3bzxe
|
Why are some TV shows only available in certain countries?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkd85zm"
],
"text": [
"After a show is made there will be various contracts with different TV stations to show it in various countries. Some stations in some countries might not want to show it for various reasons. Maybe it's too expensive or it doesn't fit their brand. Maybe another station has negotiated exclusive rights."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3chuu
|
How can high voltages push you away or is that a movie thing?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkdok99",
"gkeq5ui"
],
"text": [
"No it's certainly real. Electric shocks cause muscle contractions. The more energy in the shock the greater the muscle contraction, these contractions can physically throw you body in a direction. So in essence, you're sort of throwing yourself.",
"Yes and no. Being shocked will cause muscle contractions which can cause a person to jump. I was once shocked when I grabbed two bare conductors of a three phase circuit, I had stepped out of the room to get something, when I came back someone had flipped the breaker - I found myself on my butt a few feet back from where I started, no injuries. Then of course movies are for show, they tend to greatly exaggerate such things. Just like when someone gets shot in a move they show them being hurled backwards, that does not happen in real life. There is no force from a high voltage shock that can push you away, only the reaction of your own body."
],
"score": [
24,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3cpw8
|
This quote from Edward Robert Harrison - "hydrogen, given enough time eventually turns into humans". How does it happen?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkdkl4d",
"gkdikne",
"gkdjc4p"
],
"text": [
"1) After the big bang, there was mostly just hydrogen, some helium and trace of other light element. 2) Stars are mostly made of hydrogen which fuel their fusion. If a star is big enough, it will fuse things until it get to iron and then explode in a supernovea. This extreme pressure and temperature fuse the hydrogen together into heavy elements that wouldn't exist otherwise. 3) In those first generation stars, there was no heavy element, but after going supernovae they sent all those new heavy element throughout the universe. Second generation star like our sun have trace of heavy element in them, and those heavy element are what made terrestrial planets. On earth, that same heavy element were the source of life, which eventualy lead to human. Conclusion : pretty much every atom making up a human body right now, was once part of a star that went supernovea.",
"Hydrogen is the currently accepted most abundant element in the universe and the reactions that take place in a sun over time form heavier elements i.e. iron/ carbon. Over billions of years carbon (the building block of life) changes until one of the random reactions forms the RNA / DNA of us.",
"Hydrogen in sufficient quantities collapses into a star. The heat and pressure inside the star makes the hydrogen fuse into heavier elements. If the star is heavy enough, the hydrogen will fuse into all of the elements up to being as heavy as iron. If the star is even heavier enough it will explode as a supernova, creating elements much heavier than iron. The explosion also sends all of those atoms out into space. Hydrogen collapses into new stars. Heavier elements accumulate into planets. Complex chemistry happens, life arises, evolution happens, humans happen."
],
"score": [
9,
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3dqum
|
Why do colors fade in the sun? And not just fabrics but also painted and plastic items?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkdy83a",
"gkew0k0",
"gkgb2sq",
"gkgjfch"
],
"text": [
"The sun's energy is radiation. Basically, any objects in the direct path of sunlight is getting blasted with radiation. The radiation breaks down particals and causes deterioration. This is also how people get skin cancer.",
"Colours in durable products come from specific dye molecules. The shapes of these molecules, the distribution of electric charge within the molecules, and how they interact with other molecules, are all specific properties of the dye molecules, and they are what dictates the colours you see. Sunlight carries a lot of energy. Every so often, a photon of sunlight will strike one of the dye molecules and cause a change. Maybe it will knock an electron off, or break a bond between two atoms, or change the shape of the molecule or how it interacts with the others. Once this happens, the molecule no longer has the exact properties that give it its colour. If this happens to enough dye molecules, the object will lose its colour overall because there will be fewer molecules left to give it that colour.",
"I feel like everyone's giving really good answers to *parts* of your question, but nobody's really answering your entire question. **First**, as someone said below, the color of something is determined by the shape of the molecule. The sun's radiation hits the molecule, and parts of it are trapped while parts of it bounce around and then fly back out. The parts that fly back out are the parts that then hit your eyes, and determine the color you see. The parts that are trapped can be experienced in other ways. For example, objects that appear black look that way because *none* of the sun's radiation manages to bounce back out as color that your eyes can see. But where does it go? Well, it all gets trapped, and that's why black objects get so much hotter in the sun than white ones. **Second**, as someone else mentioned, not all color molecules are the same. You can make a lot of different molecules that look \"red.\" The thing is, in order to color a \"thing\" like a piece of plastic, or fabric, or a car, you need to have your \"red\" molecule mix well into what you're making. If you're trying to make a red birthday cake, you can pour in red food coloring. But you can't pour red food coloring into a vat of molten plastic and expect it to work. The plastic will only mix with certain molecules. You need a different \"red\" to color plastic, versus a red for a cotton t-shirt, versus a red car. **Third**, because the molecules that make paint red vs. plastic red are different, they have different resistances to solar radiation. As the sun's radiation is absorbed or bounces around them, some molecules hold up better than others. Occasionally, instead of bouncing right when struck by radiation, the molecule just shatters into pieces that no longer bounce radiation in the right way to make the color you want. That's fading. **Fourth**, there's an expense consideration. Stronger color molecules that don't shatter are often more expensive to make. They also tend to be less universal -- the strongest red for a certain kind of car paint probably can't be used in, say... plastic. The strongest red for plastic may just be weaker than the strongest red for paint, period. Or there might exist a super-strong red for plastic, but it's too expensive (or toxic!) for a $20 children's toy. Put all of these considerations together in different combinations, and you have the answer to your question why certain colors, in certain materials, fade at different rates. (Edit: If you're curious, the science of discovering and creating molecules that reflect different colors, that can be mixed with different materials, and that hold up better or worse to the sun's radiation, is an *entire industry* of very well-paid chemists and materials scientists. You can make a whole career out of your question.)",
"\"Colors\" are due to dyes, molecules that reflect (or re-emit) radiation in the wavelength of the colors you see. That happens because of the way the electrons in the molecule interact with the light and these light-interacting electrons are usually part of double bonds. When UV radiation from the sun hits these molecules over time, the double bonds break so the dye molecule doesn't interact with light anymore (becomes faded). Some dyes don't have double bonds (like Van Gogh's yellow, CdS, which is toxic) and they also fade due to chemical reactions started by the light. However, these are mostly older substances that aren't really used industrially anymore. Car paint doesn't fade as easily because it has fillers, anti-corrosives (molecules that prevent the dyes from fading) and because it demand the use of more durable dyes, especially since car surfaces get hotter (and dyes fade faster if it's hotter). Car surfaces are also metallic, so they naturally reflect part of light anyway. Source: I'm a chemical engineer working on light-activated molecules for my dissertation."
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|
l3e83h
|
The story of the massive bull run of GME stock.I'm not from the US and would like to know the reasons behind the recent rally in the stock
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gke39jx"
],
"text": [
"Part of it is a short squeeze' it's likely that many investors that had sold the stock short are either cutting their losses or being forced by their brokerage to purchase shares to close out their position. In either case, the investor has no choice but to purchase shares in the open market. Last time I checked, more shares of the stock had been sold short than actually existed."
],
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6
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
l3ee0p
|
How does dechlorinator work for fish tanks?
|
I've been keeping fish for years and have always been told to put dechlorinator in the water to make it safe for fish, but what does dechlorinator actually do? The chlorine and chloramine can't magically disappear, it has to go somewhere.
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Hi! I'm a technical writer for an aquarium supplies company! You're right, they do have to go *somewhere*. Dechlorinators are *reducing agents*. The active chemical in the dechlorinator has an electron that it doesn't need. Chlorine really *wants* an electron. Chlorine kills bacteria because the chlorine will take electrons from things that it shouldn't, disrupting the chemical bond and destroying that molecule. The dechlorinator *reduces* the chlorine by donating its extra electron, turning the chlorine into its ion chloride, which is mostly not reactive. That chemical change won't last forever, but the chlorine will either bind to other ions in the water as part of an ionic bond (like *sodium chloride* - table salt), or it will simply evaporate away. However, chlorine isn't added to tap water as simple chlorine atoms. They're too reactive and wouldn't last very long before reacting to *something* and becoming chloride. Moreover, chlorine is a gas, and won't stay dissolved in the water very long before evaporating off. In fact, in many places you can make your tap water safe for an aquarium by simply leaving it outside in the sunlight for a while (although I recommend using a dechlorinator to be safe). Chlorine can be added as part of a number of different molecules, which over time fall apart to release the chlorine. The only one of these that matters for your aquarium is *chloramine*, which is almost but not quite a chlorine atom bonded to 3/4 of an ammonia molecule. It matters for your aquarium because when the chlorine is reduced it leaves the chloramine atom, which itself becomes an ammonia molecule. If you know aquariums, you know that ammonia is bad news for your fish. So you've solved one problem (chlorine) by introducing another (ammonia). Fortunately, chemicals can be added to the dechlorinator that will *protonate* the ammonia - meaning, it will cause the ammonia to take a hydrogen ion, which is just a proton, and become the harmless ion ammonium. Ammonium will eventually turn back into ammonia, depending on the pH of your aquarium. If you know aquariums you should also be familiar with the nitrogen cycle and nitrifying bacteria, which consume ammonia and convert it (eventually) into harmless nitrate. So the harmless ammonium will hopefully slowly turn back into ammonia, when it will be consumed by your nitrifying bacteria. As for the nitrate...that doesn't go anywhere, you have to remove that from your tank with regular water changes (10-20% every week or two! Don't ever change more than 30% at a time!). Or if you want to get crazy you can grow plants or algae which will *fix* the nitrogen (incorporating it into their tissues), which itself will have to be harvested periodically. Ideally, you should check whatever product you use to make sure it will affect ammonia as well as chlorine. Most do, but not all. Chloramine is typically used in more rural areas since it stays in the water a lot longer, but I've heard of it being used just about everywhere (in the US). Most conditioners use some kind of sulfur compound, which is why they typically have some kind of rotten egg smell. The most common ones are sulfur dioxide or sodium thiosulfate. As the dechlorinator does its job, the molecule breaks down and releases that sulfur, usually bonded with oxygen, as a gas that eventually evaporates out of the water. Manufacturers often include other compounds to make them *water conditioners* which are more than mere *dechlorinators* (although AFAIK there's no regulation on these terms so always check to see what the manufacturer says the chemical will really do). Conditioners also usually include chemicals that will detoxify heavy metals in much the same way, and some chemicals to promote fish health by encouraging the fish to make a healthy mucus coating over their scales. Manufacturers and aquarists differ in opinion on whether or not that stress-coat chemical is truly beneficial or not. Others include pH buffers to regulate the water pH. Anyway, I've been keeping aquariums for about a decade now. I managed a local fish store for a while, and now as I said one of my jobs is technical writing for a relatively small company that sells aquarium supplies, like water conditioner! If you have any fish questions, AMA.",
"A lot of common ones use Sodium Thiosulfate to turn the chlorine into chloride ions, which are safe. The formula here would be: S2O3-- + 4Cl2 + 5H2O = > 2SO42-- + 8Cl- + 10H+ Now when the chlorine is in chloramine a similar reaction happens, but it leaves behind ammonia. Obviously something we don't want, so they have to use something to render the ammonia safe. I can't fine as much information on this part of the dechlorinating process, but at least one uses Sodium Hydroxymethanesulfonate. Don't know the equation for that one unfortunately since there's not as much info."
],
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21,
8
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|
[
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l3eqsh
|
Why are wounds itchy? It seems counter productive for you to scratch at a scab or wound.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkednio",
"gkfshuh"
],
"text": [
"The healing process does impact your body; the scab will tug on the skin a bit, and there may be some inflammation. The itching/scratching sensation is your body's sense of touching telling you something is wrong in that area. These two systems are working independently, so your sense of touch is just reacting to this tension on the skin. It's counterproductive, sure, but our bodies aren't perfect. And if this isn't posing a significant problem to our evolutionary purpose (to survive long enough to reproduce), then there won't be any evolutionary pressure for this to change.",
"Injured cells and the cells that do the work of healing release molecules called cytokines to communicate with each other so that the right cells are doing the right things at the right time. These are the same kinds of things of molecules you hear about in \"cytokine storm\" that can be such an problem in Covid infections. Sometimes the effects of these chemicals are useful, sometimes they are annoying. Histamine, for example, might help you to get rid of something irritating by sneezing or scratching, but the itchiness might also be annoying in a healing wound. Also, when blood in an old wound or bruise breaks down, it becomes bilirubin, which just happens to be something really itchy."
],
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131,
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[
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[
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|
l3eqzl
|
How can the weather be below freezing AND 100% humidity?
|
Doesnt the temperature mean that fog can't be "humidity"? Isn't humidity moisture and doesn't moisture crystallize into a solid form below 32 degrees?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkebhef",
"gkedf3l",
"gkelr8f"
],
"text": [
"There are two forms of humidity: relative humidity (%) and absolute humidity (grams of water/liter of gas). Something that is at 100% humidity means that it is holding as much water as possible, no matter how little that may be.",
"As the air temperature drops so does the ability of the air to contain water as a gas decreases. You need to understand the meaning of relative humidity. It is the percentage of the actual moisture present at a particular temperature relative to the saturation level at that temperature. When the temperature of warm air decreases, because of the reduced water-holding capacity, there will be condensation of the excess water corresponding to the dew point. When that happens then the atmosphere is saturated and the RH is at 100%.",
"Humidity is water as a gas in the air. Water as a gas is ivisible that is why the bubbles when you boil water are clear, the contain water as a gas. If you can see the water then it is a liquid or a solid not a gas For is liquid water dropples in the air. I am avoiding to use the word vapor as it it is ofen missued. If you vape the white could you breath out is not vapour or atleas not the visible part. The visible part is small liquid dropplets. So fog is not humid air but but liquid dropples of water in air. Fog is formed when humid air cool and the amount of water the air can contain is reduced and some of it consensate to liquid droples. So fog is formed by humid air that is cooled down but the visible part is not humid air. Solid or liquid particle suspend in a gas is called a Aerosol. So the vible part when you vape, in fog or in a cloud is an aerosol not vapour. There can be vapour there too but that is the invisible gas. Vapour is a gas at a temperatures where is can constensate bacl to a liquid without a change in temperature. Water as a gas between 0C( 32F) and 374 C( 705 F) is a vapour Steam for example exits in two types: Dry steam that is just water as a gas and it is invisible. Wet steam that is a mixture of water as a gas and liquid droplets of water. This is the typical white stram you think about. You can look this [Phase\\_diagram\\_of\\_water]( URL_0 ) and see tat water as a vapout is possible bewlow 0 (32F). The pressure of the vater vapour that you can have depend on the temperature so the lower temperature the lower possible pressure of water as a gas is possible. Relative humitity is the percetage of water currently as a gas and the max amount of possible at temperature. So if you heat upo a gas the relative humitity i will drop. If you cool it down it will increase. If you cool it below the tempeatture is is saturated with water as a gas it will start to consesate to a liquid or deposit to a sloid. Freeizng is a liquid to a solid, the change from a gas to a solid is deposition. So cold air is often 100% hunmid is becaue that do not require a lot of water So when air that was warer the hade lower humidity cool down the humidity increased untill you get to 100% when extra will become a liquid or a solid. When you breath in cool air and heat it up in you nose etc the humidity drops so 100% humid air at 0C will be quite dry air in you body. So water in you nose etc will evaporate so it can dry it out even if it wats at 100% humidity when it was cold. & #x200B; The result is that water can exist as gas at temperature is not longer can be a liquid. If you put ice in a container with air wil 0% humidity the result is that the ice will evaporate."
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[
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[
"url"
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l3ewqu
|
how can babies/toddlers learn virtually any language on earth from easy ones such as spanish or english to hardcores like chinese or arab? Why is it so difficult when you are an adult?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"There’s a whole field of study around this but the short answer is we don’t really know but we have a few ideas. Linguists don’t kill me but here’s my best attempt at an oversimplified layman’s overview: 1. Babies in general are wired to pick up certain sensory inputs at certain ages. Anyone who’s had kids can attest to how their baby suddenly seemed to notice light / food / colours / textures / etc right at certain milestones. Their brains are probably set up to pick up linguistic input in stages too. 2. The evidence we do have shows that adult brains are wired to pick up linguistic input but mostly in the form of new vocabulary, not phonology (pronunciation) or syntax (grammar). That’s why your vocab suddenly gets more complex in adolescence and continues to develop throughout your life, but learning how to speak full sentences in a new language is hard. 3. Evidence also shows that adults who do learn new languages do it best through full immersion. That is — moving to a new country, consuming all your news, entertainment, social and work life, etc through that language. As needs must. If you think about it this is exactly what babies do. They don’t take a 2 hour English class every Tuesday evening. They are living in a 24 hour English class, and even then they don’t get super fluent until after about three years. If you’re really interested in this subject you can deep-dive ad nauseam, but that’s my best summary :)",
"I taught EFL for 10 years and learned Korean as an adult. The human brain develops throughout childhood, with the last stages of development being in the mid 20s. In the early stages, the brain's native language capacities develop. Children learn almost everything through imitation, and language is no exception. As the brain's power to receive and produce spoken and written language increases, children naturally absorb the langauge(s) spoken around them. They do not actually need to be taught grammar rules or phonics in order to use the langauge. At some age that is different for everyone, this langauge-learning ability decreases. From that point on, your native language is processed in a different way than any other languages you learn. Other langauges have to be learned through memorization and practice, and you need the grammar rules and phonics in order to use the langauge. Other languages are also all part of the same cognitive process, separate from your native language. This is why, when learning two foreign languages, you may mix them up. I can try to dig up sources if you want, but that is my understanding."
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3
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|
l3f2go
|
Why do humans eat cheese made from some animals milk and not others?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkegejc"
],
"text": [
"A few reasons, actually. First is size. Cows are big and produce lots of milk. They can produce a surplus, so we're not harming the calves, either. Same with goats. On the other hand, guinea pigs wouldn't be a good choice for this reason. Next is domesticablility. We can't safely milk wild animals, of course, but many domestic animals don't take well to it (like dogs). Flavor is important. Sheep don't produce a milk that humans would like (or so I'm told). Practicality: ~~Sheep would also be difficult to milk due to their wool and skittishness, it's not just their flavor that's off-putting.~~ (E: I was wrong on this, people *do* milk sheep, e.g. Romano cheese may be made from sheep's milk.) Some animals just take to being milked better than others. You can't produce cheese without milk, so your options are limited to that. So far as I know, every animal we can successfully milk at scale also has one or more cheeses made from their milk."
],
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6
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[
"url"
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[
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|
l3fjhh
|
When a company approaches another company to acquire them do they speak with the shareholders or with the board of directors?? And how exactly does a hostile takeover happen if the majority of the owners don't wanna sell???
|
Ok so let's say company A wants to buy company B. Do they speak with the board of company B to acquire them or with the shareholders?? If they speak with the board and they say no but the majority of the shareholders want to sell couldn't they just fire the board?? But if they speak with the shareholders and the majority of them don't want to sell how can a hostile takeover happen ???
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
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"gkewdb2"
],
"text": [
"They go to the Board of B and ask. If the Board says \"No\", then A might mount a \"hostile takeover\" by going to the stockholders of B to get them to sell all their shares to A. If A has enough shares, it replaces the board and, not surprisingly, the board says \"Yes\".",
"It’s presented to the board, and then eventually has to be approved by a vote of shareholders. Hostile takeovers happen when the acquiring company is able to buy 50% of shares or gain voting control of that many. All investors will sell for the right price, so they can just keep buying shares on the open exchange, even if it means they drive up the share price. They can gain control without 50% if they have allies, say a mutual fund or hedge fund who also own large stakes and agree with their move."
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3
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[
"url"
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[
"url"
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l3frk3
|
It's been more than 40 years since the first successful space shuttle launch. However, as we saw with the recent NASA launch, we still have launch failures. Why is it so tough to achieve reliability in space shuttle launches? Does this apply to all space technology?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"\"It's Rocket Science\" is a meme for a reason. To get maximum efficiency, rocket designers are pushing the limits of human technology. Sure, we could more reliably use old technology, but it's not affordable.",
"Rockets are extremely restricted by weight, much more than most other technologies. IIRC the Saturn V was something around 3000tons and only delivered a payload of a few single or double digit tons. If the rocket was 1% more heavy it would have basically lost all its cargo potential. The result is that rockets operate on much lower safety margins than other means of transport. Everything is designed to be just barely strong enough for the expected loads and redundant systems aren’t always possible or particularly practical. A single sensor failure can lead to the loss of the entire vehicle. IIRC there was a proton rocket that just flipped upside down and exploded because a sensor was mounted the wrong way around. Another aspect is that there is only limited ways to test your product in realistic scenarios. Rockets are crazy expensive and until recently they were entirely expendable devices. „Test flights“ aren’t really a thing when your vehicle has no way to land. The engineers must rely on in flight telemetry which makes it hard to spot faults unless you have a sensor specifically monitoring that part. There was an arianna rocket which exploded because its control software was partially copied from an earlier generation of the rocket. The newer rocket was faster and as a result a sensor ( I think it was an altimeter) exceeded its range of valid values during the early phases of the launch. This wasn’t an issue on the old slower rocket because the system was shut of before it ever flew that high. It never happened during tests because all tests were performed on the ground. And lastly rocket failures are always spectacular because rockets are basically a giant fuel tank with some high tech strapped on the top and bottom. If it goes wrong it goes wrong with a big boom. In retrospect it’s often a small „silly“ thing, but every part is critical in the rocket.",
"The reason why we have failures so often is because the technology and the physics are incredibly complex. When you’re launching a rocket, you need to make sure that the three ignition systems are working perfectly, that there isn’t a single screw out of the tens of thousands loose, that the weather could not possibly pose a problem. There is so much that could go wrong, and so much at stake (even if there aren’t people on board, launches are unbelievably expensive) that launches get cancelled quite frequently. However, there are so many variables that sometimes one gets missed, something goes wrong, and the launch fails",
"When/if you watch programs showing factories producing things you rarely, if ever, see anything going wrong. In reality, there are problems ALL the time, and things are having to be corrected on a regular basis. Stands to reason things will go wrong with rockets aswell. Only difference is, instead of a small pile of food on the floor, you get an impressive big bang.",
"\"However, as we saw with the recent NASA launch, we still have launch failures.\" - What launch are you referring to?",
"There are some quality responses here; but a point the other posts dont emphasise is the very narrow specialist nature of the technology. While there is some overlap with military applications - which have tens of trillions of dollars thrown into them over the last five decades. Arguably up until recently, **manned space flight is not actually a well funded mainstream industry.** It has a (proportionally) tiny budget, for what is effectively a continued series of research experiments (the launches included). If major world economies *chose* to throw more time, money, and effort at the technology - you would rapidly see a significant reduction in cost, and an increase in reliability (all the listed problems notwithstanding). This is what we are finally starting to see with the privatisation of space flight.",
"Many people here are talking about the difficulty of rocketry, which is huge, but I think many people are forgetting a big piece: sample size. There are very very few things in this world that happen as infrequently as a space launch. There have only been \\~200 crewed flights by NASA and \\~5,000 orbital launches by the world. Cars produced: over 1 billion TVs produced each YEAR: \\~200 million Aircraft flights per year: \\~10,000 No matter what you are doing, if you don't do it enough, you'll never become an expert at it, and until you become an expert at it, you can be rest-assured you will have issues.",
"For uncrewed launchers, you wouldn't want extremely high reliability. Extremely high reliability means making things more robust and heavier. It means adding redundant systems that weigh a lot. Weight that you add to the launcher is weight you have to remove from the payload. I've no idea how the economics pay out for any specific launcher, but if they just plain never fail you've built them too strong. Obvs all this goes out the window for crewed launchers.",
"Rockets are very complex and operate as close to the limit of their materials as we can. That means there are both more things that can break and they're more likely to break since they're under a lot of stress. That's why we have so many launch aborts. If there's a minor failure that mission control can't work around, it's better to scrub the mission and try again later. Otherwise, it risks a failure in flight which is often catastrophic. A rocket isn't like an airplane that can fly with an engine out or an instrument failure.",
"The forces involved are huge, and the machines have to be as light as possible. You can't \"over engineer\" due to the weight requirements, and even slightly \"under engineered\", or even a tiny flaw in the materials, can cause failure. \"Just right\" is a thin line.",
"I’m currently working on a university liquid rocket team. Even in their simplest form, liquid rockets are hellishly complex. Not only is everything hugely weight-optimized, but it has to be weight-optimized over a large range of temperatures and conditions. Finding the failure load for a strut at room temperature in air is easy; finding the failure load for a strut with one end connected to an injector plate and one end connected to a tank of cryogenic liquid oxygen under vibrational and transverse loads is less easy. Of course, this doesn’t even get to the hardest part, which is handling the fluids. Not only does everything have to be compatible with liquid oxygen and impeccably clean (like seriously, a single drop of cutting fluid can ignite an entire aluminum tank) but you often have to predict the properties of multiphase flows in non-trivial geometric arrangements, which even computers have trouble with. This isn’t even getting into turbopumps and the associated headaches with them. Seriously, every time you look at a liquid rocket it seems like the number of potential problems has tripled. When I look at a successful rocket launch, I wonder how the hell they got 1 out of 100 launches to work let alone 99 out of 100. Additionally, a lot of stuff is found through testing because there’s no good way to model it, which won’t necessarily reveal all possible issues. For instance, the F-1 engine team for the Saturn V brute-forced their injector development, by testing 600 subscale injectors (which are often among the most costly and expensive parts) until they found one with suitable performance, and IIRC they didn’t even find out about the combustion instabilities until they tested the full scale version. A flaw that made its way to the final Saturn V was an instability called “chugging” which caused engine thrust to oscillate back and forth. The cause? The mounting plate flexed slightly which subtly altered geometry of some pipes which altered turbopump inlet pressure which altered injector pressure which altered mass flow rate into the engine which altered thrust. *Everything* in a rocket is interconnected in extremely non-obvious ways that often aren’t evident until the thing flies."
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|
l3ft0f
|
Why do women bruise more easily than men?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gkeodzp"
],
"text": [
"Women literally have thinner skin. They have more fat under the skin (relatively useless in preventing injury) in comparison to the collagen men have that helps against injury and keeps blood vessels from breaking. From an evolutionary standpoint, this likely goes back to two fundamental truths: 1. You need to make a lot of design compromises to enable an organism to self-replicate. 2. Humans are far more 'optimized' than most large animals because they need to endure under extreme performance for much longer periods of time under much more variable conditions. So along the way, nature took a look at women and said to itself \"hrm... I can lose the baby factory or I can increase resistance to impact... well, I can't lose the baby factory, so bruising it is...\"",
"This is due to the make up of the skin fat vs collagen. This is in addition to hormonal effects on blood vessel walls. See this link for more details. URL_0"
],
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"text_urls": [
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[
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[
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|
l3g6e7
|
Why did you need to hide under a blanket like object when taking pictures using an old school camera?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"Nope to these \"answers\". View cameras (which still exist – I own one) have lightight plate holders to protect the plate (or \"plan film\" nowadays) from light. The problem is composing the shot on a ground glass: the objective gives only a dim image which would be swamped by ambient light. So the photographer hides, with the ground glass, under a kind of dark \"tent\" to be able to see the image on the glass, orienting the camera, setting the focus, & c. Once this is done he removes the veil, removes the ground glass and replaces the latter with a plate holder. The objective gets closed with a cap (or just a hat in ancient times, or an inbuilt shutter) and the plate holder opened – it's either a sliding piece of metal or a kind of blind you have to move. Now the plate can be exposed just by removing the objective cap (or hat, or triggering the shutter). Once this is done the shutter is closed, the plate holder is closed too, removed from the camera and stored in the bag you have to drag along with all that gear. Most holders have a place where you can write a pencil mark so you don't mix up exposed and fresh plates. It's all a bit technical, but here's a picture of a plate/film holder: URL_1 And here's a view camera from the back where you see the ground glass and the projected image on it: URL_0",
"When you look at the back of an old school camera, the image of what you're looking at through the camera lens is projected onto a piece of opaque glass (it's not clear like a window, but white), and that image is not very bright. It's not very bright because the only light you're seeing is what's allowed to shine through the small opening of your lens. Covering the camera and shielding it from the outside light makes the image easier to see for composing your shot and getting it into focus. You can see how this works yourself by turning down the brightness of your phone and reading it while out in bright sunlight, then cover yourself and your screen with a dark cloth to get the same effect. TL;DR: It's how you turn up the brightness on an old school camera by blocking out the sun.",
"With a traditional SLR style camera, the photographer composes the image by looking through the viewfinder of the camera, where they see the image as seen through the cameras lens. Traditional view cameras don't have a viewfinder, what they use instead is a ground glass plate - this is slotted into the camera where it forms the back of the body. The cameras lens then projects the image it sees onto this glass plate which the photographer can look say to frame and focus the camera correctly. To take a photo, the ground glass plate is removed and a holder containing a piece of film is put in its place and a photo can be taken. The reason for the cloth covering is that the images you see on the ground glass is very dim and quite hard to see in bright light. By covering yourself with the cloth you block out the light behind you which makes it easier to see the image."
],
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338,
32,
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"text_urls": [
[
"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_Camera_001.jpg",
"https://www.chamonixviewcamera.com/accessories/filmholders"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3ga56
|
Why does the head on a soft drink collapse faster if you touch it?
|
If you pour a soft drink over ice (Coke or Pepsi seems to work best), the head that forms will go down on its own, but if you touch it with your fingertip, even on the edge, the whole thing collapses much faster. I'm fairly certain it has nothing to do with oil from my finger. So what causes the foam to dissipate so much faster?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkf5c9g"
],
"text": [
"The natural salt and oil on your finger breaks the surface tension of the bubbles and makes them easier to pop, that salt and oil then mixes with the liquid that made that bubble and now touches more bubbles, which does the same to them, causing a chain reaction of collapse."
],
"score": [
13
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3gotj
|
I was just recently put on to the fact that I may have undiagnosed ADHD and have always discounted the idea of seeing a psychiatrist to get diagnosed. I feel like the medication can be a huge boon to my life, how do you differ ADHD from straight up depression?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gkeysi0",
"gkf1dc6",
"gkeylyp",
"gkg8byd",
"gkfgzd1",
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],
"text": [
"Getting officially diagnosed is the best way. I'm not a professional. But if you wanna do some diving, look on the /r/ADHD subreddit. I have been diagnosed with both ADHD and depression. They're very related, and ADHD can 100% cause depression. It's hard to say, because if you have ADHD, you don't realize things you do are because of ADHD until you take medication. And Jesus the medication changed my life. But if you are forgetful, often bored and constantly wanting to do everything but can't focus on a single thing, then look more into it.",
"Short answer: There is a strong link to ADHD and depression. In a lot of cases, ADHDers with depression have “fueled” their depression with their ADHD, especially if they let it go untreated. If you think you might have ADHD, you should go get assessed. Long answer: Most if not all ADHDers have something called RSD (Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria). For example, you can tell an ADHDer that they are a social butterfly and they might hear that they are talking far too much and that they are a loser. Many of them overcompensate for their ADHD, which usually can to lead to them being a workaholic. Many are also impulsive, which may lead to addiction as well. Also, they tend to think a lot, which can lead to anxiety and dwelling on their past mistakes. All of this kind of can play into depression. Source: I have ADHD",
"This isn't really so much of an ELI5 but I hope this helps: try seeing a psychologist first. They will refer you to a psychiatrist if it's what you need. Psychologists counsel and diagnose, but do not generally prescribe medicine. Psychologists counsel less and diagnose and prescribe instead. Both are good, but it would be good to start with the former and get their professional opinion on whether you need to consult the latter. I wish you all the best.",
"ADHD is characterized by executive function issues, impulsivity hyperactivity, and inattention that occured from an early age, and often goes hand in hand with learning disabilities, working memory issues and processing speed issues. Depression often develops later, as does anxiety. Depression usually responds well to CBT and SSRIs, and typically will ebb and flow depending on external factors and age. ADHD is more consistently there, although it also can get worse depending on sleep and hormones. ADHD does not respond to SSRIs.",
"Lots of mental health issues have overlap. I am medicated for anxiety, which most people think means you’re always frightened and nervous. For me, it meant I was grouchy and hyper vigilant, and would be exhausted on a daily basis. Lots of mood swings and depression-like symptoms, but it was apparently anxiety. Doing better now. My recommendation is talk to your doctor and get a referral to a specialist if necessary.",
"I am not a doctor but I started seeing a psychiatrist about 4 years ago and was diagnosed with ADHD and later (as I became more open with my psychiatrist) with chronic depression. My understanding is that they can sometimes go hand in hand. ADHD can make you feel like you’re not in control of your life which can lead to depression (at least that’s how it was explained to me). It took months to find the medications that are right for me but once I/we found the right combination it was life changing. It’s not going to happen overnight but things can absolutely get better over time. Feel free to DM me if you need a friendly ear, my only regret is not addressing my problems earlier due to how stigmatized mental health problems can be sometimes."
],
"score": [
26,
19,
7,
7,
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3h9d9
|
How did Brazil tackle hyperinflation?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkfasvi",
"gkfbu4a",
"gkfbabz"
],
"text": [
"By installing a new, non-valued currency (later named the real) that was attached to the dollar, which would balance it out instead of shed value and continue the cycle. Every payment was made in the old currency that kept losing value until the real was ready to be introduced, which would be after the interest rates were raised to attract foreign investment and enable the real to momentarily overtake the dollar in nominal value, which would fuel imports and block demand-induced inflation.",
"It's a really interesting story that I won't be able to do justice. Brazil created a parallel currency to the cruzeiro real called the URV (trans: ' real value unit') pegged to the US dollar and let the cruzeiro real continue to hyperinflate. For a period, financial statements were published in both currencies to establish trust. Then over about a month and a half, the old real was replaced by the new real.",
"Planet Money had a podcast dedicated exactly to this case. Not so in-depth but I would highly recommend listening to it for a good explanation of the policy that was followed. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
24,
9,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/12/02/458222801/episode-216-how-four-drinking-buddies-saved-brazil?t=1611427574666"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3hdam
|
How do air-fryers work?
|
If you’re using oil, I assume it heats then atomizes the oil so it cooks the food item in hot oil by coating it with a mist rather than the traditional method of dunking it in liquid oil, but it says on the box you can cook many items with no oil.. so how is this different from just baking/roasting them in a traditional oven? ETA: Thanks everyone!
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkf8mpr",
"gkfflgu",
"gkf7zf6",
"gkf9pl3"
],
"text": [
"Air fryer = convection oven, with a fancy name. If you have an oven with a convection setting, you have an air fryer. Convection ovens come with fans that help circulate the hot air around the oven to uniformly cook the food. It's great if you're cooking in large batches; all the food will cook at the same speed.",
"Like the others have said, air fryers are essentially scaled-down convection ovens. However, there are a few crucial differences: - air fryers don't get as hot (mine tops out at 400F/204C) - air fryers have a much higher fan speed than most convection ovens - air fryers don't need to preheat in the same way (you only need to wait for the heating coils to warm up, no need to warm the basket itself) Before air fryers were introduced, there was an appliance called the NuWave that was essentially the same thing, but with multiple tiers like an oven or dehydrator instead of the basket you'll find in most air fryers. The surface of foods cooked in the air fryer are a bit more dry than what you'll get out of a traditional oven or deep fryer. That's sometimes a good substitute for the crispiness you get from a deep fryer, but an air fryer can't achieve the \"bloom\" that you get from deep fryers, which relies on a rapid transfer of heat between the cooking medium (oil or air) and the surface of the food. (Fun fact: Food in a deep fryer is essentially \"steamed\" by its own moisture while the surface is fried; properly fried foods will have relatively little oil remaining on the surface.)",
"Like a regular oven, it just heats the air and circulates it around the food. If there’s oil on/around your food, it’ll be heated as well, but nothing atomizes the oil to spread it around, that’d be extremely dangerous and inefficient for heat transfer.",
"If your oven has a “convection” mode, it’s literally no different. Air fryers/convection ovens use fans to circulate the air around whatever you’re cooking. The convection feature on ovens isn’t the default setting because it’s loud, uses more energy, and doesn’t make a difference if you’re making lasagna or a casserole or whatever. But most ovens have it. If you baste or spray whatever you’re about to cook in an air fryer/convection oven in oil, it comes reasonably close to the taste of deep frying. But a lot of people are using them for health reasons and avoiding oil altogether. Without oil, it’s still better to use the convection setting for certain things as it can make them crispier. Counter-top air fryers are just for convenience, similar to a rice cooker. You can make rice on the stove but if you have the space, a rice cooker makes it super easy and frees up your stove for cooking other parts of the meal."
],
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112,
50,
9,
6
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3hgxs
|
How the same beverage tastes different depending on what container it came in?
|
Take coca cola for example, it tastes better and fresher out of a glass bottle rather than a can or plastic bottle, yet its the exact same drink.
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkg4c74",
"gkf8tgl"
],
"text": [
"If you poured Coke from a can into a glass and a Coke from a glass bottle into a glass, had someone switch them around and you then did a blind taste test, you would not be able to tell the difference. However, when drinking straight out of the can and the bottle, you are also \"tasting\" the container, which is why you think the two Cokes are different.",
"Aluminum and plastic bottles can absorb some of the soda's flavor and add flavor's to it, leading to a milder taste. Glass doesn't have that property."
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3hnlh
|
Why is it that horrific images remained burned into your memory but normal/wholesome images you forget over a much shorter period of time?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkfawvo",
"gkg6dqg",
"gkg69op",
"gkfdevb",
"gkg6anv"
],
"text": [
"Because your brain is hardwired to remember threats, because threats are useful in the future for keeping you alive.",
"It's a self defense mechanism. The subconscious part brain thinks, \"Oh, this image caused my heartrate to spike and my breathing to get erratic. That probably means it was a threat to my safety. I had better keep it in the forefront of the memory banks to remind the conscious part of the brain to think up countermeasures so that it doesn't hurt us if we see it again\" Even if it was something technically harmless like a picture of a war tragedy from a century ago, the subconscious doesn't know that, it just reacts to the emotional distress.",
"Because evolution-wise, remembering bad things is way more important to survival. You know how if you drink too much or get food poisoning, that drink or food can make you nauseous even years later? It's because your body recognizes the poison and remembers so you avoid that thing in the future. Well guess what you have the same protection built in for emotions and situations and people too. If you see or experience something horrible, you need a record burned in so you avoid it next time. If someone betrays you or something seriously hurts you or a loved one, you need a record to not trust the person, or to save yourself next time. Our body systems (including brain and emotions) are finely crafted for 2 goals: Not dying, while having as much sex as possible. Remembering mundane things or a cute dog you saw isn't going to help those goals. Remembering a pile of meat festering in an alley behind the butcher IS helpful, since you might not walk down that alley next time and avoid disease.",
"I think trauma is the answer essentially. When you are tramatised you kind of mentally save a snapshot of the traumatic image/event and the surrounding circumstances so that if you survive you will always remember what it was that you need to avoid next time. I'm not sure why it applies to horrific shit you seen online, maybe our dumb brains havent firgured out how to separate whats real and whats on a screen yet?",
"For thousands of generations those who survived long enough to breed were those who could quickly identify, react to, avoid and remember threats. What you classify as horrific is in essence a threat to your well-being. It's in your design to be paranoid, shocked, fearful and disgusted."
],
"score": [
112,
20,
7,
5,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3i4vn
|
What exactly is liminal space?
|
There is this sub r/liminalspace and I’m not exactly sure what it is about. They say it’s about transition and space in between. All I’m getting is nostalgia?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkfgesq",
"gkfgh0r"
],
"text": [
"Liminal mean between, more or less. It's the places people typically don't think about when they're in them, because they're either full of people or just passing through. So you don't see the area empty. The pictures are usually meant to trigger some sort of nostalgia because when you take everyone out of a mall, office space, house, etc, buildings are all built very similarly. This makes a lot of empty spaces feel familiar, even if you've never been there. Hope that makes sense!",
"It's a bit tricky to pin down conceptually. Nostalgia is definitely one piece of the puzzle. \"Liminal space\" images are images of places which defy expectations about the purpose and use of a space; when you can say \"This place had an obvious and specific purpose, but that purpose is not present in the image\", then it's a good bet that this is what people would call liminal. Abandoned malls are places meant for shopping, but no one is shopping. A library with no books in it. Stuff like that."
],
"score": [
7,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3i5et
|
How did money gain value? Did someone just pay with a piece of paper and it became a thing?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkfez2c",
"gkffyy8",
"gkfhpni"
],
"text": [
"Originally money was a form of receipt, representing grain stored in temple granaries in Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia and in Ancient Egypt. This led to pieces to metal later URL_0",
"For starters someone with far more knowledge will likely answer, but I can at least get you started. Money is only worth what everyone agrees it’s worth. Originally we bartered for everything because what you needed had value (food, furs, resources, metals). U.S. currency used to be backed by gold. Like a bill would have value because it represented gold the holder “owned”. This is no longer true today, however we still place a value on items and have “certificates” that represent our ownership of an equivalent value. So the more certificates you have, the more you can trade for it. So yes. In some ways it was a collective agreement the dollar bill held value. It gets more complicated when you look at the “buying power” of the USD in other countries. And I’m afraid that’s beyond me. But hopefully there are some key words there that will start you off.",
"So this is pretty complex but I'll try: Way back in the past when people were first starting to trade there was no such thing as \"money\" you just traded what you have to someone who needs in for something they had that you need. For example, a hunter might trade some meat to a farmer in return for some vegetables. Simple, right? Unfortunately, this *barter* system runs into problems very fast. What if the hunter needs to trade for vegetables but the person farming doesn't need meat, the hunter could try finding someone who needs the meat and has something the farmer needs, but this is time consuming for the hunter who would be better served spending their time hunting. Additionally, what if the hunter needs to trade for something that's worth farm more than what he has, for example, he needs a new spear but the spear takes the person making it several days to create, the spear maker probably doesn't want several days worth of hunting meat sitting in his shop rotting. Enter *currency* where your community decides on something that is transportable but has some value(common examples are salt in the Roman Empire, gold in many places, etc). That way the hunter could trade his meat to anyone who wants it because he knows that their currency will be valuable to anyone he wants to buy things from in the future. The next leap is to make the currency not be this thing but to *represent* the thing(both salt and gold are heavy AF in large quantities), that way you have a central repository that holds the thing that has value(a bank that keeps gold in their vault), yo can trade slips of paper that entitle the bearer to a certain amount of gold at a particular bank without carrying the gold then when someone wants the actual gold they take the slip to the bank which gives them the appropriate amount of gold. Finally, we get to modern times and *fiat money.* Fiat money has value essentially because everyone involved agrees it has value. It doesn't represent any real item you can hold and only people who think they can get value from it will accept it. Almost all modern currency is fiat money."
],
"score": [
6,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency#History"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3ifss
|
can someone please explain why stopping the pipeline is making so many people angry?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkfjgca"
],
"text": [
"It makes different people mad for different reasons. 11,000 construction and oil workers lose their job, some after they moved to a remote vrea for a 5-yevr job. They are mad for obvious reasons. People who buy gas for their car are grumpy because the oil that comes through the pipeline will reduce gvs prices. Some people in the northern states are grumpy because transporting the oil by truck is less safe, are increases risks of a spill. Other neighbors have been mad at the pipeline because of the construction impact. Of course, the reason the pipeline was cancelled is because oil is a pollution source, and making it cheaper will make more people use it. The Green New Deal is all about changing the country to an extreme environmental policy, and people who are against the GND are mad that \"unity\" was sacraficed for GND policy."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3ihdf
|
What does the funny feeling we get in our belly come from after driving over a steep terrain?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkfl37z"
],
"text": [
"it's negative G-forces, when you're in the car your body is moving at the same speed as the car, and as you crest a hill and start going down your body's momentum keeps it going upward at least for a moment, and on the inside even if the outside has stopped moving up. if the car continues to accelerate as it goes down then you'll constantly be moving slightly up relative to where the car is, which is why on a rollercoaster when you go down a big hill it feels like you're going to fly out of your seat. your guts float upward, your blood moves up away from the feet, etc. effectively your body and everything in it weighs less. in extreme negative Gs you can red-out, where the blood rushes to your head, your vision goes red, and blood vessels in your eyes or even your brain can burst from the pressure of the extra blood. that'll never happen from just driving your car though. the feeling in your belly comes from your guts lifting upward inside you."
],
"score": [
16
],
"text_urls": [
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3jii8
|
Why do my devices that use lithium batteries often still perform well even at a low charge?
|
Versus say, almost dead AA’s in a toy.
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkjzqmr",
"gkkd6l9"
],
"text": [
"Lithium batteries have some circuitry in them that shuts off the battery to protect it. If they are discharged too low it can damage it. Double As are pretty dumb in but you get to squeeze out every bit of juice out of them without much worry",
"A battery's voltage will slowly drop as it discharges. For something simple like a toy the circuit is probably just a motor, speaker, and/or a light, these things will carry on running on lower voltages (to a point) but they will get less powerful. For something like a laptop or a phone, they have to have a consistent voltage to work properly (e.g. 12v). The battery's voltage will still drop as it is used, but there is some clever circuitry that converts this dropping voltage into a constant one. This means that the device doesn't care that the voltage has dropped until so much of the energy in the battery has been used that we can't convert it to what we want any more, at which point the device will turn off rather than potentially damage itself with the lower voltages."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3k8r2
|
Why use wax paper to line a cake pan? It seems the wax would heat up in the oven and mix with the cake batter.
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkg4h35",
"gkfzu6j",
"gkgg8zo",
"gkgfrcm"
],
"text": [
"Wax paper works in a pinch but parchment paper is way better for this. It’s non-stick, like wax, but doesn’t melt and withstands much higher temperature. But many folks don’t keep parchment around unless they bake a lot, and lots of folks have wax paper, so it’s a good backup.",
"You aren’t supposed to. Wax melting in with food is not really a concern, perfectly safe, the paper can catch fire. URL_0",
"You do not use wax paper in baking. You use parchment paper. Wax paper is a divider for use in freezing things. It is not for open use.",
"You DON'T use wax paper, you use parchment paper, which is different. It doesn't have a layer of wax that could melt into the food. it looks sort of like wax paper, but it is different."
],
"score": [
24,
12,
6,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.southernliving.com/kitchen-assistant/parchment-paper-vs-wax-paper"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3ke42
|
Where does the Universe expand to?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkg4nk9"
],
"text": [
"The contents of the universe are not moving outwards into empty space. Cosmological expansion refers to the growth of space itself creating extra distance in between stuff. As far as we can tell, there is no “outside the universe.” There’s a limit to how far we can see which defines the “visible universe,” but that’s a horizon and not a physical edge."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3l5ut
|
Why do babies (and adults) like to be rocked? Like how we have built rocking cribs and rocking chairs?
|
Its super relaxing. Is there a biological reason for this?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkg80uy"
],
"text": [
"It’s thought to have evolutionary origins, yes. The calming response comes from the parasympathetic nervous system and a region of the brain called the cerebellum. Researchers have found that the calming response was dependent on tactile inputs and proprioception. Proprioception is the ability to sense and understand body movements and keep track of your body's position in space. They also found that the parasympathetic nervous system helped lower heart rate as part of mediating the coordinated response to being carried. URL_0"
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201304/the-neuroscience-calming-baby"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3lnah
|
Between the time I open a webpage and the time it takes for the option to pop up to accept or deny cookies, what happens to my cookies?
|
When I opened a news site today and it asked me about consenting to cookies, it made me wonder what happens to my cookies before I deny or accept it? Are the cookies being monitored up until that point? What happens if I never click deny or accept?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkgf32u",
"gkgik35"
],
"text": [
"There is probably no cookies. The website won't automatically write cookies just because you visit it. It probably writes it's first cookie when you click \"accept\" storing that you clicked accept. If you never click anything, it will just wait for your input.",
"Hi, so the answer depend on where you are in the world. For example with GDPR (in a nutshell the european law on cookies) an european website SHOULD wait for you to click on \"YES i accept\", before droping a cookie. On a \"less protected\" country or on a website that does not respect the rules; they often drop the cookie on the instant of your arrival. So even before the \"YES i accept\". Hoping it was clear enough ☺️"
],
"score": [
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3m70p
|
why can't we sleep with our eyes opened?
|
Why can't we sleep with our eyes opened? I'm wondering... I mean, I know our eyes would dry out but there's gotta be a bigger explanation? I mean, why does our body feels the need to close it eyes? And can only rest with its eyes closed? Could I trick my brain to sleep while my eyes are opened?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkghh85",
"gkgmata"
],
"text": [
"There's no benefit to it. As you mentioned, your eyes would dry out. Additionally there's no real benefit to keeping the portions of your brain that automatically blink and processes visual data fully active while you're asleep - one of the primary functions of sleep is to rejuvenate the brain and because of that, nonessential functions essentially need to be shut down.",
"When I was a kid I had a habit of falling asleep with my eyes open. Apparently it freaked my parents out. I think I'd pretty well grown out of it by the tiem I hit 10 or so. So it IS possible, but as others have said, not really practical from a rest perspective."
],
"score": [
10,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3mi17
|
how are babies able to breathe through their noses and drink at the same time but adults can’t?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkgkmy5"
],
"text": [
"In infants, the larynx sits up high near the nasal cavity like a snorkel, so babies can drink and breathe at the same time. But, around three months of age, the larynx \"drops\" lower in the throat, making choking easier but speech possible."
],
"score": [
12
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3mpe6
|
When baking pita bread, why do the brown spots congregate in small areas rather than evenly across?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkgm2hg"
],
"text": [
"Because the bread bakes unevenly and small pockets form in the bread, resulting in those in contact with the heat source to heat faster. Resulting in little brown spots."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3mxy0
|
How does a storm or storm system move across a country without "losing steam" i.e: running out of rain.
|
Just a random question I was curious about.
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkig4cm"
],
"text": [
"I mean they do eventually, however the environmental conditions that created the storm also continue to feed the storm. Hot air and sunshine evaporate water and encourage plant respiration creating humid air which rises and is picked and accumulates in the cloud as it passes. Particularly slow rainstorms will actually feed themselves with part of the rain they drop evaporating and reforming stone cloud."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3n8sx
|
why do some hairs change from straight to curly, back to straight —seemingly randomly? What exactly is happening/changing?
|
Motivation for post- my hair is very erratic- it’ll be straight for 4”, then have tight curls for 4”, then we all weird and kinky. And each hair has its own random(?) pattern. Why????
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkgt1s3"
],
"text": [
"That's called \"wavy\". It's an incomplete dominance between the straight gene and the curly gene. It's caused by your genes. Not all genes are DOMINANT or recessive, sometimes they've mixed. Sometimes they're \"incomplete dominance\" so some sides of both genes produce, and sometimes they're \"codominate\" where both sides are fully expressed. \"Wavy\" hair happens when incomplete genes express."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3o2ai
|
What happens to a country if they go bankrupt / default on their debt?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkgzgr9",
"gkh22il"
],
"text": [
"It rarely actually happens, because most of the times the richer countries of the world will step in and help out. The US has helped out many countries about to default on debt. However, Greece experienced this situation before being bailed out a few years ago, and essentially here is what happened. \\- All their banks closed. No cash was available. Nobody could access their money. Nobody could buy food, gas, etc. \\- No more imports. So food, gas, whatever that was suppose to come into the country to keep things going, stopped. \\- Work stoppages - if companies can't access their money, they can't pay employees \\- Tourism almost stops, because most people pay with credit cards, and they can't process those cards any more. Had a friend who was actually on his honeymoon in Greece when this happened. They had to rent a car (luckily he had some cash) and drive over the border into another country that had Euros to get a stack of cash, then drive back to Greece to finish their honeymoon. Because cash was still accepted, but you couldn't get it in Greece. Luckily the crisis only lasted a short time. The EU stepped in and bailed them out. If it didn't happen, Greece would have had serious serious issues.",
"You should read the Wikipedia page on [sovereign default]( URL_0 ). It doesn't happen much anymore because of changes in laws at the UN, but it gets complicated quickly. Mostly you just see renegotiations on due dates & higher interest. In the past it meant the lending nation would send in their military and before you could say \"hippity hoppity\" they would take all your nations property."
],
"score": [
12,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_default"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3o452
|
Why is it that (on average and for most) fish, bird, and reptile species the females are larger than the males, but in mammal species the males are larger than the females? (Again, I am taking generally, on average.)
|
I probably shouldn’t have included reptiles on this list. I got my fishes and reptiles mixed up haha
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkgyo6l",
"gkgzg1q",
"gkh3r1k"
],
"text": [
"Well I don’t think they are in reptiles, but tend to be in birds and fish definitely, insects also I think. There can be lots of different reasons for sexual dimorphism, where the sexes differ in size or other traits. Humans are slightly below average in terms of dimorphism. But generally speaking one common reason is that in species that lay eggs, or have lots of children, it’s an advantage for the female to be nice and plump, with a body capable of producing and harbouring lots and lots of children. That’s much less often the case in mammals, who’s strategy tends to be fewer children and more care, so no advantage for plumpness. Us mammals love having a good scrap over the ladies, rather than having nice patterns on us or making a lovely nest, which is one of the many reasons why there’s the advantage for men of being larger.",
"Some animals employ a quantity over quality offspring strategy. To produce more offspring, the females need to be larger to hold the offspring (usually in the form of eggs). Mammals typically employ a quality over quantity offspring strategy. Nursing an offspring with milk requires the mother to be present. Since each female member of the species doesn't produce many offspring, the best strategy for a male is to have many breeding females. Mammal species tend to have larger males because the toughest, strongest males are able to claim and protect a larger number of breeding females.",
"Generally speaking being big is harder. Needs more food, more energy etc. So you need a benefit. If a female is mass producing via lots of eggs, then the bigger the better because the bigger she is, the more eggs you lay, the better the chances your eggs reach adulthood and mass produce enough eggs for one of those to reproduce. (People think of it as trying to have kids, you really need to be trying to have grandkids). Males, in that scenario don't need to be big, they just need to get someone pregnant. So why be big if you just need to walk up and put on netflix.... unless... unless you're there with your netflix log in and your bottle of wine and fucking Brian is there with his fucking netflix code. Then you have to beat up Brian.... and the bigger you are, the better chance you'll beat up Brian. So, in mammals, you're not laying eggs, so you're not having more kids if you're bigger. So you don't really get the same drive to large females, and so when the male competition drive still exists, you get bigger males. Now its complicated, because there are multiple drivers at work. So you have say, reptiles like crocs which lay more eggs if they're bigger, but generally males are larger, because a larger male will breed with more females."
],
"score": [
8,
7,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l3ofia
|
What happens with donated blood that is expired?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkh9ti5"
],
"text": [
"Medical research or the \"trash.\" When blood expires that's basically saying that \"too much of the blood cells have died.\" If you tried to inject it into a patient they would become even sicker than they already are and potentially die."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3oqq2
|
What is happening with GME stock, why do people believe it will keep going up?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkh2fsx"
],
"text": [
"People borrowed a lot shares to sell them because they thought game stop was going bankrupt. Now they have to give them back but there are not enough shares around for them to buy so they will have pay to higher and higher"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3p5rc
|
Why do people sometimes have problems falling asleep even though they are mentally and physically tired?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkh9qum"
],
"text": [
"No expert here. But I have read up in this particular issue. The answer is stress. Cortisol more specifically. Your body releases cortisol as part of your fight or fight response, and in response to general stress. Your body also gives you a dose when you first wake up to “wake you up”. When you feel exhausted, but can’t sleep, your body is involuntarily releasing stress hormones designed to keep you from sleeping. This lack of sleep is typically coupled with stress and thoughts about the next day."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3pi5f
|
Why does it hurt way more to stub/bang a finger against something when it’s cold out?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkhe27z"
],
"text": [
"I just answered this 13 days ago, so make sure to use the search function. 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": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l3pocu
|
How come some popcorn kernels refuse to pop?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gkh9f9v"
],
"text": [
"Popcorn depends on a certain amount of moisture inside the kernel of corn to flash into steam with heat. That steam expansion is what makes popcorn...popcorn. No moisture equals no steam which equals no pop which equals no popcorn and an “old maid” instead."
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
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