q_id
stringlengths 6
6
| title
stringlengths 3
299
| selftext
stringlengths 0
4.44k
| category
stringclasses 12
values | subreddit
stringclasses 1
value | answers
dict | title_urls
listlengths 1
1
| selftext_urls
listlengths 1
1
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
l7ptkw
|
What exactly is happening at Wallstreet and how exactly does all work?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl7zvbx",
"gl7zw0a"
],
"text": [
"Some very wealthy people 'borrowed' a lot of Gamestop shares. The shares were falling and they strongly believed that the shares would continue to fall in value. Their plan was to immediately sell those shares they borrowed, wait a while, then buy them back at a much lower price. They could then return the shares to the people they borrowed them from and keep the profit. ie - Borrow a share worth $10 with the promise that you will give it back in a month. Sell that share to someone for $10. Wait for the share price to fall to $6. Buy another one off the market for $6. Give that share back to the person you borrowed it from. Keep $4 for yourself. The difference in the case of Gamestop is that a bunch of Redditors realised that wealthy people had borrowed a load of these shares expecting them to fall in value. The Redditors then got together and started buying up lots of the shares. This caused the share price to go way up instead of just down a little. Wealthy people started to panic as they now owed a share back to the original share owners but those shares were now worth $300 each, not the $6 they expected them to be. The wealthy people now have to spend $300 to buy a share to return to the owner which is a massive loss. Multiplied over hundreds of thousands of shares this will cost them billions of dollars. They are not happy.",
"Here's a good video that describes what's happening right now. URL_0"
],
"score": [
65,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://youtu.be/8YrnTbzuOWM"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7pxgk
|
How do the food producers know how many calories each of the products is?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl85gv3",
"gl87gdr"
],
"text": [
"They use a device called a calorimeter. Basically a set amount of the food is burned and the amount of energy (joules) that is given off is measured. From there they can calculate the number of calories in that amount of food. Simple multiplication from there.",
"For the most part, food producers use software programs based on lab testing. In the lab, food is burned to calculate caloric content. Source: i used to work at a food producer"
],
"score": [
7,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7qz6c
|
Why do Bluetooth headphones struggle to maintain smooth connectivity with digital devices in some places?
|
While walking around with my Bluetooth headphones on, listening to podcasts playing on my phone in my pocket, I notice that the connection gets really poor in some places. The content is playing offline so it is not a network issue, nor is this a result of dying batteries since the problem persists with fully charged headphones and phones. The places where this happens don't seem to be visibly distinctive but are predictably bad Bluetooth zones. Is it because of too much EMI (electromagnetic interference) in those locations?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl85yvx"
],
"text": [
"EMI would be the first thing to look for. It uses the 2.4 GHz frequencies and is prone to interference from poorly shielded microwave ovens etc. Bluetooth also functions at a fairly low power so it is more easily interfered with."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l7r7aq
|
Why do you feel tired if you oversleep?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl8gdof",
"gl8cljm",
"gl8w8b7",
"gl9blo4"
],
"text": [
"You “sleep” in ~90 minute sleep cycles. These cycles are pattern of brain waves that help your brain clean up (get rid of waste, restore energy, clean up connection you have made in your brain). The cycles are REM (rapid eye movement-the dream state) and non-REM (the rest state). If you wake up from REM sleep you will not feel tired. Think about the last time you woke from a dream or a nightmare... bet you didn’t feel tired. There are hokey sleep cycle calculator that you can try but because everyone sleep cycle time is slightly different they may not be effective. But being mindful of this can be helpful. Also ensure you have good stretches of sleep (breaking your planned sleep into ~90 min chunks ) Once you learn you own “sleep cycle number” you can get better sleep. One thing you can do, is train your body to remember your dreams. You can do this by starting every morning by writing down what you dreamed. If you keep doing this you will train your body to remember more and more of those dreams. I have found this also trains my body to wake up at the end of my REM cycle and I feel more refreshed.",
"Sometimes tiredness is not only a product of lack of sleep. Stress can also make you tired. You also have to take into the consideration the quality of your sleep. 6h on a super comfortable bed can rest you better than 10h on uncomfortable one. I'm not an expert on this topic and hopefully someone will explain this better and elaborate on it.",
"Allegedly, you'd have two \"clocks\" for sleep in your body. One of these goes slow, so that you're sleepier at night than in the day. The other one goes faster, so that you'd sleep tightest in the beginning and the end of your sleep. And maybe get sleepy once or twice during the day. When you oversleep, you'd miss the \"awake\" phase of the second \"clock\", and get sleepy again when you're actually trying to be awake.",
"If you oversleep you probably needed more sleep to begin with. Just because you got more than normal doesn’t mean you got all the sleep your body truly needed to feel fully rested."
],
"score": [
33,
10,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7rrpy
|
Why romance scammers often ask their victims to send them gift cards rather than real cash?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl89kv6",
"gl89lj9",
"gl8cv18"
],
"text": [
"It's impossible to send cash over the phone/internet, and many types of electronic transfers either risk revealing the identities of those involved or could be reversed. The purchase/transfer of a gift card generally can't be reversed, and the card number can be read off over the phone.",
"Gift cards can be redeemed online without much of a trail. Bank transfers or PayPal can be reversed if reported as a scam.",
"Gift cards are essentially untraceable. They can be exchanged more easily and hidden even easier, whereas cash money is traceable in a number of different ways"
],
"score": [
15,
8,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7rtlj
|
How US Congress, Senate, and House of Representatives works.
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl8bo73"
],
"text": [
"When the Constitution was being formed there was a debate about how the states should be represented. Some states wanted the states to be represented as individual entities with each state getting an equal vote. Other states wanted the states to be represented as populations of people with states getting votes proportional to their population. Each side of the debate was concerned about getting fair representation. As a compromise, we decided to do both. We established a Senate with two Senators from each state to represent the state as a whole, individual sovereign entity. Each state gets equal representation. We also established a House of Representatives with each state getting a number of representatives proportional to its population. Originally we said a state get one representative per X number of people, but as the nation's population began to increase significantly we instead locked in the total number of Representatives at 435 and divide those up proportionately among the states. At the state level, States have established Congresssional districts and elect their Representatives from these districts. Both Houses (Senate and House of Representatives) form the body known as Congress."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7rxqv
|
Why is it safe to inhale noble gases
|
I was watching hamilton's pharmacopeia and he was inhaling xenon and seemed to think it was pretty safe. As a layman, my intuition tells me inhaling anything besides oxygen is not safe. Why can you breath pure gases other than oxygen and be fine?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl8aqpg",
"gl8ay93",
"gl8b2kd",
"gl90s7h",
"gl8apmz",
"gl8caou"
],
"text": [
"Noble gases don't react. The only real issue is that it takes up lung space where there could be oxygen. You can breathe in helium to do a funny voice, but make sure your next couple breaths are normal air.",
"> I was watching hamilton's pharmacopeia and he was inhaling xenon and seemed to think it was pretty safe. As a layman, my intuition tells me inhaling anything besides oxygen is not safe. Why can you breath pure gases other than oxygen and be fine? Breathing in most noble gasses is fine in the same way as it is fine to breathe nitrogen - they're inert and won't interfere with bodily functions or irritate your breathing apparatus. You still need oxygen though. If you breathe an inert gas **instead** of oxygen, not in addition, you will lose consciousness and die.",
"It isn't safe, there is risk involved. Noble gases are mostly inert, meaning that they do not interact chemically with anything (except in extreme cases). Which means they're probably not going to interfere with any biochemical processes. But anything you are breathing that isn't oxygen, well, isn't oxygen, and this does poses a non-zero amount of risk. Clearly if you fail to breath oxygen for long enough you will die and people have indeed died this way (a couple entered a large tent-like balloon that was being inflated with helium. It's interior was almost entirely helium - no oxygen - and they passed out and died). It should be thought of as slightly riskier than holding your breath for the same amount of time. If it is in short periods, not much risk. I say riskier because holding your breath for too long triggers physiological responses that force you to start breathing which wouldn't happen here.",
"Air is around 21% oxygen, the rest is mostly nitrogen and small amounts of the other gasses including the noble ones so your breathing tiny ammounts of this stuff all the time.",
"It’s not that they are “safe” Nobel gasses are inert and displace oxygen., If you inhale enough of it you will die from inert gas asphyxiation. The reason it’s safe to inhale in general is due to these being gasses diluted in the oxygen you breathe anyways.",
"Air is a mix of gases, it's not just oxygen. Noble gases are almost completely non reactive so there is no toxic or caustic effect from them. Now if you only breath in a noble gas you will eventually suffocate, but a single breath is essentially harmless."
],
"score": [
45,
18,
6,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l7s6mn
|
Sound volume of commercials
|
Why does it seem adds/commercials are always way louder than the show or content you are listening too?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl8fuvw"
],
"text": [
"Most TV shows will have a dynamic range in their sound - highs and lows in overall volume based on what is going on in the show. The commercials, however, use what is called a compressor to reduce the dynamic range - the compressor sets a maximum volume and then increases _all_ of the sound up to that maximum volume without exceeding it. This means that the perceived loudness is higher than the TV show, even if the actual volume has the same high end limit. They do this to grab your attention."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l7sczl
|
Is it a bad idea to buy cheap stocks?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl8cqll"
],
"text": [
"> If a stock costs $1 and it goes up 10 cents isn’t it the same as a $100 stock going up by $10? I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just buy a ton of cheap stock. Thx Because it can go down and you lose all your money."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7tic8
|
Why do color photos fade over time?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl8khu2",
"gl8t5qy",
"gl8raqg"
],
"text": [
"Not all inks are resistant to fading when exposed to UV light and oxygen. It's likely that older inks might not have been considered for this quality instead choosing whatever was most convenient to get the process started. Modern pigments are judged on an absolute scale of how lightfast they are with the information available online. Often the most vibrant inks are also not very lightfast",
"Yes you almost answered your own question. But it's not the air it's the light in the air. Photos are made by exposing paper soaked in special chemicals to different light waves. Those chemicals change color when different light hits them from the film negative. After the chemicals dry they sort of \"lock in\" the color. But over time as people look at the photos, the light still affects the chemicals a tiny little bit. And after many years that adds up to a lot of fading.",
"This is because the UV light affects the chemical makeup of the picture. The ink that is used to print these photographs contains a light absorbing body called chromophores. When any amount of light is absorbed by these compounds, the UV rays in that light break down the chemical bond of the picture dye, causing the colors to fade away. Various toxins and pollutants in your home and surroundings are not just damaging for your pictures. Household chemicals, second hand smoke and dust can damage the chemical composition of your pictures and cause fading, stains and even abrasions on your photographs. This is why it is important to keep your pictures away from the fireplace or any open windows."
],
"score": [
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7u5g8
|
How do failing companies benefit from rising stock?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl8r47r"
],
"text": [
"if a stock is rising, that means people want to invest in this company. the company could then consider issuing new shares and get new money for new investments this way. but this question should have been asked within the stickied stock market megathread (like your last one, which is why that one probably got deleted and you got a notification to do just that)"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7uy1n
|
What is the purpose of Wall Street?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl8u771"
],
"text": [
"It allows companies to crowd-fund investment money so they can grow, and offers individuals a chance to get rewarded by doing so. If your friend runs a coffee shop and wants to start a second one and says for a $10k investment you can own 20% of the business and get 20% of the profits in return, that's buying stock in their company. That's what the stock market does but on a more granular scale."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7via3
|
Why do we say "ouch(or any other words)" immediately after feeling pain?
|
Does it reduce the pain? Or is it because of the experience of watching people react like that before? Or is it something different from my guesses?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl8znzn",
"glal4eq"
],
"text": [
"It is a reflex that cannot be controlled. A startle reflex (from a burn, pain, sound,etc) short circuits through the nervous system bypassing the any decision making in the brain. Verbalization usually is a reaction to the autonomic reaction. That is a personalized reaction once your brain catches up to what happened. It is still not a conscious decision made for that reaction. That follows immediately. *Hit your finger with a hammer your brain will pull your finger back before the pain registers. *You yell ouch at the realization it will hurt, but pain hasn't hit. Ouch is just a generalization of that guttural sound. *pain hits and you grab your finger and squeeze it as pressure elevates pain (nerves can't fire pain and pressure signals at the same time). Then your mind is caught up and you probably will swear like a sailor.",
"Do people who speak different languages say different things? In English we say “ah” or “ow”. Is this instinct or learned language?"
],
"score": [
18,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l7vt36
|
How do long ago healed piercings get infected when the hole is no longer an open wound?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gldlgy0"
],
"text": [
"When you have a piercing, you have basically made a cozy, warm, hard to clean area of the skin that's in constant contact with the piercing. Oils from your skin get on the piercing giving the bacteria that cause infections food to grow too. So it's just more prone to getting infected like any area of the skin potentially can, unless you practice good hygiene in that area, regularly cleaning it and the piercing itself."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7vuul
|
Why is it easier to push than pull
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl8zgos",
"gl8zwpa"
],
"text": [
"For a human, pushing is mostly about extending your arms out. You usually have more space to position your feet to get a good grip on the ground, and you can put more of your body weight into the motion. Pulling requires a different set of muscles, and depending on what you're trying to pull you might not have as much space to really get your full body weight into it, even if you're leaning back.",
"Here's another thread questioning why it is ***easier to pull than push***: [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 ) You may also want to look at a Free-Body Diagram illustrating the various components of forces acting on the object while being pushed and pulled."
],
"score": [
6,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tm912/eli5_why_is_it_easier_to_pull_than_to_push/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tm912/eli5\\_why\\_is\\_it\\_easier\\_to\\_pull\\_than\\_to\\_push/"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7vvmo
|
why is it bad to cook chicken from frozen even when it cooks high enough to kill bacteria?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl96k1o",
"gl8zz3o",
"gla57p5",
"gl9vezc",
"gl9av8j",
"gl91g7z",
"gl9ty7g"
],
"text": [
"Cooking chicken from frozen is perfectly safe, **as long as it's heated to a safe temperature (165 F) all the way through to the middle**. The difficulty is that if it's frozen, it takes so long for the *center* to cook through that the *outside* ends up overcooked and dry. This problem can be solved by creating a cooking environment that stays not too far above 165F for as long as it takes (which could be hours). This means using a crockpot (\"low\" for most of them is around 200F), or poaching (as long as you hold the poaching liquid around 180-200F and keep topping it up), or using a sous vide setup.",
"You can, but its not going to taste as good, outside will be very dry an tough by the time the middle is finished.",
"The best way I have found to cook frozen chicken is to use an \"Insta-pot or Pressure Cooker\" Using a pressure cooking method uses trapped steam to cook the chicken ensuring it gets to temperature quickly and also doesn't dry out. Side benefit, it is fast too.",
"May I ask an obvious question... Why cook from frozen? Why not thaw it first? Or at least thaw it half way?",
"The reason it is bad is because the outside will cook way faster than the inside so you get tough, dry meat. However... I cook all of my chicken breasts from frozen. Usually twice a week. I'll cook them on one side, flip them cook for a while longer, [butterfly them open]( URL_0 ) continue to cook on the now exposed inside and continue until cooked. Sometimes leaving them as half breasts or slicing them into strips, dicing etc as needed.",
"It makes the meat super tough/dry no matter how long you cook it or how much cooking liquid there is.",
"okay so the real reason that I don't see mentioned is when you got chicken with bones in it (or really any meat with bones in it), it will remain as like a frozen core while the rest of the meat is at a good cooked temperature. so you'll still have raw chicken parts and then you really have to overcook it to get the Bone hot but then you got overcooked meat. so if you're cooking plain chicken breast or deboned thighs from frozen, it's not impossible to cook it nice. (especially if it's not too thick). but if there's bones in your meats you should bring it up to room temperature so that it cooks better, and more evenly."
],
"score": [
310,
37,
24,
9,
8,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQXQHgtlGP-hkWD36k0-jUnZJmXrHOf6hk4uA&usqp=CAU"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7vya4
|
Why can some stimulants like meth or cocaine potentially significantly enhance a person's physical capabilities, while others like caffeine cannot?
|
Or can it, but in higher doses?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl9cwdp",
"gl9z9dh",
"glamvg7"
],
"text": [
"I think from the article you linked you’re mainly pointing to the secondary effects of these drugs. Cocaine for example is a local anaesthetic, which can be seen as an enhancement in a capability in a way. And also yeh they work in wildest different ways, cocaine mainly works with the dopamine system, which caffeine does not.",
"Because they make you feel absolutely fucking amazing. That’s why crackheads can do shit like fall off 50 foot buildings and still survive and tame wild animals. caffeine just makes you feel less tired.",
"Caffeine and nicotine are performance enhancing drugs, but only mentally. They keep you awake, they both raise your heart rate, they are both vasoconstrictors. Your brain gets faster, but it's short lived. They do not increase performance for anything but rapid thought and problem solving. There's a reason that people do creative writing by taking a break every 15 minutes for a smoke and topping off their coffee. It works. It's just short lived. Once you've OD'd on either, you will be sick, shaky and useless. A good method is one hit of nicotine every half hour or so, and keep your coffee hot. You find a baseline and you become very productive. Don't go over that limit. Don't OD on either. Usually, you just get sick, but if you have a heart issue, you can die. But, yeah, the Red Bull performance enhancing thing is stupid. Red Bull keeps you awake at 10 times the cost of a cup of coffee and has less caffeine than a small cup of coffee so you have to drink them all day to keep awake where 3 cups of coffee will keep you burning for 12 hours at a Nickle a cup at home. Also don't smoke. Do as I say, not as I do."
],
"score": [
5,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l7w7nj
|
Why is the instinct to immediately suck on a small wound or cut, like if you smash your finger?
|
What does this do and why do humans seem to instinctively do it?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl9260u",
"gl93g5j"
],
"text": [
"Saliva is naturally antiseptic so is a decent way too initially treat a minor cut/graze etc. By sucking, you also apply a small amount of pressure to the wound which can help to relieve pain by allowing better blood flow to the area.",
"Wound licking is a conserved instinct among mammals and some other species in the animal kingdom. Saliva contains natural antiseptic that can kill some types of dangerous bacteria on contact, and also contains clotting factors that kick-start the wound healing cascade in the injured tissue. A natural painkiller is also present in saliva. Even though saliva also contains a lot of bacteria on its own, the benefits of being able to lick wounds outweigh the risks in the wild. We, of course, have access to advanced medicine so we don't always have to rely on such a crude method of wound care."
],
"score": [
16,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l7wlcs
|
Why can't we lower ocean levels manually?
|
Feels like a super dumb question with a "You should know better" answer. But if the most cataclysmic oncoming event of our species is climate change resulting in elevated sea levels - why couldn't we dig some cavernous outcroppings into the crust or mantle below the ocean, and deposit the removed materials above sea level? Just because of the labor amount to quantifiable change ratio? Is it impossible or just impractical? Whatever the answer, I'm not looking at this like it would be a fix-all or real solution. More a potential for temporary application while we reduce global emissions.
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl97fy2",
"gl9889k",
"gl95viz",
"gl9b8cn",
"gl94jqo",
"gl95kxl",
"gl94o0o",
"gl9a7f5"
],
"text": [
"Looks like a lot of people have covered the technological impracticality of it, but from a more cost-based position, why not just use whatever that massive bill would come out to to actually resolve climate change through carbon sequestration, reforestation, and energy grid reform? And if it really comes to it, why not just push that money into extraterrestrial colonization? In the end, it would be an expensive bandaid that doesn’t effectively resolve the problem, just deals with one symptom of climate change while ignoring all of the others like coral bleaching and ocean acidification, changes to the Hadley Cells and global currents, and more erratic weather patterns.",
"This might be the best scale. The melting ice that will be the cause of the rising sea level covers much of Russia, Canada, Greenland, and Antarctica. These glaciers overall, cover 10% of land in ice that ranges between several hundred meters and several kilometers in thickness. That totals a volume of 170,000 cubic *kilometers* of stuff. Basalt, or the sea-rock you're saying to move weighs about 3 metric tons per cubic meter. This means that the total mass you need to move is 500,000,000,000,000 *metric tons*. That amount of stuff is basically impossible to move for humans. We literally could not pick up that much stuff quickly enough for it to stop sea-level rise. For reference, the entire world's shipping industry has a yearly tonnage shipped of 2,000,000,000 tons last year. Some simple division shows that it would then take 250,000 years, coopting the world's entire shipping industry to try this.",
"> why couldn't we dig some cavernous outcroppings into the crust or mantle below the ocean, and deposit the removed materials above sea level? You could, but the amount of difference this would make would be completely negligible compared to how much difference it makes If you're not careful, this could even make the sea level higher, because the process of excavating would probably use some fossil fuels The ocean is _enormous_ and it'd take a lot of digging to make even a tiny difference",
"The ocean covers over 70% of earth’s surface. That means, dropping the ocean level by 1m raises all land by an average 2.3m. This effectively drops the water level by 3.3m, but more from land elevation. There is no a big advantage to raising Mount Everest by 2.3m. If we add the extra material only to lower elevations we can drop the water level even more, say 10 or 20m. Unfortunately, the extra land would be salty and sterile and we would have to live in higher elevations, probably farther from the coast than if we just let the ocean rise in the first place.",
"I think you should do the maths for that but the unit will be in E (1 E is the volume of the Everest). How many E do you need to excavate to remove 1 mm of water from the oceans? Redo for 1 cm and then 5. Where will you put the excavated dirt?",
"That's just way too much effort for small results. The ocean is so unbelievably large, imagine how much you would have to remove for it to make even the smallest difference, and then where does all that material go? And who would facilitate all this? No one would be willing to put in that money or labor.",
"Well, machinery we have access to probably wouldn’t function all too well, and we’d have to come up with ways to move massive amounts of materials from the bottom of the ocean. In theory, it would work, since you could build up the coastlines as a wall, but it would be hugely impractical. We could also really mess up the ecosystems down there, and since it’s the ocean the chances of waking up some colossal monster technically isn’t Zero. Plus, it would generally be easier to colonise another planet",
"The oceans of the world is 361.9 million square kilometers lets use 3.6\\*10\\^8 km2 To reduce the level by 1meter = 0.001km the volume is 3.6\\*10\\^8 \\*0.001 = 360 000 cubic kilometer of water. The Sahara desert is 9,200,000 km\\^2 so you have 9200000 /266000=34 meter deep water all over it. The Sahara desert is 1/3 of Africa so the amount of stuff you need to remove would cover the rest of the convention in a 16-meter thick layer do digging down is a bad idea. Building dams are simpler. & #x200B; So to reduce sea level you any significant degree you need to create an artificial lake on a continental scale. If you wanted to put it below ground level you create mountain ranges with the material you remove"
],
"score": [
15,
11,
8,
5,
3,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l7wnjm
|
what is say's law?
|
the way im reading this is that supply creates demand, but that's obviously not true, as I can go out and create a toothbrush with cactus bristles, but that doesn't mean there would then be demand. that's super simple, so im assuming i must be misinterpreting this.
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl96w6t"
],
"text": [
"It says that supply of one product creates demand \\*for other products\\*. If you create a toothbrush with cactus bristles, and somehow manage to sell it, that will increase demand for dentists, lidocaine, and, especially, non-cactus-bristle toothbrushes. It will probably also create a glut of cactus-bristle toothbrushes, making them cheap, and people will start looking for other things that cactus-bristle toothbrushes might be good for beyond brushing teeth. For example, the extremely popular Microplane graters started life as wood rasps...they held that niche for a long time (there just aren't that many woodcarvers in the world) until someone finally figured out that those make \\*fantastic\\* kitchen graters. That blew up the market, first to reselling wood rasps as kitchen graters, then a whole multitude of new products when people realized that we had an industrial base that could make stupid-sharp/stupid-cheap cutting surfaces in a variety of shapes and now you have Microplane cheese graters, Microplane potato sliders, etc. None of that later stuff would have happened, or happened the same way/speed, without the original wood rasp product. More directly: the existence of cars supports an entire ecosystem of car, car lifestyle, and car-related products."
],
"score": [
14
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l7wzt6
|
Why do chargers become “incompatible” after a while, even if it was previously working fine?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl97go8"
],
"text": [
"This is due to Apple deliberately detecting that it is not an Apple produced charger through software updates. When you buy your knockoff iPhone charger, they have reverse engineered the secret sauce (really some handshake done at the USB level**) that the phone queries in the charger to make sure its a legit Apple device. But Im positive there's an engineer somewhere in that big round building in Cupertino, somewhere in the accessories division (hi KOG) who is ~~charged~~ tasked with periodically searching online for knockoff Apple chargers, buying a bunch and then figuring out how they spoof the legit ones and then pushing a corresponding firmware update _specifically to break that_ into the PWM (power management) chip driver in the next iOS build. Im not aware of any other mobile device mfgr who deliberately sabotages non-proprietary accessory makers the way Apple does. Yeah, your Samsung might complain about a new charger you bought at the gas station when you forgot yours at home, but when that happens, its really saying \"I need a 2A charger to charge as quickly as I can, this is only a 1A/500mA charger.\", but it will _still work_... just not as well. **not familiar with the details on specifically how, but some googling suggests they actually put a special but simple chip into the cables/charger that can be queried over the USB data lines (or who knows, maybe over the power lines too... wouldn't surprise me)."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7xc0z
|
. When hooved animal's hooves are left untreated they over grow and become unhealthy. Does this happen in the wild?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl99ccz",
"gl9988j",
"gl99csy",
"gl9bkqv"
],
"text": [
"Unlikely. A hooved animal in the wild gets to run around on dirt, rock and gravel, so that naturally wears down the hoof. A bit like how if your dog is outside a lot, you don't have to clip its nails nearly as much as an inside-only pet, because its claws get worn down by the patio, sidewalk, gravel etc. Those rescue ponies and horses with the super gross curled up hooves, those are because those poor beasties have never been walked on anything but a stall or soft arena dirt, so there's been nothing to wear them down naturally. The sad thing is that can really screw up their feet; even after the ferrier corrects their hooves they're not gonna be walking normally for long time.",
"Using a horse for an example, wild horses move great distances every day, which naturly wears them down. Domesticated horses may be ridden sometimes but nowhere near enough to wear the hooves down naturally, so we have to step in and help them out.",
"No, in the wild they are naturally worn down by their environment. Animals in captivity need intervention because their “normal” habits are disrupted.",
"I know of goat keepers who provide boulders and such for their goats to avoid this problem. They still get their hooves trimmed annually but it is sometimes not even necessary if they have been on the rocks lots."
],
"score": [
41,
12,
5,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7xfiz
|
Why do we see only one 'image' with our eyes when we have 2 eyes?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl9a0w4",
"gl9ikzi"
],
"text": [
"Because usually they are seeing the same thing, so our brain just shows us one image. However, you can actually see 2 different things if you, for example, take something and put it close to just one of your eyes. You will see that image on just one side. Our brains need both eyes to focus on the same target in order to determine depth. It uses triangulation to give us an estimate of how far things are. People like myself who have a lazy eye, actually have issues with this. I have no depth perception, and my brain ignores all but peripheral vision in my left eye. Had they fixed it with surgery when I was a child instead of waiting until I was 11 I might be \"normal\" right now in that regard. Makes for fun times if a cop pulls me over and gives me a sobriety test.",
"You don’t “see” a raw feed from your eyes. You see an image that is produced by your brain heavily processing raw input from your eyes. The brain takes that input, does color correction, extrapolates missing information, highlights recognisable shapes and objects and generally just processes the hell out of it before that information reaches your conscious mind. Messing with this processing is why certain optical illusions exist. The black and blue/gold and white dress is the result of the brains of different people handling color correction differently. The blindspot in your vision from the place that the optic nerve attaches is papered over with the mental equivalent of the spot healing tool in photoshop. The fact that you can stare at a pattern without being able to tell what it is and then suddenly it clicks and you can’t unsee it is a function of the object recognition processing initially failing and then highlighting the recognisable pattern in your vision once it has been tripped. And one of the processing things your brain does is take the two images from your eyes and combine them into one 3D images using the the parallax information from the slightly different perspectives each eye has."
],
"score": [
9,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7xgzx
|
how do people get different sounds out of analog circuit based instruments?
|
Just getting into the wide world of analog synths. I’ve seen all kinds of crazy cool diy instruments. People make their own keyboards, eurorack oscillators and effects, drum machines, etc. I’ve got basic soldering experience and I’ve taken electronic instruments apart for routine maintenance. Recently, I’ve gained access to a makerspace equipped with a 3D printer, laser cutter, and lots of other helpful fabrication gear. This, to me, seems like the perfect recipe for making my own electronic instruments. I’ve seen a few different resources for circuit based instrument diy projects, like websites that outline how to make an oscillator, a sequencer, delay effect, etc., and I’m especially interested in constructing my own analog drum machine (something akin to a [Vermona DRM1]( URL_0 ) or a [SOMA Lab Pulsar-23]( URL_1 ) .) How do people get such varied sounds and effects? Why are there such nuanced differences between similar pieces of gear? Where do I look to find the knowledge necessary to get the sound I want out of circuits?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl9p7ys"
],
"text": [
"/r/synthdiy Also, by combining centuries of research on signal processing with 70 years of engineering since someone found it funny to play with speaker test equipment. That's just the result of having a lot of people experimenting for decades on the same thing and sharing or stealing their results, and improving upon each other."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l7y0hc
|
How people actually pull off new non-profit pages on social media like instagram?
|
I can understand if you have a business, then it becomes an investment. What about the cases of humor pages or art pages where you don't usually expect get profit? Of course once you get a base and keep providing good content, people will share, comment making it more visible. But how such pages make themselves visible immediately after creation?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl9gikg"
],
"text": [
"Word of mouth. You tell all your friends and other people in the humor/art/... business."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l7y8r4
|
What happens when germs die? Do they essentially disappear?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl9gehg",
"gl9gqg1"
],
"text": [
"They break up into their constituent parts just like everything else, and since life is made of materials commonly used by living things, it generally doesn’t take long for some other living thing to scoop up and make use of those parts for itself. Like any other dead thing, they start falling apart and then something eats them.",
"Germs and cells, by extension, are made up of proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates. When they die (“lyse”), they essentially fall apart, sort of like a very tiny, wet piñata. Their internals flow out all over the place, to be absorbed/eaten by anything else that passes by."
],
"score": [
14,
9
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7ykn8
|
How does sound wave energy get converted into electricity and why is it less efficient than solar energy?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl9i5wz"
],
"text": [
"The microphone reflects *a lot* of the sound energy that hits it. Your simple microphone is like a tiny speaker in reverse where sound hits the diaphragm (little movable plate) and pushes a magnet in and out of a coil of wire. This little diaphragm is hard on the surface which means that a lot of the sound energy hits it and bounces off rather than being absorbed in pushing the magnet through the coil. There are little capacitor based ones but the magnet setup is easiest to understand as a reversed speaker. Solar panels on the other hand are very absorbant of the frequencies they work with. Some percentage is reflected off the top glass layer but 90% of the light will pass through and then be absorbed down below. The efficiency of solar panels mostly comes down to the sun emitting light over a wide range of frequencies and our little solar panels only being able to absorb a small range of frequencies which is why the best case efficiency of a single junction solar panel is just 37% because that's the bigger window we can make in the highest energy portion of the sun's spectrum. Another issue with capturing sound energy is that there just really isn't all that much of it. If you were to stand 1 meter away from a jet engine its sound level is around 150 dB, but if you were to capture *all* the sound energy from that jet engine it'd be around 1000 W, a 150 dB sound only gives you 1000 W of energy to work with. You can get that much energy with about 5 m^2 of solar panels and you won't have a giant turbofan engine screaming away in the background."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7yvro
|
Even with a strong battery why do cars have a hard time starting in cold weather?
|
I don't understand what is different that prevents cars from starting right up in cold weather. Fuel is present, air is there..spark plugs are ...sparking ..and as long as you have a strong battery the starter is turning the engine...why the struggle?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl9kjjh",
"gl9kyh5",
"gla7eeq",
"gl9jlob"
],
"text": [
"Batteries are powered by chemical reactions that make an electric current as a product. Most chemical reactions occur much slower in cold temperatures. Slower reaction = less electricity generated per second. Less electricity per second means your car can't make enough sparks to ignite the fuel in your engine, which means it can't start. If you have a strong battery, these effects are small, unless you're in like, *really, really* cold weather. **Edit:** Another user pointed out that sparkplugs don't actually carry the current to the engine to make it start. That's done by a separate motor carrying an inrush current. It's still an issue with current, just not with sparkplugs **Edit 2:** Those claiming that engines won't start at low temps because of oil being more viscous or that moving solids are packed closer together and introduce friction as a result aren't *completely* wrong, but it's not the primary reason for this occurrence. The density of a liquid or solid (such as motor oil or the metals used in your engine) does change with temperature, but the scale at which this occurs is not enough to prevent your engine from starting (at least for the majority of cars on the road). It is enough, however, to increase the amount of work required by your engine to do its job, which would increase the current needed to start your engine. You'll also have lower gas mileage when your engine is cold vs warm for the same reason.",
"The oil in the engine gets thicker and harder to move when it's colder, it is harder to turn everything in the motor over to start it, so it turns slower.",
"Lot of people are forgetting that when a reciprocating engine is cold, the tolerances between the moving parts become tighter, meaning there is more friction.",
"They shouldn't have a hard time with a strong batterie. If it is older or just not fully charged for some reasons there can be problems tho, because the capacity decreases with cold temperature."
],
"score": [
90,
17,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l7z8py
|
Why is strong wind able to sway and knock down a tree, but a human who weighs far less could easily wander through the same wind?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl9rbfp",
"gl9leiq",
"gla58pr",
"gla3mw6",
"gl9lei4"
],
"text": [
"In addition to what people have said below, trees are also rooted to the ground, which means that when a really strong gust comes, they don't move with it (like humans do), but instead are forced to bend and break.",
"Because humans have far less surface area, and thus experience less air pressure per square inch.",
"I'll try to summarize some parts others have mentioned, and add more. First off is **Scale**. Trees are MUCH bigger than humans, so there is more surface area to catch wind, but also a taller tree create creates a larger **Moment of Force**. A moment of force is a force that creates a rotation movement: If you push a pencil on one end, it will just rotate, compared to pushing it at it's center of mass, which moves the pencil without rotation (translation). Moment of force is equal to Force x Distance, so forces further away from the bending point create greater stresses. Second is the **ability to bend** (there's probably a better term for this, but I can't think of it). If a human ends up getting hit with too much wind, they just fall over or stumble by moving their base(feet). Trees can't do this; they either withstand the forces and stand tall, or succumb to the forces and fall. There's no \"recovery\" for them. Lastly, is important to note: **most of the time, wind doesn't knock over trees - its the lack of wind**. If you've ever been in a wind storm, trees usually fall in groups, within seconds of each other. Trees get pushed to one side by string winds, but because it's usually a (somewhat) gradual buildup of forces, trees can withstand it. But if there's a sudden lull in the wind, **all the forces applied to the tree disappears**, and **all the tension in the tree whips it back the opposite direction** within a few seconds ([like this]( URL_0 )), and that quick switch is the killing blow for most trees.",
"Because of one very simple principle that you learn about in week 3 of physics 101: URL_0",
"I believe this has to do with both the surface area of the tree and it’s center of gravity. People present less surface to press against and their weight is closer to the ground. However, a tree presents a lot of surface and the branches catch the wind. Then having its weight higher in the air it is easier to sway and possibly topple."
],
"score": [
46,
20,
11,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhy-jK93hY4&ab_channel=SoCalCoaster521"
],
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l7zlau
|
Why does a hot bath relax me?
|
I like to have hot baths, hot enough that they burn a bit when I get in. Afterwards I feel mentally and physically relaxed - I get the physical side, but what is it about the bath that slows my mind down and makes me feel relaxed? It only works when it's very hot, had the same effect in a sauna.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl9t7mm",
"gl9r33n",
"gl9nr73"
],
"text": [
"Heat naturally helps eliminate inflammation and relaxes muscles. If your body is tense, your mind is likely to be also. Much easier to be mentally comfortable when you are physically comfortable.",
"I can relate. Hot baths are the best. It kind of reminds me of being tucked under a warm blanket.",
"SAME! My baths have to physically hurt me as I'm getting in to the point once I'm in, if I move it burns lol. I don't know why either. My boyfriend/family think I'm strange lol"
],
"score": [
11,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l80ohn
|
Why are some drug withdrawals deadly while others are not?
|
I thought about benzos or alcohol withdrawal which can be deadly but then I noticed that not all drug withdrawals have the potential to be deadly. Is there any rule?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gl9ynl2",
"glagfvm"
],
"text": [
"I'll try to make it simple, alcohol and benzos act as depressant of the central nervous system : it calms down the neurons firing and that's why it has a soothing effect. What happens is that they act on a receptor present on neurons called GABA-A receptor. Chronically, if you take benzos or alcohol at a very high frequency for a long time, the GABA-A receptors will slowly get reduced in order to adapt the body response to the chronic use of benzos/alcohol. When this happened, the number of GABA-A receptor will be so low, that when the person stop drinking or stop taking their benzos, the central nervous system will fire up full force and provoke seizure that could be deadly. It takes several days/weeks for the numbers of receptors to go back to normal and that's why you usually stop progressively your benzo medication and stop drinking alcohol by using benzos and reducing the dosage over a few weeks. The same mechanism happen for other drugs such as nicotine with nicotine receptors except that nicotine receptors are not as important in maintaing the general activity of the central nervous system like GABA-A does. So withdrawal will affect the brain but will induce discomfort and not seizures.",
"What u/Matrozi said, and I would recommend this video: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ). It's quite interesting"
],
"score": [
10,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://youtu.be/QKIobyk6Isc"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8220h
|
-What causes the “pssshhhttt” sound when something burning comes in contact with water ?
|
Like when a burning cigarette is put out by touching the tip on a drop of water
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gla4khh"
],
"text": [
"Its the water coming in contact with the source of heat, which quickly gets to boiling point and evaporates."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l82b3e
|
Why do candles only smoke when they're put out?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gla8i3a",
"glaksus",
"gla4rx1",
"gla52pw",
"glaa2d9"
],
"text": [
"In addition what others have said, you can demonstrate that that smoke is leftover flammable material. If you’re fast enough, you can relight the candle by touching a flame to that smoke trail. URL_0",
"(Solid) candle wax doesn't burn. It has to be torn up into little molecules - then, if it's hot enough, it will react with oxygen in the air to burn. A candle flame is a tiny cloud of vaporized candle wax that's super hot (that's why it glows). When the hot molecules reach the edge of the cloud they hit oxygen and burn. This reaction heats up the cloud more and keeps the flame burning. When a candle goes out, that little cloud gets too cold and no longer burns when it touches oxygen. You can see the vaporized wax drifting away as 'smoke'. This is why you need a wick, to start burning and melt the wax which is then drawn up and vaporized. The wick is protected from burning because the wax cloud keeps oxygen away from it. In the old days candlewicks would need to be trimmed every now and then, as they'd get super long and start producing too much wax vapor to burn cleanly. Candles would be super smoky after a while unless you cut the wick down. Modern candles have flattened wicks that actually curve to the side as they come free from the wax so that they poke out of the flame and burn down to a consistent length. Pretty cool technology! There are lots more cool candle facts but I'll stop there.",
"Smoke is the result of incomplete combustion. Because there is not enough heat to cause the wax to burn cleanly, you wind up with smoke",
"The smoke is little bits of candle that started to burn but didn't burn completely. When the candle is lit it's hot enough to completely burn the wax. When you put it out the temperature goes down but not enough to completely stop it from burning so it continues to poorly burn the wax and give off smoke until it is cool enough that no burning at all happens.",
"The flame vaporizes the melting wax and the mixture of vaporized hydrocarbons and oxygen from the air is what causes the flame. When you put out the flame, the residual heat continues to vaporize the wax for a short while and these particles are carried up into the air by the heat. It is basically unburned fuel. You can even reignite it above the wick and if that smoke column is cohesive and dense enough, the flame will burn down to the wick and reignite the wick and restart the melting and vaporizing of the wax fuel."
],
"score": [
107,
89,
61,
13,
10
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zrw_4v1xes"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l82baw
|
what’s the little bright things we see when it is dark? Or, why we see them?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glag8x2"
],
"text": [
"The scientific term for these is phosphenes, which refers to any time you see light without light actually entering your eye. The cells in your retina are firing for some reason other than light actually hitting them. They can be caused by many different things, including mechanical stimulation (rubbing your eyes), electrical or magnetic stimulation, or just random firings of the cell in your visual system, which you normally don't notice because you're busy looking at other stuff. Astronauts even see them when in space because of high energy particles hitting their eyes!"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l82lfs
|
What exactly tells us we need to pee, and how is the duration of when we need to pee set?
|
Or rather what speeds up the point of needing to pee? I know the body part that does it, but what chemical/reaction makes it happen and how so? *Honestly, I don't know if my words are making sense, I hope someone understands.*
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gla798l",
"glacgu9"
],
"text": [
"Your bladder is like a balloon. The balloon gets filled (with urine) and when it's about half way full, stretch receptors in the wall of the balloon starts sending signals to your brain that you need to pee. When you pee the balloon empties itself, and kinda deflates, meaning the stretch receptors are no longer sending signals to the brain about it You start to feel the urge to pee when the bladder contains 300-400ml of urine.",
"Unless you are a certain type of autistic or have another reason that the sense is inhibited, you have a thing called \"Interoception\" which is the ability for your body to tell your brain that you have to pee, you're hungry, tired, etc. When your bladder starts filling up, signals are sent to your brain saying that there's something in there. When you're ready to pee, your brain send a signal back through your nervous system saying \"alright let'er rip\" and the muscles work together to expel your urine."
],
"score": [
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l83f3s
|
KN95 vs. N95 masks?
|
Can someone please explain the difference between a KN95 mask and an N95 mask? I tried to Google it and all the articles I looked at had too much information for my smooth brain to understand..
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gladjl1",
"glacz82"
],
"text": [
"The KN95 standard is a Chinese standard which is based on the US standard N95. There are some small technical differences but the main difference is who certifies the masks. Manufacturers say that they are built to the exact same design and are therefore equivalent.",
"KN95 respirators differ from N95 respirators because they meet the Chinese standard but are not regulated by U.S. agencies. Since KN95 masks are not regulated some of them may not provide the protection you expect, however the FDA maintains a list of mask manufacturers that have passed the requirements based on sample testing ([link to FDA list]( URL_0 ))"
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-emergency-use-authorizations-medical-devices/personal-protective-equipment-euas#appendixa"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8475c
|
What is this thing called after- or pre-market stock exchange?
|
Is it just a cool kids club for people allowed to trade in those hours? Why does "market closed" does not apply to everyone?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glai2xq",
"glahz02"
],
"text": [
"Extended hours trading takes place on electronic communication networks, and not on the exchanges. This provides a few extra hours of trading per day, but also comes with a huge warning about liquidity: because of the much lower volume occuring these hours, prices may fluctuate wildly. As such, market orders are usually not allowed (ALL orders must be set as a limit order).",
"In theory, there's no reason they couldn't have no such thing as hours and run 365/24/7. Nearly all trades are just done by automated computer systems not requiring any human input anyways. But we like there being actual hours on the market. It allows people to trade when they know everyone else is trading and to give the actual humans in the business world a real schedule and some breaks. A lot of the value in a stock is that its easy to buy and sell the stock, trading when volumes are low, like say 1 AM, kinda sucks because it may be hard to do a transaction so no one is trading then. Pre and post market trading is that they do allow some trading to occur in off hours, however, volume is usually really low, so if you really want to trade you probably can, but there isn't a lot of people trading then so it can be much more difficult to find buyers/sellers. Both retail (regular traders) and intuitions can trade after hours, and most platforms allow it fairly easily"
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l84x7u
|
If whatsapp says it keeps personal conversations private thru encryption and doesn't read them, how is it able to detect messages forwarded many times?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glaoskj",
"glargys"
],
"text": [
"I'm not familiar with the specific method Whatsapp uses but there is at least one method I can think of that would work. Before the client device encrypts the message it also hashes it. A hash function is basically a formula that data can be input into and outputs a relatively short value. This result is unpredictable from the input and very difficult to perform in reverse, which means it is easy to figure out the hash from the data but very difficult to figure out what data would result in a given hash. Another important concept is that hashes are \"lossy\", which means you can't get the original data from the hash. Even if you reverse the hash function you will just find some kind of data that would give the hash result, and there are lots of those \"collisions\" (probably infinite). So if you give out the hash of your message you don't need to worry about someone figuring out your message. By looking at the hash the server can figure out if messages are all the same thing even though they don't know what is actually being said.",
"I didn't test that feature or read on it, so I don't know if they'd also flag messages that are identical but independent. Say - if you and your friends forward a message between eachother and if, independently from you, me and my friends forward a message with identical content just between us. At that point it would be forwarded, has been \"forwarded many times\", is the same message, but might not be considered \"the same\" by the service. Without knowing the internal workings of it...there are several ways to do something like that without breaking encryption, but I suppose the cheapest and easiest is to add a counter to the message sent within the encrypted message that increases by 1 each time the app is using the forward function on that specific message. When that counter reaches 5, the forwarding limit hits ([ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )) and it shows the label. This could theoretically be tampered with, as a sender could manually set the counter lower, but is very unlikely to be done by enough regular users to meaningfully increase the number of forwards to spread misinformation. Other methods could include calculating hashes of the content of a message - a hash function could take message content as input, do some calculation on it, and return a number. Under normal and intended circumstances, this number is unique for each specific message. If you change one character and run the function it again, a different number (hash) will be the result. The result is one-way, meaning you can't take the hash and get the original message back from it by reversing the calculation. Whatsapp could store these hashes and count how often they were used. That way, they wouldn't know the content, but would know \"it's the same content\" as another message with the same hash. Whenever you try to forward a message, it could hash that message and check against its table and count. If they'd use this method, there's that point though that they don't want to flag \"hi bob, how are you?\" that may be forwarded just as well as some misinformation dumbing-down society that they do want to flag instead. edit: typo"
],
"score": [
4,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/chats/about-forwarding-limits/?lang=en"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l85bxk
|
Difference between pessimism and nihilism
|
I’m extremely negative about the world and want to know the difference between the two
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glaolhf"
],
"text": [
"Pessimism - a general attitude that things are bad Nihilism - A philosophical viewpoint that human existence is without purpose, meaning, or moral principle. I think those high level definitions alone provide sufficient difference."
],
"score": [
20
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l85m0g
|
Why do accelerating spinning objects seem to slow down, stop, then spin the other direction fast again?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glaqn6g"
],
"text": [
"It's an optical illusion caused by the misalignment of video frame rates and the object's rate of rotation. If you take a picture exactly once every 60th of a second (60 Hz), and in that time the object completes exactly one full revolution, it will appear to not be moving at all - because every picture will be taken when the object is in the same position. If the object is instead turning slightly *more* than a full revolution, it will appear to slowly move forwards. If the object is turning slightly *less* than a full revolution, it will appear to slowly move backwards. So even a slight change in the object's rate of rotation (from, say, 599 Hz to 601 Hz) will cause a dramatic visual effect - a full reversal of the object's apparent motion."
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l85plz
|
What's the difference between chromosomes, genes, and DNA?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glasq2g",
"glaryzv"
],
"text": [
"DNA is a type of alphabet. Stringed together, they form words and instructions. Genes are like recipe instructions (using DNA alphabet) for a particular meal. Chromosomes are volumes of recipe books that include all the recipes you'll need in your lifetime. The recipe is to make and maintain you!",
"DNA is a type of molecule found in all known living things. It's used by living things to store information, most notably the instructions for how to construct their bodies and the proteins needed for those bodies to function. By analogy, DNA is \"paper and pencil\" or \"tablet and chisel\". A gene is a segment of DNA that tells the body how to do one particular thing. For example, there is one gene in your body that controls whether you produce a chemical that breaks down the amino acid phenylalanine found in some sweeteners, and if that gene is broken, those sweeteners can make you sick. In the analogy from the previous paragraph, a gene is the text on a written page. Genes are usually found in all individuals of a given species, possibly with small variants that leave most of the gene intact (like a page from *Harry Potter* where one of the instances of the word \"Dumbledore\" is replaced with \"thatoneoldguy\" but which is otherwise the same). These variants, called *alleles*, are sometimes also referred to as \"genes\" (but strictly speaking they are *versions* of a common underlying gene and not the gene itself). Chromosomes are a way the body packs up DNA to fit inside cells. Stretched out, the DNA in ~~even one cell of~~ (ED: every cell of, sorry) your body would stretch for thousands of miles, which is obviously too big to fit in a cell. So the body takes that DNA and \"scrunches\" it up around little balls of protein to make it fit. The way it scrunches is reliably the same from cell to cell, and this scrunching produces single units of DNA called chromosomes, one for each separate strand of DNA. In the analogy from before, chromosomes are whole books composed of many pages (genes). In humans, there are 46 chromosomes in a typical cell, 23 of which came from your mother and 23 of which came from your father. 22 of those pairs code for the same types of things (that is, they have the same genes). The 23rd pair, your sex chromosomes, may be another matched pair (if you're a typical woman) or may be mismatched (if you're a typical man). The mismatched copy, called the Y chromosome, carries special genes that cause the development of male traits."
],
"score": [
22,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l85uno
|
If stronger gravity causes time to go slower, would that have any effects on human aging?
|
I am kind of confused by this, would humans age at the same speed, but only the numerical concept of time would go slower, like minutes, hours, years etc., or would it also affect our aging if we had stronger gravity and thus slower time?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glatv0w",
"glaryn1",
"glascvm"
],
"text": [
"u/wille179 got it about right. Here is the important thing to understand (and this isn't easy to grasp). Time going faster or slower is always with respect to ANOTHER observer. From your own point of view, 1 sec is 1 sec, 1 hour is 1 hour regardless of the gravity. (within reason, this doesn't apply to things like black hole singularities where a lot of physics isn't fully understood) FROM YOUR OWN POINT OF VIEW, you don't age faster or slower. It is someone else in a different reference frame (say lower gravity) that compares how time passes for them relative to how time passes for you (say by looking at a clock that you are carrying) who can make an observation that \"time passes slower for you compared to me\". If you observe them, you will make the opposite observation. Say after one hour passes for you, the clock on the other person will have moved more than hour.",
"By the strictest definition, yes. It does affect human aging, even in Earth's meager gravity. The effect is absolutely tiny; you need an utterly immense amount of gravity (basically almost a black hole's amount) to noticeably affect time on a human scale. Mind you, if your time is going slower, it doesn't *feel* slower for you (because your brain is also going slower). A year is a year. But if you looked at someone going faster than you, they'd experience more time (and age appropriately) relative to you.",
"When time is slowed, every process that is time-dependent slows with it. That includes clocks, calendars, aging, our perception of time, and all of physics. To an outside observer, everything inside a strong gravity field would appear to move in slow motion. To a person inside the gravity field, everything around them seems to happen at normal speed—but everything outside appears in fast motion."
],
"score": [
6,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l87jmx
|
Why it costs like hundreds of millions to create a triple A game? Where do they spend money other than salaries and copyrights?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glb0xhm",
"glb359w",
"glb13st"
],
"text": [
"Programmers are not cheap, and you need a lot of them to build a complex game. Every element of the UI, the behavior of objects in the game world, enemy AI, and so on has to be coded. Assets, like textures and models, take a ton of work to build, and a big game needs thousands of them. A single raid in World of Warcraft, for example, involves something like a hundred models with three or four textures apiece *just for the items it drops*. Add in the enemies themselves, all the environment design, little doodads placed in the game world, spell effects, etc. and you've got something that takes a large team weeks or months to build. And then you have to test all this to be sure it actually works in-game, which inevitably it won't and you'll have to go tweak things.",
"If you have 200 people working on a game for 5 years, and they average $100,000 per person, you’ve hit $100 million right there just in salaries. Some triple AAA games have more people working on them. Some have less. Some pay more or pay less, and some take more time or less time than that. But as back of the napkin math, that should illustrate that because big games take a lot of people with in-demand skills a long time to make, paying them for that work adds up to roughly the ballpark of what you are talking about very quickly.",
"Office space, health insurance, massive amounts of computers, outside consultants, management salaries, HR salaries, days lost due to HR trainings, taxes... Its takes *years* to develop a game and all the overhead adds up fast"
],
"score": [
8,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l87lsz
|
What does a producer actually do?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glb24o2"
],
"text": [
"A movie producer may never set foot on the movie set. The producer is essentially the head business guy on a movie. The deal with all the business aspects of getting the movie made, negotiating, and ultimately doing their best to make the movie successful, appease their investors, and to be in line with the director’s vision of the movie —these don’t always all align, and it’s up to the producer to balance it out. The director is in charge of the creative, the producer is in charge of the business. An executive producer is a nice title, but does not mean much. In movies an EP is someone who helped get the movie funded and made. They may even have funded part of the movie. They generally aren’t involved in the actual movie or process, just getting it made abs funded. Note: a movie producer and EP are very different than those titles in TV. Same title, different job."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l87w98
|
How do chemists know the “shape” of molecules?
|
If you use an electron microscope can you see the shape and the way they interact, or is there a simpler method?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glb4snd"
],
"text": [
"For a good part of the history of chemistry, they didn't. Or at least they only had vague ideas, many of which turned out to be wrong. See for example here: URL_0 Nowadays there are a couple of pretty reliable methods, even though they can take a lot of time an effort in some cases still. * X-Ray crystallography. This is probably the gold standard, since it gives a very direct readout: the positions of the atoms in a very very pure crystal of the stuff scatter x-rays in a particular way, which you can record and then calculate the structure from that. Downside: You have to make a rather large and pure crystal, which can be pretty hard. Also the shape you get is the shape in solid form, and that may not be what you're really interested in, for example when studying proteins. * NMR: Basically an MRI machine for molecules. You put a solution of the stuff in a strong magnet and hit it with radio waves. The way the atoms resonate back tells you about the neighbors of them, which you can stitch together piece by piece. Easy to do (a basic 1H NMR only takes a couple minutes to measure), but rather complicated to evaluate if your molecule is larger. * Mass spec: Make the molecule break apart and measure how heavy the debris is. Since you know what structural features tend to break more easily, you can trace back what was in there. A good way to distinguish otherwise very similar molecules, since you can measure the mass *extremely* precisely. * UV, infrared and visible spectrometry: Shine a light on it, see what color gets absorbed and what not. Different chemical bonds absorb different wave lengths, so again you get an idea of what structural features the molecule has. That's the extremely short and dumbed down version. Each of these points can easily fill a semester-long lecture."
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene#Ring_formula"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l881pv
|
When a drug addict is going through withdrawal & get horribly sick. How does doing that drug instantly make their bodies feel better and not sick?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glb4zxm",
"glb4md0"
],
"text": [
"Drugs work by activating receptors on cells that do different things. Some opioid receptors for example cause analgesia (remove pain) and others contribute to euphoric effects in the brain. With constant use, these receptors become down-regulated which means they are expressed less or taken away from the cell membrane - this means you need more drug to get/feel the same effect. This is called physiological tolerance to the drug. This also happens with the reward circuits in your brain. Changing the amount of certain receptors will change the function of those cells for a long time. For example, constant opioid use will cause constipation as it triggers opioid receptors in the gut to stop digestion. When many of these receptors are gone, withdrawal shows people experiencing extreme diarrhea because the endogenous opioids (made by your body) don’t have enough receptors to trigger/don’t cause the same effect as the drug because maybe they have a lower affinity (attraction) to the receptor. Also, The human body is always trying to maintain homeostasis or balance of internal chemical and physical conditions. With drug abuse, the body’s idea of homeostasis changes to fit with how the drug affects your body - for example, changes in neurotransmitter or hormone levels. When the drug is not being taken and the person experiences withdrawal, these symptoms are a result of the body struggling to try to maintain that new homeostasis set by that drug. That’s why when people relapse during withdrawal, they feel better - their body thinks that it is good because it has worked around the drug for so long and needs it to function properly.",
"their brains and body function get used to the drug and over the long time of consumption brain chemistry changes. Steady drug use makes the brain change production or distribution of some body own natural substances. There is no natural balance anymore. Now that balance is only possible with steady drug supply from outside. When the drug is taken away the balance tilts over causing pain, sweating shaking and very negative emotions. I couldn't even give a better explanation."
],
"score": [
12,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l88pn3
|
How do voice calls work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glbia4k"
],
"text": [
"The simplest way to imagine doing this is by building a circuit which compares a waveform against a bunch of fixed known voltages. Say you have an analog signal ranging from -1V to +1V. By creating a bunch of fixed reference voltages (1V, 0.9V, 0.8V, ... -0.9V, -1V), you can use a simple *comparison* operation to determine which of those voltages your signal is higher than. Say your comparison circuit finds out that it's higher than 0.7V, but not higher than 0.8V. You could transmit this as a `7` to the listener. On the receiving end, a similar circuit (but in reverse) could take this `7` and interpret that by connecting the output signal to the 0.7V reference. By doing this over and over again (say, ten thousand times a second), you can make the voltage at the output roughly match the voltage at the input in basically realtime (as long as you can keep transmitting ten thousand numbers a second). Obviously, real circuits will be much more sophisticated than that. But I hope it illustrates the basic idea."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l88ria
|
Why do wounds throb?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glbaemh"
],
"text": [
"Inflammatory state and arterial blood flow to the site of injury. Wound healing involves the stages of hemostasis (blood clot), inflammation (immune cells migrating to the site with edema/ fluid; blood vessels vasodilate/ widen and become leaky from trauma, also helping bacteria and damaged tissue to wash away), proliferation (new tissue), and maturation (collagen remodeling and closure of the wound). You would likely experience throbbing wounds mostly in the first 2 stages, which would happen more acutely. Some [studies]( URL_0 ) have suggested that the perceived throbbing is slower than the actual peripheral pulse, so it is unclear how much throbbing actually has to do with arterial flow; one study proposes an alternate hypothesis of a CNS \"pacemaker\". Thus, in addition to inflammation, the sensory receptors of the damaged tissue may be irritated and may send off signals, promoting this pain sensation."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3376713/"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l897xs
|
What is dogecoin, for a beginner to stuff like this and willing to participate.
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glbc8vw"
],
"text": [
"Doge coin is a prank. Some programmers were put off by the undefined basis of bitcoin. \"Anybody could do this\", they thought, and launched doge coin to prove their point. Now it seems that people have taken the prank seriously."
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l89kkx
|
How did stocks come to be? In the history of economics, when / why / how did corporations become "shares"? Is it an inevitable feature of economics? Or was it designed along the way & is optional? (Questions about stocks get asked a lot, but I think this one has a unique and interesting twist)
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glbdcna",
"glbcqpp",
"glbietq"
],
"text": [
"They started during the age of exploration and colonialism. It's expensive and risky to run a ship to India and back for spices, but it's potentially very lucrative. Your entire life-savings invested in a voyage could literally sink if a storm or pirates strike. So instead of doing this, you pool your money with 9 other people to form a corporation, of which you have a 1/10th share. Your corporation finances 10 voyages, and the profits are shared amongst all of you. This distributes the risk of any one loss across of all you. This type of model was inevitable as ventures became more and more expensive, and required more capital than one individual could afford to lose. The invention of this system occurred during the rapid industrialization of Europe, and this is no coincidence. This model is pretty much a requirement for any kind of expensive, high capital industry to form.",
"Shares of ownership is just a natural progression of ownership of anything. I can own a thing (a house, a car, land, or a business), but of course it's perfectly acceptable for more than one person to own a thing. It can be co-owned by 2, 3, 100, 1000 other people. We can all agree to pitch in and buy a new lawn mower. Since we all bought it jointly, we all partly own it, and we will share in the benefits of that collective ownership. If I own something then I can reap the benefits of that thing. If someone else would like to share in the benefits, then they will need to purchase \"shares\" of ownership, and we will both jointly own the thing. This is what shares of a business are. You are buying into co-ownership of the company along with a bunch of other people who are constantly buying and selling their slice of ownership, hoping to make money along the way. The original singular owner of the business can make a lot of money by selling those shares of joint-ownership. The more people, the more money. The only downside is that now he has to jointly share the decision-making capability of his company with all these other people, which can be kind of a bummer, but the extra money usually makes up for it.",
"Its pretty easy. Say your buddy wants to open a store, but he needs money to do so. He asks you and another buddy for money to get started, in return he offers to say split the profits of the store and decision making process with you two (splitting ownership of the store equally between the three of you). You agree, and it happens. At this point, each of you own a \"share\" of this store business, you are entitled each to a third of the profits and a third of the decision making process. There are 3 total shares in this company at this point. Say you no friend that you invested in no longer want to be part of this business, but your friend Bob has shown interest in it. He makes an offer to Bob to buy his share of the company in the business, he accept that offer, congrats, the share in the company has been sold. Business is booming and you want to open up another store. The three of you get together and decide you are willing to give up another equally controlled portion of the company to sell to someone else to raise the funds needed to open another store. You find Charlie, who is willing to buy this share, there you go, you have just made an additional offering of this share. At this point, each of you own a 25% share in the company. Charlie no longer wants his share in the company but business is booming. Charlie unfortunately has no friends so to find someone willing to buy his slice of your company, he goes to a place where he knows he can find someone to buy his slice of the company, he heard a bar in New York has a lot of people looking for things to invest in, and people with opportunities to invest. He goes there, chats up Alice, they strike a deal, and sells his share to Alice. You can kind of see how it progresses from here. At some point a lot more people start crowding this bar, someone decides to buy a place that is dedicated for exchanging shares in companies (known as an exchange). For the next century they yell over each other to buy shares in an auction style type of thing, or just privately talk to others and strike up deals in the exchange. Rich people give their money to brokers so that they can invest money for them, do all the shouting on the exchange floor. People figure out at some point that computers kinda make this whole buying and selling thing easier rather than yelling over each other, so they create computer programs that can send and receive orders to a main computer that pairs up orders that work with each other. Etc."
],
"score": [
8,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8a2t8
|
If the hottest part of a flame is blue in color, why does it seem that candle wicks, kindling, etc. ignite quicker when hit with the orange part of a flame?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glbfipp",
"glbhl9b"
],
"text": [
"Your candle still needs oxygen to burn too. So if you put it at the very center of your starter flame, where it's hot, but also lacking oxygen (because it's all being used by the starter flame), you might not ignite your candle.",
"The outer part is called the oxidizing part of the flame. That's where the oxygen is and where stuff can react with oxygen . ( This process , matter reacting with oxygen, giving heat and light is what we usually call a flame/fire."
],
"score": [
9,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8arsk
|
Why do movies (mostly action) have action scenes that are incredibly loud, then dialogue sequences that are much more quiet?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glbkz5m",
"glbkase"
],
"text": [
"They do the audio so it sounds good on movie theater speakers, which is usually a 5.1 speaker setup. In the standard 5.1 audio mix, action comes out of 4 speakers, dialogue comes out of 1, and you also have a subwoofer that's only producing bass. They don't remix it for home audio, so you're getting that same 5.1 mixed audio when you watch it on netflix/dvd/whatever. The problem with that is most people don't have a 5.1 surround sound setup at home. So your tv/computer/speakers try to compress the 6 channels of audio data that they're being fed into whatever number of speakers you have. If you have 2 speakers, then you end up with a situation in which 3 speakers worth of audio is coming out of each of your speakers. Since the ratio of that audio is 2 speakers of action/.5 speakers of dialogue/.5 speakers of bass, action+bass is substantially louder than dialogue. As to why they don't remix the audio for a home release - its expensive to do so and the home release doesn't usually make much money. edit: and just to be a bit more clear: in a 5.1 setup the speakers don't all produce the same amount of sound. The front speaker produces the most, followed by the two front side speakers, with the two rear side speakers producing a small fraction of the total sound. But when you run 5.1 mixed audio into a stereo setup those ratios get completely screwed up and most systems just weigh each 5.1 speaker channel equally (even though that's not how the 5.1 setup is weighing them).",
"It's a good thing, assuming you have the right environment and setup. It's called a high dynamic range, which means a large difference between the loud and the quiet. If you've ever played a video game, you can modify the sound on the fly and can really hear the difference in the audio mix. A low dynamic range (night mode or whatever) makes everything loud and near the same volume. You can hear it all, it just sounds terrible and flat. The quiet noises (foot steps) are loud, and loud noises (gunshots) don't stand out.The high range setting ( usually headphones or something) sounds a hell of a lot better. With a movie it's the same, but you can't swap it on the fly, so they have to pick one. You want high dynamic range. Loud should be loud, and quiet should be quiet. The music industry actually tends to make shittier sounding music nowadays. The loudness wars. They completely washed out the sound and dynamic range, all to make things louder on the radio or whatnot. Same idea as commercials being loud, to grab attention. A music track from the 70's tend to sound better than pop music form the 2000's as they had more range to work with, as the goal wasn't to be the loudest song going. However, you don't want high dynamic range of you have a shitty sound set-up and or are in a noisy environment. Someone sounding like they are actually whispering is not a good thing if you're watching a movie off crappy TV speakers with people talking in the background. If you have a good sound set-up, are using headphones, or are in a theatre, it's awesome though. Movies should really have both mixes nowadays, and swapping on Netflix or something should probably become a thing. You may have also seen high dynamic range, or HDR, used in reference to TVs too. It means the same thing really, large difference in brightness between a black and full out bright white. It also sometimes means more resolution in the steps between dark and bright."
],
"score": [
68,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8b4le
|
Why isn't mycology discussed as much as botany or zoology?
|
I am uncertain if this only applies to my country, but I, alongside several other students, have not undergone a mycology class. Since elementary, all I know of are plants, animals, some earth science, and some astronomy, but never fungi. At most, it would only be mentioned during taxonomy classes or when discussing mycorrhizal networks. The only real study one can get is by actually getting into a mycology course. For fungi to have contributed so much only to be treated as a "fun fact" kind of a subject, feels too much of a shame.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glblqyf",
"gmoe8ek"
],
"text": [
"Plants and animals are generally seen as more important than fungi. And they're more photogenic.",
"Yes, so glad to have found this! A lot of great things mentioned by other commenters, but I'd add that mycophobia is a big part. Culturally, we just don't \"get\" fungi. Typically people think they either ruin our crops, grow on our feet, spoil our bread, poison our kids and dogs, etc etc. Or at least that's the western idea of fungi. It is changing slowly though! The next big thing is how easy it is to study them. Mycelium, or the \"roots\" of macro fungi (the ones we can see and touch, microfungi would be like yeast), is typically either bound up in soil or decomposing matter. Their fruiting bodies, or mushrooms, are only available for study during short periods of the year, and even then, for only a few days to a few weeks for most species. It's this secretive lifestyle that eludes us and for a long time made it difficult to study them. Microscopy and genetic analysis has helped us identify fungi without needing a mushroom, and they have indeed pushed the field forward. But think of it this way: fungi only became classified as a kingdom separate from plants **50 years ago**. We still mostly throw mycology into plant pathology in universities and don't worry about it too much. But there is so much to learn! We haven't even scratched the surface of the basics!"
],
"score": [
9,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8ba01
|
Why can a fetus grow a hand with finger nails but if you cut your finger off it won’t grow a new one?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glbn2su",
"glbnqme",
"glbnl7b"
],
"text": [
"The presence (and lack) of specific hormones determine what parts of a cell's DNA strand activate (or remain dormant). This basically determines how a cell is going to behave: in how it multiplies and divides, what kind of cell it becomes, etc. However, once it goes through this process and becomes a specialized cell, it loses the ability to become another kind of cell. It has become specialized and fix. So when you lose a body part, you no longer have cells in that part of the body that have the capability to become the cells you lost.",
"When a fetus is developing it has the use of stem cells that take instructions to create new cells and new tissues. When you're injured, your body uses your immune system to heal the wounds. The immune system won't grow new parts of your body or you would end up with new hands sticking out of a small cut on your arm. Basically the tissues are already programed to do a certain thing and that thing is all they will do. So skin makes skin. Skin is programmed to cover flesh. Bones will recalcify if broken. Muscles grow larger when the fibers tear apart slightly. But nothing in you is really programmed to check to see if you still have the tip of your finger and grow a new one if you lose it.",
"One Theory: We have the gene that would allow cellular regeneration, but it doesn't work. It's \"turned off\" in a sense. At some point, the ability to adapt to the lost limb became more prevalent in our ancestors (way before modern humans). Re-growing a limb takes a lot of time and energy in vertebrate species. Since someone with a missing limb could still technically reproduce, there isn't really an environmental pressure that might cause the ability to regenerate arms or legs naturally. That said, research is being done in this field. At the same time, great advances are being made with prosthetics, and that's much easier."
],
"score": [
16,
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8bq2g
|
how can I explain to my grandma that my epilepsy has no cure?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glbpud0",
"glbqa5v",
"glbydt1",
"glcd8o9",
"glcwop1"
],
"text": [
"Tell her it's just like with eye color: it's something you were born with, you can wear contacts to temporarily alter it, but there's no way to permanently change it with our current therapies and technology.",
"It doesn’t sound like this is so much a comprehension problem, as a paradigm difference. In your grandma’s world, there are forces above that are willing and able to cure you. You can’t explain her out of that position because she likely wasn’t explained into it. Rather it became ingrained over many years. Instead I would focus on explaining that you don’t have the same faith as her, and therefore you are putting your trust in medication, which you understand will never cure you, but it’s the best you’ve got. She won’t like that answer, but over time she may come to accept it.",
"Mmn... It's going to be a bit hard probably. Like your grandma would probably not feel the same about someone loosing a leg. Those don't just grow back. Having something like a prosthetic leg helps, but it doesn't exactly fix the root cause of not having a leg. But things without visibly obvious physical causes tend to get lumped under the category of I can't see it, therefore the causes are mysterious, and therefore the cures are mysterious. Essentially you kindof need to convince her that the epilepsy has a real physiological cause, and that while medicines, like the artificial leg can help, they can't fix the root causes. But really the core of it is that you grandma has faith that a higher power of some sort can and will fix the problem. From your standpoint it's probably not productive to go about saying that the problem can't be fixed, but rather they won't/shouldnt be addressed by that power. As a short intro to how I would personally address this accounting for grandma's perspective: Why is it that those above should address the problems of man. Humans all have challenges in life, sickness and disease, injury, and age, sadness and pain. But they also live, experience joy and triumph. It's because people are never born perfect that allows us to grow and overcome the challenges of life. Those above would not, and should not casually interfere with the human condition, lest that cheapen the value of life. In many cases where something exceeds humanity's capacity to adapt that higher power would of course see fit to intervene, but in cases where humanity is capable humanity should be the ones to rise to the challenge and overcome adversity. Epilepsy is merely one of many of those challenges, and for now remains treatable but incurable. But we should capable of finding a cure ourselves and that higher power leaving this problem in our hands is a matter of trust in humanity's resolve. Abandoning that resolve does a disservice to that trust places in us as a species. Etc. TLDR. Convince your grandma that epilepsy is a challenge from that higher power to be overcome.",
"Explain it like its an allergy but instead of to food like peanuts or berries it is to certain stimulation to the brain. There is no cure, but there are ways to prevent",
"You can't explain it to her. She's trying to love you the best way she knows how. Make sure she knows how to care for you if you seizure, but also know that she simply doesn't have the capacity to understand. Some of my kind but religious relatives are like this."
],
"score": [
24,
21,
10,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8cw4n
|
How, and why exactly, is the universe constantly expanding?
|
Space and astrology amazes me. Naturally, I like reading about the topic but I don’t understand why or how the universe is constantly expanding. I tried reading something on it but my brain can’t comprehend it. ELI5?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glbz4u1",
"glbxhdc",
"gld3j18",
"glbz3bj"
],
"text": [
"Great question! If you can find a definitive answer to that, you start practicing your Nobel Prize acceptance speech. We have no idea why the universe is expanding, or by what process. All we know is the observation that every galaxy is moving away from ours, and farther away ones are moving away faster. If that was due to pure kinetic energy, we would expect gravity to be slowing things down, eventually causing everything to crunch back together. Instead we see the opposite. This is taken as evidence that space itself is expanding. We don't know why space is expanding and we only have mostly-hypothetical models on how. \"Dark energy\", for example, is the name we've given to *whatever* is contributing the energy behind this expansion. Dark energy could be a fundamental property of physical space, it could be a new energy field (a la electromagnetic fields), or one of many other lesser theories, or it could be totally fake, and modifications to existing physics could explain everything without the need to invoke dark energy at all.",
"Well, we don't know. It was a Nobel Prize-winning feat just to determine that it is, in fact, expanding and that expansion is accelerating. But we don't know how or why.",
"I am by no means an expert, so I will try to explain what I think I understand. No one knows for certain. It could very well be a momentarily effect of inertia, still (a tricky word when space-time are no longer constants) in effect from the Big Bang. When you take out the concept of space and time as immutable entity, everything becomes possible changing the system of reference; The Big Bang could still be happening in a time reference different from the one from our own galaxy (with this I mean that we could be at that very beginning, at that first second, in that incredibly dense black hole, but being pushed out at a speed far superior than light, we experience a very different time reference from the one experienced by ‘everything (even us) ‘still’ in there’) The universe could have already stopped expanding and maybe even started shrinking, or even stranger scenarios could be occurring while we are just experiencing what already happened at a velocity faster than light. Not having the ‘whole picture’ clear, we can only formulate hypothesis from our own point of view. One hypothesis formulated regarding the expansion is the existence of dark matter, that instead of creating gravitational field that attracts, creates one that pushes everything away. Getting away from the center of gravity, this dark energy meets less and less resistance, increasing acceleration. The universe is still a big mystery for everything that concerns this phenomena.",
"General relativity has a term called a cosmological constant. It's just a number in the equations Einstein came up to explain spacetime and gravity. At one point Einstein thought he was actually wrong about this term, but then comes observations of the universe expanding and accelerating in this expansion. So what is the cosmological constant? It is the energy density of spacetime itself. Matter has energy, light has energy. Why not space and time themsleves? Well, that's in the equations. Seems crazy, but in the equations it leads to expansion, which leads to more space, which leads to more of it. So acceleration. Basically what we're observing. But what is it? Now quantum physics also has a concept of a ground state. A vacuum energy. A certain amount of energy left over when it's as low as it can get. Well damn, did two different areas of science come to the same conclusion? Seems pretty cut and dry. Well no, turns out, it's the worst prediction ever made. The difference between the vacuum energy (ie empty space) from quantum mechanics and the cosmological constant is hilariously far off. Trillions of times wrong isn't even beginning to describe how wrong it is. So long story short, we have no clue why. General relativity and quantum mechanics are very accurate, but they clearly aren't correct nor the whole picture. But we did name the complete unknown, dark energy. Dark, as in we can't see or detect it. It's mysterious energy, and there is no answer. If you find one, collect your Nobel prize."
],
"score": [
12,
5,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8d63m
|
What is the difference in hardware between a cpu, gpu, and dpu?
|
I understand the benefits of using these 3 different types of processing units. I am in need of an explanation of what makes them operate differently and why you need a gpu or a dpu instead of just having a software update to allow a cpu to do similar work to a gpu and a cpu. What is the difference in hardware and software that make them work differently?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glc1i2g"
],
"text": [
"As an analogy, think of a CPU as a fast car, and a GPU as a big truck. If you want to get from point A to point B as fast as possible, the car is way faster. But if you want to get a lot of cargo from point A to point B, the car will have to make a lot of trips, while the truck can carry it all in one trip. The circuitry of CPUs and GPUs are quite similar in some ways. Both of them are very general-purpose, they execute whatever software instructions they're given. What differs is what sort of instructions they know how to follow, and how they execute them. A CPU's instructions are all centered around doing one thing at a time. The circuitry is designed to execute each instruction as quickly as possible and get the next one ready behind it with as little wasted time as possible. CPUs have a lot of circuits that peek ahead at upcoming instructions in an effort to save time. A GPU's instructions are all around executing the same set of instructions on lots of data at once. You give it an instruction, and it executes that same instruction in parallel on hundreds of separate cores that each have their own slice of the data. That's why GPUs are really great at graphics. Your monitor has millions of pixels. If the CPU wants to turn them all black, it has to do the pixels one at a time. The GPU can do hundreds or thousands at a time."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8dp0h
|
Why is “Sigma” such a pervasive word in business? Six Sigma, Two Sigma, lean sigma...
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glc4m7h",
"glc65vj",
"gldc3rs"
],
"text": [
"Let's use a manufacturing business as an example... Everything you make has a target specification range. This could be width, weight, etc. For example the product should be between 2mm and 4mm thick. In a perfect process, your mean would be exactly in the middle and never shift. That never happens though. Variation is inevitable. More variation means more products you have to scrap. How much variation you have can be measured and plotted on a curve. We can then see how many standard deviations exist between our mean and our spec limits. Sigma is the mathematical notation for standard deviation. Six sigma is having 6 std deviations between the mean and spec limits. If we can achieve 6 sigma, then we'll only have 3.4 defects per million opportunities.",
"I think it's because in statistics the Greek letter sigma σ is used to denote the standard deviation. This measures how your tasks or products vary around what you want to actually produce or do. Sometimes you take longer or you need less of something to make something else. So when sigma is used in business are saying that they are looking to improve how much it takes to carry out tasks or produce something, meaning that they waste less of what customers aren't paying for in the first place.",
"There are a lot of explanation here already about the math side of sigma. But to Op's question as to why it is so pervasive in the business world, is, IMO, that the end users in business now equate, six sigma, lean six sigma, etc. to mean process improvement. All the math as explained here is all the behind the scene work, or the actual sausage making, for process improvement professionals. End users in the business world don't really care how you make the sausage, they just know that the company hired some lean six sigma black belt person, and now I'm able to get a better sausage faster when I need it. As u/OM3GAM4N stated, sigma is now also used as a marketing scheme. Business world now equate sigma to quality and efficiencies. To be able to say you apply sigma or have lean six sigma people working for you implies you have a quality product or service."
],
"score": [
45,
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8eilq
|
How is people buying and holding dogecoin going to inflate its price? Isn't there currently no cap on the dogecoin to curb any sort of inflation? Even if there were a cap there are currently 100 billion coins in circulation, isn't it too high to reach even 1 dollar per coin?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glc6wbm"
],
"text": [
"The rate at which new currency is issued is limited: as long as demand for it grows faster than the growth of the currency supply, the price will increase."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8eq2y
|
If 2 rays are required to form an image, and surfaces like paper reflect light, why isn't an image formed?
|
The explanation I was given is that the reflection is irregular, but out of all the rays reflected by rough surfaces, surely two of them could converge and form an image? Thank you.
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcanhd"
],
"text": [
"Two rays need to converge (that came from the same origin) *for an image to be in focus*. Randomly combining rays, which happens all the time, doesn’t make an image. It makes a random field of random color...which is what we call white. Which is what matt reflective surface looks like. The reflection from something like paper scatters rays in all directions. Two ways from the same point never consistently meet up again. If you have consistent reflection the rays *do* meet up and you *do* have an image...and that’s what we call a mirror."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8ezam
|
How does increased sweating affect urine production?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcaf7v"
],
"text": [
"They're generally opposites of each other. You only produce urine to remove salt or water from your body, but since both are lost from sweating you would pee less when you sweat. This is common among athletes who drink a lot of water while exercising but don't usually have to pee because they sweat out the water. Also yes I know gatorade exists but not everybody drinks it when they exercise."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8fatp
|
what would happen if we all closed our credit cards from any one bank?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcbmsw"
],
"text": [
"Keep in mind that many credit card users rarely pay interest. But even considering that, the loss of revenue from their cut of merchant fees alone would be annoying for the bank."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8ffks
|
Why are different viruses different shapes?
|
Covid is like a ball with spikes. When I was in high school they taught us viruses that looked like nanobots.?? Whats the difference?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glchyiw",
"glcibj1"
],
"text": [
"There are a variety of different structures that viruses can have. While COVID is a ball with spike like structure, the viruses you are referring to with ‘feet’ like things are bacteriophages or viruses that infect bacteria specifically",
"Viruses come in many different ‘species’, just like how animals come in all shapes and sizes. For all life that exists, there is pretty much a set of corresponding viruses that infect it, from bacteria to humans. The nanobots you’re referring to are bacteriophages that infect bacteria, and work by binding to a cell and ‘injecting’ their DNA into the cell. Other viruses like COVID have a membrane, with proteins on it that bind to a cell and allow the whole virus to be taken up into the cell. There are some viruses that are completely different and are actually super simple - just a small piece of RNA floating around with some proteins encasing it. It all depends on the virus and what they have evolved to infect."
],
"score": [
5,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8fk1x
|
What is the need of silent letters if we don't pronounce them? Why are words like psychology not pronounced with p?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcedxq",
"glce9n5",
"glceq18",
"glcxiws"
],
"text": [
"Because in most cases, they _used_ to be pronounced with those letters at one time, either when we borrowed them from another language (as is the case with \"psychology\") or at an earlier stage in English, like \"knight\" (which was `cniht`, pronounced like \"k'nicht\", in Old English). English has a tendency to retain the historic spelling of words.",
"The thing with English, is that when a word comes from a language with a similar alphabet, we often keep their spelling. \"Psyche\" is a Greek word for example. Since we take words from many languages, then we follow the pronunciation rules of many languages.",
"Pronunciations and spellings drift apart over time. Generally spellings are much more slow to change which is why the pattern with shifts tends to be towards silent letters. And because modern English is a mishmash from multiple European root languages with their own spelling rules, its pronunciation ends up especially inconsistent and easily warped. There have been a few proposals to simplify English spellings over the years, but none of them have really gained traction. Most of our current spelling is the same as it was in the early 1800s when Webster’s first dictionaries were published which really set the rules for the “correct” way to write words.",
"Most of the replies here have focused on English, emphasizing the ways that English stands out in this regard, but the fact is that pretty much all languages have silent letters. This is because pronunciations change over time. It's a universal phenomenon because universally, tongues are lazy, but printers and schoolteachers have standards. For example, I'm a student of Czech, which the spellings were codified relatively recently in the 1800s, so the spellings *mostly* follow the pronunciation exactly. But interestingly, you can see some letters becoming silent: the initial *j*'s of the conjugations of the verb *byt,* 'to be', aren't pronounced by most people most of the time, so *jsem* pronounced just as \"sem.\" The annoying-to-pronounce /js/ combination is only pronounced for emphasis. The same for other combinations like /jd/ or /jm/ in *jdu,* *jmeno.* I'm not a linguist but I would wager that in a century initial J will be considered a silent letter much like the D in /dc/ combinations, for example *dcera*."
],
"score": [
42,
9,
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8fny6
|
Why do opposite poles of magnet attract and like poles of a magnet repel?
|
Why are things polar ? Why do like charges repel and opposite charges attract?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcvrh2",
"gld6v0t"
],
"text": [
"As of now, it’s fundamental. Meaning we don’t know why and accept it as the way things simply are. Of course there are people questioning whether a thing considered fundamental actually is such. Ideally, we’d like to arrive at a point where we only need to accept a single fundamental thing, from which the rest follows.",
"I'll defer to the great Richard Feynman when it comes to magnets: [ URL_0 ]( URL_1 )"
],
"score": [
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn\\_8",
"https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8fwpm
|
Why are the colours blue and purple relatively rare in nature?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcn3zl",
"glcv4l9"
],
"text": [
"When you look at things, their coloration comes from the light they reflect while absorbing the rest. A blue object absorbs all colors while reflecting only blue light. Blue light is the part of the visible spectrum with the most energy. Since plants want to absorb as much energy as possible, they didn't evolve to reflect blue light. Pretty much the only time plants use blue pigments is when they want to attract attention. Blue flowers, blue fruits etc. Many animals get their pigments from the food they eat. Herbivores eat the plants, predators eat the herbivores. Flamingos are pink due to the red shrimp they eat. The shrimp are red due to the plants they eat. So on the one hand, blue doesn't make for good camouflage because plants don't want to be blue. And on the other hand, animals can't consume plants for their blue pigments either. Most animals that do appear blue aren't blue because of pigments (which the usual way organisms display color). Instead, they evolve textured surfaces that bend light and reflect it in a different wavelength to appear blue. As you can imagine, that's a really unusual adaptation so there's not that many animals that have it.",
"Blue and violet wavelengths are the shortest on the visible light spectrum, meaning they get refracted much more easily when reaching the atmosphere. That's why the sky is blue. Because the blue wavelengths from the white light of the sun get scattered in the atmosphere. This means that the light that does reach the earth is mostly \"not blue\". As various organisms evolved, their pigmentation worked with whatever light was most prevalent around them. Which again, is mostly \"not blue\". Because most of the blue was scattered in the sky."
],
"score": [
70,
10
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8fxoc
|
What's the instinctual purpose for people to find things irritating?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glck94v",
"glcnegf"
],
"text": [
"I’m interested to see smart people answer this. My guess would be that irritations can tax your resources. Disrupting you from being able to pay attention to what’s important. That you only have so much bandwidth and it’s sucking away what you need to focus, kind of like how you feel like you need to turn the radio down to find a parking spot.",
"Let's say you're a caveman. You make a spear. You go to the lake. You aim at a fish. Ogg throws a rock at the fish causing them to scatter. You can't catch fish because of Ogg. You get hungry. Ogg keeps scaring the fish. Eventually you know either Ogg stops throwing rocks or you starve. Ogg throws the rock. Again. Hungry and angry, you throw the spear at Ogg. Ogg dies. Now you have fish to eat."
],
"score": [
16,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8fxt0
|
why you feel so tired after having had water in your eyes (eg from swimming)
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glciaom"
],
"text": [
"Dude, aren't you just tired from swimming? Swimming is a whole body exercise. You also move muscles you usually don't, and ylu have fun, so it's easy to forget your actually tired. Are there any other cases you feel tired after you had water in your eyes? Is this a troll?"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8g1br
|
DPI vs Mouse Sensitivity
|
So I've been trying to figure out the difference between "DPI" and "mouse sensitivity", and I'm not even gonna go in to what I've found because it all seems to conflict. I want to know why DPI isn't the same as mouse sensitivity but we use it as such (supposedly 400-800 is good for gaming yet I've been using 2400 and my mouse goes up to 16000). Does the distance a cursor travels at one DPI vary across different screen resolutions? Why would a mouse be able to go up to 16000 in the first place if you wouldn't use it? Is DPI the number of pixels per inch on a screen or how many pixels your cursor moves when you move your mouse an inch? I'm so confused. & #x200B; Sorry if my thought trail seems sporadic, I just kept thinking of new questions as I wrote.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcgnx3"
],
"text": [
"DPI and mouse sensitivity are effectively the same thing, however one is a hardware setting and the other is a software setting. DPI is hardware - meaning the mouse's setting. Some mice do not come with customizable DPIs while others do - mouse sensitivity, which is the software-based adjustment of the mouse speed, is used to give you some control when you have a mouse like this. A mouse that actually has customizable DPI settings, such as those that go up to 16,000 DPI allow you to fine tune the mouse to exactly how you want, typically much more effectively than mouse sensitivity because of the # of settings (1-16,000). Why DPI goes up to 16,000 I don't know exactly, it seems a bit redundant to me with the current monitor resolutions. DPI means dots per inch aka pixels per inch. So if your DPI is set to 2,400 then that means in a single inch movement on your mouse pad your cursor will travel 2,400 pixels in that direction. So yes, resolution does make a difference for this. If you play on a 4k monitor for example, a higher DPI will feel more comfortable as playing at as low as 400 dpi on a 4k monitor the cursor will be **very** sluggish."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8g3k4
|
Why can’t we use steam generators for desalination?
|
Heat up seawater, use the steam to spin the generator, take the steam and condense it. Filter the remainder for usable salt.
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glci2ed",
"glcm0ru",
"glctdko",
"glcge6a",
"glchwww",
"glct1lj"
],
"text": [
"Because how do you heat up the water? Burn a bunch of coal and stuff? We know a better way to do it, which is to push the water through a special filter that salt molecules can't go through. Still takes loads of energy.",
"You can't run a boiler on seawater. Corrosion would kill it in no time. The water has to be pretreated and almost completely pure before you can use it to generate stream for a turbine.",
"All of the previous ones, plus this one: for a steam engine's efficiency, you want to keep the \"used steam\" - the very hot water that you get from the steam once it condenses, then reheat that. It saves a lot of energy. If you were pre-heating seawater from room temperature and then dumping hot, fresh water on the other side, the energy cost would be hideous. Plus, of course, all the other stuff about corrosion and wear.",
"At what cost assuming it can be done. Desalination is not rocket science, it is a process that is constrained by its cost energy wise and financial wise.",
"You might get a bit of power back from that, but you'd still be spending a lot more from heating up the water than you'd be getting back from the turbine, because of how much would be lost to the environment. Plus, by not capturing that energy in the turbine, you can have it go into the incoming water which'll reduce how much more energy you need to put in. This is because the way desalination plants are set up, the cold incoming water travels past the heating chambers before it gets to them - it goes in then loops around and the heating is done on the way back out - so if you're going to be putting excess energy to work it makes more sense to put it straight back into the water than to convert it to electricity and send it back to the water via the more circuitous, more lossy route of having it power the heater.",
"The short answer is that the salt and other stuff in the water would destroy the steam boiler and probably the delicate turbine."
],
"score": [
25,
20,
13,
8,
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8g4dt
|
Why are things elastic and why are some materials more so than others?
|
Also: What determines how much stress can be put on certain materials before it starts deforming plastically? Why do different material deform differently elastically from a constant amount of stress? Im guessing it has something to do with the the structure of the material, but any help around the topic would be much appreciated :)
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glco491"
],
"text": [
"This all pertains ro the realm of materials science. I can see you are familiar with elastic deformation and plastic deformation so I won't use vocabulary for a 5 yo. Depending on what kind of material you consider, the answer will differ a bit. Typically you can distinguish Metals , Polymers and Ceramics. Metals have a cristalline structure: metal atoms are organised in a specific way depending on the metal/alloy and its manufacturing process. This structure can be slightly deformed without altering it in any way: this is elasticity. The more you can deform the structure without altering anything, the higher the maximal elastic deformation. Also metals atoms pull/push on each other, the more cohesive the structure is, the harder you have to stress it to deform it. Now if you stress it too much, the structure may be irreversibly changed: this is plastic deformation. For metals it basically involves defects within the structure that “move around” as the metal is deformed. For Ceramics there is typically no plastic deformation: the structure of a ceramic is such that when you overcome the maximum elastic deformation, a defect propagates throughout the whole structure very quickly, inducing a fracture of the ceramic. For polymers, the structure is basically an entanglement of long strands. If you pull just a bit, the entanglement is not changed: there is no relative movement of a strand relative to any other and as such, when the stress subsides the polymer reverts to its original shape. If you stress it hatder, the strands starts moving relative to one another and their entanglement becomes looser or tighter but is not the same anymore."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8gizz
|
Why are screen sizes (TVs, Monitors, Displays) given as a diagonal instead of total surface area?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glci6ok"
],
"text": [
"Because they use a ratio of width to height which is 16:9 now which is more or less standard wide screen. Back in the day TV's used to be 4:3 which is why they were more square, and those shows on modern TV's have black bars on the sides. Because the ratio of width to length is constant is makes sense to just measure the diagonal to get a more useful number."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8gtd4
|
What exactly happens in your body when you all of a sudden get a beeping sound in your ear (when nothing is actually beeping around you)?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gld7brc",
"glda3f7"
],
"text": [
"I actually don't think we know for sure - if this happens all of the time it's called tinnitus and lots of people suffer from it. One possibility is that it's something about your nerves, that send signals from your ear to your brain. Another is that it's in your ear itself - there are actually tiny cells that act like little motors to amplify sounds you hear. When a sound moves your inner ear (specifically, the basilar membrane in your cochlea) these cells push back and forth to magnify that movement. Sometimes these cells can get triggered and keep going when there's no sound coming in - just like the feedback loop you might hear from a microphone and PA system that keeps trying to make a sound louder after it's already gone.",
"Every once in a while ill get the ring in one ear. Like a long high tone that appears out of nowhere."
],
"score": [
30,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8hov6
|
Why is Shakespeare considered to be one of the best writers in history?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcq1lz",
"glcpfmm",
"glcp9ju",
"glct1vm",
"gld0oy4",
"gld515c",
"glct4fx",
"gld5xg7"
],
"text": [
"He was a playwright first and foremost, writing for a troupe of travelling players. His brief was to write plays that would entertain both the gentry and the uneducated masses, and which could be staged quickly with little in the way of effects or props. With this limited palette, it is completely remarkable how he was able to incorporate not only a rollicking plot that people could relate to but also the deep insights into the human character and nuance of language that transport the plays into high literature. They can be difficult to read but as I say, seen in the flesh with interpretation from skilled actors, they are much more understandable and make you realise that the same issues we deal with today on a human level were very much the same as those of our counterparts from five centuries past.",
"Thing about plays is that they're not a universal genre. If you're not the kind of person who's prone to liking plays then no matter how hard you try, the best play you ever watch will only be OK. Shakespeare was a good playwright - better than most playwrights, for sure. He produced a huge number of works with a wide variety of content, and quite importantly he wrote about characters, rather than stories - his works are driven by the motivations and psychologies of his characters, which makes them stand the test of time: You can update all the things around the characters and as long as the characters are the same, the story is the same. You can even change the language and get the same story. Unlike many writers, Shakespeare's works are as easy to understand today as they were hundreds of years ago (besides the silly language, at least) which makes them pretty good materials for English classes to study in school, as much as the students might hate them at the time. Shakespeare did a lot of things, knowingly or not, that would make him be remembered even had he been a bit shit. A lot of memorable speeches and soliloquies and a lot of coined phrases that have made their way into regular English usage, as well as an almost pantomime-like encouraging of the audience to react to the performance. Of course, he was not without help in this legacy. Shakespeare's works, largely by chance, made it into English educational curriculums, and from there he was bound to be immortalised within the pain of millions of bored students for centuries to come, and you don't necessarily need to be good to be considered good if the reason everyone knows who you are is because they weren't given a choice. Hype begets hype - call something good often enough and people will begin to think it's good even if it isn't - and Shakespeare is the most hyped human to have ever lived.",
"I feel like a lot of movies and shows are based on plots from his plays. He also invented a shit ton of words we still use today below is a list of some of them URL_0",
"Two main reasons: 1) his artistic genius: his rich language, his complex thought, his surprising metaphors, the psychological depth of his characters that was centuries ahead of its time, his intricate and satisfying plots. 2) his variety: how he was able to please in so many different ways with both great comedies and also great tragedies, with royal characters and with peasant characters, with noble speeches and with gutter puns, with very strict poetry and with very loose meter, with medieval stories and with tales from Greece and Rome, with horror and with romance, with very classical works and with works that strain the bounds of genre, with politics and with fairy tales. Classicists love him. The Romantics loved him. Modernists love him. He has something for almost everyone.",
"I’m copying this from Will Durant’s excellent essay on his picks for the 10 greatest poets in human history: What we like in him most is the madness and richness of his speech. His style is as his life was, full of energy, riot, color, and excess; “nothing succeeds like excess.” It is all hurried and breathless, this style; Shakespeare wrote in haste, and never found leisure to repent. He never erased a line or read a proof; the notion that his plays would some day be read rather than performed did not enter his head. Thoughtless of the future, he wrote with unrestrained passion. Words, images, phrases and ideas rush from him in an inexhaustible and astounding flood; one wonders from what turbulent springs they pour. He has “a mint of phrases in his brain,” and his fine frenzy is of imagination all compact. No man had ever mastered language, or used it with such lordly abandon. Anglo-Saxon words, French words, Latin words, alehouse words, medical words, legal words; tripping monosyllabic lines and sonorous sesquipedalian speech; pretty ladylike euphuisms and rough idiomatic obscenities: only an Elizabethan could have dared to write such English. We have better manners now, and less power. Yes, the plots are impossible, as Tolstoi said; the puns are puerile, the errors of scholarship are un-Baconianly legion, and the philosophy is one of surrender and despair—it does not matter. What matters is that on every page is a godlike energy of soul, and for that we will forgive a man anything. Life is beyond criticism, and Shakespeare is more alive than life.",
"Soooo many words and phrases we use all the time were invented by him. It's as if it's a show we are all constantly referencing.",
"The language has changed a lot since then but this was mostly how they talked. We miss out on a lot of the subtleties like the absolutely filthy euphemisms he uses. He wrote to be popular at the time but also had some brilliant skills.",
"Besides his incredible and unarguable artistic skill, which can level mountains, it's primarily a question of English nationalism. Shakespeare lived just before a very specific time in history when the English state was solidifying into its modern form and looking to create a mythos for itself. Unsurprisingly this coincided primarily with the age of colonialism. Shakespeare was respected in his life, but only really took on divine status in the 19th centuries when we exported him to places like India as a symbol of True Britishness. Beyond that there's also the dirty practicality that we have a lot of his works, whereas many of his contemporaries have been lost to time."
],
"score": [
107,
26,
11,
10,
10,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/words-shakespeare-invented/"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8hy7s
|
How does the skateboard continue to stick to the skateboarders feet while doing flips in air?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcprjp",
"glcri27"
],
"text": [
"It doesn’t “stick to the feet” exactly. The jump (ollie) is done by pushing the back of the skateboard down with your rear foot while dragging your front foot up on the sandpaper like surface that skateboards have. This gets the board off the ground and the flip is done by pushing your front foot either forward with your heel (heelflip) or backwards with your front foot (kick flip)...the surface of the board is textured so that it’s easy to catch with your feet after the flip.",
"They aren't actually connected, they're just following roughly the same trajectory at roughly the same time. It's kind of like holding a golf ball and a tennis ball in the same hand and tossing them at the same time. The first third or so of the arc, they do about the same thing at about the same time. The grip tape on the board allows the rider to influence the direction and speed of the skateboard, keeping their arcs similar longer."
],
"score": [
9,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8i576
|
what is Heterogeneous computing ?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gld0si8",
"gldeihu"
],
"text": [
"Imagine you and your friend wants to solve some complex problem, like a really difficult quadratic equation with many many terms. With regular computing, your friend is your classmate, skilled at about the same things you are; be it rearranging equations, or doing arithmetic. But the key factor is, that the two of you are both good only at one of the tasks, and mediocre at the other. So you two might have a really good start rearranging the equation to solve for x. But what happens now, is that on one side you have x, and the other side is some complex expression, with large divisions and square roots. This is when things start to slow down. Because none of you are very good at doing arithmetic, progress gets much slower. Now let's consider if instead of rearranging, the two of you were only good at arithmetic. You would struggle for hours trying to solve for x, so that's no good either. Now, with Heterogenous computing, you can instead bring along a friend from a different school, so they might have been learning some hardcore arithmetic while your class was busy with learning to solve equations. So in this scenario, your friend just watches as you rearrange the equation to solve for x, since they are not an algebra person. But when you're once again at the point of x at one side, and lots of arithmetic at the other, your friend can step in and crunch the numbers for you very efficiently! **In real world terms:** Conventional computing uses microprocessors of the same architecture, so they can only be really good at the same thing, but in heterogenous computing, you can employ\" application-specific instruction set processors\" for example. This might be any chip that's particularly good at one, but only one task: be it mining crypto or rendering images of fluffy bunnies. Or you could use a power-efficient mobile ARM processor while idling, only turning on the power-hungry x86 when some heavy computation is needed.",
"I like the other metaphor, but I would change it a little. For a manageable task, like cleaning your bedroom, the task can be completed by a single person, and sped up by getting some help of a few friends. Everyone is in the same area, and can communicate with each other directly to complete this fairly small task quickly. This is similar to what the main processor in a computer does, where each processing core can perform a whole task, or split it up between other processing cores if the software is made that way. This is regular computing. If the problem is much larger, like cleaning up a city after a flood, you may need specialized equipment run by teams. Each team may have many people doing the same thing, like clearing out mud from drainage and homes, removing debris from yards, and hauling away garbage. There is a smalls group at the top managing the process, both tracking results and assigning tasks to the teams working on the larger cleaning tasks. Nothing stops the managing team from pitching in if they choose to. The individuals workers who are cleaning up probably do not have the expertise to manage a large scale clean up. A computer working on a computationally large task may choose to use other resources to speed up the calculations. Computers and mobile devices have a main processor which runs general software well. Now, many also have specialized chips or functionality which is optimized for running certain calculations. If the computer or mobile device is running software which can take advantage of those other resources, the main CPU can let those faster or more efficient resources perform the calculations instead. Most computers and consumer mobile devices have graphical processor units, mostly used for games, but which can also perform general computation. Mobile devices also have specialized circuits called digital signal processors, some of which also perform specific computations that are useful for tasks. The combination of running computer tasks between different processors, like the main CPU and a specialized processor, is heterogeneous computing."
],
"score": [
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8icjs
|
How do we identify location of objects without looking ?
|
While I was brushing my teeth in the shower this morning, a thought suddenly came to me that how am I able to identify the precise location of the toothbrush inside my mouth, so that I can control the toothbrush to the position where it is needed without looking at the mirror.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcrwky",
"glcrg39"
],
"text": [
"So you know how you have the senses like touch, taste, sight, hearing, smell. Those aren't the only senses balance is a sense, temperature detection is a sense, and proprioception is a sense. Proprioception is the awareness of the position and movement of your body, even when you don't see them. Like if you were in a pool knowing where your legs are and how they are moving even though they are behind you. The interesting thing about proprioception is that once you hold an object essentially it becomes an extension of you, and your brain senses it proprioceptively like a finger. There are limits to this like I know how big I am in a jacket but if it's flowy I might not realize how it moves when I turn but over time if I wear it long enough by brain will calculate that too. When we drive the same car over and over we get a sense for the dimensions of the car and how big we are, can we fit in this space, is there enough room for me to move. This is our body using proprioception too",
"There are a lot of senses working for this. First off you can feel the pressure of the brush on your teeth and in the mouth as a whole. You won't be able to so accurately determine the position of the brush if your mouth was paralyzed or anaesthetized Secondly, there's a matter of habit and practice. You know how much to insert the brush so that it goes as much as you need because of practice and other stuff. If you being a right handed person, try brushing with your left hand, I'm pretty sure you'd hurt yourself a lot"
],
"score": [
16,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8ieb9
|
If countries switch to electric vehicles only, is crude oil still distilled for the other products (plastics, oils, tar, etc) ?
|
And if so what happens to the gasoline and diesel that would be produced as a byproduct?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcs2zu",
"glct2o4",
"glcsvo6"
],
"text": [
"I suspect that we will still need lubricants,and heavy fuels such as kerosene, and JP4. But the requirement will be greatly reduced as gasoline will become a byproduct rather than the primary product. With luck, once we move away from our dependence on internal combustion for transportation, more focus can be placed on development of efficient engines for things such a generators. Also. Oils and plastics can be recycled, it’s not a 100% recovery process, but it can significantly reduce the need for new crude oil.",
"Refineries don't just simply distill, they also crack and reform the hydrocarbons in oil. If less fuel is needed, that process can be adapted to yield more of the fractions you are interested in for the chemical industry. It'll require a good lot of retooling, I would suppose, but there's nothing fundamental saying that it can't be done.",
"Oil is seperated into many different products but you can actually take just about any part of oil and change it to make another part. If we stop using gasoline entirely then those parts of the oil will likely be \"cracked\" which is a process of breaking the molecules into smaller pieces either to be used directly or as an ingredient to something else. Even without using any fuels at all, we will certainly still need petroleum products. This is a growing field of sustainable chemical engineering that aims to make our life's necessities out of something *other* than oil."
],
"score": [
10,
5,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8ieq9
|
If mouthwash gets rid of 99.9% of everything compared to 50-60% with toothpaste - and there’s a noticeable difference - why do people still brush their teeth?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcripx",
"glcsmhq",
"glcsl5p"
],
"text": [
"Mouthwash may kill a lot of the bacteria that are currently present in your mouth, but it doesn’t necessarily remove all the food or plaque on your teeth, on which further bacteria would then grow. As vigorously as you “swish”, you don’t generate enough power to essentially power-wash all the debris from your teeth. Brushing and flossing remain the best way to physically remove food remnants and plaque from your teeth and gums. Mouthwash then kills any remaining bacteria and freshens your mouth.",
"> Get’s rid of food in between teeth Mouthwash cannot do that. Not even a toothbrush can do that. Only floss and interdental brushes work for this purpose. The purpose of brushing your teeth is not to kill or remove bacteria. That would be a futile effort in a warm and moist environment like your mouth. The purpose of brushing your teeth is to remove *plaque* from your teeth so your teeth don't constantly marinate in bacteria's waste products and develop cavities. This can only be achieved with physical brush contact - not with mouthwash and not even, as every dentist will learn very early during their training, with high-pressure water jets.",
"I heard a dentist on the radio recently saying that mouthwash is far less effective than people think and that you should use it BEFORE you brush as otherwise it washes away the fluoride which the toothpaste delivers to your teeth and which needs time to do its thing. I don't have an opinion on the matter as I'm not a dentist,. Just passing along what I heard."
],
"score": [
9,
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8ietj
|
why do the moving parts of cartoons have a slightly different color? Like if a car for is about to open, it will be a slightly different shade of color until it opens. Then when it's closed/done moving independently, its color matches the rest of the car.
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcshv2"
],
"text": [
"In most traditionally-animated cartoons, the backgrounds are paintings (usually on paper, sometimes glass) while the moving drawings are ink & paint on sheets of celluloid (“cels”) laid overtop. Cels are painted on the reverse side and things like gradients or textured colours aren’t really possible like they are with paintings. The colours are totally flat because of this, and the cel painters also need an outline to know where to paint. So if something has to move, it has to be on these cels, and it has to be a flat drawing with a black outline. When you can predict something is going to move based on how it looks, TVTropes calls it the [Conspicuously Light Patch]( URL_0 ). Nowadays, most 2D animation is digital, so it’s easier to have background and moving elements look similar, though it still involves a lot of work to make something that looks like a painting move. Shows like *The Simpsons* and *Family Guy* (back when they weren’t digitally animated) didn’t have this problem because the backgrounds were also painted on cels; that’s why they also have the black outlines and flat colours."
],
"score": [
13
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConspicuouslyLightPatch"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8ieyr
|
How does car insurance work and why it is mandatory to have it?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcs0jb",
"glcrug7",
"glcuiz8"
],
"text": [
"Insurance in general works like this: Everyone involved pays the insurance company regularly. Let's say monthly. When one of them suffers a disaster, the insurance company pays them to help cover the expenses of the disaster. In this way, the financial risk of the disaster is spread across all of the participants and over the duration of their contract instead of just turbo-fucking one person. Everyone can breathe easy knowing that, in a disaster, they won't be fucked financially. Car insurance serves an additional purpose. Some other types do this as well. If my house burns down, I won't end up owing other people money. *However*, if I'm a doctor and I fuck up bigtime, or if I'm driving and I fuck up bigtime, then I may owe someone *else* money. By forcing *me* to have insurance, we protect whoever I might owe money to. Example: I get into a car crash. It was my fault, and I just wrecked some dude's jeep. I'm broke, and I sure as shit can't afford to buy him a new jeep. Do I owe him one? Yes. But, no matter what the law does to me, I simply do not have any money to give him, and he's fucked. If the law requires me to have insurance, then regardless of if I have money, my insurance plan will cover his jeep (or at least, some of it).",
"First and foremost, car insurance is to cover liabilities you may incur on others when driving. It's also to cover damages and losses you suffer yourself. Whenever you're driving a car on a public road, you're taking a lot of risks. And critically, it's not just your own safety and possessions you're risking - it's other people's too. People who never volunteered to have their safety and stuff gambled with. If you lose control of your car and smash it into someone's million-dollar lawn sculpture, do you have a million dollars lying around to pay them back for it? Probably not. That's why you need insurance.",
"I work in insurance pricing. The legal requirement is primarily to cover third party bodily injury. If a driver hits someone else and they become paralysed, who's going to pay for their medical bills and lifelong care arrangments? The law is there to ensure that victims get the financial compensation they need."
],
"score": [
29,
7,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8ix82
|
When nails break, why does the wound turn white?
|
As far as I understand, nails turn white at the tip because it doesn’t have flesh underneath. However, nails that are broken turn white where the break is, and sometimes the white even spreads, even though there is flesh beneath. Why is that?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glddt15"
],
"text": [
"Basically, your nails are attached to the flesh underneath. Your nails are relatively transparent so you are getting a clearer view of the flesh normally. When your nail becomes injured to the point where it separates from the flesh you can no longer see the flesh in that area clearly. What you are now seeing is the mostly dried out back side of the fingernail. I'd compare it to a bubble under your screen protector on your phone. No bubble equals a clear view through the protector. But when you get a bubble, it now becomes harder to see the screen."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8j0ip
|
What is a seized engine?
|
I was watching a video on Dunkirk and was told that soldiers would run truck engines dry to cause them seize and rendering them useless to the Germans. What is an engine seize? Can those engines be salvaged? Or would the Germans in this scenario know it's hopeless and scrap the engine completely?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcu95p",
"glcufmv",
"gld2rt8",
"glcv244",
"gld20ec",
"glcufql",
"gld3cc7",
"gld7vze",
"gld6066",
"glcv9q2",
"gldj48j",
"gldo4r6",
"gld8r52",
"glcuorb",
"gldhubx"
],
"text": [
"When an engine runs without oil, the friction causes it to get extremely hot to the point that internal parts break or, in more extreme instances, the metal pieces weld themselves together. The end result, though, is a 100% dead engine that can’t be fixed in any practical sense of the word. (Sure, it could stripped down piece by piece and completely rebuilt and have any damaged components sorted out... but that’s not practical in the middle of a war. And it’s usually costs more than it’s worth.)",
"Inside of an engine, you have hollowed out tubes and cap-like pieces that fit within these tubes. [Image.]( URL_0 ) Crucial to the operation of the engine, these cap-like pieces must be able to slide up and down constantly. They run pretty much the full length of the tube multiple times a second. If even one of them stops, the engine cannot run, as they are all coupled together. From here on, the cap is called the piston, and the tube is the cylinder. The piston and cylinder must very tightly fit one another. The piston is just barely small enough to fit within the cylinder. Should one of the pistons be damaged in such a way as to begin to grip the walls just right, it can easily become wedged. It will immediately stop. Since it is physically connected to the other moving parts of the engine, and they are moving quite fast, the forces jamming it in are absolutely huge. Things bend, things break, and the piston can become effectively fused to the cylinder. It would be far cheaper to build a new engine from scratch than to repair this one.",
"This is the first post I’ve ever seen where the first ten responses are all correct and not jokes. Yeah to make it really simple: no oil or coolant in a box filled with explosions (an engine) = extremely hot metal gouging itself apart and welding itself solid simultaneously.",
"Engines have moving parts, which is why they need oil to lubricate them. One job of the oil is to dissipate the engine heat. If an engine is drained of the oil, then the heat that gets created by it expands the metal parts until there is no space for them to move about. When these parts rub against each other, they grind together and fuse, or seize up. Then the engine is useless until it can be taken apart and rebuilt properly.",
"Ok, let's try this: A seized engine is a broken engine. Normally, it means that the pistons have jammed within the cylinders (the two parts that contain the exploding fuel) and the engine is locked in place. Yes, they are salvageable, but thats expensive, time intensive and difficult. An advancing army does not have any of these luxuries. The Germans would have tried to fire up the trucks that got left behind and use them, only to find they won't start. Knowing likely what had been done to them, they would have had to proceed without them, rather that waste resources and time on them. Denial of surrendered equipment is always a good idea in wartime.",
"Running an engine dry (of oil) causes moving parts to overheat, warp and bind (seize). Essentially the crankshaft no longer turns. It is sometimes possible to recover but it requires a LOT of work, replacement parts and a good workshop - it isn't something that can be done in the field so it renders a vehicle stuck on the road useless.",
"An engine is seized when it is mechanically impossible to rotate its crankshaft. In the scenario you described, seizure was achieved with excess friction because there was no oil to lubricate the metal-on-metal movement. The pistons probably expanded and warped, becoming wedged inside the cylinders. Besides that, connecting rods and crankcases usually break. When the engine is seized in this way, repair *might* be possible depending on how extensive the damage is, but usually it's so severe that it is both not repairable in the field and more expensive to repair versus replacing outright.",
"Someone drained the oil out, and the metal parts in the engine get stuck together through heat and friction. They expand into each other and is irreversible to fix without some serious, time-consuming work.",
"Engines move very fast. When metal moves fast it gets hot and it gets slightly bigger. Oil stops the engine from getting too hot. The space in an engine is so tight that when you take away its oil, the metal expands and gets stuck together.",
"A seized engine is an engine which does not turn over any more. Even if you try hand cranking them or bump starting them the engine will not physically be able to turn. In an engine there is a lot of metal components moving against each other with a thin film of oil between them to slide on. But if you remove the oil from the engine the metal will just scrape against each other \"dry\". This will make a lot of heat and scrape up the metal. The heat weakens the metal causing even more damage and may also warp it. The end result is often that the metal pieces in the engine which is supposed to be a tight fit is now crashing into each other and the engine does not turn over. If this happens to your car and you notice the oil pressure light turn on and immediately pull over and stop then you might not have damaged any components at all. And even if you did some damage it is possible to swap out those components of the engine and it will be good to go. And in the late 30s swapping engine components were a regular maintenance task so these components would have been readily available. The problem was that most of them were back in the UK as German and French cars were built with different engines then the British cars. In addition the cars were run dry as long as possible which would have likely damaged a lot of the internal components. They might even have damaged the engine block which is the biggest component of the engine. At that point it is cheaper to just get a new complete engine then to replace most of the components of the old one. In any case it would have been a lot of work for the mechanics. So I doubt any of the trucks that were run dry and left on the beach would have ever been operational again. They might have been used for spares to help maintain the trucks that were abandoned intact. It is also possible that some Belgian farmers would get a hold of a few of the trucks and spent a good amount of their spare time getting one of them working again.",
"Metal on metal needs lube. Without it the metal gets too hot and expands. That means your motor is fused together. Congratulations on your new boat anchor",
"ELI5: Engine seize... 2 moving metal parts get so hot that they melt and when they cool down a little the two parts have melted into each other and are now just 1 non-moving part.",
"Seized means stuck. They make the engine stuck so it doesn't move anymore. In most cases doing it this way, the engine is no good anymore. Because it damages the block that everything on the engine is attached to!",
"An engine is usually seized when it locks up due to a number of reasons, but in this case they'd drain the oil and coolant causing major damage. First the engine overheats and causes the block and heads to warp making it pretty much unable to seal between the parts. The cylinders will warp and not allow for the pistons to properly move nor for the rings to keep the combustion chamber separate from the oil, which is now mixed with any coolant left in the system. Narrow clearance areas like bearings also warp and now provide much more resistance. I'm sure I left some out, but also the main forms can outright crack. Metal against metal needs lubrication. Things like main bearings and rod bearings are simply metal separating two other metals. In short it's not worth rebuilding versus new equipment and sometimes not even possible at all.",
"Inside an engine there are pistons that reciprocate (move up and down) within a cylinder. Due to the large amount of heat produced by engines from combustion and rapid movement of the piston inside the cylinder, engines must use a lubricant such as engine oil in order to stop the pistons from essentially melting to the cylinder walls. There are two types of engines, 4 strokes and 2 strokes. While both use oil as a lubrication, 4 stroke engines store oil inside what's known as the crank case near the bottom of the engine. Oil is essentially shot into the cylinder from the crank case while the piston is moving up and down in order to lubricate the cylinder and allow the piston to move freely with very little friction. The oil then drains back down into the crankcase and is reused. 2 Stroke engines work very similar but rather than storing the oil inside the engine, the oil is usually mixed together with the gasoline. When the fuel valve opens, the engine is not only receiving gasoline for combustion, but also a portion of oil mixed within the gasoline to lubricate the cylinder. The excess oil is burned off during combustion. For both engines, oil is a necessity. Without it, the pistons won't move for very long before they become stuck inside the cylinder or what's known as becoming seized. This renders the engine useless. Generally, the engine is destroyed if it becomes seized as parts become almost welded together inside or break apart. In rare cases, the engine may be salvageable if it wasn't run completely dry of oil or the engine was shut off before it fully seized. However, this almost always results in scoring on the inside of the cylinder and piston. When scoring occurs, the piston no moves as fluently reducing power and oil can begin to leak between the scars inside the cylinder. This is fixable though, usually with a replacement piston and boring out the cylinder to a slightly larger size to get rid of the scarring inside the cylinder. This becomes more of a hassle the more cylinders you have. Jesus, I think I made this too long to actually be of any use lol. Anyways, in conclusion, don't run an engine without oil or it will seize and become useless. The Germans, or anyone for that matter, would most likely scrap the engine as it would not be worth the time or cost to try to repair a seized engine, especially in the middle of a war."
],
"score": [
7746,
367,
219,
203,
32,
19,
11,
6,
6,
5,
4,
3,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Internal_combustion_engine_pistons_of_partial_cross-sectional_view.jpg"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8jxph
|
What is the difference between cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias?
|
Hi. I already plunged myself in a pool of behavioral books and websites but I have a hard time knowing the difference between the two.
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glcyltf",
"gldxc6p",
"gld0gpu",
"glczb1f",
"glczzty",
"glfe4aw",
"glec4gx",
"gldahx0",
"gled1jn"
],
"text": [
"They're not all that similar. Cognitive dissonance is where thinking and doing are two seperate things. Imagine a serial killer believing killing is wrong. Confirmation bias is where a outcome is expected (or wanted) so badly it shifts results. For example, imagine you believe all cheese is yellow, so you then notice all mcdonald's burgers use yellow cheese and therefore you use that as evidence that all cheese is yellow",
"A lot of folks are defining cognitive dissonance here in reference to actions, which isn’t wrong per se, but it is incomplete. Cognitive dissonance can also be understood as the discomfort created by believing two competing contradictory ideas at once. For instance, believing the creation story in the Bible but also believing in evolution. Confirmation bias is the preference to ignore evidence that contradicts your held beliefs in favor of evidence that supports your beliefs. For instance, disregarding evidence of evolution and favoring evidence that confirms your belief in the creation story in the Bible. In a way, confirmation bias is a way of avoiding cognitive dissonance.",
"Cognitive dissonance is when your established belief system, or how you view the world is challenged by conflictng beliefs that you've determined to be true. For example, you might believe in the Christian creation story of the universe, but you have also come to believe in evolution. This causes internal stress and conflict. Confirmational bias is exactly what it states; you search for evidence that confirms your biased beliefs and disregard any evidence that contradicts those beliefs.",
"Cognitive dissonance is when your thoughts and beliefs are inconsistent with your actions or directly contradict them. For example, someone smoking despite believing it's bad for them. Confirmation bias is coming to the conclusion something is true based on new evidence without taking into account how it would be true. An example would be someone believing left-handed people are more creative than right-handed ones and only focuses on cases of creative lefties.",
"*Confirmation bias* is when you're more likely to accept information or an assumption to be true if you already agree with it. Example: Lets say you already believe people don't like you. Then, a friend has to cancel plans (a neutral event). You're likely to read into this that they don't like you. You've taken neutral information and jumped to a conclusion because that conclusion fits your held beliefs. *Cognitive dissonance* has to do with a misalignment of thoughts with actions. If actions are not aligned with thoughts, it becomes uncomfortable so one of them has to change. This happens all the time and can encourage healthy behavior. However, it can also be used to promote discrimination or unhealthy behaviors. Example 1: Let's say you don't like broccoli but your new partner cooks with it a lot. You want to be agreeable so don't say anything. Now your behavior and your thoughts are misaligned and the behavior is controlled. You convince yourself that everyone should be eating more broccoli. Example 2: You grow up in a multicultural environment and appreciate diversity. You're straight but have several gay friends. You move to a new school and have trouble at first fitting in. You start to hang out with a group but soon learn they are homophobic and racist. You are lonely and don't feel you have options. Over time, you may find yourself adopting their beliefs - the action of hanging out with them is incompatible with holding an opposite belief. You might even begin using slurs, first just around the group and then on your own. When you return home you find it again incompatible to hold both sets of beliefs. Since \"actions speak louder than words\" our beliefs are more easily shifted than our outward behaviors. You end up saying something hurtful to a gay friend, destroying that relationship.",
"When you’re buying a car you spend ages searching through adverts and dealerships, looking for the best deal you can find. The best car, the best price, the best deal. The very moment you commit, you then avoid looking at car ads, billboards, etc. Even TV Ads Make you feel uncomfortable; your brain doesn’t want to create doubt and see other deals that might be better. That active avoidance of discomfort is cognitive dissonance. This is because the brain is wired to commit and stick to your decisions. It’s actually a safety feature. ..... Others have given clear descriptions of confirmation bias. I would add that it also a common strategy in avoiding cognitive dissonance which is why there may be some confusion between the two.",
"Cognitive Dissonance occurs when an existing belief or behavior is challenged with new information that contradicts that belief or behavior, or shows it is considered \"bad\" or \"evil\". You then have these contradictory pieces of information in your head (which is the cognitive dissonance) and you have to resolve it somehow because it feels mentally uncomfortable not to deal with it. The most difficult way to resolve is the changing the belief or behavior. It's easier to resolve by ignoring/attacking the new information, or otherwise explaining a way that it doesn't apply to you, or you'll change \"later/eventually\", just not right now. Confirmation bias is the natural tendency to look for evidence that supports a way we already think, and not search for (or discount) evidence that does not support it or contradicts it.",
"Cognitive dissonace - I'm stressed because my actions don't match my beliefs (ie good kid doing bad things makes the good kid feel stress). Confirmation bias - I only tend to accept information that confirms what I already believe, and reject information that doesn't confirm my beliefs to be true. (Ie a person follows a news site that only supports their political views, and trashes others",
"Cognitive dissonance is a what happens when you hold 2 or more incompatible thoughts in your head. For instance. Cheaters are bad. My mother cheated on my father, leading to their divorce but it was a complicated issue and they are ultimately both good people. So now I have 3 ideas in my head that don't add up: My mother is a good person. Cheaters are bad people. My mother cheated on my father. Being able to think both that my mother is a good person and that cheaters are bad people causes cognitive dissonance. Confirmation bias is a way that you filter or act on information in order to confirm what you already believe. So I believe Honda has best car. I'm more likely to notice positive articles about Honda, I'm more likely to remember information about Honda being good. I'm also less likely to pass on information that disagrees with my preconceived notion."
],
"score": [
279,
126,
34,
32,
9,
5,
5,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8k5ci
|
Why does most rainfall occur over hills and mountains?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gld5l2r",
"glczq1n",
"gld8jyf"
],
"text": [
"Clouds move due to wind, as a cloud moves over a mountain it needs to rise in elevation, as the cloud moves up in elevation two things happen, it gets colder and it gets less pressure. Cold air holds less moisture than dry air, this means if warm air can hold a cloud with a million gallons of water and cold air can hold a cloud with 600,000 gallons of water, as the cloud moves over a mountain it will drop 400,000 gallons of rain. Whats kind of neat is that air cools as it goes up a mountain, but also heats up when it goes down a mountain (do to compressing a gas) moist air going up a mountain cools slowly on the way up and tends to precipitate all of its moisture by the time it reaches the top of the mountain, but once it goes over the mountain and comes down the other side it is now (relatively) dry air which heats up ata faster rate than the moist air cooled going up. Long story short winds coming down a mountain can be warmer than the winds on the other side of the mountain. This is what Santa Ana and Chinook winds are in LA and Denver",
"I believe it’s dues to when warm air rises, and as it rises it cools and condenses. Meaning humidity increases and helps rain form. * yes warm air naturally rises, but in this case we mean warm air compared to the air up higher from the ground. Asthe air flows(wind) it hits the mountain which in-turn forces the air upward.",
"You know when your breath fogs on a cold day? That's because it's warm and wet, and as it cools down the water is basically squeezed out of it. When warm, wet winds blow towards a mountain range they get pushed up into colder layers of air and the same thing happens. Cold air is denser and holds less water just like a squashed sponge. This is also why when you bring cold air into your house in the winter and heat it up it's as dry as in a desert. You have to add water back into it with a humidifier to feel normal."
],
"score": [
18,
7,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8kj8h
|
Why are lakes rich in nitrates?
|
If it’s due to hills, how are the nitrates moved from the hill to the lakes?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gld107t",
"gldaj21",
"gld904t"
],
"text": [
"Lakes are a natural collection point for water, and anything that the water happens to wash over during its journey. Rain gets into the ground and dissolves nitrates into itself, then washes into streams which wind up in lakes.",
"There are two sources of nitrates in lakes, allocthanous (from outside) and autochthanous (already in the lake). Things with nitrogen in them wash into the lake from the shore, it rains (rain has a surprising amount of nitrate in it) and bacteria rip nitrogen out of the air and soil and change it into nitrate. Most of the nitrogen is already in the lake, just changing forms from nitrate to nitrite, moving into plankton and plants and animals and back out as ammonia when the rot, getting changed back to nitrates, cycling around and around. The nuances of the balance of the different nitrate species is a totally not ELI5 question. Here are some diagrams that might help: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"It depends on the watershed but usually the limiting reagent for \"life\" (phytoplankton) is phosphorous so that's why this other stuff is abundant"
],
"score": [
39,
15,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.esf.edu/efb/schulz/Limnology/Nitrogen.html"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8kkly
|
Why do planes and boats use the same unit for distance. Maybe the question would be why do they both use knots?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gld2dba",
"gld19eb"
],
"text": [
"Knot is not a unit of distance but a unit of speed (Distance divided by time). A knot is a short way of saying one nautical mile per hour. A nautical mile is how ships (and aircraft) measure the distance they travel. One nautical mile is exactly 1852 meter. Nautical miles are conceptually related to meters and kilometers as one nautical mile is the distance of one minute of latitude. A minute of latitude is a 60th of a degree (the same as a minute of time is one 60th of an hour) and there are 360 degree in a circle. Thus a nautical mile was originally defined as being one (60 x 90) part of the distance between the equator and a pole, while a kilometer was originally defined as 1/10000 of the distance between the equator and the pole. The name knot originally comes from ships measuring their speed through the water by having a rope with literal knots on it unspool into the water to see how fast they are going. Today it is used to mostly describe the speed of a vessel though a medium like water or air, but in theory since it is just a measure of speed you can also use it to describe how fast your car is going (but nobody does that). It use today is mostly down to tradition rather than any practical use. The navigation equipment and other modern devices used to measure speed of ships and planes etc today could just as easily display the result in any other value, but knots and nautical miles is what we have gotten used to.",
"Ships use knots for historical reasons, and planes were viewed as \"airships\" (as were lighter than air craft like blimps, zeppelins and balloons), and nautical terms were used from the outset and they just stuck. So with planes, it's tradition. A knot is a \"nautical mile per hour\" which is a measure of speed, not distance. A knot was literally measured using a long rope with uniformly spaced knots tied in it - when a ship wanted to measure its speed over water, it would toss one end of a rope over its stern that had a plank tied to the end of it. As the boat moved forward, more and more rope would be pulled over the stern, and sailors would count the number of knots pulled over the stern over a given amount of time to determine speed."
],
"score": [
48,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8l1tp
|
How does the brain burn calories?
|
How does the brain burning calories different from calories burning by other body parts? What actions make the brain burn calories?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gld5yea"
],
"text": [
"Nerves use ions to transmit signals along their length (called an \"action potential\") until they get to the gap between nerves (which are the \"synapses\"), which then spit out some more ions and other chemicals to activate the next nerve. Both of these processes take energy. Take a molecule like potassium chloride. It has a positive side (potassium) and a negative side (chloride). If you split the molecule apart, you get the two ions with those charges. The ions are attracted to each other like two magnets. So what your nerves do is put one ion on the inside of the cell membrane, just kind of floating around and hanging out, and the other ion on the outside just kind of floating around and hanging out. Because they're attracted to each other, they'll tend to hang out near the cell membrane on opposite sides, like two magnets on opposite sides of a piece of cardboard. With so many negatively charged ions around them inside the cell and so many positive ions away from them, the negative ions inside *really* want to be outside. Likewise, the positive ions *really* want to be inside. Neither can get in or out because of the cell membrane. The action potential happens when special gates are opened in the cell membrane, allowing the ions to flood in and out towards each other at one end of the cell. This causes the ions to swap places, which drags all the other ions around. It's a bit like [dropping a magnet into a pile of other magnets]( URL_3 ) and they all flip around. This wave of flipping ionic charges travels down the nerve [like so]( URL_2 ). Once the process is finished, the ions have to be separated and reset, which takes *work*. The ions are attracted to each other, right? So, like pulling apart two magnets you have to use energy to separate them. Your cells have special gates in the membranes that act like pumps, grabbing onto the ions and forcing them in or out of the cell as needed, *against* the direction those ions want to go. Activating those ion pumps takes energy - specifically, an energized electron is put onto the pump, which changes its shape [as seen in this gif]( URL_1 ) from a [Crash Course]( URL_0 ) video (link goes to their video on action potentials). Communicating across synapses also takes some energy. When the action potential reaches the end of the nerve it triggers the release of neurotransmitters. Those chemical are spit out of the nerve and float across to the next nerve, where they bind to special proteins on the membrane, which triggers an action potential in the next nerve. Building those neurotransmitters takes energy, too. They have to be assembled from amino acids just like every other protein. Plus, they have to be broken down and removed, too. Once they trigger the next nerve, they have to go away so the nerve can reset. Imagine communicating with a telegraph, pressing a button for a beep and releasing the button for no beep. The neurotransmitters are pushing the button. But you can't have a telegraph message with the button constantly pressed, because then it would be nothing but one beep, right? You have to be able to turn it *off*, too. To do this, your brain is full of enzymes that attack and break apart the neurotransmitters so that they stop \"pushing the button\" on other nerves. It also prevents them from floating too far and activating other nerves that aren't meant to be activated. The pieces of the neurotransmitters can be reused and put back together but - you guessed it - building the enzymes to break them apart takes energy and putting them back together takes energy. Most of the energy your brain uses comes from those ion pumps, which are constantly moving ions across the cell membrane so that your brain can keep working. Since humans have a *ton* of neurons in our brains, and we use them *a lot*, we need a lot of energy to maintain the right balance of ions inside and outside the cells. TL;DR: Your brain uses tiny atomic magnets to transmit a signal down the length of the nerve cell. The magnets balanced against the force pulling them together, and released to send the signal. Your brain has to use energy to pull the tiny magnets apart before they can be used again."
],
"score": [
16
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZG8M_ldA1M",
"https://thumbs.gfycat.com/HalfFelineHornshark-small.gif",
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Action_Potential.gif/640px-Action_Potential.gif",
"https://thumbs.gfycat.com/DistantCluelessHairstreak-size_restricted.gif"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8l329
|
Why exactly do we need verification that you're not a robot when accessing some sites?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gld3q7z",
"gldc061"
],
"text": [
"Owners of many sites don't want people to be able to create large numbers of accounts (for example, to send out spam e-mails) or overload the server with requests that ultimately lead to it being unusable for the intended use (for example, you could write a bot that attempts to request a million Google searches per second - without countermeasures, this kind of attack can cause websites to go down temporarily when orchestrated from many different computers at once).",
"One of the original reasons is to prevent a Brute Force Attack to gain access to accounts. Since most accounts use your email address half the battle for thieves/hackers/extortionists is already done and they just need your password. They tell a robot to try passwords until they robot gains entry to your account and once inside it will change the password, email, etc. so that you can't gain access to it. This is also why some sites will only ask you to make sure you're human after 1 or 2 failed attempts."
],
"score": [
10,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8lg6w
|
You can learn a new language if you already speak a different language. How do baby's learn languages and the meaning behind words?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gld541a",
"gldf6dp",
"gldba9i",
"gldfzin"
],
"text": [
"It's all context. Babies minds are sponges. You pick up a bottle and say 'do you want your bottle' often enough, that baby will learn to associate 'bottle' with what happens next, which is one of the primary reasons a lot of babies have bottle as their first word. So on and so forth. It's all context.",
"they dont learn the way we learn as adults, they actually dont really technically 'learn' a language at all. they 'acquire' it, meaning they basically absorb everything around them until it starts to make sense. if you hear a certain sound every single time someone sees another person (hello) after a long time you're going to intuitively or subconsciously understand that the sound \"hello\" is a greeting that occurs when two people are seeing each other for the first time that day (or whenever). if every time someone sits down to turn on the tv you hear the sound \"tv\", you'll start to realise that that big box with pictures in it is probably the tv. thats how babies naturally acquire a language.",
"These days we don't usually teach languages by giving you the translation of new words and forms. We try to illustrate the use and meaning of new forms only by using the target language, context, and visuals or concrete examples. That's basically how babies learn, they have the meaning and use of words illustrated for them, often with concrete examples",
"Babies have cognition and understand what's going on around them. They just don't have the physical acuity or mental ability to articulate what they are thinking. Eventually, over the first two years, they figure out what is going on around them by making connections. They learn that when they cry they get attention. They mimic and observe. Language is slowly developed until the brain develops enough to make it easier to learn more."
],
"score": [
7,
4,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8lpdd
|
Why do we have the urge to constantly touch a bruise or a wound that hurts?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gldb5pf",
"gld8qmr",
"gldd9bg",
"gld7dct"
],
"text": [
"It’s not so much the pain of a wound, but the brain’s response to pain going away that makes you want to touch an injury. When you touch a bruise or similar minor injury, it hurts for a moment. The pain subsiding causes the brain to release a stimulus of pleasure because the pain is subsiding. It’s that release of pleasure that somewhat tempts you to touch it more.",
"I'm no doctor, but possibly as an instinct to check for infection, dirt, heal progression. Maybe just a way of pointing out to peers that we are injured so they can protect us from threat.",
"Every single comment here is speculation. There is no scientific basis or theory as to why we have the urge to constantly touch a bruise or a wound that hurts. It doesn't even make sense that you have the urge to constantly touch a bruise or a wound that hurts. This is because the evolutionary advantage to pain is to get you to stop doing whatever you are doing.",
"I have pondered this question when I was younger. I believe it is to build up tolerance to pain. We go through so much as humans that attacks our personal outlook on life. We may have a difficult time or situation and we want to \"numb the pain\" from the external (or internal) source."
],
"score": [
10,
6,
5,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8mh8x
|
¿Why can rockets move in space when there is nothing for them to push against?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glda51q",
"gldalg6"
],
"text": [
"Newtons 3rd law is still in affect. Every action produces an opposing reaction. So fuel being burnt out of one end pushes the rocket",
"Rockets don't PUSH. They REACT to their fuel into gas that goes in one direction by going in the other direction. What happens when you burn fuel is you convert something that's liquid (or sometimes powder) into a gas. That gas takes up a lot more space than the liquid did, in the same way you can use a tank of helium to blow up thousands of balloons. In a rocket engine, that burning creates lots an lots of gas in a chamber that has only one small opening at the back, so all that extra gas wanting all that extra space has to exit at that spot. Now there's an important law of physics that says \"for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction\". It's weird, but imagine this example. Say you're in the middle of room and are sitting in a wheeled office chair, and you're trying to shove a wheeled heavy desk away with your feet without getting up. You prop your feet up and push... and not only does the desk go forward, but your chair goes backward with you in it! What happened is the same force from your push goes in BOTH directions. The rocket engine (and attached rocket) shoves gas out the back really really strongly... and just like your office chair push moves you and your chair backwards because that balances the desk going the other way, the rocket engine gets pushed forward to balance the gas going out its back. So the rocket engine, and the rocket it's attached to, go FORWARD."
],
"score": [
10,
10
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8ms5p
|
"a particle can be at two locations at the same time" Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland experiment
|
They won a Nobel Prize for this experiment and I cant understand how and what happend in it
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gldbuzp"
],
"text": [
"The reason is that there is no such thing as a particle on the atomic scale. There are wave particles. This is a behavior of objects with very small mass. This means that they exist as both a wave function and as a particle at the same time. It is less that a particle exist in multiple places but rather that is is spread(as a point particle) across a region of space. How much it behaves as a wave or particle is based on mass and speed."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8n1f8
|
How are we still not sure if there is a Planet X or not?
|
With all the technology we have at our disposal how can we still not be sure that there's another planet in our solar system?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"glddxfo",
"gldeot8"
],
"text": [
"The planet would be further out then Pluto. Maybe even in the oord cloud. That means two things. One: It's gonna move super slowly. Pluto already needs 248 years to get around the sun. He's between 25-50 earth orbits away. The oord cloud only starts at 1000... A planet there wouldn't have moved much at all in the small time we could look. Not moving objects are hard to see. Two: it would be super cold and dark. Just because it's so far away. That's why we can't say for sure.",
"It is unlikely that there is another planet out there, but there is a possibility that way far out there is an object big enough to be a planet but it is far enough away and dark enough we can't see it very well Pluto is on average 40 times further away from the sun than we are and on orbit is about 248 Earth years. Eris is on average 68 times further away from the sun than we are and on orbit is about 559 Earth years. There is a lot of dark space out there to look at and there's always a possibility that another non-dwarf planet could be hiding out there."
],
"score": [
11,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8nmwl
|
How do Solar Sails work?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gldgaps"
],
"text": [
"Despite not having *rest* mass, light does possess momentum and energy. Just like a regular sail is hit and pushed by wind, a solar sail is hit and pushed by light. Because light has very low momentum, the solar sail must be incredibly light (compared to any standard space craft), and to get the most efficiency, the sail itself must be made of a very reflective material."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8o565
|
If Japanese is a “high context” language, why do they speak so bluntly in media?
|
I just found out about the idea of high and low context languages, and Japanese is considered a high context language, meaning they don’t need to overly explain what they mean, certain thing can just be understood contextually. But in movies, anime, etc, they always speak so literally, like they’re talking to a child, often explaining situations that are very clearly understood to everyone that’s there including the viewer. I get that they probably don’t actually speak like this in irl Japan so why is it always like that in media, is it a translation thing?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gled4cw",
"gle1ajd",
"gldlh3u"
],
"text": [
"It’s not direct at all. They don’t even like to say the word “no,” and instead have lots of phrases they use to dance around it in different contexts, which another Japanese speaker will understand to mean no. Someone who doesn’t understand may go crazy wondering why nobody is simply telling him no, he’s looking for a concrete negative and is getting all this hemming and hawing. Translations may just say no.",
"A lot of the vagueness in Japanese gets removed in translation. Like in Japanese they might not indicate who they are taking about but in English translation they’ll make it clear. Translator and interpreter friends of mine have told me it takes less time to say the same thing in English as in Japanese. The circumlocutions and honorifics are removed from English translations.",
"Well, loads of the anime IS speaking to a child. And are you saying the translations are repetitive, or that the actual Japanese language is? You included news in the list, so the chance it is aimed at an adult and not translated is there. If you are talking about translated stuff, the repetition is the translation trying to cover all of that context rich content."
],
"score": [
5,
4,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8o8pc
|
How does more energy consumption equate to better tech?
|
The Kardashev scale posits that more energy harvesting/consumption equates to increasingly better tech. Solar panels alone can easily power the world. Geothermal can easily boost more than is needed. Does seemingly impossible science advancement (e.g., teleportation, replication, weather control) really hinge on the fact that we can’t currently generate enough juice? It seems like it’s a mechanics problem to solve, and less about the fact that we need to have a damn Dyson sphere? We’ve got plenty of energy access, even in 2021. No?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gldjvr3",
"gldjp6v"
],
"text": [
"The Kardashev scale is a measure of the ability of a society to use technology. We do not have \"plenty of energy\" in 2021. Why don't counties with fresh water shortages desalinate sea water? Because they don't have enough energy. Why don't we use chemical processes to remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere and reverse climate change? Because we don't have enough energy. We can't do things that we already have the science for because we don't have enough energy that's cheap enough. The SciFi stuff isn't needed to show that the current Earth is energy limited.",
"Would put it the other way round higher tech requires greater energy consumption, so without energy supply the higher tech isn't practical, so mobile phones aren't of any use without somewhere to charge them."
],
"score": [
11,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8oj7t
|
How come Nazi Germany was able to go to war against so many countries and last so long? Weren't they supposed to have way fewer soldiers than the allied nations?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gldnj6u",
"gldm3wr",
"gldmcg3"
],
"text": [
"1. The other countries did not want to go to war. Even after Germany conquered Poland and the allies declared war, they still did little other than waiting defensively at the Maginot line. This mirrors the winning strategy of WWI. 2. The USSR was their ally, so it was only France and Great Britain left. 3. Germany by-passed the Maginot line through the Ardennes, defeated France-Britain, and captured France in a campaign that lasted little over a month. With that, they had control of continental Europe. 4. Britain lacked the resources to mount an offensive, so they successfully defended their islands, prompting Germany to betray they former ally: the USSR. 5. While the USSR had a much bigger army, Stalin had recently purged the officer corps, and were not prepared for a full-scale confrontation. They were not a wealthy nation and their army was not properly equipped or trained at the start of the war. The industrial capacity and army equipment and preparation never ceased to increase, though, and by the end of the war they had the biggest and most capable European fighting force. 6. The US entered the war in December 1941, but the logistics and military preparation to mount a capable offensive in Europe, took until june1944. 7. The combined pressure of USSR on the eastern front and the US/Allies on the western one, crumbled the German forces in a matter of months. & #x200B; So in short, blitzkrieg defeated the only capable opposition, and it took the allies 3 years to mount a successful push-back. Then about a year to win.",
"They were better prepared because most of the allied nations were going for appeasement and hoping there wouldn't be a war, so they didn't start building up until quite late on. Also the Germans had devised a tactic \"Blitzkrieg\" (\"Lightning war\" in English) where they basically aimed to invade and subjugate a country so fast that their supply lines didn't get over-stretched.",
"Novice here so don't fry me but from my understanding. 1) They were able to prepare (gearing up the Luftwaffe and military) and actually take a lot of land (Austria and Czechoslovakia) without the allied nations really doing anything against it. 2) They used to work with the USSR and Stalin to take Poland only betraying them later. 3) Britain originally didn't want to go to war and so sat bag for a bit in the early phases 4) They basically overran France in Blitzkrieg (lightning war). 5) USA joined WAY LATE when Japan bombed Perl Harbor and Nazi Germany being 'friends' with Japan also declared war on the US. 6) When it came to actual fighting, they got their asses handed to them more and more as the war waged on because Hitler was a shit commander. Basically telling his troops to stay and fight even if it means death. Never retreating. Especially when invading Russia during the winter with little to no preparations."
],
"score": [
18,
12,
9
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
l8os7t
|
who are the professionals that use "professional grade" products?
|
For example: knives, power tools, kitchen equipment... Many of them are marketed as being quality because professionals use them. Do they go to professionals and ask them to endorse their equipment? Are there "professional grade" standards they have to meet? Or is it mostly just a vague marketing ploy that doesn't actually mean anything?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gldnz7c",
"gldoek3",
"gleccbg"
],
"text": [
"“Professional grade” or “military grade” have literally no meaning. None. It’s just completely made up marketing terms to appeal to schmucks to make them think they are getting high quality products. Literally no meaning.",
"It's almost all marketing. Actual professional stuff is rarely advertised to normal people. And sure, there are standards, but they're not in any way uniform. It's not like there's any organization out there deciding what exactly qualifies as a \"Pro\" hard disk. It changes over time anyway. In general, if you're a professional you understand the subject matter well enough to know what kind of specs you need. So for instance if you are looking to store some data you have some particular requirements regarding to size, IOPS, GB/s and write endurance. You're not looking for a \"Pro\" sticker, but something with the right specs that fits in your budget. It's up to you to understand what you need and what parts satisfy your needs. Because both the scenarios of \"I need to store a whole lot of stuff, but it doesn't need to be fast\", and \"I need it to be extremely fast\" are possible. It's then your job to pick the right tool for your particular job. And of course in any given field you'll get different characteristics. For a CNC mill you can get all sorts of stats about how precise it is, how fast it can move, what size of tooling it accepts... again up to you to understand all of that and determine whether that machine is suitable for your job. And depending on how big of a deal it is you may have a contract with your vendor where they agree that if this thing breaks, they'll ship replacements by next morning, or give you a lot of money as a penalty.",
"Normally it’s a meaningless term. However, go into a restaurant supply store and check out for example mixers. You won’t see fancy designs, but they’ll be big and heavy with high torque motors that and designed to mix many batches of dough every day without breaking down. It’s all metal with all metal gears, compared to a cheap home mixer which may have plastic gears that would break under the stress. But most of the time it’s just used to sell stuff, not better than anything else."
],
"score": [
14,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
l8ppm5
|
Whats the difference between AC and DC?
|
I already watched a lot of videos and i just don't get it. It would be awesome, if you guys could actually explain, like i am 5 years old, because i seem to be a little bit dumb.
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gldtgkx",
"glds7w8",
"glds7rk",
"glduxcm",
"gldwpwk"
],
"text": [
"Let's say you have an absurdly long rope that you just continuously pull. The rope just keeps going in one direction at the same speed. If you replace the rope with electrons in a wire, that's DC. Imagine you have a rope and the end is tied to a spring. You yank it one way and the spring yanks it back, over and over. The rope itself moves one way, then back the other, then back the first way, etc. Replace the rope with electrons in a wire and that AC.",
"Electricity moves on wires like cars on roads. Some roads are one-way only and all cars move in the same direction all the time. That's the same thing as DC (direct current). Some roads are two ways, but are reduced to one lane when there's road work being done. On those roads, cars can go both directions, but only one at a time, so they have to take turns. Some cars go one way for a little while, then the card going the other way get their turn. That's the same thing as AC (alternate current).",
"Both AC and DC describe types of current flow in a circuit. In direct current (DC), the electric charge (current) only flows in one direction. Electric charge in alternating current (AC), on the other hand, changes direction periodically. The voltage in AC circuits also periodically reverses because the current changes direction. [More Infos]( URL_0 )",
"Electricity is a flow of charged particles. Almost always electrons in practice, but the definition does not require it and there are some common cases when it's something else (e.g. the electric current in your brain are actually positive ions!). In Direct Current, these particles are flowing in one direction, like a toy train in a simple loop. In Alternating Current, these particles are jerking back and forth. They gain speed in one direction, stop, gain speed in opposite direction, rinse and repeat. Like the teeth of a handsaw.",
"AC = > Alternatin Current DC = > Directed Current DC has a fixed polarity meaning it has a direction the Current flows and definitive polarity negative (-) and positive (+) AC has alternating polarity, which is often 50Hz or 60 Hz for Houshold Power-Outlets, while Main Power Lines have 25Hz. Hz means changes per second. So handling AC and DC is completely different because of the changing polarity. For electronic circuits one would need pretty much always DC becuase you need a fixed polarity. On the other side AC is the choice to transmit Power over long distances. This is beacause if you use DC the resistance of the wire is a pretty huge factor. The longer the wire the higher the resistance. One could build thicker wires which would reduce the resistance. But ultimatly the wire will get heated up by DC a lot more than with AC. So AC enables thinner wires and much larger distances before the wire would melt."
],
"score": [
16,
8,
6,
5,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/alternating-current-ac-vs-direct-current-dc/"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.