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8ksgf3 | If women were able to get rights in time periods as old as ancient Greece, why did it become so hard for them in more modern times such as when America was already established? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Women in ancient Greece had very few rights. In Athens, foreign women were able to own property, but the number of such women was very small. Athenian women did not own property and had virtually no participation in public life. They were not citizens and were part of their master's (father's or husband's) household. They married very young and had limits on education. Women in some other Greek states (Sparta for instance) had higher status, but not equality by any means. A few (possibly legendary) exceptions to these rules cannot be taken as evidence of general status of women, which was very low through out the classical period.",
"you mean voting rights? If i remember correctly, women couldn't vote in ancient greece, just free men",
"Because humanity is far from a perfect collective with a perfect memory, and a lot of social achievements get badly wrecked over time due to the actions of single people or interactions with other cultures. So social factors like progressive women's rights effectively vanishes as their parent country loses power or vanishes. Countries get invaded and prejudice and suppression become features of the replacement culture. Others are wiped out by natural disasters. Still others are taken over by totalitarian dictators that stomp on anything that they feel threatens their power. Religion has been a cause too, because many are highly oppressive since their roots are from male-dominated historical societies. There's amazing pictures from Iran from just before the Taliban's insurgency, and women appear to have many very standard civil liberties like driving cars and walking around wearing modern fashion. After the imams took over, all of that disappeared.",
"Not sure by what you mean by “women were able to get rights” but you are wrong and comparing apples to oranges.",
"On top of what people are saying, there were also some things we call rights now that were more of privileges during early America. One major example is voting rights; most women didn’t want them, because it was a privilege afforded to men as part of the draft. It was all interconnected, so unless they wanted all women to be draftable getting the right to vote wasn’t straightforward. I don’t know of many others off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s a few other examples where they struggled to get a “right” that was tied up as something they wouldn’t want",
"We need to understand the background. Most importantly, women were incapable of sustaining themselves financially. Pretty much all jobs required intense physical effort, which women are incapable of. Almost all the jobs women do today were nonexistent in the past. No healthcare, no state education, no services like hairdressers and manicure (except for the very limited aristocracy), no secretaries nor clerks, no machines to operate. Even traditionally female jobs like cooking and sewing were very limited in numbers because nobody could afford to outsource them (most clothes would be made in-house for the family, for example). As such, a woman needed somebody to support her. Thus marriage, which legally obligated a man to support a woman until death do them part. It was an exchange of female child-bearing abilities for male provider ability. A woman could remain independent and own property if she remained unmarried. It was possible for aristocrats who inherited fortunes or widows running successful businesses but otherwise nearly impossible. Sexual rights were a natural consequence of the above. In those times, sex meant pregnancy. There was just no way around it. As such, parents were making sure their daughters aren't going to get pregnant without a man to support her. Remember, women would marry within their teenage years, which means they were \"controlled\" by their parents for actually shorter time than currently. Also, young people are just dumb and easily abusable. We don't let them drink, drive, make serious financial decisions, own guns or make their own choices in almost anything. That was no different at the time of the past. Once married, they were obviously legally obligated to not cheat on their husbands. Lastly, voting rights. Nowadays the state has crept into our lives to totalitarian levels but in the past, people have much more freedom. Your vote, originally, would give you a little bit of control over three main aspects: taxes, the spending of those and foreign affairs (wars mostly). Now, women didn't (in general) make money nor paid taxes. Women did not fight in wars. In such case, why give them a vote over something that only affects men? Now, back to the original question: why would women gain votes in Athens and in the 20th century West? in both cases, women were capable of sustaining themselves financially. In Athens, because they could own slaves and in the West because they could work in the newly established light industries."
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8kukg0 | Why is Jesus white in most depictions of him, when he most likely was brown due to Living in the Middle East? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The painters didn't really care about realism, instead aiming for symbolism and an idealized form of what an attractive person would be. Generally speaking the church was more interested in what was useful than what could be considered historical.",
"For starters, there's plenty of people in the Middle East whom you would call \"white\" by simply looking at them. Secondly, even in the stories he wasn't genetically related to his parents, so there'd be no reason to expect him to resemble them. But, really, it's because the people who made those depictions were predominately white and wanted their religious figures to look white. If you look at paintings Christians and Muslims who are Middle Eastern, Jesus is depicted as much more Middle-Eastern looking."
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8kwas7 | Why do radio stations announce the next songs and then play them in the reverse order? | For example: "Coming up right after the break we got Ed Sheeran, Drake and Rihanna, stay tuned". Then after the commercials they go on to play Rihanna, Drake then Ed Sheeran. Every time it's always the reverse of when they announced the songs. Is there a reason for this? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They announce the most popular songs first so that it grabs your attention and more people keep listening for that song to play, then go to commercial (it's called a teaser so you wait through commercials) then play them in reverse order so you wait for your song to come up. The radio world is all about getting you to listen just a little bit longer. edit: Added aside, they almost always say the name of the artist BEFORE it plays and then the name of the song after; this is so that if you're hoping to hear a new song from X artist, you won't flip channels when you know it's the same damn song you've heard 12 times today already."
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8kwtyi | why are they called Presbyterians and Episcopalians? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basically they are named for how they thought the church should be set up. Episcopalians favored a more hierarchical approach with a bishop in charge of all the presbyters of an area. Presbyterians favored a more collegial approach with all the presbyters gathering together as equals to come to collective decisions."
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8l3yg8 | How the first human beings were able to translate from one language to another. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is all speculative as well... there's no historical records from back then. But, the same way any person not familiar with one language becomes familiar with that language - trial, error, and guidance by someone fluent in said language. Every one of us as a child learned to understand and speak a language they weren't born with the knowledge of. As with children, things like the names for objects are the easiest as you can just point at an object and say the name. Eventually concepts get much more advanced, but learning doesn't happen overnight and it's built off of previous lessons learned.",
"In addition to other's answers: In the worst case, you could raise children among speakers of both languages, and then use the bilingual children to translate stuff.",
"They're called pidgin languages URL_0 They usually start when a trader moving along the coast stops to trade with locals and there's no common tongue. You point to your mouth, then hold up some fancy thing you want to trade. Eventually a few words will become obvious, then an ad hoc grammar can develop. A couple dozen return trips from the traders, and since neither group has been practicing each other's language the pidgin you've developed and used becomes more and more structured, eventually becoming a blend of the original two that's a little easier to pick up on. No one's writing poetry or telling stories in these improvised tongues, just as long as it's good enough to trade this gunpowder for that silk.",
"When I was traveling in countries that didn't speak English or French, my best moments was to communicate through tries, sounds and sign.",
"Time and patience. I'm willing to bet that if you take 2-10 people than don't share a common language and put them together in an isolated place. Given time, be it 1 week or 1 month, they will eventually be able to community. It's about establishing common words.",
"I feel it would be remiss not to post [this classic tumblr response]( URL_0 ) to a very similar question",
"I live in China. Though I speak a few languages, Chinese usually speak only.... chinese. This has put me in the unique position of learning (at the very start) by listening. If 20 different people try to start a conversation with you, or speak the same words whenever you enter an establishment it is safe to assume they mean some form of a greeting. That's how I learned the meaning of Ni Hao. Tap someone on the shoulder give him a pencil and say Ni Hao to him gesturing \"you write this down for me\" et voilà now you know that Ni Hao is written as 你好.",
"Languages evolve like living organisms. Language changes over time. A group speaking the same language, separated over time, will change in slightly different ways. Given enough time, it may be indistinguishable from its cousins. There are three main branches of language. These branches deviated from each other before language formed. Within a branch, all languages share a common ancestor language. As a result, there are many similarities between languages on the same branch. Root words and basic words are the easiest to identify. For example, most Western languages use the root \"amo\" for love, or root sound \"ma\" when referring to mothers. Two groups on the same branch will be able to get the general gist of what the other is saying. If less time has passed, this process will be easier. In addition, and most commonly, they can literally perform pictionary or charades in order to start the process. Point at or draw a cow and say \"cow\" enough, and people will get what you mean.",
"Ever see 13th Warrior? It's a great representation of language learning if you pay attention and start piecing together bits from what you hear and assume context. You know, [Listen!]( URL_0 )",
"They just used people who knew both languages. And you don't need a translator or teacher to learn a language. You just live with or around people that speak it for a few years and figure it out. Language learning doesn't \"turn off\" after you grow older, it's just much easier as a kid.",
"Check out this scene from Dances with Wolves: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"They did it exactly like this. [A scene from William Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth.]( URL_0 )",
"Also, from a mathematical approach. Certain words are used more than others and can sometimes help translate given the context.",
"IANA Liguist but I consider myself to be a language enthusiast. The first instance of language translation is completely lost to history. Modern homo Sapiens appeared at least 50 thousand years ago, though it’s quite possible language evolved long before that. Despite this, we can reference contact between two completely alien languages, in this case Spanish and Taíno. Columbus and his men did what essentially all humans do when they find themselves incapable of crossing linguistic barriers: point at stuff and name it until their shared lexicon allowed them to communicate. Interestingly quite a few English words are derived from Taíno vocabulary, such as hurricane and tobacco. Later in history, explorers would abandon children in the new world for a number of years and return to find fluent bilingual translators."
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8l44z0 | What happens when you renew wedding vows? | I saw this happening in a TV show and I have neither seen nor heard this thing happening. What does it mean to renew vows? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Legally? Nothing. It's just a public display of affection. Wedding vows themselves carry no legal weight in any way.",
"Whatever you want to happen. It's not a legal or religious service like a wedding. So couples who choose to do this make up their own rules. Mostly is a excuse for a party and they'll exchange vows to reaffirm thier love for one another.",
"It doesn't actually mean anything, legally. It's just something that people who have been married for a while sometimes do in order to reaffirm their love and commitment and \\(usually\\) throw a nice party for friends and family. They usually sort of re\\-create a wedding atmosphere and it ends up being a fun, romantic way to celebrate an anniversary. But it's not a legal contract like a marriage is, no forms are being signed, no licenses required, and it's not required by the government, by a religion, or whatever. It's just a good excuse for a couple to reaffirm their partnership and celebrate.",
"Nothing official... it's just way to commemorate the original event. Can be whatever the couple wants it to be, just a way of saying they still love each other, a chance to have an event with friends and family."
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8l4avp | Have other languages changed as dramatically as English has over the last 1000 years? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yep, every living language experiences change, and if you look at writings from a thousand years ago in French, German, etc. you'd have a very hard time reading them even if you understood Modern French or German very well. Different grammar rules, different words, and a lack of standardized spellings meant that languages changed quite a bit as writing became more commonplace \\(and therefore more standardized\\) and each language borrowed from its neighbors or got conquered by its neighbors! And as a fun fact, the biggest change to English actually came with the French/Latin influence from the Norman invasion of 1066, which we call the dividing line between Old English and Middle English."
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8l4li4 | How do documentaries about nature get close-ups/action shots of animals without chasing them away or disturbing fights/intercourse | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're using really really expensive telescopic lenses. A lot of the audio you hear isn't the audio from what you're seeing, sometimes it's from other recordings or at least other equipment because it's too far from the camera. However I have seen some extreme docs where they're using disguises and crazy stuff"
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8l4y6u | What's with the Bible and foreskins? (and circumcision) | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"God had the ancient hebrews circumcise thier sons so they would stand out as god's chosen people and be different than gentiles \\(non\\-jews\\). If that doesn't make sense, well not much from a desert dwelling herder tribal religion really does make sense now a days does it.",
"Like most of these types of actions it was to keep followers healthy. Circumcising lowered infections, pork being “unclean” and not to eat kept them from parasites etc etc"
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8l4yok | What are the main differences between catholics and protestants? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Note: I grew up Catholic with a Catholic mother, but my father's family is Southern Baptist, so I've spent plenty of time attending the Protestant churches as well. I ended up meeting in the middle in joining an Episcopalian Church in college. So that's where my information comes from. The biggest differences between the two are the following: Catholics believe in transubstantiation, meaning the bread and wine of communion actually physically become the body and blood of Christ. Protestants believe that the bread and wine, or in the case of some Protestant faiths the bread and grape juice, is representational and symbolic Catholics believe in intercession, meaning that a priest facilitates communication between the individual and God. The priest is also authorized to hear confession and provide absolution on behalf of God. Protestants believe the individual communicates directly with God and there is no need for a priest for anything, communication, confession, or forgiveness. There are a whole bunch of smaller differences, like sainthood, the veneration of Mary, the concept of a celibate priesthood, the observance of a Liturgical Calendar , and a few other things. But transubstantiation and intercession are the two biggest differences between the two.",
"It depends on the flavor of Protestant, and the timeperiod but here is a partial list: Protestants: * Do not put a single human as the head of the Church most of the time. Many do not even have a hierarchy and instead have a local eldership/council that runs the Church. * Protestants believe in personal connection to God and Personal study of scripture. At the time of the reformation when they first split from the Catholic Church the bible was not allowed to be written in a vernacular language and was instead in Latin or the earlier languages (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic) that it was originally written in. This has changed and Catholic now have bibles in almost all languages. * Protestants believe in having your worship period in a language you can understand. For centuries mass was in Latin, not a vernacular language. This changed in in the 80s or 90s for the Catholic Church. * Many Protestants believe that praying to Saints is idolatry. * Many Protestants believe that baptism requires full immersion of a person who is able to understand what they are doing and that sprinkling or pouring of an infant is invalid. But there are also some Protestant branches that do infant baptism. * Some Protestants have open communion. This means that anyone from any denomination that calls themselves Christian can take communion with them. Catholics have closed communion so only those who can prove that they are Catholic can take communion."
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8l5cg7 | how close are Gaelic/Olde English to Old Norse/ modern Scandinvian languages? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Gaelic and Old English are not closely related languages. Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is from the low (in elevation) early German dialect, from the Western-Proto German dialect. Old Norse is from the Northern Proto-German dialect. Their common ancestor is the original proto-Germanic language. So Old English and Old Norse were cousins. Modern English has moved more apart from Old English because of French and other influences, so Modern English is more a distant cousin of Scandinavian languages, with a shared Great Grandparent. But, interestingly, Norse had a strong influence on Old English *after* Old English was formed because of the Viking invasions and the creation of the Danelaw regions in England. A lot of Norse words, and even some grammatical changes, made it into English that way. Edit: Circling back to Gaelic, some Gaelic words made it into Old English (and even Latin, which found their way into English through there or later French), but there is no direct lineage between Gaelic and English."
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8l5myz | How do nascar/Indie races have some of the highest attendances in sports when they don’t seem all that popular compared to many other sports? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The other comment is mostly correct, racetracks are larger than other sports venues so their stadiums seat more people. Popularity usually takes TV into account. And since more people have access to TV compared to having access to the event venue, TV is usually more important for popularity than attendance is. Also, in NASCAR there's only one venue hosting the race at any time. In team sports there are up to 15 or 16 venues hosting games at the same time because there are 30\\-32 teams in the league.",
"As a dude said in a movie, men love women, but men love cars even more. I must be weird...i love women way more than cars.",
"Because a racetrack is bigger than a football field. More room equals more seats. Also note there are fewer events and ticket prices are lower than many other sports. Total attendance and total revenues are much less than football or basketball."
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8l87lq | What is the difference between a princess & a Dutchess? Why did Meghan Markle become a Dutchess & not a princess? Why did Harry’s title change from Prince to Duke? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Prince/Princess are royal titles reserved for the monarch's family, while Duke/Duchess are titles which can in principle be granted to anyone. In practice, you'd now have to inherit the title because only members of the royal family are given new Dukedoms. Harry is still a Prince because he's still a male-line grandson of the Queen. But on his wedding day the Queen granted him the title Duke of Sussex. That's now his normal form of address since he holds that title in his own right rather than because of his father and grandmother. However, he'll still often be referred to a \"Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex\" or just \"Prince Harry\". Had Harry not been made a Duke, Meghan would have been properly addressed as \"Princess Henry of Wales\". A cynic might suggest that part of the reason for giving Harry the new title on his wedding day was to give Meghan the more sensible title of Duchess of Sussex to use instead (unfortunately Princess Michael of Kent was not so lucky).",
"Meghan *is* a princess of the United Kingdom, since she is married to a prince. She is therefore entitled to the style of \"Royal Highness\". But the word \"princess\" doesn't appear in her title: she will be known as \"Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Sussex\". Likewise, her husband is now \"His Royal Highness The Duke of Sussex\" -- which sounds like a demotion from his original title \"His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales\", but it isn't. There are two different types of prince: one who is the ruler of a principality, and one who is the son or grandson of the monarch. Prince Harry is the latter type: he doesn't rule any principality, he's simply the grandson of the reigning monarch. Harry's father is -- deep breath -- His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, KG, KT, GCB, OM, AK, QSO, PC, ADC, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. Prince Charles is an actual prince; he (in theory, but not in practice) rules over the principality of Wales. As long as Harry didn't get his own peerage, he had \"Prince\" in his title; as soon as he was made a duke on the occasion of his marriage (as is the custom), though, although he was still a prince, the word \"Prince\" was dropped from his title. And so his wife, although by marriage a princess, doesn't get to have \"Princess\" in her title either. Something similar happened to Harry's brother William, who on getting married was made Duke of Cambridge. Also, Prince Andrew is styled His Royal Highness The Duke of York, and Prince Edward is His Royal Highness The Earl of Wessex. Princess Anne, though, doesn't have her own peerage. Originally she was Her Royal Highness Princess Anne of Edinburgh; when her mother became Queen she became simply Her Royal Highness The Princess Anne; when she married she became Her Royal Highness The Princess Anne, Mrs Mark Phillips; and finally, in 1987, she was granted a special title reserved for the eldest daughter of the reigning monarch to become Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal."
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8la8b3 | Why do people who plea guilty in court get time knocked off of their sentence when they still committed the same crime? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Costs the state a whole lot less if they can avoid a trial, guarantees a conviction, etc. It's a form of leniency for admission of guilt and saving resources.",
"Anyone who does know please correct me but I think it's because they cooperate. Instead of wasting time and money on going through the full court case"
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8ld3dn | How do we develop our sense of humor? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Positive reinforcement. As a kid, you’ll see people laughing and try to make them laugh to. As people ignore some of your jokes and laugh a lot at others, you will slowly refine your skill. Just like any other social skill really.",
"I find watching alot of funny shows and comedians help. Also watching many TV shows and movies to come up with great references to funny scenes"
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8lg32w | - what is the difference between freedom of will and freedom of action? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I am free to will you harm but not free to actually harm you. I can will/want whatever I want, that's freedom of will. Expressing that will is an action and is far more limited.",
"Freedom of will is the ability to do otherwise. Given a set of circumstances, if you can do more than one thing, you have free will. Freedom of action is the freedom to do what you want, to assert your will to bring about a desired outcome, not just choosing being arbitrary alternates. Freedom of will: We have ice cream, you can have chocolate or vanilla. Freedom of action: I'm in the mood for pistachio ice cream, and I am going to find some of that."
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8limtg | What are the differences between regionalized, decentralized, and centralized states? | I recently saw [this map]( URL_0 ) on wikipedia and I saw no explanation or examples of how these systems of government differ. They are all supposedly decentralized, with certain responsibilities being removed from the federal state, but to what extent and how they all differ is not explained. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Think about all the services that a government can provide to their population. Now those services can be provided by the federal government or province/state. The more the province/state provide the more the country is decentralised, the more those services are provided by the federal government, the more centralised the country is. For example, here in Canada, the federal government have little direct impact on the everyday lives of the population (to a certain extend). The federal government take care agriculture/fisheries, immigration, defence, inter-provincial infrastructure, public safety, etc. But it's the Provincial government that take care of the health services (hospitals, clinics, ambulance, etc), education, infrastructure inside the province, social services, culture, energy, etc. Compare that to the UK. The Health care system is for the whole country, it's the same for education. It's a more centralised states. The US is in the middle. Both the federal government and states have their hands in health care, but education is a state affair.",
"Centralised vs decentralised (I'm using British spelling) is about how much power the central government is vs how much power the parts of the country have. In a highly centralised country, there is one government for the whole country that makes nearly all the decisions. In a decentralised country, the different parts of the country (e.g. states, provinces, cantons) have their own governments which make most of the decisions themselves, and the government of the country as a wholr is only responsible for a limited number of things such as defence and foreign relations. A related concept is federations vs unitary states. A federation is a country like the USA, where the constitution guarantees that the constituent parts of the country can run themselves, and the federal government is only responsible for things set out in the constitution. A unitary state is where the central government holds all the power. This is where a regionalised state comes in. A country which is a unitary state is not necessarily very centralised. The central government can create autonomous governments for regions of the country. The difference between this and a federation is that the central government still has ultimate power, the regional governments only have the powers that the central government lets them have. The UK is an example of this. It's a unitary state, meaning the UK Parliament in theory holds all the power. But Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own governments which the UK Parliament has given powers to. In theory the UK can overrule or abolish these governments (although it would be politically very difficult)."
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8ljwcc | why is 4 beats per measure so common in music? | Why is it used so much more than 3 or 6 bpm and why is 5 bpm practically non-existent? What's so special about 4? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mostly cultural conditioning. In the west, we prefer 4/4 - and most pop music is written this way. But if you asked someone in another country or time period - a lot of music could written in 3's - which is a waltz. A lot of music is also 8/8 or 6/8 and although this is all divisible, it's *mostly* just a different way of writing and counting within a measure. There are plenty of songs written in 5/4 - like \"15 Step\" by Radiohead and 7/4 like \"Money\" by Pink Floyd. Anything not a 2, 3 or 4 (and isn't divisible by them) is generally considered an abstract time signature and are naturally harder to follow. They're not as good for dancing. As an FYI, BPM is beats per minute, not beats per measure, and refers to the speed of the song rather than it's time signature.",
"It’s a really good middle ground between having enough beats to explore the chord you’re on on the progression while also being a small enough number that our brains can easily keep track of it. It’s also really nice because it has clear subdivisions they are also small and convenient to use. The problem with five is that it’s a bit long, so our brains don’t keep track quite as well with where we are, especially given the way that we use “down-beats” in music. We alternate between “down-beats” and the “back-beat” as a way of providing a sort of constant in the music to keep us grounded. This is the alternating between the deep bass drum and the snare in most rock. In 4/4, the length of time between the down and up beats will be constant (unless you’re fiddling around with the meter), which helps keep the music grounded. In 3/4 or 5/4, there’s no way to, within a single measure, have an amount of time between down and up beats that is equal. Think of a waltz, which would be in 3/4, and how it has a down-up-up feel that gives it a nice airiness."
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8lqiux | Why is it okay for women to have private gyms, but it’s not okay for men to have them? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are men only gyms. Boxing clubs are the most common. They are just less common, or at least less public than the women's because they are not as socially accepted at the moment."
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8lsa32 | Why do companies have awkwarkly gratuitous celebrity placement in adverts? (think: Lost In Translation) | I understand famously pretty women advertising cosmetics or notoriously 'manly' men advertising trucks. But I saw an advertisement today with Drew Barrymore for Crocs and Bruce Willis for a central European off-brand Red Bull. What gives? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It grabs people’s attention, and advertising only works if people pay attention to it. When I taught English in Japan in the late ‘90’s, there was a commercial with Leonardo DiCaprio driving a truck, squeezing some kind of energy paste into his mouth. My female students were *obsessed* with this commercial, and would regularly ask me to quote DiCaprio’s line in the commercial (I can’t even remember what it was, because it was so banal). I don’t know what impact the ad had on energy paste sales but I bet it was positive."
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8lt99v | Why is the concept of men's rights so controversial? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because a lot of the \"men's rights\" movement are about \"equality\" through controlling/punishing women -- for example, when it comes to custody rights often a portion of what the Men's Rights movement wants is to be able to take the custodial mother to court for not doing what the father tells her is OK (i.e. \"we could not reach an agreement on (Child Issue), and she did what she wanted anyway, I want legal recourse so she stops doing the thing we didn't agree to\"). It's possible to point out iniquity without asserting the \"men's rights\", that is very much a codeword for a certain group of people that you have pointed out you don't want to be associated with."
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8ltlo6 | How did chicken eggs become a staple in western breakfasts, and when did that start? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Almost all breakfast foods have something in common: they can be cooked quickly with little preparation. This is important for the first meal of the day. Eggs are the ultimate example of this: they are high in protein and take about two minutes to cook.",
"It is primarily because they can be prepared fairly quickly, and are generally gathered early in the morning making them ready on hand. Other common breakfasts were actually leftovers from the night before, and that eventually morphed into the breakfast dishes of: Frittatas, Omelettes, and Hashes which were created by adding eggs to the leftovers."
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8ltpu1 | If someone flips and makes a plea deal, what's keeping them from changing their story after sentencing? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nothing, but very often those plea deals are contingent on giving testimony of a specific type against another person. If they refuse to give testimony, then the deal is invalidated."
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8ltyd1 | Gangstalking. What exactly is gangstalking, and what about it is fact and fiction? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Gangstalking is a particular manifestation of paranoid schizophrenia. Specifically, that \"everybody is out to get me\". The internet has enabled paranoid schizophrenics to network, sharing and reinforcing their delusion. This has resulted in a fairly standardized presentation with shared terminology and perceived tactics. The \"targets\" of gangstalking believe that they are the target of a *vast* conspiracy. So vast that literally every person they see or talk to is a member. This conspiracy expends vast amounts of time and money to, say, beam intrusive thoughts into their heads with top secret technology; frame them for crimes; break into their homes to tamper with things; and generally annoy them in extremely petty ways. For example, it's common to believe that multiple people will pass them, each saying one syllable of a slur. Here's a \"comic\" that explains gangstalking from the perspective of a victim: [Targ the Target]( URL_0 ). Edit: Because a lot of people have been confused, I want to be clear. *Targ the Target* is not a parody or a description of the condition from the outside. It's written by a woman who suffers from the delusion, and is 100% serious. Targ appears to be a composite of herself and other sufferers.",
"Gangstalking is when a group of people stalk an individual. Probably, someone at some point has actually been gangstalked. But most people who think they're being gangstalked are actually [experiencing symptoms of a mental illness]( URL_0 ), like paranoid schizophrenia.",
"Ok, so I have an acquaintance who is posting about gang stalking on Facebook, and I'm wondering what I should do. He's unfriended all his real friends due to them \"being part of the street theatre\" , so I'm kinda the only one left. How do I tell someone that his posts are signs of paranoid schizophrenia and that he needs help, without making him think I'm part of the conspiracy?",
"Wolves gangstalk. It's taking turns to harass a thing until it wears them down, but because you're taking turns you don't get worn down. The fictional part others have described perfectly.",
"The Last Podcast on the Left has a really good episode on it. Basically the idea is that you get a lot of people to do a variety of things to make it seem like everyone's out to get you. The goal is to make you look/feel crazy. It can be done in a variety of ways like individuals following you, groups of people not-so-subtly whispering about you, etc. The entire point is that it's a lot of people involved. When it comes to fact vs. fiction, well, what's more likely: there's a conspiracy to make you look crazy or that you're just paranoid?",
"The only event even close to gangstalking is the frenzy of journalists and photographers that harass celebrities. These paranoids are simply projecting their own fears onto ordinary actions. They'll complain about emergency vehicles, messages in licence plates, passersby clearing their throat, mailmen, delivery people. They think the weird looks they get from the public when they're acting weird occured before their weird behaviour. Really, anything that you or I would consider slightly annoying or beneath notice is evidence of organized harassment. I realize that people could be more sympathetic to mental illness, but when you're stopped on the street by someone angrily accusing you of sniffing at them, among other things, and shoving a cell camera in your face... see how generous and accepting you feel then.",
"Gangstalking is the thinking that those around you are working together to abuse you or make you look crazy. Some people believe it is real and some believe it's part of mental illness. People who believe they are being gangstalked think that those who are doing it really want to make them upset or make them look bad. They believe that a lot of people are involved and that the people work together to hurt them. Sometimes they believe the people receive payment or entertainment for hurting them. What makes gangstalking believable to some people is that individuals with mental illness are sometimes treated very poorly by others. Some people have very strong opinions about how they should live their life. Some people also like to gossip, talk, and speculate about why the person is ill. When the mentally ill person encounters these behaviors, gossip, and opinions they become concerned that the people are trying to harm them or assassinate their character."
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8lw9gf | Where is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory supposed to be based? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I always assumed it was based on Cadbury's Bournville factory...Birminghams slum housing where Charlie lives surrounding the grandeur of the factory. It would have been a place Roald Dahl would have most certainly been to at some point in his life.",
"According to spark notes, > · An unnamed city; a small wooden house on the edge of a great city; a fabled chocolate factory I'd argue that the author Roald Dahl probably left the location ambiguous, so that the reader might believe it's not in some far away place."
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8lzc45 | What exactly do courtroom artists do, and why are they a part of some trials? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Especially in high profile cases people want to know what's going on. Nowadays if become more common to televise events. But before this was the case Judges often banned media like pictures and video in thier courts. So courtroom artists would sketch parts of the precedings for newspapers to use.",
"I recently watched an interview of a court artist explaining their role and why it's important even though they are televised/cameras sometimes allowed in certain court rooms: There's emotions and other things that only an artist can capture.. while a lens can only pick up so Much at once, an artist is able to fit the whole court room on a small canvas if they choose and can tell a whole story. Although she did say that the business was dying of a little.."
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8m1jod | why is the national anthem played before sporting events? How did this become tradition? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is almost exclusively a US thing. For European (and commonwealth +other) nations, national anthems are only played for meetings between national teams. It's considered a bit over the top to play it for non-national-team meetings in all the countries I've lived. The almost ubiquitous adoption at US sporting events happened slowly over time. There is a record of TSSB bring played at a game in Boston in the 1860s and again at the 1918 world series. But I think it was the 1950s when they started to roll it out more regularly.. as stadia got sound systems.",
"Because these sportspeople are representing a country in the sport they play. And to show the viewers which nation is represented they hold up a flag and play the national anthem.",
"In the US it's because the govt actually pays sporting events to bump up the \"Patriotism\" in order to get more recruits for the military. So basically propaganda.",
"Its a mix of nationalistic war mongering, patriotism, and government propagansa. The practice, as far as I can figure, started with base ball, where the Star spangled banner was played before it was the national anthem. From there, it became a shoe of support during world wars 1 and 2. Post WW2, the NFL commissioner wanted the new tradition to be kept so that Americans never forgot the service of those in the military. Sound systems meant that bands no longer had to be hired to play it, and it became a cheap and effective way of reassuring patriotism, esp in the days of McCarthy. Nowadays it's partly government propaganda. John McCain authored a congressional report detailing how much Congress spent at professional sporting events promoting patriotism to encourage military enlistment. The practice of bringing reenlistment ceronies, homecomings and more to the field started as a way to encourage enlistment post 9/11 because there was a shortage of available military personnel. It dovetailed nicely with the already existing practices and encourages surging nationalism, which reinforces nativism. URL_0"
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8m4xgn | What is the difference between an ocean and a sea? | You always hear about "sailing the seven seas", so are oceans also seas, but seas aren't necessarily oceans? Edit: The reason I asked this is because Google says a Sea is usually a body of water that touches a landmass, but we don't call it The Pacific Sea when you go to the beach in California. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Seas are geographic locations of the oceans where land and ocean meet. There are more than 7 seas. Our oceans have general boundaries, but ultimately it's difficult to really tell where one ends and another begins. Our Earth has 1 ocean, we just geographically call areas of this 1 ocean: Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Antarctic.",
"Generally seas are enclosed, or semi enclosed. And salt water. The Salton Sea in California is basically a huge lake, but it’s saltwater so it’s considered a sea. The Mediterranean Sea is semi enclosed, as it only had one small outlet to the Atlantic Ocean. An ocean is one of the larger, globally circulated bodies of water. Basically the difference is size",
"Many people use the terms \"ocean\" and \"sea\" interchangeably when speaking about the ocean, but there is a difference between the two terms when speaking of geography (the study of the Earth's surface). Seas are smaller than oceans and are usually located where the land and ocean meet. Typically, seas are partially enclosed by land.",
"\"The Sea\" is the open, interconnected salt-water expanse of water surrounding the surface of the Earth. \"Oceans\" are partically separated expanses of the Sea, named differently for ease of navigation. Because we have also colloquially referred to any salt-water expanse as a sea (Sea of Galilee, Mediterranean Sea, etc), the larger term of \"The Sea\", and even \"The Seven Seas\" has fallen out of favor. That said, the Seven Seas was not even original to the world oceans, which Mesopotamian and Roman references found for the term."
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8m80jo | How does guilt work? | I understand what guilt is, but why do people feel guilty about different matters? Apart from attributing it to social norms, are there other factors? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It’s your society imposing its values on to you, what you’ve experienced in your life and then didn’t get rewarded for (or your parents/family made you feel ashamed about) throughout your life. And those values are yours since you’ve been indoctrinated into a set of thinking."
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8m9oiq | How is it ok for the USA to try to force other nations to denuclearize even though we maintain a nuclear arsenal that is capable of destroying the world. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nobody wants anyone to have nukes, they're bad news *but* once you get some, you can't really give them up as long as somebody else has them - it's sort of a \"Mexican Standoff\" where safety & peace is assured by the fact that nobody with nukes will fire them first because they know everyone else that has them will fire back. This all gets *much* more complicated when you have somebody new trying to join \"nuke club, *especially* if it's an unstable country like North Korea or Iran. So the nuclear powers do their *damnedest* to stop everyone else from getting nukes - either through friendly diplomacy (\"we'll protect you if anyone fires nukes at you\"), stern diplomacy (\"we won't ship you any food if you keep this up\") or outright threats (\"we'll invade your fucking country if you don't stop now\"). What makes it \"OK\"? It's not like there's any laws that all countries have to obey - it just boils down to what you can do without making everyone else so pissed at you that they're going to attack you. Most of the world is OK with nobody else getting nukes, making it OK for the US (and the rest of Nuke Club) to stop others from developing them.",
"We have signed onto denuclearization and test ban treaties and have complied with them. We have dismantled hoards of nuclear weapons. It isn't the US trying to force countries to denuclearize, it's the international community that recognizes dangerous regimes that support terrorism and threaten their neighbors that pressure them to denuclearize.",
"The US isn't trying to \"force other nations to denuclearize\", certainly not in general. The US is trying to entice North Korea to denuclearize, but that's a very specific situation. Fewer nuclear weapons is a laudable goal, but the more pressing goal is that nuclear weapons should not be used arbitrarily. The US has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons, and a correspondingly huge and careful control system to make sure they are not lost, stolen or used improperly. NK has a few nuclear weapons, like India or Israel, but it lacks a careful control system for them, having an absolute dictator is a problem for a nuclear power. That's also the problem with Iran having them.",
"Realistically the more countries that have nukes, the greater the chance of one country using them and kicking off nuclear war, especially with unstable countries like NK or Iran."
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8mc28j | What makes killing between countries 'legal' during war? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"By virtue of not being illegal. A soldier following legal orders to kill someone is committing what is called justified homicide. This also covered legal executions, legal euthanasia, and self-defense. The international community agrees to this so that after a war you don't have millions of people tried for murder.",
"*Murder* is defined as unlawful killing (which can be mitigated by self-defense, etc). If a state-of-war exists between two countries, then the killing becomes lawful because both parties have agreed to the hostilities.",
"Killing is only illegal if there is a law banning it, and it only matter if a government is capable of enforcing punishment for said law violations. The status of war justifies killing for your own soldiers, and the laws of your enemy do not matter as they cannot enforce them upon your men."
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8mdw4u | Amish are famous for barn-raising, but how often do they actually need to raise one? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Not often, it's just an interesting sight to see a hundred men build a barn in a day instead of the usual three men taking thirty days. Since they're not paying for the labor, they can pull of the brute force build that a typical construction firm cant.",
"They will also do other construction outside their own community. My father in law had the Amish build his garage out in the country. The quality of carpentry was exceptional.",
"Most barns last a long time, especially built in the old ways. Our barn is rough cut logs and has been around for over 100 years and it is still going strong."
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8mej3j | In parts of India where cows are worshipped, what do they think about milk? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"As an offering from the animal that is partaken with respect, after first offering some to the gods.",
"Saying cows are \"worshipped\" is a bit incorrect. They are *revered*, and one of the reasons for that is specifically because they provide milk."
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8mh2p7 | Why a teddy "BEAR" and not another animal? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"If I remember right, it's because of Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt. The story goes he was out hunting (as an avid hunter, he did a lot of that. He's why we have national parks in the US), and his hunting party came upon a bear cub in a tree. Teddy refused to shoot it, because it wasn't sporting. That story got around, the president hunter's mercy, and people started making teddy bears based on the tale. That's not even close to the coolest story about Teddy Roosevelt. Check out the story of him getting shot, then continuing his campaign speech. Or even more entertaining is the time he ran into bigfoot.",
"It's a reference to President Theodore \"Teddy\" Roosevelt. The story goes that Roosevelt was out hunting. The other members of the hunting party had rounded up a bear and tied it to a tree, and invited Roosevelt to shoot it. He refused, saying this was unsportsmanlike, and this gave rise to a political cartoon in the Washington Post. This cartoon was seen by a toymaker called Morris Michtom, who was inspired by it to design and make a toy stuffed bear. He got Roosevelt's permission to use the name \"Teddy\" (even though Roosevelt himself hated that name), and the toy was such a huge success that Michtom founded the Ideal Toy Company."
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8mkvwb | why indigenous ancestry is a source of pride in the US, but a source of shame in Latin America? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"I can't speak for America but in Canada it was always a source of shame. Something people hid. Education would be the major change. The country started teach about their part in our history it was celebrated more and more. Now people are proud of the rich shared history.",
"The reason people claim it in the United States is because of the legacy of affirmative action. Being of Native American heritage helps one claim all kinds of benefits from college scholarships to workplace positions all for the sake of diversity. In general white skin is favored worldwide, but in the United States, you get benefits for being Native American, meaning more people will come forward",
"Umm people with dark skin are looked down upon in the USA too.... All around the world light skin is favored and in places like SE Asia it is blatantly favored. Google whitening cream. In much of Mexico and South America there are plenty of plenty of people proud of their heritage. Racism exists in all countries."
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8mmblv | Did the Greeks look at the gods as actual beings or more like representations of different elements of the world? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Herodotus recounted actions of deities as if they were real entities and not fictional personifications of natural forces. For instance: > The Scythians who plundered the temple were punished by the goddess with the female sickness, which still attaches to their posterity. I seem to recall some more direct intervention accounts, but I'm not finding them quickly."
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8mmk3k | what is male privilege | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"privilege in that context is used the same way it is in \"white privilege\". It means something that can be taken away, not necessarily something 'given'. So an easy example of male privilege is being far far less likely to be assaulted when travelling alone or at night. That safety is privilege that many women don't have. You can sort of move it from there into a variety of more clear cut areas (like catcalling, objectification, assault and sexual assault rates) to more grey areas (like wage gaps and rape cases). but basically it is things we as men don't need to worry about by default, while women often do.",
"A woman's worst threat is a male. A males worst threat is heart disease. - Louis C.K., ironically enough."
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8mnwv5 | How much does a guilty criminal confess for his/her lawyer? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on the person really. Some people will admit things and let us do our jobs. Other think they only need to outsmart their own lawyers and the issues will go away, because they think the prosecution and judge won't care for some reason. A lot of them spend much of the time trying to fool us or convince us, and get upset when we point out obvious flaws in their stories. Most people will tell a distorted version of the truth, which contains both admissions and twists to make it 'excusable'. Of course what they think is 'excusable' is often totally different to what the law thinks.",
"If you want the best possible defense from your lawyer, don't admit your crime to them. It's up to the state to prove you guilty, not your lawyer to prove you innocent. So keep your trap shut. A defense attorney cannot lie to the court. Even though you are paying them, they are still an officer of the court.",
"You tell the lawyer everything because speech between you and your lawyer is privileged and cannot under nearly every circumstance be used against you. Lieing in court is a good way to end up in jail for perjury."
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8msouk | did fracking cause increased earthquakes in Oklahoma or not? If not why has there been more earthquakes then usual? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The key problem in this issue is of terminology that's confusing the general public, confounded by shitty reporting on one side and deliberately misleading reporting on the other, paired with general confusion as fracking in different areas/countries can actually be a substantially different process, and thus have substantially different results (e.g. fracking in Canada vs. the US). Put bluntly; fracking **is not** the cause of the earthquakes. Instead, improper disposal of the fracturing fluid *associated with fracking* (and other oil/natural gas extraction processes) is generally at fault. Most of the media glosses over this and (incorrectly) blames fracking, while the other half of the media (e.g.[ Breitbart]( URL_0 )) jumps in when scientists correct the media, and mischaracterize the corrections that the scientists make (i.e. \"fracking doesn't cause earthquakes, but improper disposal at those sites and other oil/natural gas extraction sites can\") into something they can sell to their readers (i.e. \"fracking doesn't cause earthquakes\").",
"Earthquakes have been induced by human activity in Nevada, Oklahoma, Arkansas and elsewhere. In Arkansas teh number of small earthquakes reduced after injection of water into wells in seismically active areas was stopped."
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8mvpc3 | Why stockings are considered a necessary part of business attire for women? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Bare legs for men or women is often seen as highly casual and therefore inappropriate for the workplace. This is why shorts and kilts are normally banned for men, and why women are often encouraged to wear pantyhose or stockings. In some highly conservative workplaces women may even be required to wear them.",
"It's not necessary everywhere, but in the places where it is the reason is tradition. It's like men wearing ties. They serve no real purpose but people have been wearing them for generations."
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8n5ktp | why is it ok to pray to statues and pictures of Jesus if there’s a commandment against graven images? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The commandment is to have no other God's not no pictures, in Catholicism. Islam forbids images because they worry about exactly what has happened in the Catholic Church before where the symbols and pictures became more....up front important for lack of a better way of putting it. Can't say it's a bad idea, just think it's a bit of a harsh punishment."
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8n6eki | The difference between imagination and creativity. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I have an active imagination, I can see characters described in a book, I can easily suspend disbelief when watching a film. I can imagine complex things, and visualise how they will look. Creativity is turning the above into reality, which on a small scale I can, but artists and engineers thrive on this process as do programmers, and other creative types.",
"Creativity is being creative, and/or creating something, more so on the physical spectrum. Imagination is more imaginary based and tends to describe non-physical creations. Stories, music, ideas, etc. Just my opinion tho",
"By definition there is a difference, imagination is the ability to form something in your mind that doesn't exist to any senses, while creativity is the ability to utilise your imagination to create something physical"
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8n6y40 | how come we are told that flat shoes or ballet pumps in women causes foot problems, but it doesn't seem to in men? | I have read this numerous times but it makes no sense to me why. Is this real or a myth, why does it exist, and if it is true, why? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Women's \"flats\" are *really* flat. They tend to not have much cushion in the sole and not much in the way of arch support. This is what causes foot problems. Men's dress shoes may not be the most comfortable in the world, but they are more cushioned and have more arch support (and a wider toe box, which I'm jealous of). In addition, they tend to be the type of shoes that one wears with socks, which may not be the case for women's shoes.",
"I don’t suppose there’s much research on men in ballet flats. Seriously though, men’s dress shoes still cater to the natural curvature of the foot and provide shock protection from walking on hard surfaces, just not to the extent of an athletic shoe. Women’s shoes are most often completely flat, with no arch support or padding and a toe box that restricts natural movement. The average women’s flats are about as thick as a men’s insole.",
"Men, as a rule, don't wear flats. Their shoes, even dress shoes, tend to be more functional while women's shoes tend to be more ornamental. A \"flat\" man's shoe is going to be sturdier and clunkier than a woman's, and have thicker soles, more cushioning and better arch support. Women's flats are often little more than slippers with slightly reinforced bottoms."
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8nagty | What are the oldest religions we know of and what did they believe? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Sumerian religion is probably the oldest organised religion that we have conclusive evidence for. The epic Gilgamesh contains some details of the Sumerian beliefs including a heaven and afterlife with a pantheon of gods. URL_0",
"You'd have to decide if you want organized religions or just religion first. Humans don't seem to let religious ideals go. There are still people who believe in what we think is probably our first religious belief([Animism]( URL_0 )) and it's the root of most every other religion around simply because it's so basic. Religion as a concept evolves and religions as human belief systems develop from that concept. Hinduism is generally seen the oldest organized religion still practiced.",
"This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Counter-intuitively, the concept of \"religion\" is a very modern one, and has only really been around for a few hundred years -- and even so it's a Western idea. This caused problems in 1853, when America forced Japan at gunpoint to guarantee, among other things, freedom of religion -- even the word didn't exist in Japan. Before then, nobody actually identified as \"Buddhist\" or \"Taoist\" or \"Confucionist\". Sure, people worshipped and followed certain teachings on morality and ethics, but the idea of separating out \"religious\" ideas from everything else made no sense. \"Religious\" wars were really not about religion: they were ethnic conflicts over things like land, access to resources, and so on; but since each ethnic group had its own set of gods telling it what to do, they were often *described* in terms of religious conflicts. If by \"religion\" you mean \"concepts of supernatural deities\", as far as we can tell that's as old as humanity itself: some of the oldest human skeletons that have been found appear to have been cremated, which suggests some kind of ritual (either that, or it suggests that early humans simply discovered that cremation solved the problem of bodies just rotting and attracting flies and disease). Humans seem always to have wanted explanations for why things happen the way they do. In recent centuries, we have the technology and the experience to be able to investigate our environment more closely. Before then, none of that existed, so humans had to guess. The oldest \"religious\" artefact so far found is the Lion-man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel, a carving of a human with a lion's head found in a cave in Germany: it's dated to around 38,000 BC. Nobody knows for sure, but it may be evidence of shamanism, the practice of entering an altered state of conscience in order to communicate with the spirit world. Entering an altered state, by the way, is easy: simply take a psychoactive drug. There are many naturally-occurring substances that might cause somebody to start hallucinating; with no clue about how the human brain actually works (even today we are barely beginning to understand it), these early humans had no choice but to conclude that their hallucinations were real."
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8nd3ii | How did the very first sets of global traders and explorers sailing into a foreign land learn to communicate with its people? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Drinking and whoring. There are always pubs and brothels by the ports. Bartering items for alcohol and sex don't require words to be spoken, and both are good places for learning words, phrases, and cultural norms. Complete immersion in a foreign culture allows you to pick up conversational fluency in a relatively short time. Once the basics are established, learning about what goods are desired or offered in a port becomes the basis for further trade. Soon, offices are established, and emissaries are posted to look after the shippers' interests during their absences. They teach others, and soon there can be thriving trade between the cultures. ...or they get slaughtered as soon as they land, and no trade is ever established. That happened as well. But the short answer really begins and ends with boozing and whoring.",
"As a corollary to r/craic_d, I'd actually say the real answer is **children**. Children are born with an uncanny ability to learn any language they're exposed to. Which means that if you're a foreigner in a strange country, and you have a child, the child is almost certainly going to be able to speak both your language (learned at home, by being around you) and the local language (learned by being exposed to everyone else they might encounter in their daily life). Pretty quickly after explorers turn up (in part because of that drinking and whoring), you're going to have a generation of kids who speak both languages. Which means they can translate. Additionally, where multiple peoples' territory overlaps, you're going to end up with a few kids born to parents from different groups. They're going to speak both their mom's Algonquian and their dad's Mohegan (just to make some random examples, I have no idea if these languages existed near each other at all). If you're a trader who's already met the Mohegans and wants to get into Algonquian territory, you find those kids and get them to translate for you."
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8ndam5 | How did the Native Americans deal with the insects? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Aside from natural insect repellent and a higher tolerance, population density kept things manageable. And depending on the tribe, nomadic lifestyle did as well. Cities tend to have insects because we create good habitats. Food waste and feces, is home to a lot of bugs. Standing water in pots, cest pools, puddle in agricultural felds all create mosquito breeding grounds. A tribe that is nomadic and lives in an area for a few days or weeks will be gone before the mosquito population grows big enough. A tribe living in a southwest desert might be more stationary but stagnant puddles don't last long. Depends on the tribe, geography, and local weather.",
"When I worked up in Northern Ontario one trick I learned from the local (edit) First Nations guys was to sit in the smoke of the fire and get all smokey. Get it in your hair and your clothes and the mosquitos don't bother you as much.",
"Mud works. Sage works (white sage better than common). In Canada, First Nations is almost universal among FN persons. Indigenous or Other are Non-FN terms. Tolerance is certainly an issue where mosquitos and flies are concerned, but what nobody has mentioned are the effects of a modern diet and the chemicals released through sweat and skin. Malaria has been documented for close to 2,000 years; FN and Native Americans weren't immune entirely, but certainly location was a factor. Documented studies have shown that the Osceola Tribe in Florida has more resistance to Malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses than the Cherokee Tribe members. In addition, mosquitoes are attracted to CO2, moisture, the amount of iron in the blood, and some studies have shown that mosquitoes are attracted to certain blood types more than others. A person with A-Negative blood is less of a target than someone with O-Positive, for example. And while O-Pos is the most common blood type in the world, it is relatively (on a per-capita basis) rare among NA/FN populations. So, a NA tribe that lived primarily along a coastline or a waterway and ate a diet heavy on fish and less venison would be relatively unpalatable to most mosquitoes, whereas a Tribe like the Cherokee who at mostly warm blooded mammals like deer, rabbit, and squirrel, would be larger targets. Moving along to flies, as previously mentioned, Native Americans tended to not be in one spot for long periods of time. And the agrarian tribes like the Cherokee who basically only had winter/summer locations used every last bit of meat, sinew, intestine, organ, and bone...resulting in less breeding ground for flies. There were some, but not nearly as many and, also as previously mentioned, there were no major population centers."
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8nmmv9 | How did K-Pop become so popular? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are actually a number of good documentaries on this exact subject. It's easy to say it's catchy, crowd pleasing, the idols meticulously guard their images, etc but the simplest, (maybe too simple) answer is: 1) It's highly corporate and there exists a large, well supported infrastructure for identifying, developing, marketing, selling, and supporting various K-pop groups. Much like European soccer has infrastructure and developmental leagues decades ahead of their American counterparts, the Korean idol industry is very well developed. 2) The government actively supports the industry. It's not just music, locally produced movies and television are also very popular outside of Korea and the government considers this cultural influence a very important part of their soft power in Asian and abroad. Korea has a population somewhere between Myanmar and Kenya, but in Esports, television, movies, music,etc it punches well above its weight. This isn't an accident. Somewhat relevant to this: I always find discussions of cultural appropriation, getting upset about kimonos, sushi, qipaos etc mildly ridiculous. Somewhere in Seoul entire departments filled with middle aged bureaucrats are trying their damndest to get Americans (and Chinese, and Japanese, and anyone else) to eat more Kimchi, watch Korean cartoons, read Korean comics, watch Kpop videos buy Kpop music, dress in Korean clothes, anything to make non Koreans appreciate Korean culture. Simultaneously their relatives (at least a few of them) in America are getting upset because white people are making Kalbi inauthentically. It's... Ugh."
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8np6hz | What's the reason behind of 666 being the number of the beast? | Both biblical and anthropological,if posible. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It comes in The Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible. The writer, known to theologians as John the Divine, describes a vision he had of the end of the world. This involved the overthrow of Israel's enemies and the coming of a new age in which God would rule for all of eternity. Chapter 13 talks about two \"beasts\", one rising from the sea and one rising from the earth. The second beast is described as having horns like a lamb and a voice like a dragon's, and he puts a mark on every person's forehead or hand without which they cannot buy or sell anything. And in verse 18, it says this: > Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is... and then a number. This book is an example of \"apocalyptic literature\", which was very popular around that time. Rome ruled over Judaea, but not all Jews were very happy about the arrangement: there were actual terrorist groups fighting to free Israel from their Roman oppressors. Apocalyptic literature was often written to encourage these efforts, so it was a dangerous thing to be caught with: for that reason it was written in religious metaphors as a kind of a code, so that to the Romans it would look like the incoherent ravings of a religious nutcase. Unfortunately, nearly 2,000 years later, most of these metaphors are lost on us. This verse is basically saying, \"If you can understand the code, you'll figure out what the beast represents. Here's a clue.\" The text was written in Koine Greek, the \"ordinary\" Greek (spoken by ordinary people, not poets and philosophers) of the 1st century. Like Latin, Greek used letters to represent numbers. Most manuscripts that exist give the number as χξϛ, which represents 666; the oldest manuscripts, though, give it as χιϛ, which represents 616, and may be the original number of the beast. As it turns out, though, that may not be significant. The best theory is that if you convert 616 into Hebrew -- which also uses letters for numbers -- you can get NRO QSR. Most vowels are not usually written in Hebrew (readers have to just know what the vowels are), so this represents \"Nero Qaisar\", i.e. \"Nero Caesar\" in Latin. 666 also works, though: that gives you NRON QSR, for \"Neron Qaisar\", which has \"Nero\" with an extra grammatical ending. Most theologians think that Revelation was written after the death of Nero and during the reign of Domitian. There are at least three possibilities here: 1. Although it uses the future tense, this actually refers to past events. This is quite a common thing: prophetic literature would often start with a list of things that had already happened, but in the future tense, so that readers would think: \"Yes, that came true, this came true, this thing also came true, so the rest will also come true!\" 2. There's an extra layer of obfuscation: having figured out the 616 or 666 refers to Nero, the reader has to understand that Nero is actually a coded reference to Domitian. 3. There was a widespread belief at the time that Nero hadn't actually died and would return in the future; or even that Nero had died, but would return from the dead. EDIT: Thank you, kind people, for the gold. I never thought this post would get this response... EDIT 2: I'm doing my best to respond to as many comments as I can, but there are now over 1700 of them. But just to address one point here: My explanation here is only one of several theories, and there are several problems with it. However, as far as historians and theologians are able to tell, this explanation does seem to be the best fit, so it's the one that's most commonly accepted.",
"I've read a bunch of comments regarding Nero, some of which were very thorough, so no need to rehash that. I'd like to share a different interpretation that I heard a year or two back from a Catholic seminarian. Numbers in general hold a lot of significance in the Bible. The number 7 represents perfection, so 6 can be taken to represent imperfection, being one less than 7. According to this seminarian \\(I am by no means a scholar in any form of Hebrew\\), ancient Hebrew did not have superlatives like, for example, \"holiest\". Rather, you would repeat the word three times, such as \"holy, holy, holy\" \\(something we still say at mass today\\). Thus, the number 666 could be taken to mean something like \"the most imperfect\", as opposed to God who is the most perfect. I want to state very clearly that I can't vouch for the validity of this explanation, but I personally found it very interesting so I thought to share it. Maybe someone else here could provide more clarity.",
"In Hebrew, there is thing about letters representing numbers 1-10 10-90 100-900. Somebody wrote a Bible, while being angry at current emperor of Roman Empire, Nero, whose name spelling represents 666 (or sometimes 616). Of course he could just say \"Nero's devil\", and got to get creative. More and fully explained here: URL_0",
"There’s also a musical connection to that number as well. An interval of 6 semitones produces a tritone which is the most dissonant of intervals and called the devils interval a long time ago. Used in metal music and horror movie scores to create tension. An interval of 7 semitones is a perfect fifth and sounds beautiful by contrast.",
"Fun fact OP: If you have 1 of every denomination of metal coin from the Japanese, that's a 1, a 5, a 10, a 50, a 100, and a 500 in yen. And that adds up to... 666.",
"There are various interpretations. In Christian theology there are four main views regarding revelation: 1. Futurism - this is the belief that Revelation refers to future events yet to happen. This is the most common view among dispensationalists which are highly prevelent in American evangelicalism. 2. Preterism - this is the view that Revelation refers either partially (Partial Preterism) or fully (Full Preterism) to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Full Preterism is considered a heresy as it denies a future ressurection. Partial Preterism is probably the most common view among non-evangelicals such as Reformed, Lutheran, and even some Catholics. 3. Historicism - this is the historic view of many Reformers such as John Calvin and Martin Luther. It is held today by a small amount usually in Covenanter and confessional Lutheran circles. This is the view that Revelation does not refer to simultaneous events but rather spans over the course of history: from its writing to whenever the Second Coming happens. 4. Idealism - This is the view that Revelation doesn't refer to historic events (strictly speaking) but rather is a vision showing the struggles of good and evil on a cosmic scale. This is becoming more popular. Originally really only liberal theologians held to it but a more serious version is held by conservative scholars like Vern Poythress, G.K. Beale, and Joel Beeke. It my opinion, this is the correct view. Each has a different view of what 666 means. For the Futurist, it is a yet to be meaningful name that will be revealed in the future. E.g. we don't know what it means but when the end comes we will. That's why American evangelicals tend to be obsessed with the number and trying to find it everywhere. A partial preterist believes that it refers to Nero. This is the exegesis given by the top comment here. Should be noted that PPs mostly (with some exception) believe the Book of Revelation, being about the fall of Jerusalem, was written before said event so it was written pre-70 A.D. The other three views by and large believe the book was written in the 90s A.D. A historicist believes the number refers to the Papal office in Rome and he who holds the office. The fall of the beast in Revelation marks a future event when the Pope will be defeated. An idealist believes 666 does not refer a single person specifically but marks sin and evil in its various manifestations on earth. 7 is a number of perfection on scripture, with threefold meaning fullness (a superlative e.g. God being called Holy Holy Holy in Isaiah 6). 6 is a corruption of 7. 666, threefold 6, is the fullness of curruption, sin, evil, etc. So in the end, what 666 means depends on one's school of eschatology.",
"Biblically it is in Revelation. Revelation is what is called apocalyptic literature. It is a distinctly Jewish thing. The cultural references and codes of numbers are meant to make sense to anyone in that society and not to outsiders, like the Roman occupiers. Hebrew letters represent numbers as well as letter sounds and as such they have many cultural numbers of significant. God’s number is 7, it represents perfection. 6 is evil because it falls short of perfection. The same number 3 times is emphasis, 666 is the most 6 you can be. In second temple era Jewish tradition they blamed the Queen of Sheba’s marriage to Solomon for the long line of pagan queens and ultimately the exile to Babylon. If you add up all the numbers of gems and precious metals listed in her dowry it adds up to 666. That is why in Jewish numerology 666 also represents the fall of Israel. If you study other apocalyptic literature of that era 666 comes up frequently. (Source: Father is an Intertestamental Hebrew Literature scholar and chair of Biblical Literature at a seminary. His apocalyptic literature course is probably his most popular. This has been 90% regurgitation of his dinner party answer to the question. Evangelicals are weird and this question has been asked at so many parties and dinners it’s absurd.)",
"6 protons 6 neutrons 6 electrons = Carbon. Essential for life, spirit bonded by matter. Harsh reality, this universe. Good question. Edit: Actually, this is a genuine hypothesis if you look really deep into Gnosticism and the esoteric. That the body itself is the beast, 666. It is insatiable. As soon as we are born we become its slave. If we don’t feed it, we go crazy and die. If we don’t quench its thirst, we die even quicker. We are at the will of our bodies. Our body is a physical vehicle and our mind is a type of spiritual vehicle but it is still not free. The mind is influenced strongly by the body and the experience of life. Our thoughts are shaped by what the body experiences and our thoughts often times determine our perspectives (the only time they dont is when you are not thinking). The mind is bondage just as much as the body is. It is not necessary to suffer in this, but if we do not tend to our minds, we will go crazy. If we do not tend to our bodies, we will die. We are slaves to life itself.",
"In the classical era [Greece, Rome, etc] it was not unusual for a language to grab a few letters from its alphabet to double as numbers. Roman numerals are the most familiar: I, V, X, L, C, D, M and so on, but most written languages at the time used this concept in one way or another. For example \"Maximillius\" would be > M+X+I+M+I+L+L+U Or, > 1,000 + 10 + 1 + 1000 + 1 + 50 + 50+ 1 + 5 Or 2,118 if my math is right. Remember that the Romans generally treated U and V as interchangeable; it is only later in language evolution that the two diverged. You would not include letters that do not have a number-usage in your equation. In Revelation, the writer does not identify the anti-christ, but does offer clues he thinks might help believers to identify the antichrist; among others, that the letter-numbers of the name should add up to 666. Unfortunately, this can apply to a huge number of names; especially if you include organizations, nicknames, add or exclude middle names, add or exclude first names, use initials...whether you identify U and V as the same or different letters... [Edit: not to mention which language are you taking the letters from!] A lot of candidates have been identified over the centuries, fortunately none have as yet brought about the end of the world.",
"What's funny is every barcode that can be read in normal and upside down has 666 in it. There there long bars on barcodes represents the number 6.",
"I see a lot of bad answers here, and I'm sure ill be buried them all. Generally you have two possible categories. One. You accept that the bible is true and prophetic, then you could get any answer for who the beast is, since it could apply to any time and place. Two. You don't believe the bible to be devine inspiration, and you affix a later date to the text and get answers like Nero, or something equally concrete. 7 being the number of god and 6 being the number of man is an important symbol that should be accounted for. (6 is short of perfection). Also note that it ties to the Anti-Christ. Anti doesn't just mean \"complete opposite\". It has more of mirror imagery. If you look in a mirror and raise your right hand your reflection raises its left hand. It is the Anti-you. The anti christ will imitate Christ and deceive people. Any interpretation has to fit that pattern as well. In short, the number of 666 will be someone pretending to be Christ, (or taking his place, but not claiming to literally be hin) and is just a man. False prophets. Wolves in sheep's clothing. That sort of thing.",
"There’s a series by Morgan Freeman called Story of God. In the second episode it talks about apocalypse and there’s a section dedicated to the explanation of the 666 if you are interested."
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8nrw3s | Does youth unemployment necessarily cause social unrest? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Almost all unrest and violence occurs amongst the young in a society. When your demographics are skewed towards the young, this tends to cause problems. When your demographics are skewed towards the young *and* they don't have much supervision or anything useful to do with their time, the problem is exacerbated. High youth unemployment also tends to follow from a demographic skew towards youth. When you have a lot of older people in comparison to younger people, there's a strong demand for workers to replace the retiring/dying older people. When you have the reverse situation, the demand is much lower.",
"You should not try to simplify this sort of thing as always or \"necessarily\" having some effect. That's why statistical correlations, despite being harder to understand, are used by scientists and others who truly want to understand the world. After all, youth unemployment is not a yes/no condition. The rate varies but nowhere has 0% youth unemployment... Also true of \"social unrest\"-- everywhere has some amount of protest. You could draw lines, say 20%+ is \"high\" unemployment and social unrest is \"rioting\" or protests with property damage. And with those definitions, you could check whether high unemployment \"always\" comes with social unrest. But what value does that information have? You wouldn't seriously expect 19% unemployment is totally OK while 20% is instant riots. So you might get an answer but you're not improving your understanding of the situation. In fact, youth unemployment increases the likelihood of social unrest as it gets higher, though it's not the only factor, and there *isn't* one universal number which will \"necessarily\" have a big impact in all locations."
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8nss16 | How did the average work day become 8 hours? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"There was a political movement, at least in the English speaking world, which pushed for a 5 day workweek, with 8 work hours a day, 8 sleep hours a day, and 8 hours for whatever you need to do."
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8nx4vt | What is Occam's razor and what does it mean? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Its a principle that basically says if two solutions are otherwise the same, the one that is simpler is the best choice. Its a fancy way of saying don't make things harder than you need to."
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3
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8o6i1n | What's with Da Vinci's painting Mona Lisa? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The Mona Lisa wasn't a particularly interesting piece for art for a very very long time, it was regarded as technically a good achievement, but not much more or otherwise. It was pained int he early 1500s, Da Vinci was a famous artist and Mona Lisa was one of his better paintings, but not much more. Thats really it. Until... it was stolen! theft! conspiracy! intrigue! insanity! The Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in Paris in 1911! the world was in shock! My god, they stole a painting from the Louve! What was it? Wow, now *everyone* knows it. It was recovered a couple years after, but now what was previously a fairly uninteresting, but well regarded painting was now one of the most famous paintings ever -- having nothing really to do with the art behind it, but instead the story behind it... that didn't occur until 400 years after it was made and had little to do with the picture or artistry involved. **tl;dr**: The Mona Lisa is famous for being stolen, and got insane recognition due to that, not really for the art of it. But most people don't know the story in today's world, and assume its something special more than it is. It's not. It's freaking the Paris Hilton of the 1910s. Thats hot."
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8o9y2y | Related with Carl Sagan's civilization scale based on the information it has, how do we know the number of bits we have access to? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"According to citation 15 [here]( URL_0 ) (to which the original link disappeared, so I'm going off the wiki), in 2012 we had access to 2.7 zettabytes, which was a 48% yearly increase. If the trend has continued, by the end of this year we will have 28 zettabytes globally, or 224 zettabits. This would put us at 2.24E23 bits, or a level Q civilization."
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8ohig2 | How is Paleo any different from Atkins? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Paleo isn’t anti carb per we, it’s about natural unprocessed foods theoretically similar to what a human in the paleo era would eat. As a consequence of no potato chips, ice cream, and other processed foods carbs are naturally lowered and nutrition (from all the ideally organic greens and such) is increased. Atkins is about replacing carbs with fats to put the body in ketosis but doesn’t concern itself with the quality or origin of the food."
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8ohxo8 | Spiral of Silence Theory | Noelle-Neuman’s theory of The Spiral of Silence regarding public opinion. How does it work? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Through fear of being ostracized, individuals in groups tend not to voice unpopular opinions. Sometimes, these unpopular opinions *are*, actually, popular amongst the group, but other members doing the same thing means those opinions may never actually get expressed."
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8om1mq | what is a cult and why are they bad? Are Jehovahs Witnesses technically a cult? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"What separates a cult from a devote religious group is that a cult aims to make you reliant on the group and only the group; cutting you off from friends and family not in the cult. Sometimes a cult will require \"donations\" to move further into the ranks and have more \"truths\" revealed or to assure your place in the afterlife."
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8onxo8 | Why are so many medical institutions (like hospitals) religiously affiliated? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Because back before the government provided social services, this was done by the churches. The church took caring for people seriously. Some still do."
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8oqkue | When someone receives an inheritance from a distant relative whom they barely knew: who contacts the heir, and how does the heir know it's not a scam? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"1. Don’t ever send money to receive money 2. Don’t tell name, birthdate, social 3. Ask for details on how you are related 4. Ask for a copy of the will",
"1. The odds of this happening are low, most people don't leave their inheritance to distant relatives, only close family or friends (or even places like their local church. Source: I work for a Financial Planning firm and have handled many wills/inheritance claims. 2. If it's a probated will, it is public record, and you can see the contents of the will itself. 3. Typically the executor of the will would be the one to contact you, and the executor is designated by the person making the will, so it wouldn't be some random person most likely, it would be another relative or close friend of the deceased."
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8oue5w | Why do people go to ridiculous lengths to block their license plate when selling their car online? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Say you've just stolen a blue jeep compass.. Do you want to drive around to find a blue jeep. Compass, so you can clone the plates? Or search online for a blue compass. copy the plates and then you can rack up as many parking fines etc as you like...",
"It's stupid, not sure where it came from. It's not like our plates are hidden in real life and only exposed online. Plus in real life I can drive by your house, get your plates AND your address."
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8ov553 | when and why pro gun culture became associated with God and Christianity? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, I live in a very conservative, very pro-gun part of the country and I've never seen anything like that picture you mentioned so I can't comment on that. As for why religious people might be more likely to own guns or support gun ownership, I'd say it has more to do with correlation than causation. Being Christian does not necessarily make people want to own guns, and owning guns doesn't necessarily make people want to be Christian. It just happens that a lot of conservative Christians have a more traditional view of society in general, and that includes firearms ownership.",
"There's probably no one answer to this. I prefer to think this all started in the early 1980's. This was when big televangelists wanted to get into politics and started \"The Religious Right.\" And at the time they latched onto Abortion law (as in anti-abortion), so because of that, they associated themselves with the Republican party. And when you take on one issue, you have to embrace everything else the party represents. So because Jerry Falwell (who was the main figurehead of the RR) wanted to get into being influential in politics, it brought the rest of the religious people with it. Prior to the 1980's, you didn't really see the church advocate for parties, more on individual issues.",
"I don't see the association. I know a bunch of Catholic people from the Northeast who have no guns and I've met a lot of christian people from the South with lots of guns. I think the connection between people and guns has more to do with culture and political ideology than it does with God or Christianity. I will say that conservative ideology tends to revolve around independence from, and lack of reliance on the government, which of course extends to concept self defense. Did you literally see an image of Jesus shooting sinners? I'm not religious at all, but I don't think this is how Christians view Jesus or how he was historically. Seems like a bizarre bastardization of Jesus and what he taught. tl;dr This answer isn't good."
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8ovttz | Why do third party candidates run in American elections knowing they won't win and will take votes away from major party candidates that may share similar values and goals? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It could be to emphasize a specific issue. Previous elections have shown that third party candidates that don’t get elected still cause change or at least an increase in visibility on the issues they run on.",
"They probably feel they are spreading their message even though they have no chance at winning. Imo the election system is broken and until we figure out how to stop insane power mad fucks run for office we are all screwed."
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8ovuyy | How did Sheep (Especially lambs) become the most common animal to be found or themed at nurseries, baby products, and commonly associated with early childhood? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Sheep are famously docile and helpless, requiring help (from humans or dogs etc.) to keep them safe. Lambs, even more so. This remind us of helpless babies.",
"The symbolic connection between the lamb and children in Western culture goes at least as far back as the writing of the Christian Bible. The followers of God and Jesus (the shepherd) are likened to sheep and their children to lambs: > The Lord Jehovih cometh in strength, and His arm shall rule for Him; He shall feed His flock like a shepherd, He shall gather the lambs in His arm, and carry them in His bosom, and shall gently lead those that give suck (Isa. 40:10, 11) They are similarly connected to innocence: > The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them (Isa 11:6) And Jesus: > The next day John the Baptist seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world (John 1:29, 36). Various nursery rhymes and stories reinforced this tradition through the centuries (e.g. Mary Had A Little Lamb)."
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8p0gab | If I go to bed at 2:00am and wake up at 6:00am, I feel great! If I go to bed at 11:00pm and wake up at 6:00am, I feel awful. Why? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It could be in and out of sleep so say every 1.5 hrs you're in a deep sleep and then you're in a light sleep you might be waking up on your light sleep and feel good but if you wake up on a deep sleep your body takes longer to wake up.. there is a doc that explains it much better than me but it's something like that..",
"Usually this has to do with the timing of when you wake up and at what point of your sleep cycle you've woken up during. REM (dreaming) is the worst cycle to wake up during and can leave you feeling very groggy for the rest of that day. This is because you are literally stopping one of the bodies restorative processes mid-process. The next worst cycle would be waking straight up in a deep sleep cycle. The best way to wake up is gradually which facilitates waking up during a light sleep cycle. Your body's circadian rhythm likes routine and consistency. It will develop a sleep cycle that maximizes REM and allows enough time to wake up during a light cycle at the time you normally wake up. Unfortunately us humans with our hectic lives don't typically do well with sleep routines and this messes up the routine of sleep cycles and subsequently can lead to inadvertently waking up during any of these cycles - REM, Deep, or Light. Going to bed at 2:00, you could be waking up during a light cycle, and going to bed at 11 you could be waking up during an REM cycle. Some humans are more sensitive and have worse side effects from waking up during the wrong cycle.",
"When you sleep, your body goes through sleep cycles. You get \"credit\" for the sleep if you make it through an entire cycle. If you wake up during a cycle, it takes your body some time to adjust to being awake, and that process feels yucky. A single cycle is approximately 4 hours. In a full 8 hour night, you get two cycles with a pee break at intermission. When you sleep from 2-6, you're getting a full cycle and then waking up. When you sleep from 11-6, you're getting a full cycle and then waking up 3/4 of the way through the second cycle.",
"Before artificial light, it was dark for longer than humans needed to sleep. Typically we would sleep 3-4 hours, get up and do something for an hour-90 minutes (chat, visit neighbors, sexytimes) then back to sleep for another 3-4. There are references to this pattern in a lot of old literature. Only very recently history-wise have we tried to cram all our sleep in a single time. So there’s that.",
"I would chalk it up to circadian rhythms. Each and every person is wired in slightly different ways. Among other things, a person's circadian rhythm tells him when to sleep, when to wake up. For you, that's your body's normal rhythm. For me, I'm most awake and alert from 11:00pm to 6:00am. Edited for spelling.",
"Sleep momentum is a thing, the more you sleep the more tired you will feel in the morning. Humans have also been know to naturally switch to a biphasic sleep schedule when they are under conditions where they don't see the light of day for a while."
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8p0ywd | How come internationally, musical scales developed differently? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"An octave is a natural interval - when you go up an octave, you double the frequency of the note. This is naturally pleasing to the ear. There are other intervals that are somewhat natural as well - for instance, a perfect fifth (the notes C and G, for instance). G has a frequency of 1.5x the C below it. The ear can pick up this fact easily (though not everyone finds this interval pleasing!). Societies which made use of a lot of math and measuring noticed this. China and Greece both did a lot of measuring - you gotta measure your farm fields to support a large empire. They had a lot of string lying around from this measurement. You've probably noticed that if you pull a length of string taut and pluck it, it makes a note - this is the basic idea behind many instruments, from Western harps and guitars to Eastern sitars and erhu. Early Chinese and Greek scholars noticed that if you divided the string into a 3:2 ratio, you could play a natural fifth. Thus, the fifth formed a central part of the music theory in both these cultures. The Greek were notoriously ratio-obsessed. For a long time, they believed that any number could be expressed as a ratio (or fraction), and they kept things in ratios as much as possible. So the 3:2 ratio of the fifth appealed to them. They also rapidly identified the 4:3 ratio of the perfect forth (the notes C and F, for instance). From these notes, C F and G, they went on to construct the 12-note chromatic scale we know today. The 12 notes appealed greatly to Greek mathematicians, as it can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6. China, meanwhile, developed a very similar scale based on the same mathematical concepts, but placed greater importance on the interval of the fifth. China used a 12-note chromatic scale, but they also focused greatly on a 7-note subscale. In the middle of all this, India, another technological giant of the ancient era, was developing their own music theory, embedded in the Hindu religion and based around a limited set of scale-like entities known as raga. The musical traditions of Greece, China and India spread outwards (along with the rest of their culture), and soon cultures around the world were using their musical ideas, mixed together in different ways. But, as tends to happen, these ideas got mutated over time; local scales developed, styles of playing grew popular in some areas and not in others. Over hundreds or thousands of years, this led to different scales in different places."
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8p8e1o | Why is mental health such a taboo subject? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"I feel like when mental health is discussed people are afraid that something could be wrong with them. Mental illnesses challenges what is normal and what is not. I have a feeling we all that one family member that is crazy but no one really talks about."
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8pet2v | Why is it acceptable for smokers to take additional breaks at work? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It isnt! I found out that as a non-smoker, if you start hanging out with the smokers during their \"breaks\", it will cast a negative light on their excessive breaks and bring about enforcement of established times for said breaks. It should be just as acceptable for a non-smoker to take 10 minute breaks every hour as it is for a smoker. If management has a problem with you as a non-smoker taking these breaks, you have a case for discrimination. A person's habit should not make them above company or workplace policy.",
"It's not acceptable at every workplace and some workplaces don't allow any \"smoke\" breaks outside of the regular legally required breaks. So it really depends on the employer, the job, and the location. But those companies that do, it generally is a holdover from when most people did smoke and a lot of times people and managers don't realize how big the inequality is between the smokers worktime and the non\\-smoker's work time.",
"Non smokers in my work place are allowed to take 5 min breaks twice a day same as the smokers",
"I agree and would add that \"timed break\" should only be necessary in jobs where its critical to be available and working at all times (which kinda sucks) like being a cashier or a phone operator or maybe an assembly line worker or a bus driver. If the job is not that mechanical you should take as many breaks as you like, whether to smoke or just to look at the trees and get some fresh air, as long as you get the job done or maybe even if you *can't* get the task done: the break will help you focus.",
"I've always taken a break when I feel like I'm getting frustrated regardless of if I'm going to smoke or not. I've also always been more efficient at my jobs than others so my employers have never had a problem with it. Maybe looking up to check on people taking breaks is detracting from your work. Get a task done and take a break!"
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8pq9af | If the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian & Swedish) are mutually intelligible, why are they considered distinct languages instead of different dialects of the same language? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Its kind of a semantic argument, you could make the same point for Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. while it is a partially political distinction the many thing is that mutually intelligible is really hard to prove as a set concept. The main theory being that just because you can understand a few words doesn't mean you can hold a conversation. and there is a fuzzy line in there somewhere that splits dialects and languages. I wish there was a better answer but there is no golden rule.",
"They say the difference between a dialect and a language is that a language has an army. That is, if you have your own sovereign nation, then you can declare and enforce that you have your own language and you can make your own language rules and pronunciation and grammar.",
"Languages are considered \"different\" primarily due to the politics involved in their respective regions. As such, the primary reason is that Norwegian (both Nynorsk and Bokmal), Swedish and Danish are primarily spoken (and taught) in three different countries, so the three are considered different languages. But is there another reason, more related to language classification, that they're considered different? The three languages aren't spoken homogeneously by everyone in each nation; instead, they form a sort of dialect continuum. These continua are quite common in many parts of the world. For example, consider starting out in Switzerland, and being able to understand the Swiss German-speaking population. You make your way up north slowly, crossing into German states where Alemannic and Bavarian are spoken. These are slightly different from Swiss German, but with a little practise, you become easily fluent. Then, with the same results, you cross over into Low German, then Frisian, and then Dutch. But if you fly back to Switzerland, you may find that the language has now become almost incomprehensible. So where do you draw the line between what is German and what isn't? Arbitrarily. That is also what has been done between Standard Danish, Standard Swedish, Nynorsk and Bokmal. Going back to the question, if the Kalmar Union still existed, where Denmark, Norway and Sweden were united as one country, we might have seen a different story, with the \"language\" being termed \"Scandinavian\", similar to how the languages of the Hindi belt in India are all termed \"Hindi\", while Hindi itself is a continuum. As it happens, the standardized versions of each language render themselves satisfactorily separate from the others, in the eyes of the people that speak them, and so they are three different languages. EDIT: removed percentage",
"If Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are comparable to the closeness of Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, then I would say that Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish aren't mutually intelligible."
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8pqtkn | Why are Homer’s epic poems considered so great and influential? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"1)Because he is considered the founder of greeks litterature 2)Because the poems managed to last trough the years and we have them complete 3)Because even if they are not historically correct it gives us a way to understand how greeks percived the world around them, both because it helps us understand how miths where important to them and how they lived and felt on their everyday life"
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8pwj1w | Why is Ireland so much more religious than other Western European countries? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, Roman Catholicism was preserved in Ireland when the rest of Rome fell apart. So it's got a strong history. But I think you'll find that Christianity has a strong foothold in other countries as well, such as Poland and Hungary. The bigger question to ask is: why have other Western European countries moved away from Christianity? I think you'll find the answer is mostly the Humanist movement. And while England was going all\\-in on the reformation and later on kicking off of the Humanist movement, they were also in the middle of subjugating the Irish, who wanted no part in the cultural beliefs of their oppressors.",
"Not an easy question to answer but here goes, you learn in school that before even st. Patrick got the ball properly moving there was places like Skellig Michael (from star wars) where permanent beehive huts were created for monks. Ireland is somewhere that people like to try rule over, (vikings, England etc.) when the vikings came they robbed most of the monks of any belonging and destroyed temples. The catholic church came to help us and built some churches. Generally they were quite nice so people gravitated to them; with every town in Ireland big and small having churches in them as the focal point. These towns were ruled by noblemen and then cities and larger areas by lords. The county then had counties ruled by small monarchs so you win them over you win the county over, so you give them a big building and some cash and the town is yours. Then England took over after hundreds of relatively stable years of Christianity. For a few hundred years they were annoyed because we spoke Gaelic (Irish native language) and it was hard to understand, so they started with the churches building them up and such as English (moving from Latin at the time) to then attempting to move them to protestantism nearing the end of king Henry the 8ths rule. This didn't go well, fast forward to 1900's when Ireland got her independence from England and established itself in 1922 as a independent state minus the 6 counties which remain in British rule this was due to money and infrastructure of this area being very advanced thus wanting to keep it for themselves. The church helped Ireland at the start with many of our leaders being from the original set of traditional Irish households (typical dad makes money, mam rares the kids, kids work from a young age etc.) but they relied on the church for guidance, help and hope really for the future as our history is one of great sorrow. This ment that the social norm was to be catholism which is our major religion it's an off branch of Christianity. So many people campaigned on this notion of I'm more catholic than that other guy, this also lead to ALOT of our laws being based on religion. Even to this day our primary schools require baptism certs to ger admission. Although it changed last week so they can't ask anymore. They built out infrastructure really, schools, hospitals and such were ran by nuns or priests. Another off branch is protestantism but all through the 70's we had people killing eachother over this and all. That's a-whole - nother thing. Today the church is losing power in Ireland due to immigration and the trust Irish people had in churches ment that they did alot of shady stuff like killing babies, selling babies, killing women, shaming people in the town to make their life hell, pedophilia etc. There was alot of bad that has surfaced the past 30 years, and naturally we've moved away from non progressive organizations. It'll always remain in the majority I believe due to the infrastructure here such as churches and stuff but it'll be less prominent in politics and day to day life as we progress such as the new abortion laws, gay marriage, and such. **TL;DR** the church was nice to us, they built church's, schools, hospitals and such. We trusted them, then found out they weren't all that nice recently and are know moving far away. With the older bunch being the main cries for it. Source: I'm Irish, this is drilled into us in school. You're catholic, you're part of an unfortunate country and your ma will beat you with a wooden spoon if you're a lil fecker"
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8pwz6l | Why do companies have 'values' ? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I believe to lure customers. If company 1 and 2 sell the same product for the same price but company one is committed to recycling or hiring veterans ext most people would buy company ones product. At least that's what I've always been told.",
"It tells employees how they are expected to behave, and tells customers what they can expect from the company. For example \"we value environmental protection\" might mean we won't lower our cost by using chemicals that hurt the environment.",
"Corporate values aren't just a marketing ploy for customers. If the values are shared by the staff, it can be a powerful tool in improving employee job satisfaction and retention, which in turn improves the companies performance. Of course that only really works if the company leadership actually believes it's 'Values' and practices what it preaches. Some just pay lip service to the idea, hoping that just claiming to have the values will net the potential benefits. (Spoiler alert: It won't)"
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8q297e | How did the "college standard" happen? | I applied for the exact same job at the exact same steel mill that my dad worked at through the late 60s-2012. He started right out of high school, got a pension, saved a bit of every pay check, and collected social security. He is retired now and set for life, plays golf and swims everyday. That same job at the same steel mill now requires a college degree. How did stuff like this happen? It feels so unfair and just wrong. I don’t believe people when they say technology is more advanced, because anyone can learn how to do a job with enough repetition. When my dad retired in 2012 he said there wasn’t much difference in the way he did his job in 2012 compared to 1970, and if a high schooler applied nowadays he could learn just like they taught him back in the 60s. I understand we have more people now and there’s more competition, but a lot of that’s due to outsourcing jobs. A lot of the steel industry is outsourced, if it were just citizens working jobs it would probably be different. I just don’t understand how the working force of America let colleges take over and demand degrees for jobs. Why is that OK? How did it happen? Can it be reverted? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They do it because they can. If you are looking for people to hire, and you want them to be reliable, smart, and not likely to just flake out in 3 weeks, you need an easy way to select for these people. The easiest demographic is college grads. Having invested another 4 years of education and making it to the degree show some amount of responsibility, dedication, and basic intelligence. With people that only graduated high school, you don't really know what you're getting at all.",
"> Can it be reverted? Requirements would only be lowered if we needed more people to fill positions. As technological and process advancements counteract the need for more people this is very unlikely to happen.",
"The requirement for a college degree is simply the outsourcing of Human Resources' responsibility to check a candidate's employability: it now signifies that you were willing to jump through enough official hoops to be considered reliable. That's literally all they want it for.",
"It's simple. A company's goal is to hire the most qualified person possible and pay them the least possible. In 1970 they best they could do was high school. In 2012, they can get away with hiring college grads and paying them the equivalent or less.",
"It's not that technology makes it easier, it's that technology lets steel mills run with fewer people. Because between the 60s and today, technology improvements allow each mill worker to make about 5x as much steel. That means the steel industry needs way fewer workers today, even though steel production has been relatively flat since the mid 80s. Combine fewer jobs with a higher population, and it means you have a lot of people applying for every position that lets you work for 40 years and retire to play golf every day. A company might get hundreds of applicants for each job opening, so they need some way to whittle down the applicant pool to find the one person they're going to pick. \"Has a college degree\" is an easy one to add because it's quick to check and because \"was able to get through four years of college\" is a decent signal for \"is willing to work hard for an extended period of time\". A lack of college degree doesn't mean you're a slacker, of course. It's just that when you apply to a job, you need to prove to the boss that you're going to be a good worker. The people with college degrees have a certified piece of paper saying \"I'm not a slacker\", and you don't. Given that, why would the boss pick you over them? Now, if there were fewer people applying for each job opening, there'd be no reason for the company to keep this requirement. After all, if no one with a college degree applies, or if a college degree becomes less good of a signal, they'll have to find some other way to evaluate if you'll be a hard worker. But given the pace of technology, that's probably not going to happen any time soon.",
"Your Dad started his career at the tail end of a fantasy world. We were the only first world Nation that left the second world war in better shape than we entered it.",
"Your dad's generation voted in republicans, who destroyed the unions that got them the pensions they're living off of. They gave the power back to the businesses, who can now do whatever they want, because the labor pool is big enough that they can be picky.",
"It is because there's enough college grads to put that requirement out there. College grads from bad for-profit colleges are less skilled than the average high schooler. But due to federal student loans, they still get through college with massive debt. Companies can require a college degree today because so many college grads who really never should have gone to college in the first place, are looking for these jobs. One day we will realize that low level college degrees are a scam, putting below average IQ students into a lifetime of debt they can never pay off, while making for-profit institutions rich. College holds a great deal of value for those with the aptitude to use it. For those without the aptitude, it is a way for the government to lend money to unsuspecting children who make consultants, administrators and owners of for-profit colleges rich.",
"This is due to a couple of things. 1) Almost everyone born in the US within the last century has the whole \"College will make you a billionaire\" mentality and passed it on to their children and so forth. As a result alot of people now have some form of higher education which overall lessens its significance while pushing those with just GEDs or HS diplomas to the bottom. 2) The desired employee mentality changed. From what I've heard companies used to settle for any decent employee but there came a point when it became standard to always hire the best and brightest even if they would be horribly overqualified. In job markets where the unemployment rate is very low, the required standards are often lowered as their main priority is filling the job. Other than that there aren't any major exceptions to this trend and it will continue to get worse as more low skill jobs are automated. That said there are plenty of jobs out there that will take years of experience instead of a degree",
"1. While it's true that \"with enough training you could train just about *anybody* to do the job,\" some people take more work and investment on that front than others. This is why jobs have qualifications in the first place. Some people learn faster than others, and some people are already trained when they come in. 2. It partly just happens because so many people go to college. When most of the applicant pool has a college degree, *not* having one makes you stand out in a bad way. Sure, it's kind of a vicious cycle where \"everyone is doing it because everyone else is doing it,\" but it is what it is. You see this at higher levels than college vs. high school degrees as well. Master's degrees are basically a requirement for some jobs now when a Bachelor's used to be enough because so many people are getting Master's degrees. 3. For your specific example, your dad was lucky and got in during a kind of Golden Age for those types of jobs. For a variety of reasons (increased automation, cheaper foreign labor, unions losing power), there just aren't near as many opportunities like that anymore in general, college degree or not, and they don't have near as good of benefits (especially pensions) as they used to.",
"I now see basic receptionist jobs at hospitals requiring a BA degree paying $13.00 an hour. Weird times.",
"Same thing happened in the 60's though. Your granddad (or great granddad anyway) would've been able to get basically the same job with a grade 8 (or even a grade 4) education. Then it became possible for most people to be able to afford to not have to quit school to work until they had a full high school education so the entry level bar was raised. Then we got richer as a country and enough people could afford to go to college that the bar was raised again. It would get dropped if there weren't enough people meeting the minimum requirements so employers couldn't use that as an easy filter. That could happen but it will be in some ways harder to go back because of the overall raised expectations."
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8q7h8f | why isn't there more than two parties in the US? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are. But we have a voting system - on the federal level, anyway - called \"first past the post.\" Under this system, the candidate with the most votes out of all candidates wins even if that number is less than a majority (there is no runoff voting), so third-party candidates who show too well end up sabotaging their own side of the political spectrum. Nobody wants a symbolic victory while handing political power to the exact opposite of their ideals. This usually deters other parties from trying to win, and consolidates ideologies into the two major parties.",
"There are more than two parties in the United States. However, the electoral college system combined with first-past-the-post voting rules make it difficult for more than two parties to ever be viable options to win in any given election."
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8qgk5o | What exactly are potheads doing with those cheap cigars and why? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're emptying the tobacco and rerolling marijuana cigars. Commonly referred to as a blunt, it's one of the more common ways to smoke marijuana. They use the cheap.cigars because it would be foolish to waste a high end cigar. Presumably. Source - I'm a police officer"
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8ql1lj | When a crime is committed in the middle of the ocean, how is justice determined if borders of countries are undetermined? Is there a universal law? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I've searched tha seven seas fer an answer. Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5: How is crime handled in international waters? ]( URL_0 ) ^(_ > 100 comments_) 1. [If you where to kill someone in international waters on a private boat, could you be done for the murder? ]( URL_5 ) ^(_16 comments_) 1. [Can you really do whatever you want in international waters? ]( URL_3 ) ^(_33 comments_) 1. [ELI5: Maritime Law and International Waters. ]( URL_6 ) ^(_5 comments_) 1. [what crimes are legal out in international waters? ]( URL_1 ) ^(_19 comments_) 1. [ELI5 Are there laws in international waters? ]( URL_4 ) ^(_9 comments_) 1. [ELI5: If a crime (like murder) is commited during an international flight, whose laws apply? ]( URL_2 ) ^(_11 comments_)"
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8qldbl | In (screen)writing, what is the difference between "point of attack" and "inciting incident"? | I have heard these terms in reference to analysis of 3-act structures in movies, but I assume they are more generally applicable than that. When I searched for definitions of the two phrases, there seemed to be little or no difference, but that might just be the vagueries of the internet or my poor googlemancy skills. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is from TV URL_1 : Occasionally, \"Point of Attack\" is included as a separate concept to the Inciting Incident — the Point of Attack sets the plot in motion, and is often outside the protagonist's control; the Inciting Incident is when the conflict is thrust upon the protagonist, forcing them into action and setting up the motivation for the main character. URL_0 So, my guess would be that in Star Wars, the point of attack is the rebels getting the battle plans. The inciting incident is Luke Skywalker watching the hologram."
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8r55uw | What was the original purpose in the joker card in a deck of playing cards? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"According to [Bicycle Playing Cards]( URL_0 ): > In the 1860s, American Euchre players made up some new rules to their beloved game. These new rules required an extra trump card, which they referred to as the Best Bower, the highest trump card available. > American card printers jumped onto the trend fairly quickly, soon including these extra trump cards in their decks. British manufacturers did the same by the 1880s. > It wasn’t long before the Best Bower card was called the Joker, or the Jolly Joker. Like the Ace of Spades, Joker cards were often given a unique design that contained a company’s brand imagery. This could often be a logo, a floral or architectural motif, or something completely different. The jester we know and love only became more popular once the “Joker” title was universally adapted."
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8r93u9 | When people go to the beach... men are shirtless with shorts (sometimes speedos 😳) and women are wearing a two piece (sometimes topless 😈) Why is it that we freak out when people see us in our underwear, and we are perfectly fine when people see us in our “beach underwear” ? 🤔 | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Context is important. I'm not surprised to see a hot dog at a hot dog stand. I'd be surprised if I opened my wallet to pay for a hot dog and it only had a hot dog inside. I'm not surprised to see beach clothing at a beach, but would be concerned if I'm about to go into surgery and the surgeon shows up in a speedo.",
"No exact reason other than cultural norms and fashion. Underwear evolved slowly just kike the swimsuit and bikini did, just at different paces. But I guess is there is an arbitrary line, similar to a quote from a famous supreme court case \"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [\"hard-core pornography\"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it...\" Keep the idea of the words open and then compare that to the difference between underwear and swimwear (not pornography) So the idea is there is such a fine line between a bikini and underwear that you have to see it to discern between the two sometimes."
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8rdew6 | Why does reggae music seem to mention Zion and Babylon a lot? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Reggae is closely tied to the Rastafarian religion. Babylon represents the evils of modern society & oppression while Zion represents the promised land to which they want to escape.",
"Rastafarian is basically Judaism for Jamaicans. So they have a lot of the same religious symbols like mount Zion. If I remember correctly strict Rastafarians don't eat pork either. In my opinion reggae is the best religious music out there.",
"TL;DR: The reason that you hear these terms in Reggae a lot is because so many of the practitioners of the music are of the Rastafari belief system. Joe Higgs is considered the father of reggae by many people, as he started Bob Marley and the Wailers, Bunny Livingston, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, and more. Back at that point, many of the original Reggae players (Reggae was quickly dividing into 4 sub-genres) were of the Rastafarian belief. In the Rastafari belief system, god is referred to as \"Jah\" (likely from Jehovah), which is why you hear Jah a lot. Now, since Rastafarianism originated in Africa, many times \"Zion\" is referring to Africa. But to many Reggae performers (particularly those in Africa) Zion is only the holy group of Rastafari, and specifically those in Africa. Additionally, in groups such as the Reggae musicians mostly living in Jamaica, Zion refers to all Rastafari, both in Jamaica, Africa, and sometimes all over the world. Sometimes these more liberal Reggae musicians will accept a wider range of African descended people into their definition of \"Zion\", even if they aren't Rastafarians. This all becomes more important when you talk about Babylon. \"Babylon\" Is mostly a term used to refer to the entirety of the world that is not Zion. So based on the definitions of \"Zion\" that the different groups have, the definition of \"Babylon\" can change drastically. For example, some Rastafari groups simply refer to all white people as Babylon, while some may just call anyone who is not Rastafari \"crazy bald-heads\". There is varying degrees of militarism in the different Rastafari groups, with some being outright armed and violent, and some being entirely peaceful. At the end of the day, the reason that you hear these terms in Reggae a lot is because so many of the practitioners of the music are of the Rastafari belief system.",
"The people pointing out Rastafarian roots are correct, but I think it is easier to focus on these specific reference. Babylon: In the Bible, Babylon defeats the Jewish kings and takes some of them prisoner in the city. For the Caribbean communities that are tied to reggae and Rastafarianism, Babylon is the place of their captivity ... basically the Americas. Zion: In the Bible, Zion is Jerusalem, the home promised to the Jews by God. Likewise, for the reggae singers, Zion generally refers to Africa, the home that their ancestors were taken from as slaves. You can add a lot of little details, but that is the basic idea for a lot of the references.",
"Zion and Babylon are symbolic. Given that reggae music in itself is religious, Zion symbolizes the promised land while Babylon symbolizes unrighteousness and moral corruption; analogous to Christianity.",
"Reggae music is pan african music. Made for Africans who don't live there, but profress a desire to repatriate. At its core reggae music is a spiritual and political artform. When Marcus Garvey spoke of a black king come to bring black men together and usher in a new period of peace on earth, the early rastamen and women truly believed, and worshipped Haille Selassie H. I. M. As the second coming of christ. Where he was, was paradise. The result of their prayers and devotion led to the establishment of sheshemane. Land devoted to renaturalised rastamen and women. Those who stay are living physically and spiritually in babalon. We are slaves to sin, oppression, and discrimination. Those in Africa, with a specific focus on Ethiopia (where the conquering lion of juda was born) are said to be living in Zion. A promised land of peace milk and honey. Reggae is a cool artform man, and when you believe and understand aspects of the spiritual and political messages, it takes on a whole new look."
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8rgdfh | Is the economy really messed up? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well the complaint is they always voted to lower their taxes , increase spending, all fueled by debt. That debt is going to come due as while they are in retirement so they won't be paying it back. Oh also now they retired they will fight tooth and nail for social security, and Medicare all while trying to take away any entitlement spending that helps young people. It's not that they ruined the economy, they racked up a ton of Debt, and now that they are retired they expect young people to pay back their debt as well as pay for their retirement .",
"So to start, let's talk about what an economy is. An economy is kind of like an ecosystem, but for money and trade. All things have value, and the value of these things in relation to each other is an economy. What it boils down to, ultimately, is what do we value our own time and the rarity of certain goods or services at? This is the most simplistic explanation that I can possibly think of, although I invite anyone to offer an alternative. Now that we've established WHAT an economy is, we address how it works. I need something you have, but have nothing to offer you in exchange that you want. This is where currency comes into play. I wanted your cow, and offered chickens, but you need hogs not chickens. In lieu of hogs, and since you don't want chickens, here's some money! Go buy the hogs you need from the guy who has hogs and needs horses but you don't have horses. I have horses, so hog man takes your money, and comes to me for horses. I don't need his hogs, since I got your cow already, so I'll take the money instead. I'll need something else later. This is how an economy works, an exchange of goods or services for a pre-valued \"middle man\" which in this case is money. Now that we've established HOW an economy works, we'll addressed why it doesn't work the way it used to. Or rather, it works exactly as it always has, we just haven't adjusted values to keep things fair. The Boomers are a generation which were born after World War II, typically coined as the generation between 1944 and something like 1972, I don't remember and don't frankly care. What's important here is that between 1956 and 1968, as the boomers were in the height of entering the job force, Minimum Wage was pretty significantly increased. Minimum wage laws first introduced in 1938 guaranteed that everyone would receive at least the same base pay no matter what work they performed, ensuring everyone could afford to live by being able to purchase the necessary products to do exactly that. However, as time went on and things got more expensive (see Inflation in relation to economics for a breakdown of this concept if you aren't familiar with it), the minimum wage wasn't correctly adjusted. The height of buying power for the minimum wage in the U.S. was in 1968, and every year after that the wage became less effective than it was at that time. This is due in part to the generation preceding the boomers, who saw a huge opportunity to make money by raising the price of goods and services to meet the money everyone was now promised they would make. Eventually these same people raised the prices more, and people began to struggle. As a result of charging more money for products, companies had more money in their pockets. The minimum wage was adjusted, companies paid their employees more money since they had earned more through higher prices, balance in theory was achieved yet again. In addition to this, the government continued to print new money despite having nothing to keep its value stable (money is valued according to how much precious metal the government holds as a lean against the dollar, which is to say that if one pound of gold is equal to one dollar, then one hundred pounds is one hundred dollars. But if you add another hundred dollars without adding a hundred pounds of gold, you have a 2 > 1 ratio, and each dollar's value is effectively halved because it isn't equally represented by gold). As a result of over-printing money, it became worth less overall. Companies raised prices again to make sure they had the same percentage of gain, but wages were not adjusted. People struggled again. The minimum wage, established in 1938, started at $0.25/hr. It was increased in 1939, 1945, 1950, 1956, 1961, 1963, 1967, 1968, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1990, 1991, 1996, 1997, 2007, 2008, and finally again in 2009. It has not seen an increase in nine years now, which is fast approaching the largest gap in history between 1997 and 2007, of ten years. And yet, prices keep going up even though our wages aren't increased. Here's where we get into the conversation about the Boomers \"ruining\" the economy. Boomers now control the government, and the economy, by and large. They are currently, and for the last thirty years or so have been, the force deciding the way this country is going. Specifically, the rich boomers in direct power financially and politically. It's these people who have driven the costs of education through the roof, horribly inflated the value of property and housing, and tried their very best to increase the gap between the production cost of a product and what you or I pay to take that product home. This is an idea they inherited from their predecessors, but they took it to an extreme. First they became the generation to embrace college education and capitalism, then they became the generation that \"achieved\" the american dream. Then, they repetitively told every generation to follow that going to school was absolutely necessary, while increasing its cost far over the ability for anyone in the middle class to conceivably afford it on their own. They effectively forced people to take out loans to cover the cost, which they are then forced to pay back or else ruin their credit and the ability to do other financially important things later in their future. All while increasing the minimum wage enough to cover the cost of food and shelter, barely, but not anything outside of that without either multiple incomes or other outside assistance. Women joined the work force in full swing as they embraced social equality, and they were paid less for the same work than men (and still are). Yet it costs the same for them to live as it does a man, more in fact once you consider certain hygiene products they are essentially forced to buy and use. This drove individual debt per capita (debt owed per person x an area or population, represented by percentage of the total group) up as women owed the same money men did but made less money and had to spend more of the less they earned to live in the same comfort as men in their same field. Again, prices for school and housing inflated as their \"value\" increased, and we received little to no compensation to offset these increased costs. Only new programs for borrowing money we still can't afford to pay back. At no other point in the history of any nation has an epidemic of debt to income ratio ever been this severe, and it's happened under the guidance of the Baby Boomer generation. So when people blame the Boomers for our economy being \"ruined\", what they're really saying is that it's the fault of the Boomer generation for setting expectations for certain paths in life, and then simultaneously inflating the cost of those paths while offering us nothing extra to help with the cost, except a promise that we can pay them over time instead of all right now. We haven't even tackled the issue of interest on debts, that's just a ten kiloton bomb on top of an already deep crater. It was the Boomer generation who made these changes to our economy, and they are responsible for the impact their collective greed and social pressure has had on our country as a result."
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8rh9v5 | Why do red states tend to have worse socio-economic and educational issues and why do lawmakers strive to maintain this? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Oklahoma resident here. Its a really simple answer. The promise of Trickle-down economics fuels people around here. The idea that if you tax business less, business will be more likely to succeed is prominent. Unfortunately, new businesses don't want to move to a place that has crappy schools and infrastructure and that is what you get when you don't have taxes coming in. Lawmakers strive to maintain this because this is what the people of Oklahoma want. They don't see themselves as an oppressed proletariat, but instead see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. They want low taxes for business because they are just one big break away from being successful businessmen. When that break never comes, the GOP says \"Well it is the fault of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or any other Democrat they can think of.\" It is a bizarre case of ideological ignorance and Stockholm syndrome",
"Part of it is the nature of industry and the way unions proliferated throughout the US. Factories popped up around concentrated urban centers where large populations with low skills resided. The south focused more on agriculture and animal husbandry. The large population centers became simple trade hubs for transporting material to the north or the ports. So most factories ended up in the North or midwest. With it, came union activity. This came with a specific form of politics. Even some newspapers have origins from unions. Alot of politicians had to navigate unions in some form to get elected. This has cultural implications for the sort of laws and ordinances that would arise. During the conservative revolution of the late seventies and early 80s. The south started passing right to work laws that would defang unions. Since unions didn't have quite the stronghold in the south and cultural cache, it was a bit easier. With this, meant the business lobby had a stronger influence on local politics then the workers did. In terms of educational issues, this tends to be an issue of funding. This issue is two fold. 1. Red states tend to resist state income taxes or at least tend to keep them much lower. The conservative outlook is that an underfunded government is less likely to oppress its occupants. In addition, even the laws that are passed and favorable to its citizens may not be enforced if the legislature purposely underfunds itself. This often leaves education to suffer. As cuts have to come from somewhere and public education's payoff is usually a 12 to 18 yr project. So the pay off his hard to understand. So in the short term. It seems like an easy cut. 2. Racism. Ok so here goes. Back when slaves were freed, most of them elected to stay in the same states they had always resided in. Mostly because they didn't have resources or the skills to look for work up north. Any way they stayed in the south. Well, the south set out a campaign to keep blacks in a permanent state of subservience. They kept black citizens out of normal institutions such as school. In Plessy vs Ferguson, it was decided that black students must be provided separate but equal governmental services. Such as public schools. So separate schools existed for white students and black students. Obviously, doubling the government resources for to subsets of people gets expensive. So black facilities and resources were often cut short. What were they going to do? Vote you out? So anyway. This status quo existed for quite some time. Eventually Brown V Board came up. This ruled that schools must be integrated Well since this point. States have taken up the effort to circumvent Brown V Board. The most effective measure has been for different counties and municipalities to divvy up school resources specifically based on the immediate region. So instead of collecting a dollar from every state citizen and spreading that money equally to every child in the state, a **specific** municipality will collect a dollar from each person and those dollars are only spent on the children within that municipality. What happens is, the rich start to congregate in specific regions. These neighborhoods become affluent and their schools are well funded and well maintained. Meanwhile, municipalities with poor residents collect less money from each person and have to maintain resources among its poorer schools. This also creates other issues. The nature of migration Inc the US is such that these poorer areas are usually concentrated in large urban centers in the south while affluent neighborhoods flank these urban centers around the edges of the city. The affluent have their cake and eat it too. They take advantage of the perks of a large city by entertaining themselves, working a visiting a city. But they keep most their tax dollars within the affluent neighborhoods. Meanwhile large cities have to maintain big budgets and complex systems with more demand for crime prevention, safet, cleanliness etc. But their tax base for educating children is poorer and they have to spread these lesser taxes among more kids. The end result is much the same as segregation. Black poorer children growing up in lesser governmental facilities. While affluent, white children get access to better government facilities with more consistent resources."
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8rrd46 | Why are American comics so much more focused on superheroes than European ones? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The issue here is that you're drastically oversimplifying American comics and lumping them all together into the same category \"superhero comics\". Many of the absolute most popular comics and characters are ordinary people dealing with ordinary problems. Think of Archie, Garfield (a cat, but still), Charlie Brown, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, and many many more. These aren't just popular characters, they're extreme critical market successes that have been running (in Archie's case) since the 1940s.",
"It all goes back to the 50s. Post WWII, comics were pretty diverse. You had action, horror, mystery, scifi, even some raunchy stuff. Superheroes were actually on the decline. Then some quack psychologist published a book titled \"Seduction of the Innocent\" about how comic books were eroding the moral fabric of America and corrupting our youth. There was a public outcry and Congress got involved. It was basically a preview of McCarthyism. To protect themselves, the comic book corporations created the Comics Code Authority as a means to self-regulate, similair to the ESRB. Very few non-superhero comics survived, and even they changed significantly. Thus the Silver Age began."
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8ruz9l | Why Disney and Comcast are attempting to purchase major parts of 21st Century Fox, and why Murdoch family has no problem with handing off its valuable entertainment assets away? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They would never \"hand away\" valuable assets. They want to sell them for a gigantic fortune. Good deal!"
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8rygyr | Why are nerdiness and eyeglasses synonymous with one another? Is there a tangible link between intelligence and bad eyesight? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The connection is the other way around, glasses, especially very thick framed one, tend to make you the target of bullying, as they are an easy target to ridicule and you are very helpless without them, making them ideal to steal and mock you with. (They also symbolise a flaw in your, your non-perfect eyesight, which is exploited in the same vein) Being ridiculed can make for a recluse and that can make people turn towards things that doesn't involve other people, like learning or video games.",
"Noticed this article a few weeks ago: 'It’s not just a pop culture trope – a University of Edinburgh study has found intelligent people are 30% more likely to have genes related to poor eyesight.' URL_0"
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8sbzay | Why is Seattle pronounced "see-a-tle" and not "sea-tle"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because it's not an English name. The city was named after the native American [Chief Seattle]( URL_0 ), and Seattle is an anglicization of his name.",
"Seattle is not a normal English word. The city was named for a Native American chieftain of the Squamish tribe who accommodated and helped white settlers found the city in the area and negotiate with the other tribes. His name is usually spelled \"Si'ahl\" which has a glottal stop sound in the middle, which was anglicized into a \"T\" sound. English isn't known for consistent spelling rules, so whatever the original settlers wrote down is what stuck in the language."
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8sfq89 | Why didn’t white Americans enslave Native Americans systematically on a wide scale rather than shipping slaves all the way from Africa? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because Africans were selling slaves. Europeans typically weren't going out and enslaving Africans directly, rather they were buying slaves from African tribes who already engaged in the practice. Of course once there was a market for more slaves the practice kicked into higher gear, but the idea was something that originated from Africa.",
"Because white Americans didn't create the slave trade. Africans did. They would raid each other's Villages and take captives eventually this led them to selling captives to Muslim slave Traders who eventually developed a market for it that still exists today and some parts of the world. Here's where the Dutch come in, they would buy the slaves of the Middle East and then take them to the Europe in the Americas and sell them. So basically since there was already a product on the market that was accepted the instances of Americans taking Indians as slaves were few and far between though it did happen. People also don't talk about the Irish slave trade much so there's that. Oh and the first slave owner in the American colonies was a black man himself. So there's that. I'll leave a link to his Wikipedia page. URL_0",
"In general, African slaves were either agricultural workers or women who lived in fixed settlements. It was simply too much effort to capture warriors or hunter-gatherers. Once you put those people on a ship and sail them across an ocean, they're likely to simply accept doing pretty much the same work they'd done their entire life. They didn't have anywhere else to go, after all. In contrast, native Americans weren't pre-selected like this. If you want to take native American slaves, you needed to get together soldiers and go kill off the warriors protecting them. After you did that, you had to deal with the fact that your newfound slaves could simply stroll down the road and find shelter with a similar tribe.",
"Lol. They did try. But the Native Americans kept dying from smallpox and other diseases. Africans had better resistance to those diseases.",
"They did , natives knew the areas they were being held at too well and would easily escape this caused Europeans to start shipping mainland natives to the West Indies where it would be much harder to escape . The Spanish had plenty of native slaves in the southwest and Latin America",
"One of the main reasons was the fact that Native Americans were not able to keep up with the rigors of labor. Also some Native Americans were not able to withstand some of the diseases that the Europeans brought over . The Africans could with stand those diseases for the most part could work for a reasonable amount of years .",
"They did. But many Native American Slaves simply left and went back to their peoples as they were physically capable of walking or riding a horse to get back to them. An Escaped Negro slave did not really have any place to go for most of the era of the slave trade, and even when they had places like Canada or Free States as an option there was not much support for them once they got free. You also have the fact that African Slaves were being sold by other African Tribes who took the effort to physically capture them then sell them to White Slave Traders. That is far easier than taking the effort to find, fight, and capture Native Americans. And finally a lot of Native American Slaves died from the diseases that they had no native immunities to. Africans tended to have those immunities just like the White Europeans did."
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8sktpd | How do these relatively obscure internet rappers (such as XXXtentacion and 6ix9ine) come from seemingly out-of-nowhere and become super popular while making ridiculous amounts of money? | I don't really know much about rap music or why people even like it at all (it's just not my thing, please don't jump down my throat), but I'm especially baffled by how these random dudes become over-night millionaires. I was under the impression that the music business isn't as lucrative these days as it once was, especially for independent artists. Where is these guys' cash flow coming from? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Soundcloud pays them for listens and then they get booking fees for performances. [And they probably arent that rich in the first place]( URL_0 )",
"> I don't really know much about rap music This explains why you aren't familiar with artists until they're household names. XXX has (had) slowly grown his fanbase for years to get to this point of fame. I'm not a fan of soccer, but as far as I know David Beckham came out-of-nowhere and became super popular. If I was involved with soccer culture, I would have seen his gradual rise to stardom as opposed to only knowing the most famous of the bunch and thinking they came out of nowhere.",
"They get five figures to play a club for a single night. They are also faking how wealthy they are. Jewelry might be loaned by a record label. Cars are leased.",
"x and tekashi both owe a lot of their fame to no jumper, a podcast with a large following that focuses on interviewing up-and-coming rap artists. a lot of their money comes from bookings, features, and merch sales."
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8sl51w | The practical purpose of "Sister Cities" | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cultural exchanges happen between them. For example my city and a city and Japan are sister cities and the college students go there and vice versa over the summer. That's obviously not the only purpose but the one I know about."
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8swtro | How did the spinning red, blue, and white barber pole get synonymous with barber shops? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Barbers way back in the day used to practice bloodletting (cutting to release blood) as a treatment for certain illnesses. The red represents the dripping blood. The pole used to represent that has stayed with the image of being a barber.",
"A long time ago barbers were also like surgeons. The red resembles blood, the white are bandages, and blue are veins. They did more than cut your hair but fixed maladies.",
"As others have said, barbers did surgeries! We call them \"Barber-surgeons\" in the history of medicine. They'd hang the bloody rags outside and they'd twist around the post, creating the spiral pattern of the barber's pole. Now the other tidbit others haven't mentioned. Why weren't the doctors the surgeons? Well, back then doctoring was purely an academic craft - medicines, treatments, curing with the mind alone. To touch the body was beneath the doctors, a dirty affair, so we had the barbers doing surgery, we had the midwives delivering babies, and so on. No, it was with the thoughts of the mind that the cure would be found, not the action of the hand. It wasn't until the mid-late 1800s that doctors started getting hardcore about surgery and babies and so on. Interestingly in modern medicine, we roughly still have such a division, with the surgeons doing procedures and the medicine/pediatrics/psychiatrists working only with their minds. Of course, medicine specialties DO still do procedures, this is not an absolute, but by in large surgeons perform the more highly paid procedures and are wealthier, docs who primarily work using their head and not their hands get paid a bit less. And of course, barbers are now cutting just hair.",
"I think it’s because barbers used to carry out basic surgery, as well as haircuts. Somehow the pole is connected to that. But I can’t remember how sorry!",
"Not only is a synonymous with Barbers but to call your shop a barber shop vs just hair stylists you must display a pole according to municipal laws in many areas."
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8t5mgx | Why are hearts associated with love? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"There are actually two parts to this question. First the idea that the heart, as in the physical organ, was associated with love probably stems from the idea that it was the seat of the mind or soul. The Greeks thought it was responsible for emotion, logic, and day to day thoughts. So love of course would have to originate there and the tradition persisted. As for the *symbol* of the heart being associated with love that is probably due to the now extinct plant \"silphium\". The seed or fruit of this plant was [shaped like the heart]( URL_0 ) symbol we all know. Among its various uses as a seasoning or medicine, it was said to \"promote the menstrual discharge\" and probably was used as a sort of contraceptive."
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8t5mka | Why is pink considered a "girl color"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Somebody picked some colors to help differentiate newborn baby boys from the newborn baby girls & it just grew out from there. It's completely arbitrary & only came about in the last hundred years or so. Basically, it's one of those \"traditions\" that boils down to \"that's how the Baby Boomers grew up\". URL_0",
"It actually used to be a boy's color (as it was seen to be a version of the masculine red) and blue was a girl's color as it was supposedly the color of the Virgin Mary's dress (at least as painted by classical artists who of course had no idea). But in the 1950s several ad agencies pushed pink as a girl's color according to their interpretation of society's preferences and it caught on from there."
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8tf7mw | Where the term “late” to describe deceased came from | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's shorthand for \"lately deceased\". It's traditionally used to describe someone who has died recently, but as the abbreviated phrase eclipsed the full one in popular speech, it's come to describe anyone who is dead regardless of how recently they croaked."
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8tln8d | Why are many Asian written languages word or idea based whereas most European written languages are sound or phonetically based? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is generally believed that writing systems began as picture-based systems before transitioning to a system of abstract symbols which correspond to words, and from there to a system of abstract symbols which correspond to individual sounds. You can see traces of this early picture-based writing in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian pre-cuneiform writing, and Ancient Chinese oracle-bone script. Not all languages, however, found it necessary to make this last step to sound-based alphabetic scripts. Chinese is a well-known example of this, but outside of China and its immediate sphere of influence this style of writing is less common in modern Asia than many westerners believe. * Japan uses a combination of borrowed Chinese characters and a native system where each symbol represents a syllable. * Korean similarly used a hybrid system until Sejong the Great developed the present-day writing system in the 15th century, which is primarily alphabetic but also shows syllable boundaries by grouping the letters of each syllable together into a \"block\". * Vietnam is another example of a country which formerly used borrowed Chinese characters, but today they primarily use the Latin alphabet with diacritics to indicate special features like tones. * Many central- and northwest-Asian nations use the Cyrillic alphabet, the same alphabet used for languages like Russian and Ukranian, due to Soviet influence. Others make use of lesser-known alphabetic systems, like the Georgian and Armenian alphabets. * India and southeast Asia use a wide variety of different scripts, mostly belonging to the Brahmic family. These writing systems are \"abugidas\", an interesting form of writing somewhere in between the syllable-based and alphabetic methods. * Many nations in the Middle East use Arabic, or occasionally other systems derived from the old Aramaic script, such as the Hebrew alphabet. Arabic and Hebrew both originally used a system where each symbol represented a consonant and vowels had to be inferred from context, but both have since developed methods for notating specific vowel sounds. Mongolian originally also used a system descended from Aramaic, but converted to using the Cyrillic alphabet during the Soviet era."
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8toyy2 | What makes a bad joke bad and why is it viewed in distaste when there is a clear humor? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Jokes, at their core, are about subversion. The set up is mundane, common, understood. The punchline, a surprise, unexpected. Theres a reason they're called dad jokes. Kids haven't heard them before, puns and play on words that they've only recently gotten comfortable with are novel and fun. As we get older, even jokes we haven't even heard before may become unfunny because though its still something we were unfamiliar with, it wasn't a surprise, it wasn't novel in conception. I haven't multiplied every number ever by 2. But if I've done it enough times, I can extrapolate what would happen. Multiplying yet another number by 2 will get a result that I can anticipate or something I'm familiar with. That's actually at the core of why most professional comedians refuse to apologize and tend to try to push the boundaries, they are always searching for subversion and a counter to expected thought.",
"I think it has a lot to do with the audience and the timing. Especially the timing. Even a lame joke can get laughs if delivered at the perfect moment. That said, if the mood isn’t right or it’s delivered to late, even a good joke can fall on its face.",
"Its not bad, but people who know you or have ecpectations from you ( mind you even strangers can have expectations from you ) are dissapointed"
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8tx2oy | Why did wearing surgical masks become socially acceptable in parts of Asia but not in the rest of the World? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"in addition to pollution, social mores would urge that a sick person should wear a mask to contain their sneeze or cough as to make effort not to infect others around them. in contrast, most western countries, you wear a mask when you're not sick in order to prevent all the sick people who know they're sick and are open mouth coughing and sneezing without a thought of caring about infecting others. western culture is very individual minded, as opposed to eastern cultures which are more group minded. western culture favors the independence of the individual above the group. eastern culture favors the unity of the group over the individual.",
"China’s cities are some of, if not THE heaviest polluted in the world. Therefore people who live in and around China have to often wear the masks to help protect their lungs. And because it affects nearby nations like Korea and Japan, they’ve taken to doing so as well"
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8tzzxc | What are tonal languages and what are their differences from non-tonal ones? | My SO is an Speech Language Pathologist and mentions tonal languages often but I'm not fully understanding what that means. I'd love a good explaination of what they are and mean to communication as a whole. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"My favorite tonal language is Mandarin. In tonal languages, the exact same word (we'll use the Mandarin \"ma\" here) can mean entirely different things based on how you say it. \"Ma\" has four different tones, Mà (to scold), Má (hemp), Mā (mom), and Mǎ (horse). You form these tones by lowering or raising your pitch, or elongating the vowel sound. ( URL_0 a short demonstration of this particular word and it's tonality) These tones are incredibly important because a native speaker will quite literally be unable to understand you if you screw them up. They're so ingrained into their language that it often won't register that you could be mispronouncing a tone, you may end up saying something like \"how is your horse?\" and they'll wonder why you think they have a horse. Or, my favorite little Mandarin pun could be used, \"Mā mà mǎ\" (Mom scolds horse) can be shifted over to \"Mǎmà mā\" (Horse scolds mom). This contrasts non-tonal languages like English, where we mess the tonality of a word for emphasis rather than to drastically change the meaning. Sometimes we'll say something like \"I really want to do that\", but we can use \"I **really** want to do **this**\" to emphasize.",
"Some Asian languages are tonal (ex. Thai and Mandarin/Chinese, etc.). The varying tone changes the meaning (I.e. Flat, rising, falling, etc). Mandarin has 4 tones and depending on the tone it changes the meaning of the word. For example \"ma\" in mandarin can mean mother, horse or it makes a statement interrogative (a question). Most people however look at the context of the sentence to determine the meaning, especially with westerners learning Asian languages as it's extremely difficult for us to master tones. So if I said \"ni hui shuo zhongguo hua ma?\" Which means \"do you speak Chinese?\", obviously if the tone is wrong they realize I'm not saying \"your horse speaks Chinese\" lol. So again, context is key. Hope this helps.",
"Think about upward inflection when asking question;; URL_0 Family guy, ~20 sec. Except apply that to language, on a per-word basis, where instead of changing the meaning of the phrase into a question, it's changing the definition of each word. Tonal languages do this more than with just upward inflection; they also have downward inflection, as well as at least one static/steady tone (but usually also having steady low & steady high tones meaning different things too). English is not a very \"tonal\" language because English speaking usually uses tone to imply change in punctuation (\"turning everything into a question\"), or otherwise change context (enthusiasm vs sarcasm), rather than to change individual definition of words."
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8u02pz | Why is the Roman Empire considered so important that we teach it to this day? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"TL;DR: the Roman Empire was massive, lasted for ages, and covered much of Western Europe, so it’s no surprise it is so important to Europeans and their offshoot nations. (And I assume to many others, in North Africa, the Middle East, etc., but I can’t speak for them.) At its height, the Roman Empire was one of the largest empires in world history. It lasted, in some form, for almost 1500 years. Within its borders it often provided a level of peace, stability and organisation that was unprecedented, and perhaps unmatched in Western Europe for another thousand years (that’s a very debatable point). It undertook amazing feats of civil engineering, many of which are still visible and impressive today, or are even still in use (especially in the east). The Roman Empire also produced a great deal of literature, from comedies to philosophy to engineering. Many of these were core texts until the modern era, and some are still very relevant today. It was the birthplace of Christianity, and the empire officially adopting Christianity was a turning point for the religion. The home of the Catholic Church is, of course, still Rome, and its language Latin. After the fall of the empire in the West, rulers and intellectuals looked to the Roman Empire as a model to aspire to. From their fragmented, troubled kingdoms the Roman Empire was a lost giant. In many ways, this admiration has continued up to the present day, with Rome viewed, for better or worse, as *the* greatest empire. *Edit:* The Roman Empire, and its rise and fall, has also been turned into many powerful stories and lessons. Its rise, its peak and fall can be used as political and moral lessons (which may or may not reflect the actual history).",
"*All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?*",
"All historical nations are \"important,\" and should be taught, but the powerful ones in particular are of note. The Roman Republic and Empire were quite powerful, and many European nations have their roots in the Empire, so they form a part of most Western history curricula. Elsewhere in the world, you may find curricula which focus more on other great empires. The Han Dynasty of China existed at the same time as the Roman Republic *and* Empire and was very successful.",
"Rome is the foundation upon which civilization is built: * Many of the languages in Europe are derivatives of Latin. * The legal systems of Europe are based on Roman Law (even in Germany and England attorneys **still** use Latin terms for many legal concepts). * Catholicism is still headquartered in Rome, and spread Roman culture and institutions globally for centuries. * Most imperial units are based on Roman units of measurement. * Our calendar comes from Rome, and several months of the year in the modern calendar are directly derived Latin (September, October, November, and December are literally 7th month, 8th month, 9th month, and 10th month in Latin, the names were retained after January and February were added to the calendar). * ~~April Fools is a memorial to a Roman calendar change (shifting the new year From April 1st to January 1st).~~ * Concrete and glass weren't invented in Rome, but Rome popularized them and developed many techniques we still use today (like glass blowing).",
"It was one of the first actually the first of its kind. It was run politically sound with a few exceptions. It turned into a republic also which is even better. We base some of outlets government off of it as well."
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8u2mca | Why are there such stark cultural constants between the Japnese Yakuza, and Mexican Cartel? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Japanese society prizes conformity and stability to a great degree. The Yakuza and mainstream society have an agreement: the Yakuza will operate underground and out of sight, and in exchange, the government will leave them alone. The Yakuza get to live in peace and the government gets to maintain the image of a harmonious society. Also important is the fact that the government is strong enough to hurt the Yakuza if they violate the agreement. By contrast, Mexico is a much poorer country than Japan. The Cartels, fueled by the untold billions that they make in the drug trade, are too strong for the central government to truly defeat. Plus, since Mexico is a poorer country, it’s also easy to bribe and corrupt their opponents in the government. Mexico also doesn’t have that strong Confucian desire for social harmony."
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8uc61b | How did English become the 2nd language that most countries chose to adopt? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"British Empire -- > Post-WW2 / Cold War America -- > British and American pop culture -- > Silicon Valley.",
"It first started with Britain having the largest empire with the most widespread colonies. Then as their power lessed the US took over with an economic hegemony. Both the UK and US also export their movies and TV as well as music a lot."
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8uc9lj | why do bikers bike on the road when there is a sidewalk right next to them? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In many places it is illegal to bicycle on the sidewalk. So if you want to ride legally and there's no bike path, you ride on the road.",
"It most cities bicycles are considered vehicles. So, if there is not a dedicated bike lane, they are legally supposed to go on the street.",
"It isn't called a \"sidebike\", it is explicitly called a sidewalk. Bikes are vehicles to get around with and should remain on roads. People in cars need to give proper respect to bikes.",
"It is safer. Sidewalks are for walking, anything faster should be in the road. A bicycle can move anywhere from 10-25 mph which is hazardous for pedestrians. Sidewalks are narrow, which limits room for moving out of the way. Additionally, many states categorize bicycles with motor vehicles, which allows them to be in the roadway. This means bicycles are subject to the same rules as cars with regards to signaling turns, riding in the correct lane for the direction of travel, stopping at stop signs and traffic lights, and yes, even speeding."
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8uc9rh | How do Rappers such as Lil Xan, Lil Peep, Lil Pump etc. admit to doing illegal substances such as Xanax or Lean ( codeine and sprite ) not get arrested or sought out by the authorities? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It is artistic expression. Jim Carrey could go on stage and say he murdered someone, but that isn’t a confession because it is part of an act, and people can lie. Rapping falls under the same rules, so long as it is part of their persona then they can say what they like."
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