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5xsa0q | Time dilation | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What time dilation is not: --- In order to explain time dilation, let me fist explain what it is **not**. A popular, but entirely wrong notion of time dilation states, that time passes slower the faster you move. A quick examination of this claim, however, reveals that it cannot be true. There is no absolute velocity, so velocity only makes sense with respect to a frame of reference. Thus, if this version of time dilation were true, time on your spaceship would magically speed up and slow down depending on the frame of reference you measure your spaceship's velocity against. Thus, the statement that the rate at which time passes depends on your velocity (relative to an arbitrary frame of reference) cannot be true. Now, let's get started with actual time dilation: Why does time dilation happen? --- To understand how time dilation can happen, let's consider the following thought experiment: A clock is any object that does an action periodically. As such, a light beam bouncing off two mirrors can be considered a clock, with each period of the photon bouncing up and down again being one tick. Let's now consider a train with such a clock in one of the compartments, as seen [here]( URL_0 ). Imagine a person in a train with a flashlight. They shine the beam of the flashlight across the carriage and time how long it takes to return to them. Very simply it is just the distance the light travels (twice the width of the carriage (d)) divided by the speed of light (c). Someone on the embankment by the train will also agree with the measurement of the time that the light beam takes to get back to the person with the torch after reflecting from the mirror. They will both say that the time (t) is 2d/c. Now consider what happens as the train moves at a constant speed along the track. The person in the train still considers that the light has gone from the torch, straight across the carriage and returned to them. It has still traveled a distance of 2d and if the speed of light is c the time (t) it has taken is 2d/c. However to the person on the embankment this is not the case. For them, the train has been moving during a tick of the clock, and the photon has to travel a longer distance accordingly. Now in classical physics, pre relativity, we would now say that since the light beam has moved further in the same time it must be moving faster, in other words we have to \"add\" the speed of the train to the speed of the light. But the theory of relativity does not allow us to do this. It says that the speed of light is constant. Thus, the photon will take longer to reach its destination from the point of view of the observer on the embankment. Hence we know that it takes the photon longer to complete this journey from the point of view of the observer on the embankment than it does from the point of view of an observer resting in the train. And we know that the time it takes the photon to complete its journey up and down again corresponds to one tick of a clock. Thus, it follows logically that the observer on the embankment sees clocks on the moving train as ticking slower than someone resting in the train. Which is exactly what special relativity is all about. Due to the equivalence principle, however, it is entirely valid to state that the train is at rest and the embankment is moving at a velocity of -v relative to the train. This leads us to the conclusion, that the clocks on the embankment are also slowed down from the perspective of the person on the train. This means, each observer sees the clocks of the other observer as being slowed down. This might seem paradoxical at first, but can be solved withing the confines of special relativity. The thought experiment addressing this issue is the so called Twin paradox: --- One of the central claims in special relativity is, that all inertial frames of reference are equally valid to describe a phenomenon. That is, the laws of physics are the same in all frames of reference that are not being accelerated. This is called the equivalence principle. Consider an inertial frame of reference I and another inertial frame of reference I' that moves at a constant velocity v relative to I. Time dilation states, that an observer O resting in I will measure clocks resting in I' as ticking slower than their own clocks. According to the equivalence principle, the same statement has to be true for an observer O' resting in I' as well, since they are both in inertial frames of reference. Thus, the observer O' resting in I' sees clocks resting in I as ticking slower than their own. **Time dilation is a symmetrical effect. Both observers see clocks in the other observer's frame of reference as ticking slower.** \"But wait\", you might interject at this point, \"what about the [twin paradox]( URL_1 ). The twin making a trip to space ages less than the twin remaining on earth. Doesn't that contradict what you are saying?\" While that seems true on the first glance, this is actually not a contradiction. In order for the twin paradox to work, the twin traveling in the space ship has to return to earth. In order to do that, he has to change direction at some point. This change in direction implies acceleration, and acceleration breaks the symmetry of the problem. Remember, that we stated that all *inertial* (un-acclerated) frames of reference are equal. By accelerating, the space traveling twin breaks the symmetry of the equivalence principle, thus leading to the observable difference in passed time."
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5xvb7f | Why is discovering the Higgs-Boson particle so significant? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Higgs boson was the last major prediction of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, but for many years it's discovery eluded physicists. The Higgs mechanism tells us how elementary particles get their mass. You can imagine the Higgs field being like treacle. Particles which couple to the Higgs field will slow down from the speed of light in the field. If they do so, they have mass, like the electron. If not, they are massless, like the photon. There Higgs boson is an excitation of this field, like a vibrating spring in a mattress, and finding one confirms that the field exists and the mechanism is correct. But the Higgs boson was predicted to have a very high mass (although the exact value could not be predicted), and therefore would be very short lived because it could quickly decay to lighter particles. This means you don't see many of them hanging around, so you need to put a lot of energy into one place to make one. This is one of the reasons why scientists built the LHC, as it allows us to accelerate particles to extremely high energy, smash them together, and see what the energy of that collision makes by analysing the products. They managed to do this in 2012. So, finding the Higgs boson confirms the last major piece of the Standard Model. But it also has more potential than that. While the Standard Model does a great job of explaining everything it tries to, it leaves a lot out, namely gravity. If we can find any irregularities in the properties of the Higgs from what the Standard Model predicts, we might be able to find a lead to the new physics we desperately need to connect quantum field theory with gravity. More analysis of the Higgs will be done in the coming months and years to see if we can find any such leads.",
"It verified parts of our current mathematical model of the fundamental functions of our universe, which predicted the existence of the particle, though that partical had never been observed. That means our current model of the universe is close to correct in this area, and is therefore useful for predicting how certain things behave.",
"Ok so quick tl;dr version of quantum field theory. 1: A field is a function defined over some region space and time. If that sounds scary it's not. You're used to some of these, think gravitational fields and magnetic fields. 2: In the case of quantum fields, they're what give rise to the fundamental particles. Individual particles are excitations in their related quantum field. Basically this means there is for example one electron field and every election can be described as an excited state of that field. That's a littreal scarier, but the nutshell is that if you find a fundamental particle, it means it's field is also a thing. 3: The interactions between those particles can be described by the interactions between the corresponding quantum fields. The higgs field in particular is of major interest, because interactions with it are why some particles have mass, which is why everything isn't traveling at light speed and why we're here talking about this. You'll note the lack of qualifiers in that sentence, a couple years ago the words \"we think\" would have been included there. 4: Those fields are a PITA to study directly. You can use QFT to make empirical predictions and etc, but you can't realy point at something and go \"yup that's the higgs field\" 5: fortunately if the field exists it has a corresponding particle, and particles are things you can point at. So if you find the higgs boson (which is the particle associated with the higgs field), and its properties match the theoretically predicted ones by extensions you've gone a long way to confirming the existence of and the properties of the higgs field. Which is kind of a big deal, if you do that you get to move from \"we'll this is probably right\" to \"yup this is definitely how things work\" In the case of the higgs boson it was a big deal because it had been predicted to be a thing back in the 60s and half a century of waiting for confirmation is a long time to build hype, especially when it proved to be much much harder to create and detect than initially expected. The LHC was built in large part to finally find the damn thing."
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5xve3i | Why is our brain programmed to like sugar, salt and fat if it's bad for our health? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As humans, we're only separated by about ~20,000 years from our hunter/gatherer ancestors. That period of time is extremely short in terms of evolution so although we live completely different lifestyles, our bodies have not changed much. We crave sugar, fat, and salt because they were \"healthy\" back in those days just because of how rare those things were to our hunter/gatherer ancestors. Being able to eat the calorie dense sugar and fats means that we would be able to survive more days without food, improving our overall \"health.\" We needed salt to replenish all the salts lost through sweat because humans are built for endurance running (early human hunters would jog along until the prey runs out of energy). The humans who didn't crave sugars, fats, and salt would not build up enough energy and wouldn't survive as well as those who did crave them. Nowadays, the food industry takes advantage of our primitive brain cravings to sell us more food. Normally, a person only eats a constant amount of food. If that was the case, for the food industry, the profits will never increase. They have to make people eat more food to generate profits. Thus, there is a strong incentive to put more sugars, fats, and salt in our foods so we eat more of it, regardless if it was healthy for us.",
"It isn't bad for our health. They are essential for life. When we lived in the wild those were the things that retained water best for us (salt), and had the highest calories (sugar and fat). Our brains don't know they live in a time where food=fridge in a sense, so it is still in 10,000 BC where when you find sugary and fatty food you pig out on it to gain fat to hold over until you can get your next bit of fat. Think of a gas engine. Give it gas, and it functions. Give it 40L of gas and it will function longer. Give it 100L of gas and it will function even longer than with 40L. Sure, it'll weight more having a bigger tank attached to it, but It'll just keep humming along for that much longer because it has that much more gas. The gas engine will only last as long as it has gas, and because it doesn't have knowledge of when it will consume some again it will allow you to fill it as much as possible. Exactly like the body. That part of the brain only functions in the now you could say, and that is why it goes \"FAT/SUGAR/SALT!!!! GIMME GIMME!!!!!!!!\" because it knows that eating 1lb of those foods will make it survive far more than foods with very little of it. So due to being \"cut off\" from the other parts of the brain that could think \"we can just eat more in 3 hours....fat ass\" it will just forever crave it as long as it knows it's in front of you. **Edit/sidenote:** It's trans fats that are bad for us, processed sugars(in relations to it often being found in empty calories), and TOO MUCH of those. All those metals we need in our body do wonders for us, but my god can they do damage to us if we consume too much of them. Much like anything we consume: moderation. It's all good in moderation, and all bad without. Look at fibre. It can constipate you, but can also give you diarrhea. **Edit2:** Should've mentioned a bit more detail about sugar. Its the only energy source for the brain. While people explained to me we, as mammals, can make our own. With that being said, it is still easier to just consume some instead of making the body do it all itself. **Edit2b:** I have been informed by many of you that recently science has discovered that the brain can survive on ketones made by the liver with fats. **Edit3:** Thanks for the gold and the upvotes everyone! **Edit 4:** Many people pointed out I screwed up on my explanation when I said sugar=high calories. What I should've/wanted to say was that sugary foods were highly beneficial to our survival due to often being rich in nutrients (apples, berries, etc), and being found in abundance (apple tree with 800lbs of apples). I didn't mean to make it sound like gram to gram sugar (carbs) has more calories.",
"It's not bad for our health, in the amounts we \"naturally\" get it. We're programmed to seek out the biggest bang for the buck, nutritionally speaking. For most of our history, resources were scarce, so we needed to be encouraged to seek out the stuff that would do us the most good. That's why we like those flavors. The problem is in modern time, that scarcity doesn't exist anymore, but we're still programmed to act like it does. If you eat \"bad\" stuff in moderation, you'll be fine. It's only when you regularly gorge (eat more than you burn) that it really becomes a problem.",
"Because sugar, salt, and fat are only bad for you when consumed in excess amounts. In fact, salt and fat are quite necessary for a healthy diet. For the vast majority of human history those things were not available for consumption in excess amounts, except for by the most wealthy nobility.",
"First of all, nutritional fat isn't really that bad for us. That's a myth that was pushed for decades in the US, because the sugar companies wanted to cover up the real cause of obesity. Second, humans today are in a much different situation than our ancestors. They had to hunt and forage for everything they ate, so if there was a way to eat something that would provide quick energy and some fat storage, it was great. Today, we have no problem getting enough to eat. The problem is getting ourselves to stop eating when we're already full.",
"Because for most of humanity's existence (when the genes were selected that determine your tastes), the risk of starvation was much higher than the risk of obesity related diseases. Sugar and fat were great sources of calories to avoid starvation.",
"Salt is only bad for you if your organs already don't function well and/or are unable to drink enough potable water. Fats aren't bad for you, with the exception of artificial trans fats, which are only possible to make with modern industrial methods. With the exception of trans fat studies, there is a dearth of studies on the health effects of dietary fat that are focused on healthy populations, with control groups, that account for lifestyles and food quality in general. Naturally occurring sugars tend to be fine because they're packed with water and fiber and it's neigh impossible to match a Western diet without processed foods. As with trans fats, processing makes them bad for you.",
"Mostly because evolution is very slow, and it's only recently that we've had access to those things in large enough quantities to present a danger to our health before we were able to pass on our genes. Sugar, salt, and fat are important parts of the human diet. And that's doubly-so when we had to chase an animal for a few miles and beat it to death with a rock and a stick. As far as evolution is concerned, we're still right about at that level--so it makes sense that the body is designed to crave those things and get them when it has access to them.",
"Your question is based on the dubious assumption that fat is bad for you. That aside - If you get a ruler and put your finger on 29.9cm the bit that is left is about where 'we' are in terms of human evolution. For the rest of this time we were out hunting animals to live. Humans survived because we were great over long distance. As long as we could follow the prey - the prey was fucked. So we had a high fat/protein diet. Every now and then we would find some berries etc and it was like motherfucking xmas. This would give us a mad sugar rush, so we are programmed to crave fat and sugar. (Our brain knows these kept us alive.) Problem is that these days instead of our hunter gatherer brethren who had a 99/1 ratio of fat/sugar we now have something more like a 70/30 the other way. Even if we were still running all day to catch a fucking elk this still wouldn't be a great diet. The brain can't cope with this much sugar (anyone who tells you to lower your cholesterol doesn't realise what makes up 1/4 of the brain yet) and I'll assume everyone knows about blood sugar by now. So...tldr: Our brains crave what they need. It's our shitty interpretation of this that is making us all sick, fat and smelly :) Edit - So many good answers here that probably explained it better, but I said fuck a few times so I'm just gonna leave it.",
"For 99.9999999999% of our evolutionary history, the biggest threat from food was not getting enough. Starvation. Foods that are high in calories and easy to digest are excellent anti famine foods. Imagine you are stuck in the desert and come across a fast food value menu. That'll provide 2000 calories for less than 5 minutes of chewing and eating. That is enough energy to walk for hours. Basically, its only today when we have an unlimited supply of anti-famine foods that it causes us to develop health issues like diabetes, obesity and vascular disease.",
"The only one or these that is truly bad for you when eaten on a regular basis is sugar. Humans are well adapted to eating fat and require salt to function. Sugar, however, messes with our hormones and is metabolized by the liver directly into visceral fat, ultimately leading to fatty liver disease.",
"The human brain did most of its evolution prior to the 20th century. Prior to the 20th century, famine and salt-deficiency were major killers, not colesterol buildup or high blood-pressure (also infection, plague, and violence). People also had kids earlier (20 year-old Romeo crushing on 14 year-old Juliet wasn't creepy by the contemporary standards), so there was limited evolutionary pressure to extend the human lifespan beyond 50-60 years old, an age where hard-laboring farmers became more burden than help to their families. Therefore, the unhealthy excesses of sugar and fat simply wasn't possible for most people, and other deaths probably people before obesity got the chance, so getting your hands on as much salt and fat as you could was generally a net benefit in context.",
"Fat is a necessary macro nutrient you need and salt is a necessary electrolyte you need. You don't need sugar but it's an easy to digest source of energy.",
"Our instincts and tastes evolved long before we became civilized and technologically advanced. In our natural, pre-mega-technological state, things that are bad for us to overeat were rare and valuable to our diet - salts, sugars and fats were hard to get, and virtually impossible to get too much of. In small amounts they are all vital to our health, making us strong and powerful. This positive effect became a strong selective force that pushed us to evolve the instinctual desire to eat them. Lethargy and bad body habits were also difficult to achieve - you didn't have a choice to sit in an air-conditioned apartment and binge netflix. You had to interact with community/nature for food, materials and entertainment. Any extra rest you could 'steal' was a bonus, so we evolved to desire lethargy even though we couldn't maintain it. It used to be impossible. Fast forward to 2017, we mass-produce everything and live cushy lifestyles. The impossible combination of sloth and overeating is now possible. Our instincts are outdated, but they don't kill us before child-bearing age. Thus we are unable to evolve a counter-balancing set of instincts, stuck in the loop of the desire to eat chocolate cake until diabetes.",
"Evolution doesn't really care about our concept of health. It just cares that we reproduce before we kick off. Whatever food gets us there, is evolutionally \"healthy\".",
"Because those are hard to find in the wild and we do need them in small doses so our \"caveman brain\" is programmed to always be on the look out. Only problem is now you can get all three for $8 at a drive though.",
"As I explain to my students... \"you have an instinctive urge to eat them. Two are energy sources (sugar and fat) and the other is an electrolyte (salt). 100,000 years of humans and human like species were instinctual like all animals. We increase our probability of staying alive with them in our diet, hence you and I like eating them so much.\" Edit:wording",
"Sugar and fat aren't bad for you. In a way, the reason they're unhealthy is they're *too* good for you. Sugar and fat have extremely high energy density. You get a LOT of calories per pound...so when we lived as hunter gatherers, it made sense that you wanted food that provided you with as much energy as possible, so evolution conditioned us to seek out foods that contained a lot of both. Basically a green salad might provide you with enough calories to sustain you for a couple of hours. A big slice of cake will give you enough calories to last a couple of days. The problem is that today we don't spend all day walking around a forest gathering nuts and berries, or spending a couple of days tracking an animal for its meat. We call the pizza place and get our food delivered to our door. Basically, we're eating a lot of high-energy food, but not working enough to burn off the calories...something our primitive ancestors didn't have to worry about. It's a similar situation with salt. Salt is an extremely important micronutrient. It acts as an electrolyte and, quite simply, we can't live without it... but salt only occurs in tiny amounts in most of our foods, so our bodies basically treat it like crack. When we find a source our bodies essentially go \"Holy crap! Salt! Get as much of this as possible!\" Of course, today, salt is everywhere, but our bodies have evolved to treat is as a rare resource.",
"Fat isn't bad at all. Salt is quite necessary, but of course take it in moderation. Sugar is garbage. Get it from your fruit and cut the rest out as much as possible. We're programmed to like it because of its rarity back in the day, but the stuff we're consuming right now is toxic trash.",
"Sugar is what's really bad for you. It acts like a drug and messes with your hormones. Nothing wrong with salt and fats. Your neurons need both to function. You don't need sugar.",
"Salt and fat are not bad for your health. Unless combined with sugar. However, sugar alone IS bad for your health.",
"It's much worse for your health to have no access to any sugar, salt, or fat at all, so they taste good to get us to seek them out.",
"In the quantities we could get it in when we had to hunt our own food the more you could get the better",
"Because they're great and necessary for our health. Sugar is rare in nature. Industry concentrates sugars and fats and makes obtaining them totally effortless. There is no obesity in the wild.",
"Human evolutionary biologist here. This is a classic example of an \"evolutionary mismatch\" in which what was once an advantageous behavior (consuming as many calorie-rich foods as possible) is maladaptive in the current environment. Premature death from obesity was not a major force of selection in human evolutionary history, but starvation was. See also: My fat cat. Another example of evolutionary mismatch is moths being attracted to lights. In the evolutionary past, the only lights at night came from the stars, so moths evolved to navigate by starlight. Add artificial lights to the system and now this once-adaptive behavior is seriously maladaptive.",
"Too much of anything is bad for you. This is the issue, not the sugar, salt and fat themselves. Food is essential to life. The reasons why we crave junk foods...well I'm shit at explaining but I'll try. Basically they're dense and full of energy, its easy to break down by our bodies and gives us instant gratification. Sends a lot of happy signals to the brain, but it doesn't last very long and lends you to craving more. A vicious circle. Because it's so dense, its very easy to eat too much of these maligned sugar, salt and fats. That's when the health problems come.",
"Fat isn't bad for us. See paleo and keto diet ideologies. Saturated fats have been improperly demonized by science thanks to funding from the sugar industries.",
"I'm going to go against the grain here and say that salt isn't bad for you, even in excess. The hypertension caused by salt is temporary and not associated with negative health outcomes. You'd have to eat a crazy amount of salt to really hurt yourself. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ).",
"It's not. You've been programmed about that by Big Sugar, and Big Agriculture in general. Sugar is bad for the brain, and fat is a much better food source for it. If you eat a keto diet for a while, you'll feel less hungry, sharper, more energised, and won't even like the taste of the sugar-laden junk sold in stores, much less crave it.",
"As every time this is asked, because they are only bad when eaten in excess. Salt is necessary for many biological processes and must be consumed for you to continue to live. Sugar and fat are highly calorie dense, so in the far past when food was scarce, sugary and fatty foods offered the best bang for the buck as far as energy expenditure per calorie gained was concerned. It's only now that food is so abundant that we can be selective enough to not eat all the food available to us.",
"Because those things are not bad for your health. They are ESSENTIAL to life If you drink enough water you die from hydro-shock, do you categorize water as \"bad for your health\" too ?",
"Is it just me or is \"Explain like I'm 5\" supposed to be in simple terms yet most answers for physics and science are very complex I'm new to this subreddit please correct me if I'm wrong",
"Fat and salt are not bad for you. Fat gives good calorie density and salt provides electrolytes, too much of either is bad for you. Sugar is the only one which is generally bad for you, but again can be consumed sensibly with mild issues.",
"Sugar is horrible, anything refined to a powder can be considered a form of sugar. It's basically toxic and is the leading cause of food triggers. The fat on your meat is the healthiest part of red meat. Salt, shit girl we all crave that mineral just take it easy.",
"Actually.. On the ketogenic diet these are STILL the best fuels for our bodies and minds. I shit when I seen someone say that they weren't. Our bodies need 10,000 years to adjust genetically to any massive technological change like the agricultural boom we experienced which is how we've got shit loads of food on the shelves in stores and other madness. RIP.",
"Because we evolved to take advantage of things in a state of scarcity. Sugar, before modern civilization was rare, and things that were sweet often provided a lot of nutrients needed to survive. However, with modern agriculture, we have way TOO MUCH sweet stuff today and we tend to overeat, not undereat, and we tend to make artificial stuff with things like fructose, which is far less healthy than natural sugars found in fruits. Our sense of liking sweet stuff, back in the day drew us to fruits and stuff. Now we drink tons of soda and stuff which is extremely unhealthy.",
"This is actually backwards, believe it or not. Sugar, salt, and fat are bad for our health *because* our brain is programmed to like them. These are fairly rare in the wild, but they're needed for survival. We need carbohydrates (sugar) and fat in order to survive, but these things aren't so easy to find. The fruits we eat today have been bred over the last few thousand years to provide us sugar, but they don't have fat; meanwhile, our only source or protein and fat is animals, unless we turn to agriculture (tofu doesn't grow on trees, generally). Animals are difficult to obtain. So, we pretty much have to like those things so that we'll spend the effort required to get them, because we will die without them. Salt is necessary for our electrolyte balance, but it's even rarer, and it's also part of eating animals that have these electrolytes in us (there's a whole food chain thingy to get us our sodium). Well, we humans are smart, and we figured out ways to obtain sugar, salt, and fat much more easily: farming. Or however it is we get salt -- mining, drying seawater, etc. In the last several decades, we've improved on these processes *so* much that it's actually cheaper to eat foods with sugar, salt, and fat than to eat foods without them. All because our brain is programmed to like them. We invented capitalism, which means that companies will sell us what we'll buy, and we'll buy what our brains are programmed to like, so companies will pack their products with as much sugar, salt, and fat as they can, because the more we like them, the more money they make. Our brain is programmed to make us like those things that were hard to get so that we'll work to get them, but this backfired, because we worked so hard that it's now too *easy* to get them and we get sick. See, humans are intelligent and *lazy*. We use our large brains to make life easier for us when we evolved from animals whose lives were hard and whose bodies were optimized life being hard. We're too smart for our own good, we humans."
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5xvfbb | Why does a lack of sleep give people bags under their eyes? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's the extended strain on your facial muscles from having to keep your eyes open for longer than they normally should be open. Note: this isn't the *only* reason for eye bags/circles, it's also genetics, dehydration, allergies, and too much sodium."
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5xxhzo | Why are larger objects often depicted as moving in slow motion when viewed from the perspective of a smaller objecr? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because large animals like elephants move more slowly than small animals like dogs. If an elephant moved at the speed of a dog, the forces involved would exceed the strength of the materials an elephant is made from."
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5xyh83 | What exactly is sleep? And why do we do it? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sleep is the brain's \"clean\" cycle. Your brain cells aren't connected directly to the bloodstream. There's a barrier in the way, the *blood-brain barrier*, that prevents random chemicals in the blood from affecting brain function. You wouldn't want your personality to change based on what you had for lunch, for example. This means that the brain cells need some other way to get nutrients and dispose of their waste. So they use the *cerebrospinal fluid* (CSF). CSF is a nutrient soup that surrounds and fills the brain. It flows slowly through the brain, and nutrients float around in it to be absorbed by the brain cells. But those cells have to expel waste - they expel their waste into the CSF, too. And the CSF doesn't flow fast enough to really carry that waste away, so it just sits there, building up. By the end of the day, the cells are basically floating in a soup of their own waste products, which is bad for brain function. So the brain enters sleep mode. During sleep, channels around the brain open up. The day's old and grimy CSF is pumped out, and fresh CSF is pumped in, flushing away all those waste products. By morning, you wake up with a squeaky-clean brain."
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5y1b8e | Why does bright sunlight make people sneeze? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"demeptu"
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"text": [
"Other light should be causing it. It's a reaction that some people have called the [Photic Sneeze Reflex.]( URL_0 ) It's similar to an allergy in that if you take antihistamines, it reduces the light's effects."
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5y1cfi | Why do guys have morning wood? And is there a variation of it for girls? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Erections are stimulated by the parasympathetic nervous system causing Nitric oxide release within the corpora. This pro-erection process is counter-balanced by an anti-erection effect from the sympathetic nervous system. Normally, they cancel each other out. The Sympathetic nervous system activity dips in the small hours whilst you are asleep and the parasympathetic effect 'wins'. Coupled with a normal diurnal rise in testosterone levels; you get a stonking boner. Source: Urologist",
"This other poster is incorrect, it has nothing to do with the bladder pressing on the prostate. > the absence of norepinephrine during the REM phase of the sleep causes erections. In women, this phenomenon is called Nocturnal clitoral tumescence while it is called Nocturnal penile tumescence in men. Considering women have a similar phenomena, and dont have a prostate....it should be fairly obvious that this has nothing to do with a prostate... URL_0 EDIT: Note that there is apparently some debate as to the exact reason for morning wood. The stimulation of the prostate is from a sentence on Wikipedia where citation is needed. While the cause is not entirely known, stimulation of the prostate is absurd",
"The female equivalent is referred to euphemistically as \"morning dew\", because the female equivalent is unplanned lubrication.",
"Though it is less common, women experience something similar! When aroused the clitoris has increased blood flow, and women can wake up with this still happening.",
"Before I became sexually active (with anyone but myself) especially as a teenager, I would have REALLY sexual sensations in my dreams. I wouldnt necessarily come during these dreams, but because I was pretty sexually frustrated my body would begin the sexual arousal process in my dreams. So, this is equatable to morning wood.",
"Sometimes I wake up to me humping my mattress...that's my morning wood i guess?",
"Girl here. We may not have the same physical \"wood\", exactly, but yes, clitorises get hard. But I often wake up earlier than my partner and fade in and out of horny sleep until we're both awake enough.... by the time he wakes up I'm so damn ready. My understanding is that estrogen levels increase in early waking hours, which makes sense, because i come so much harder from morning sex. So, yes, i get morning wood. Very much so.",
"I remember once hearing an explanation that was obviously just a joke but it always stuck with me. And it was basically that nobody really knows why we dream, or where dreams come from, so maybe an erect penis is actually an antenna where we receive our dreams."
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5y2cy1 | Why is telephone hold music still so shitty? | Even though voice audio quality has definitely improved, it seems like all hold music still has serious issues with static, volume control, "tinny-ness", etc. Why can't we apply the same methods to the music as we do to the voice? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"There's actually an optimization in use to keep the data usage down. Audio encoding methods we normally use for music can handle a wide range of frequencies. However, because the human voice only has a limited range (and we usually speak in only a small slice of that) the audio encoding system used on phone lines doesn't bother to properly encode highs and lows, making songs sound like ass but saving data. If we switched to a better encoding system, it'd mean more data traveling over the same phone network, which'd put more strain on the network and probably lead to the phone companies charging everyone more to carry it. So we decided to just deal. It's not like the hold music is **good** music even when you can hear it properly, right?"
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5y36bd | why does a wooden spoon prevent a pan from boiling over? | In use this LPT a lot (placing the spoon horizontally across the pan, under the lid), and it works perfectly. So what's the science / witchcraft? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"Two main reasons: 1. The rough surface of the wooden spoon will break the water bubbles, causing the foam to break around the spoon. 2. The contents of the bubbles is mostly steam, and when it comes into contact with the room-temperature spoon the steam condenses into liquid water. This hack isn't a complete fix though, and will stop working when the spoon gets saturated with water or reaches a similar temperature to its surroundings.",
"The bubbles are little pockets of air that push up off the water. When they interact with a smooth object, like the side of the pan or the lid, they don't pop very easily and can overflow the top of the pan. A wooden spoon is not smooth, it is course and has tiny pits and gaps and ridges. This helps pop bubbles as they come up, preventing them from running over the top of the pan.",
"Two reasons. One is that the spoon causes the bubbles to burst by breaking surface tension. You could sit there and rapidly poke bubbles and this would have an effect, too. Second, the wood spoon is at room temperature and is able to absorb some of the heat - not much, but just enough to help (this is why a metal spoon won't work). You can also blow on the bubbles which will both decrease their heat and pop some of the bubbles. It doesn't actually work perfectly, though. If it's boiling rapidly enough, it'll boil over anyway. As an aside, if you do this enough with a wooden spoon, it will also warp it."
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5y4l89 | Who's in charge of coming up with street names and is there any approval by a committee? Also, if you were someone that decided street names how did you come up with them? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In private developments in Ohio, it's up to the discretion of the developer. For example, the development I live in AND the street I live ON are both named after the developer's grandson... who lived in the development. The development I used to live in was interesting because every street was named after a winner of the Kentucky Derby. I would guess that the county commissioners name the public streets. This is probably different in all fifty states and I'm sure it's different in other countries.",
"I am not sure how heavily it's enforced anymore, but I believe that here in New Zealand the type of road (Street, Avenue, Road, Lane etc) used to be (may still be?) dictated by features of the location, while the unique part at the start was up to the land owner. I've always wanted to see a place called Lois Lane"
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5y5w65 | What is it about corn syrup that makes it so bad? What is the difference between it and other forms of sugar? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"denfv21",
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"text": [
"The biggest problem with (high fructose) corn syrup has nothing to do with it's chemical differences from pure sugar, it's about the economics and ubiquity of it. Due to the massive subsidies the American government gives the corn industry, the cost of HFCS is ridiculously low. People have sweet tooths so we're drawn toward eating sweet things. When the cost of sugar is artificially low, that creates incentive for manufacturers to use lots of sugar in *everything* we eat which means we're eating more sugar & consuming more calories. This leads to weight gain & the obesity epidemic.",
"There are real difference between high fructose corn syrup and glucose (another form of sugar) and how they affect satiety, or how satisfied you feel after a meal. That feeling of satiety comes from leptin, a chemical released from fat cells that signals the hypothalamus that you've had food. Fructose has been shown to have a much smaller level of leptin release than glucose after consumption, meaning that the \"I've had food!\" signal is a lot weaker, so you tend to consume more food. If fructose is the soda of sugars, then glucose would be your balanced meal! There are also a ton more differences between the different types of sugars and how they are absorbed and used for fuel by your body! Definitely good information to know while trying to be health conscious!"
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5yb7k3 | How will the economy still function when automation takes the majority of jobs and nobody has money to purchase anything? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Automation taking the majority of jobs will quickly lead to an economic situation called [post-scarcity]( URL_0 ), where the majority of people's needs and most of people's wants will be satisfied at little to no cost. The capitalist economic system you're familiar with, with free markets and money, is fundamentally incompatible with post-scarcity. A new economic system will take its place.",
"In its current state, it won't. This is a crucial issue for millennials because it is our future that is at stake. Many will be without work unless they are in a skilled trade, or work in the must haves(IT, nurses, teachers, etc). Any uneducated labor will have no place in the modern world. Many other countries are trying things like minimum income, widened welfare, etc but those methods are ideologies that do not bode well in the United States as we tend to be more of a 'you get what you earn' culture. Countries like Germany have completely revamped their educational system in an effort to reduce this mass group of uneducated people, but the long term results are still yet to be seen. The places hit the hardest are going to be urban areas. Unfortunately the answer that many people are given is goto college but that doesn't work for everyone and presents its own problems such as being saddled with student debt. There are over two million jobs available in the skilled trades but unions and companies have a hard time finding quality candidates. Instead a different form of slavery is being pressed upon the youth of this nation, one from which they can never escape. I said this was an important issue because it is, but there are so many other variables out there that could cause any solution to fail. Leaving the top 1% and the skilled with jobs hauling the uneducated masses. I don't have a solution, but I know where our obstacles are. This has been something I've thought about for sometime. Maybe one day I will create a plan for it.",
"Automation has already taken the majority of jobs. 200 years ago, 90% of people worked in agriculture. It has been automated so heavily today that number is only 2%. Did 88% of people lose their jobs? Not really. New jobs are created by new technology. Technology/automation is actually the driver of our standard of living in the long run. [See the Solow Model]( URL_1 ), which is taught to every economics student at the intermediate level. In the long run it is actually the destruction of jobs that boosts our wealth, it allows us to produce more with less people, dropping the price of goods. Automation really is a non-concern for economists. I shouldn't say that, because many economists are actually very concerned with it, concerned with encouraging it! Don't believe the fear mongering. Historically, people are always pessimistic about the future. You can say \"oh, but AI is different!\" the response to this is: 1. You can construct a model where humans are capable of producing only 1 or 2 goods, and automate them. Humans will still benefit from this and reach full employment. 2. If truly all jobs today and in the future were to be automated - everything would essentially be free, making this a non-issue. We would be so insanely wealthy, even a miniscule portion of GDP dedicated to social welfare would make the average welfare recipient as wealthy as the average 1%er today. [See this classic piece on the subject by a nobel prize winning economist]( URL_0 )"
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5yc575 | would eating 24,000 calories at once result in more weight gain than the food weighs? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"deoun5q"
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"text": [
"> Doesn't that violate the Law of Conservation of Mass? No, because the fat cells are also going to contain water which the person is assumed to be drinking as needed."
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5yep76 | How does a record player work? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Very simply (please don't add on to something here. It's explain like I'm 5, not a PhD ) The record as small groves on it that the plastic piece travels through as the record spin. The groves are jagged and curved to give off certain sounds, which are amplified by a speaker. Newer ones instead hooked an electric pulse on the other end of the stick, plugged into a speaker where the electricity moves the magnet inside the speaker and vibrates the plastic/paper cover of the speaker. Now you know how a record and speaker work."
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5yewdj | When your phone is plugged into the wall, electricity is moving through the cable. If the charger is left plugged into the wall with nothing attatched to the end, how come it doesn't shock you when you touch the end, or catch fire when left unattended? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The adapter changes the voltage from whatever it is that you have in your country to about 5 volts. A laptop might be 20 V. The electrical resistance of a human body (dry) is 100.000 Ohm, more or less. If you were to connect perfectly to the 5 volts and close the circuit (which you don't), and you were dry (please, don't do this right out of the shower) electrical current will pass through you: I = V / R = 5 Volts / 100.000 Ohm = 0.05 mA. Threshold of sensation is 1 mA. [Death is around 0.2 ampere (200 mA). Don't play with electricity.] But, again, you don't really close the circuit. Air is in the way. Air has an even higher resistance to electrical current. You need thousands of volts to make electricity travel through it (we call that lightning). It's closing the circuit (air is everywhere) with an insulator. That's why the open end charger doesn't catch fire."
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5yezfw | What happens to all the cancer cures in the news? Where do they go? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"depfmtm"
],
"text": [
"They sensationalize minor breakthroughs. So for example, say the process to develop a full blown cure for a specific type takes 100 steps. They finally unlock step number 38, which was really complicated and exciting to overcome for the scientists. But the news reports it like it only takes one step and finally a cure is here...well no. There are still a lot of other issues to overcome."
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|
5yg49m | How does CRISPR and Cas9 work? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"depslj6"
],
"text": [
"Hey ! The question has already been asked [multiple times]( URL_0 ) so you might wanna go check these posts you'll probably find what you're searching for :)"
],
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5yjmei | What is happening when people experience voices in their head? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The first thing to know about hearing is that it is mostly processed within the temporal lobe of the brain. This part of your brain lies just inside your ears. Scientists discovered that certain regions of the left temporal lobe are more active during an auditory hallucination, as compared to when a patient is not hallucinating. When one talks, their brain tells itself that it's talking, now, and that they must be talking to someone else. In studies of this nature, scientists have concluded that the brain signals originating in speech-generating regions of the brain were not bothering to tell the auditory regions that the forthcoming thought was actually self-generated. If the auditory part of the brain does not expect to hear its own voice, then any voices that are heard MUST belong to someone else. The actual problem, which was discovered, is an anatomical error within the fiber bundle that connects speech-generating areas in the frontal lobe with auditory cortex in the temporoparietal lobe Essentially, if you do not know with certainty that you are speaking then you will assume that the voices are talking TO you.",
"I use to run an interprofessional club at school, one of the workshops we did was about mental health. We did this one activity where we had a bunch of iPods with this audio stimulator to somewhat understand or experience the voices in your head. We had members walk around the school, speak to friends, get food or a coffee, just typical student activities while listening to the stimulator. If anyone felt uncomfortable they were free to stop anytime. It's a very interesting experience. Here is a popular audio stimulator from YouTube if you'd like to try it out, URL_0"
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5ylwrz | why foods taste so different when hot vs cold? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"I have a degree in food science and this was a very interesting topic to me. I'll try to answer to the best of my ability while keeping it simple. The first reason relates to how you actually taste things. The way we perceive taste is actually a combination of our taste buds and our nose working. Taste buds send a signal to the brain when food touches them. But your nose is also very important. You have probably experienced the decrease in taste perception when you have a cold or stuffy nose. There is a passageway in the back of your throat called the retronasal route that leads into your nose. So when the food hits this spot, you essentially \"smell\" it from inside your mouth, and this adds another layer to flavor perception. Different food flavors volatilize, or become airborne (smellable) at different temperature. You will notice this when you cook. As you pull the ingredients out of the fridge they might have some odor to them, but once they are all in a pot together cooking the smell is amplified and starts to fill the whole house. In the same way, you will essentially \"smell\" hotter food through the retronasal route in your throat more than colder food, because the flavors are more airbourne. There is also an interesting link between temperature and taste. In studies, people tend to perceive spicy foods as less spicy when they are cold. If you keep your hot sauce in the fridge, you will notice this. This is probably due to the reasons I explained above."
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5ymsmn | Why are all the planets spherical? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Gravity. When something has enough mass, the gravity from the center will pull equally in all directions. This will make a sphere. In the case of planets \"mostly spherical.\" Something like an asteroid doesn't have enough mass to \"crush\" itself into a sphere, so they can take many shapes. One of the requirements of being called a planet is that it is spherical (to a certain degree).",
"Imagine you had a non-spherical object the size of the earth (let's say, it's a Cube instead) Well, in that case, certain parts of the cube (the corners) would be farther away from the center of mass than other parts (the center of the faces). Because the corners are farther away, they have more potential energy (the same way a brick on top of a building has more potential energy than the same brick resting on the ground). Now Gravity is trying to crush everything into the center (it's just what Gravity does, attracts mass towards other mass), the areas with higher potential energy have a higher likelihood of 'Falling' from their elevated position to a lower 'Rest State'. As this 'Falling' action occurs (over vast periods of time), your Cubic-Planet would crush itself into a Spherical-Planet, where all points on the surface experience the same gravitational force. (Sidenote: other's have already pointed out planets aren't spheres, they're spheroids. This is because the rotational energy counteracts gravity more at the equator than at the poles)",
"Well they're not really spherical, they're kind of compressed spheres. Essentially what happens is that in a sphere, everything is as close to the gravitational center of the planet as possible. If you had, say, a cube, then the corners would stick out, and tend to be pulled back toward the center of the planet over time. Essentially the same force that makes a mound of sand unstable and likely to spill down makes planets roughly spherical.",
"Gravity pulls planets into a shape that has the lowest surface area; to mass ratio, which is a sphere.",
"First look [at this video]( URL_0 ) of water in space. The lack of gravity makes the water spherical because the forces inside the water itself are enough to keep them together and nature always choose the less energy shape to keep something that is in equilibrium that, in that case, is a sphere. Because the planets are rotating, they are not really a perfect sphere. Earth for example is larger at equator because the speed is bigger there and trends to make the whole thing expand a little bit. In fact, earth's south half is larger than the north one. So earth is like a pear but the differences between all parts are minimum, just detectable thru instruments."
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5yn0ol | Why do computers slow down over time? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Slowing down is not always the problem. A lot of it is caused by newer software/websites require additional resources that weren't so easily available back when that computer was designed so it makes it seem slower. There is also maintenance that people forget about; I've seen tons of computers that have so much bloatware installed using resources for no reason. Rarely it will be the actual computer slowing down. If you don't dust often the insides can get hotter than needed and cause long term damage that can lead to a slower computer. I hope this answers your question.",
"No. I personally do not think it's something that can be simply fixed. The computer slowdown is mainly because you keep filling more programs and files into it. They start to fill up your memory. Some of the programs that you install run theirselves in background, which makes the computer allocate some of the resources to run it. For example, the Skype app defaults to start when you start your computer. That can make your computer slower to turn on and also slow your computer down realllyyy slightly even when it's on standby. Because, the Skype app needs to listen to incoming calls when you're logged in. It needs to keep updating the status of your friends, so you don't have to see the loading screen everytime. This consumes a small amount of processor, memory (RAM), and disk resource. Examples of other app would be Antivirus. They also run updates, scans, and their stuff even when they're on standby. Now, one application might not be that big of a deal, but it all adds up when you install a lot of applications. When RAM starts to fill up, things may get really slow. RAM is the memory used to store currently running program. It's basically the difference of a Skype app lying in your desktop, but unopened, thus not consuming RAM, and the opened Skype app after a loading screen (from the disk). After a brief moment of loading, the application will always be ready for you to use even when it's minimized, until you exit it by yourself. The Skype app is saved in RAM. If the RAM fills up, then they need to start closing programs, do memory compressions, and sometimes use some of the disk to help the RAM! Disk is slower, by much, than RAM is. Another might be disk activity. Usually applications like antivirus checks your disk now and then. Even many other applications do their minor disk check / write every now and then. If you use a Hard Disk Drive (contrary to SSD), the read/write operation is going to get really slow. Imagine a really big room and you need to take/put items from one edge, and then the other edge, and then in the middle. You will need to move a lot, unless if it was located in the same place. Hard Disk Drive (HDD) only has one arm per platter, like CD readers, that's why I somewhat crudely used this analogue. This analogue is what is usually called, in computer terms, 4K Random Read/Write (scattered files) and Sequential Read/Write (when the files are in one place). Random Read/Write is where SSD excels by a lot, because they're mostly wires and chips. You can split the workload between a lot of chips easily, but it would be impractical for use in a HDD because a platter needs its' own share of components and making it really small so that a HDD can hold a lot of platters to multiply the speed would not be beneficial. Some programs also consume processor time, when they need to process data. Now, if you ask on how to fix them, I'd recommend upgrading your PC so that you won't really notice the slowdown even after you have installed many programs. Also, uninstall programs that you deem not necessary, and delete your really unused files (so that SSDs can do better garbage collection and HDDs can defrag faster, but the performance gain is miniscule). I'd start by recommending SSD upgrade! Since many of the slowdowns I saw, as far as I know, are disk-related."
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5ypx4k | Why do we have fingernails? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"des0hap"
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"text": [
"We evolved from animals that had claws. Wikipedia cites a few functions: to protect the soft tissues at the end of the digits, to enhance sensitivity of the fingertips by causing counter-pressure when the fingers press against something, to act as tools for precision pinching, and to be used for cutting or scraping certain things. It is thought that broadening of the nail went along with broadening of the finger that allowed for primates to grip small branches more easily."
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|
5ypzhc | Why isn't sales tax included on American price tags? | It seems as though in most other countries it is quite rare for the price tag of something in a store to not include taxes, why is the same not true in America? Yes, taxes vary state to state but why does that make it 100% impossible to include it? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"des0orx"
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"Keep in mind that taxes don't just vary by state, they also change by county and by town. A lot of companies want to set the price for their product, including by printing it on the product. It really just becomes a burden by having to do different prices by city."
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5yq2q1 | Borderline Personality Disorder | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"des25lo"
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"text": [
"My mother has borderline personality disorder so I've done a shitload of reading on it. What it is at its core is a complete inability to regulate your emotions. Every emotion that you feel is turned up to such an intensity that it is just unbearable for the feeler. And that phenomenon of strong emotion is combined with a lack of formed identity in your brain. People with BPD have a really unstable sense of self. They don't feel like complete people on their own. They feel non-existent or like their identities are constantly shifting. So they tie themselves to other people and fix themselves to their identity which helps for a while. But then they become absolutely *terrified* that the person will abandon them, which means they will lose their identity. And that feeling gets ramped up to 11, and this establishes the push-pull dynamic that is typical of BPD. \"I hate you, don't leave me,\" is the title of a very popular books on BPD. What causes it? Most people with BPD have really chaotic or abusive childhoods that seemed to lead to their unstable sense of selves. If you figure out who you are based on other people's reactions to you, but then those people don't have consistent reactions, how do you figure out who you are? Your young sense of identity gets screwed up and that carries later into life. How do you identify someone who has it? You can armchair diagnose by evaluating whether they have the [9 symptoms of BPD]( URL_0 ), but really that's something that should only be done by a professional. I think it's important to state that BPD is treatable, and many people these days have profound success with DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy. Treatment is rigorous and has to take place over a number of years, but people with BPD can have stable, happy lives with some work."
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5yqx9d | why are ancient civilizations buried underground? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"des9eqp"
],
"text": [
"It depends on the environment, honestly. Not all ancient ruins are actually underground. But there are a few factors that are important, as far as I understand it: *Wind*: consider that the wind is constantly blowing around tiny bits of sand and dirt, along with leaves and other things. You might not notice them over the course of a year or so, but after a hundred years of not being lived in, things start to pile up. *Erosion*: untended buildings don't tend to survive hundreds of years. Weather wears them down even stone can be slowly worn away over a long period of time. What we find are often crumbling remains 'close to the ground' so the speak. 100ft tall buildings aren't being burried. Additionally, things burried under dirt or shielded by other natural things tend to be much better preserved than things exposed to the elements. There are certainly huge numbers of things destroyed by the elements long before we could ever have found them. *Human action*: human civilizations sometimes built stop each other. What is easier: eating land for your own city or town, or building in the ruins of one already cleared? Also, often things we find are burried remains of animals and pottery and the like. These things may have been burried on purpose by the people. Most notably, people bury *other people* usually. We can find the bones of the ancients from their funerals."
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5yqzf0 | Why does the voice in our head sound like our voice but isn't actually audible? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"des9fal",
"desj43f"
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"text": [
"Actually, the voice in our head is whatever we make of it. We can mimic anyone's voice, but we usually use our own because it is us that thinks our thoughts, not someone else. If that makes any sense.",
"Google subvocalization. Some people have it, some people don't. A lot of people who have this constant voice accompanying thought think that it is universal. It isn't."
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5ysdwg | Why are screeching sounds so annoying? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"desli7s"
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"text": [
"There are only a couple of things that make a screeching sound in nature: birds of prey, crying babies, and a human scream. Evolutionarily, these either induce terror (because some part of our brain remains from when large scary birds used to eat us) or alarm (is our baby in danger? Is that person screaming because danger is nearby?) But since we need to hear them, our ears and brains are very sensitive to those frequencies, and we hear them as irritating, because if we didn't, we or our children would be more likely to die. Nails on the chalkboard, forks on plates, etc. all make a sound in roughly the same frequency range. Since this frequency range is never a good thing in nature, even when we know things are safe, and especially due to that increased evolutionary sensitivity, our brain finds it to be very unpleasant."
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5ysho5 | how does the switch thing on a rearview mirror work to make lights behind you dimmer, just by changing the angle of the mirror? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Unlike common mirror, where the glass and the reflective coating on the back side are parallel, in the rearview mirrors the glass has an angle, like the cross-section of the glass is not a very thin parallelogram like any mirror, but is in fact a triangle. This way, the front of the glass is not parallel to the reflective coat in the back. You can see this in this diagram: URL_2 When you have the mirror in \"day\" mode, what you see is what gets reflected in the coating, like any other mirror. When you tilt it to \"night\" mode, you end up seeing what gets reflected on the *surface* of the glass, not on the reflective coat (that light just shines above your eyes) like this: URL_0 Because the reflection on the very surface of the glass is a lot dimmer than the one in the reflective coat, you see the lights of the cars but it doesn't bother you as much. If you watch with more attention, you can see that in night mode you end up seeing the roof of your car in the reflective coat, but because the roof is just very dark, it doesn't interfere with the glass reflection. For another explanation if mine is not so good (I'm not a native English speaker), see this: URL_1 Regards!"
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5ysht0 | the root differences between all different facets of Christianity like Protestant, Catholic, Evangelical and other? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"desl6ow"
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"text": [
"So there are 3 main branches of Christianity: Catholics were more or less the original. They believe that Peter, one of Jesus' disciples, was put in charge of the church. His successors are the Popes, and they believe the Pope to be God's representative here on earth. They don't worship him, they just think he has a really good idea of what God wants and so he's in charge of the church. The Orthodox Church is really big in Eastern Europe. They split off in the 400s over some very minor-sounding technicalities, and they that they are in fact the real church, descended from Peter, and that Catholics are wrong. They're based in Constantinople instead of Rome. Their beliefs are fairly similar to Catholicism, but they don't listen to the Pope. The Protestants are every other kind of Christian you've ever heard of. Basically, Protestant just means \"not Catholic.\" They split off in the 1500s because the Catholic Church had gotten really really corrupt and was way too involved with making money and political affairs. So Martin Luther founded his own church in Germany (Lutherans), and Henry VIII founded his own church in England (Church of England/Anglicans). Their beliefs aren't terribly different from Catholics nowadays, but they also don't listen to the Pope. They also stress more of a direct relationship with God, so they are less likely to pray to saints to intercede with God on their behalf, and they don't need to confess their sins to a priest, they do so directly to God through prayer. Notably, in response to the whole Protestant thing, the Catholic church changed itself quite a bit in order to correct some of the really weird stuff they were up to, this was called the Reformation. After things started splitting, they got really carried away. Thousands of Protestant sects appeared and usually disappeared. Some have survived. The Church of England came to America and renamed themselves Episcopalians. The Methodists later formed as an offshoot of them. The Evangelicals aren't necessarily a particular denomination, but a movement that grew out of Protestantism. During the 1700s, there was a huge revival of religion in America and Europe, and people started getting into a more \"charismatic\" style of Christianity, rather than the very calm and ritualized Catholic style. Speakers were fiery, and stressed an intense personal relationship with God and especially the need to be \"born again\" into life as a Christian. Rather than the very regimented education system for priests that had previously been taken, pastors started sprouting up all over the place to fuel the demand for this intense new religion, and rather than an organizing structure of rituals like the Catholic church, they stressed going back to what was actually written in the Bible, rather than tradition. Of course, this was as open to interpretation as anything else, so millions of churches sprung up, some of whom believed similar things, and some that were really off-the-wall (like handling venomous snakes to prove your faith. Some of the ones who agreed on things formed their own denominations, or kindof took over existing ones. The Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians are all heavily influenced by the Evangelical movement. Others just kind of kept their own church going, some of which got really big (like the ones you see on TV)."
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5ysvsf | Why do we have designated foods for breakfast, lunch and dinner? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"desn73a",
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"text": [
"Thats really a first world/western thing. Most cultures eat the same type of food all day long.",
"These answers are terrible lol. I never understood American breakfast habits, even tho I do enjoy them from time to time. Bacon, pancakes, a mountain of eggs, ham.. all that stuff is delicious but it makes for a terrible start for my day. Here in the Middle East breakfasts are usually much lighter than lunches, which makes perfect sense. Just something to start the day. Usually just a little cheese and bread and some tea."
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5yttff | Why do pigeons move their head back and forth when they walk? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"desu2g1"
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"text": [
"Pigeon eyes cannot focus when they are in motion, so they keep their head still as long as possible when walking. When they move it, they move it as far forward as they can, and then hold it stationary as long as possible to maintain focus."
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5ywehk | How does antivirus software know what to look for when scanning a computer's files? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"They maintain a massive database of known malware and it looks for anything that matches that code. This is why it is important to update your antivirus frequently, as new malware is discovered, it is added to the database."
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5yx6sz | Why do we have a permanent human presence in ISS, and want one for mars, but not for moon? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We use the ISS to conduct experiments, usually centered around how things react in micro-gravity. The moon has enough gravity that it wouldn't serve this purpose. This along with the moon being pretty dull means we know all we need to know about it. Mars on the other hand has resources and could possible support human life. We could theoretically live there long term, which could proof useful seeing how the earth is gonna reach its maximum occupancy soon. Meanwhile, the moon is a boring rock with very little promise for supporting any life.",
"There is water on mars so it's easy to imagine a future where humans can live and thrive on that planet. The moon doesn't offer that. ISS is basically the same as a moon base would be only it won't take three days of space flight to get there.",
"Because we more or less (with exception, ofc) did most of the things we wanted to do on the moon. Basically, been there, done that, now let's go to Mars.",
"I'm no expert but let me try to answer this question the best I can. Mars is the preferred over the moon for an extraterrestrial colony because of several reasons - It has an atmosphere. The moon doesn't. Mars's rotational cycle is around 24 hr 40 min, which is pretty close to an Earth day. This means that our plants will find it easier to adjust. If we want a permanent colony on an off-world rock, a launch facility is a must. Mars is rich in iron and the atmosphere is filled with carbon dioxide and oxygen-which can be used to produce rocket fuel. I'm not a native English speaker so I apologize for any grammatical errors.",
"The moon is really, really far away. It is not even comparable to the ISS so logistically it may not be possible now. That said, the moon is also much, much closer than Mars so it isn't as exciting. This makes it harder to get funding since we've been there and it was supposedly not even worth going back when the Saturn program was launching every six months. Starting Saturn over from scratch would be extremely hard and needs the kind of enthusiasm that Mars exploration generates. On a side note, the moon is actually much more diverse in content than was believed until the Chinese got some rocks of their own. It seems that, through some coincidence, all the different Apollo missions landed on similarly composed areas leading to a false impression that the moon is \"boring.\"",
"Because there is already a permanent presence on the dark side of the moon. It isn't human. But we know him as Santa Claus. He has a number of operations running up there."
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5yx9sz | What's the difference between Sunni and Shia? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"detmj1u"
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"text": [
"After the death of our Prophet Muhammad (Peace and blessing on him), some believed that the leadership of the Islamic community should go to someone in his bloodline. Others believed that those who were closest to him and who learned the most from him and whom he trusted most should lead the Muslims. The former (bloodline people) were the Shia. The second were the Sunni. Over the centuries, more ideological differences popped up but I'm not 100% sure of all of them, but this was the main origin of the schism between the two sects. To be honest, it's all a little outdated and stupid. In some countries, there is still bloodshed over Sunni vs Shia and it's ridiculous. Unnecessary violence. We're all Muslims and we have far greater problems in our community than Sunni vs Shia. We should be getting together to solve the bigger problems our community is facing. Source: I'm Sunni Muslim."
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5yx9ur | Why does everyone with down syndrome have the relatively similar facial features? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Down syndrome is a condition of the genes where chromosome 21 has 3 copies instead of two. It happens when there is a problem during meiosis in one of the parents. This causes chromosome 21 to not work properly. As a result certain things that are supposed to happen as the fetus developes, don't end up happening, and the person grows a little differently the he or she otherwise would. Whatever these irregularities are, they are consistent in everyone with the condition, so they all share the same unusual facial characteristics that result."
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5yxb27 | In what way, EXACTLY, is sleep as crucial to human health and fitness as they say it is? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"detmjq7"
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"text": [
"We dont actually know why we need to sleep. There are a lot of theories ranging from it being crucial to tissue regeneration to it actually changing our brain chemistry. What we do know is that if you go long enough without sleeping organ failure tends to occur within a week or so."
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5yxk46 | what part of my clothes does dryer lint come from? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"detr7vg"
],
"text": [
"It's little fibers breaking off of the threads your clothes are made up of. Slowly, over time with many dryer cycles, the clothes will give up most of the fibers they had, and this is when you start developing \"ratty\" clothing with holes in it, even though you never put enough stress on the clothes to rip them."
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5yz046 | How does travelling near light speed cause time dilation? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"detyjwl"
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"text": [
"There is a very elegant way to think about this that I think is reasonably accurate: instead of imagining us living and moving around in three dimensions like normal, imagine us in four dimensions, our three plus time, and that everything must always move in those four dimensions at the same speed, the speed of light. If you're not moving at all in space, you're only moving through time, at full speed. As you start moving, your velocity in space is increasing, which would increase your total 4D speed which is the sum of your speed in space and in time. So to keep that 4D speed constant, you have to slow down in time and experience time dilation. (A more to the point explanation will talk about how time dilation is necessary to keep other physics consistent in the context of constant speed of light, but I'll leave ELI5ing *that* to someone smarter.)"
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5yzr1a | Why does NASA assume that there is no life on planets that has conditions that are not ideal for humans, when the organisms on the planets could have adapted to their respective conditions and thrive? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Let's say you are walking down the street and dropped your keys. They might have landed in the gutter, or gone down the sewer. Where do you look? You look in the gutter because if they are down sewer, you won't be able to find them. That's the approach organizations searching for life are taking. We know a *lot* about earth like life, and have very good ideas what it might look like from light years away. We know nothing about other forms of life, and might not be able to detect it in our own solar system.",
"Because exept for a few very strange occurances, mankind has not observed any form of \"life\" that is able to survive in environments unlike our own. The only thing we know are carbon based lifeforms and we're pretty good at telling how well we can survive our own evironment. We can't be sure of anything that is off planet until we directly observe evidence of the contrary.",
"We call \"life\" what we see in this planet. Not necessarily what humans need. There are bacteria that thrive on sulphuric acid. That we know, and if we found a planet that offered the adequate conditions it would be labeled as such. But life (as we know it, human or not) requires ranges of temperatures and pressures that are usually not found \"out there\"",
"If you are referring to the goldilocks zone the definition does not mean that conditions are ideal for human life. The definition is that conditions will allow for liquid water. The reason for this is that all life that we are aware of requires liquid water at some level. While it is possible for life to exist without liquid water it is all theoretical as far as I know.",
"They don't assume that, it's just a lot easier to search for planets that have ideal conditions for life that we know of then to search for lifeforms we have no knowledge about."
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5yzust | How do they actually figure out the nutrition values in food, such as calories, carbs, cholesterol.. Etc? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Nobody has really answered this question yet. I am a food scientist and work at a large food company and we have a certified analytical lab that does testing on food samples. To get the fat% for instance, one popular method is to boil a sample of the food in a non-polar compound like ether. Since fat is also non-polar (opposite of water which is polar) you can remove all of the fat from the product and weigh the difference. For protein you basically extract the nitrogen in the product and use that data to tell you the amount of protein. For minerals, you put the product in a furnace to burn off all of the organic material. Moisture you put the sample in a special oven or microwave and cook off all the water. Carbs is usually done by just calculating the difference of all the components from the mass of the sample. There are other methods like using near infrared detection but I don't know the details of how those work."
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5z2glv | Why do we get brain freeze? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"From mayo clinic Scientists are still unsure about the exact mechanism that causes this pain. One theory is that the cold food or drink may temporarily alter blood flow in your nervous system, causing a brief headache. Blood vessels constrict to prevent the loss of body heat and then relax again to let blood flow rise. This results in a burst of pain that subsides once the body adapts to the temperature change."
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5z2p61 | Why dont other countries have military bases in the US, While the US has bases in many other countries? | Can you explain why we have bases in so many other countries while they have none in ours? I caught interest in this when watching a video on the US vs The European Union, and how our militaries match up against each other. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The US has a huge military force with the primary mission of projecting force worldwide. Most other countries have comparatively small forces with a mission of only local self defense or regional force projection. Local self defense obviously does not require bases half the world away. Many countries also depend on the US for military protection. The US has always been the backbone of NATO forces, with the other members being a relative footnote. Western European states therefor have many US bases because they depended on US forces to protect them from the USSR during the Cold War.",
"It is the result of the end if World War 2. In short, as the war was winding down, Stalin, Churchill, and FDR convened in Yalta in Crimea to discuss how the liberated countries of Europe would be granted self governance. In reality, as the war ended, the Russians already had plans for occupied territories. The UK and U.S. realized this, so it outlined essentially how the powers would be divided as the Cold War commenced at the end of WWII. The U.S. began spreading its military throughout its occupied territories as Europe was rebuilt and subsequently divided across ideological lines. Furthermore, Europe lost a lot of power after the war. As a result, their territories fought and gained independence quite rapidly. Power vacuums were left, and communists, nationalists, republicans, etc. fought for control of their governments. Well, that, or brutal dictatorships developed from offices once regulated by European powers. These nations were easily exploited and/or open to influence from both the Soviets and the Americans. As a result, aid and resources flowed from both the world's superpowers. A lot of countries had resources from either power, especially in the Southeast Asia and some Latin Countries. Because our power and influence was contingent on having control of these countries in some regard, the U.S. stationed basis there. For instance, n Europe, the U.S. had control of military strongholds.",
"Well, primarily because the US doesn't allow other countries to, nor do they really want to. Some countries often to take US bases into their territory for two primary reasons, they want the protection of the US or just want something from the US in exchange for a permit to build a base in the country."
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5z2v1y | Why do we have tax Brackets and not a continuum? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"So it's a \"graduated system\" ELI5 simple: the first $100 you make gets taxed at 0%, the next $900 you make gets taxed at 10%, and the next bracket (anything over) is taxed at 20%. You make $50, you get taxed $0. You make $100, you get taxed $0. You make $200, you pay $0 on your first $100 and 10% on your next $100 so you pay $10, or a 5% rate. You make $1000, you pay $0 on your first $100, and 10% on the next $900, so you pay $90, or a 9% rate. You make $5000, you pay $0 on your first $100, 10% on your next $900 so $90, and 20% on your next $4000 so $800, so $890 in total, which is just under 18%. You're thinking it's You make $50, you get taxed $0. You make $100, you get taxed $0. You make $200, you pay 10% or $20. You make $1000, you pay 10% so $100. You make $5000, you pay 20% so $1000. which is wrong",
"No, because when you move into a higher bracket, the new percentage only applies to money over that cutoff line, not to the money under the cutoff line that has already been taxed at lower rates.",
"> But in the bracket system, don't you create scenarios where if someone is close to the top of one bracket, and they make a few dollars more in a year, they could end up losing money by being pushed to the next tax bracket and owing a higher percentage? This is false information. The way the tax brackets work is that you are taxed at that percentage for all money earned within that bracket. So if you have $5 in the new tax bracket only that $5 is taxed at the higher percentage.",
"So as other's have explained we have a graduated system that ensures that you are not penalized by \"graduating\" to a higher tax bracket. To address the other part of your question, why don't we use an equation... For one reason main reason. Politics. The reason we have tax brackets is to tax different sections of the population differently. These brackets allow us to adjust bracket A without having to do anything to bracket B and C, and then we can move D a bit as well.. Take a look at the tax brackets we currently have, 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, 35%, 39.6%...There isn't exactly any rhyme or reason to these percentages and therefore any equation trying to capture this would be wildly complex and pretty damn unwieldy. The downside an equation type system would encounter (which frankly is also a benefit imo) is it is inflexible and would be difficult to change in a political way (raise taxes on the rich, lowering them on the power, and keeping the middle class un-effected)"
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5z3935 | Why is every planet spherical? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Planets form spheres because of the gravity emitted by their own mass. In space, any mass in space that exceeds about 6x10^20kg, or about 1/10,000 the mass of Earth, will compress itself into a sphere because its gravity pulls all of the mass in. Ideally, this leads to a shape where all the mass is equally distant to the center, or, a sphere."
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5z4uri | If we get sick because of virus and bacteria, why do we get sick when it's cold? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Two reasons: 1. When the temperature drops severely, your immune system is more compromised (mostly because at that point your body is focused on staying at 98.6 degrees than it is on fighting off invaders). 2. When it's cold outside, people stay inside more. If you're inside with other people, you're more likely to transmit and/or catch a virus than if you're all outside building a barn or playing frisbee or selling vacuum cleaners door to door or whatever."
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5z4wrx | Why are there countless numbers of animal subspecies, but no human subspecies? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well subspecies is a rather nebulous term. See when a two population of the same species become separated geographically, they won't exchange genetic material through breeding. If they are separated for long enough of put under enough pressure, they will genetically change enough that they will eventually become different species. But it's a long process so you have some population are that in between. Meaning they become different enough that they are clearly not the same species, but didn't change enough to be clearly two different species. But you probably don't talk about that, because there isn't that many subspecies. You probably talk about species that look similar, like how there is like 8 different species of bears. Now it depend on what you consider human. Are human only homo sapiens or all Homo are humans? Because there was something like 16 different Homo Species. Some went extinct by their own, but other were assimilated or killed off by home sapiens. The difference between other animal and us is our intelligence. The intelligence that allowed us to spread to the whole globe very quickly. See usually animal don't spread as much and if they do, it take them a LOT of time. So by the time they reached another continent, they already became a new species. We spread so quickly, that by the time we covered all of the planet we were still the same species and competed with all the other Homo species for resources and we won all over the world.",
"All modern humans *are* a subspecies, *Homo sapiens sapiens*. There is an ancestral subspecies also defined, *Homo sapiens idaltu*, and some taxonomies propose classifying Neanderthals as a subspecies of *Homo sapiens* rather than a separate species. A major objection to classifying human racial groups as subspecies is that the variation in smooth and different features vary in different ways. To identify subspecies it's usually expected that there is distinct uniformity within each subspecies and clear differences to the others and that's not the case for humans. Evolutionarily, the ability and willingness of humans to cross all sorts of geographic barriers is probably what's prevented the races from becoming clearly distinct subspecies.",
"Depends on your definition of \"human\", but it is not unfair to say that neanderthals were human, or that homo floresiensis or rudolfensis should be considered human. Neanderthals died out 30,000 years ago, and floresiensis were around as recently as 12,000 years ago (with the very first cities being as much as 8-9000 years old, this is surprisingly recent). So you could say that up until very recent human history, there were human subspecies which we interacted with. We even mated with neanderthals. Now, why humans currently are the only ones left is a matter of speculation. It could be that we simply killed off the others, or that we out-competed them in the struggle for resources and food. Or something else. We simply do not know. If you are interested in this and don't want to dig into really hardcore anthropology, I can recommend the book \"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind\".",
"There are genetic differences between races (indisputable), they are just small because humans spread out so quickly, relative to other animals, once they began spreading out.",
"There are many examples of animals where there is only one living subspecies, humans are not unique in this regard. There were other subspecies of *Homo sapiens*, but there are not extinct. We don't consider human races to be subspecies, because in general, there is more genetic diversity within a race than between races.",
"There are. Take an Australian Aborigine, A Japanese, A Russian, A Somalian, An Arab, A Native American, An Inuit, and a Native Chilean. One could call the different races \"subspecies\" They all share differences within their subs, but are majority similar as a whole. It's just not politically correct to do this, so you get called a racist.",
"There are. Although for political and social reasons western societies don't acknowledge this.",
"Because we killed all of them. There used to be a time where there were a few different human-type beings that lived concurrently. Homo Sapiens weren't the strongest of the bunch, rather, we were the smartest, so we were able to conquer the other species of human-like beings.",
"There differences that exist between Europeans and Africans are similar in magnitude to those that exist between certain animal subspecies -- say, a sheepdog and a border collie. The fact is that when you divide two populations of a given species by an ocean, they will take on different characteristics. Back in the day, it was normal to classify humans into different subspecies based on observable differences. That's not kosher today, because it's kind of bullshit. But it's not really that much more bullshit than the different classification of certain dogs.",
"Because it wouldn't be politically correct. If you look at the different subspecies of African Gray Parrots you can tell that they are physically extremely similar looking, much more so than an African and a European."
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5z5ajq | What is te difference between pansexual and bisexual | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Bisexual\" people are attracted to males and females. The root of the word is \"bi,\" which means \"two.\" \"Pansexual\" people are attracted to males, females, transgender people of all points in the spectrum of transition, and to people who don't closely fit typical gender roles. The root of the word is \"pan,\" which means \"all.\"",
"Bisexual is a term people use to identify as being sexually attracted to either genders. Pansexual is a term that is used by people who are attracted to any infinite number of genders or someone who claims to have a lack of gender. For example, if I decided I was a cis gendered attack helicopter it would be rude if you claimed to be bisexual while being attracted to me because my attack helicopter gender is not one of the binary genders. It would be more \"politically correct\" on Tumblr for you to say you are pansexual to show you appreciate my attack helicopter gender identity.",
"I have a friend that identifies as pansexual. When I asked her what the difference was, she said that she basically has \"no limit\" on who she's attracted to as she believes there are more than two genders. She doesn't base her feelings on whether they are male or female."
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5z5m00 | Why do some drunk people get belligerent and angry, while others get cheerful and jolly? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> One of the most well-recognized behavioral effects is disinhibition, where behaviors that are normally suppressed are displayed following intoxication. A large body of evidence has shown that alcohol-induced disinhibition in humans affects attention, verbal, sexual, and locomotor behaviors [link]( URL_0 )"
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5z87cc | What's the difference between an atomic bomb and a hydrogen bomb | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"An atomic bomb, in the traditional sense of being like the ones dropped on Japan are powered by nuclear fission. Fission is the process of taking one big atom and breaking it down into two smaller atoms, which releases energy. The \"big\" atoms used are heavy elements like Uranium, Plutonium, etc. Hydrogen bombs rely on nuclear fusion. Fusion is the process of taking two small atoms and fusing them together, which also releases energy. The atoms involved are the particularly light ones, like hydrogen being fused into helium. Fusion is the process by which the sun and all other stars work. There is one caveat to fusion bombs - fusion as a process as a relatively high energy barrier. Simply put that means that in order to get fusion to happen, the hydrogen need to have lots of energy before they can fuse. Usually this means they need to be in a very, very hot, environment. Unfortunately the only way we know of to create this environment in a way that can be turned into a bomb is a fission bomb explosion, so most hydrogen bombs have a regular atomic bomb built in to get them going.",
"An atomic bomb is any weapon which uses nuclear reactions. A hydrogen bomb is just a specific type of atomic bomb where hydrogen is fused to create an explosion. More specifically, in a hydrogen bomb there is first a fission reaction (atoms splitting) which is used to compress hydrogen to the right pressure for fusion which releases huge amounts of energy."
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5z9beq | The Multiverse Theory | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The basic idea is every single decision any**thing** makes creates multiple universes, each where another outcome was decided. Like if you are walking down a path and it splits into two. As soon as you decide to take one path another universe is created where you decided to take the other. Repeat this for all time since the big bang and you have every single possible universe created at some point. There may be one where a string of decisions made me the president of Mexico! Bow before your president señor!"
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5z9yox | Why do you see shapes and color while rubbing your eyes? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In addition to light, the rods and cones in your retina can be stimulated by pressure. When you rub your eyes hard, the pressure gets transmitted through the jelly part of your eye to your retina. **This is not a good thing to do.** Putting pressure on your eyes like this puts stress on your retina. There's a small chance that you could tear your retina. That could cause partial or even permanent blindness. If you must rub your eyes, do so gently. Or better yet, use eye drops if your eyes are irritated. *Source: I have torn retinas, so I have learned a bit about this subject.*"
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5zaebl | Why do cigarettes contain so many toxic chemicals? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Burning any plant matter produces a bunch of toxins. Cigarette tobacco is different in that tobacco companies use chemicals to cure the tobacco, and add other chemicals for different purposes such as changing the flavor, the rate of burn, etc.",
"Some of the chemicals you inhale are just part of the plant and the result of chemical reactions as the leaf dries and chemical reactions that occur when the leaves are burned in a cigarette. Those chemicals are bad enough, but then there is the whole assortment of other chemicals added during the manufacturing process that add another level of danger or uncertainty. [List of additives]( URL_0 ) Not all of those additives are in every cigarette. Many are added as flavorings or fragrances and many of them are used in other consumer items like perfumes and food products and many occur naturally. You've probably eaten one or more of these compounds today. Some of the compounds are preservatives to help increase the shelf life of cigarettes. Others have multiple uses. For example, ammonia is commonly added and may act as an anti-microbial during process, but it also acts to \"freebase\" the nicotine, meaning that it chemically alters the nicotine so that our bodies can absorb more of it (and increase how addictive it is). Like I said, many of these compounds are used or consumed on a daily basis from natural or man-made sources with little to no negative effects. The problem is when you mix them all together, burn them, and then inhale them into the lungs that things get dicey."
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5zav0p | what do the two numbers on engine oil mean? Such as 5w 20 and 10w 40 | Also, is it okay to put higher weight oil in a car during the summer? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Previous reply was pretty close. \"W\" is often referred to as winter or more specifically cold, this is the viscosity of the oil when it is cold. The 2nd number is the operational viscosity, or how well it flows once heated. It's is best to put the recommended oil weight in a car. Truth be told there is a complex science to the correct oil ratios. And oil that is too thick may not be able to efficiently move thru oil lines or one that is too thin may not properly lubricant the cylinder walls. In my experience as long as the 2nd digit is the same you should be fine in summer, but the correct weight will always be the safest bet."
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5zbakg | If energy cannot be created or destroyed, where did all the energy from the Big Bang come from, and where will all the energy go when the Universe collapses? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As far as I know, all that energy was contained within the singularity that all things once were before the big bang. As for \"the big collapse\", it's still not certain that there ever will be a big collapse, as the universe keeps expanding beyond what previous models of the universe originally theorized. Basically, if their theories were completely correct, the expansion should be slowing down, however is is actually speeding up, which means there is some form of energy that is increasing the rate of expansion. So, where will all that energy go? Outward, inward, up, and down. It appears that more and more energy is appearing out of nowhere, which is why scientists are theorizing \"dark energy\", a form of energy that we don't yet know how to observe directly. The only reason they think it exists is because of the expansion of the universe which would be impossible without some unknown force at work. I don't think a 5 year old would understand this, but I don't know how else to explain it."
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5zd8dg | How are clubs and other social gathering places allowed to have "Ladies Night" without people pulling out the discrimination card? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"People can pull out whatever cards they want. It's a free country. They generally don't, because it also benefits guys in that it brings more women to bars - men often go to bars to meet women or at the very least enjoy their presence. Having a Men's Night with discounted drinks for men would mean they're paying less for drinks but it would also exacerbate the existing issues with too many men and not enough women at 99% of bars.",
"In general it is because 'ladies night' benefits both groups. Yes, men don't receive the monetary discount that women do, but they gain the benefit of there being more women in the club/at social gathering that would not otherwise be there. Therefore no one complains."
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5zecg4 | Why can we put plates in the microwave but not things like silverware? | I know there are microwaveable plates and such but I want to understand why and how something is not okay to out in the microwave. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Microwaves are essentially high-powered radio waves, so think about how your radio works -- you have a long, pointy metal part that sticks up from your radio that \"soaks up\" radio waves from the air, and turn it into electrical flow that, in your radio, gets turned into sound. Those long, straight forks and spoons you put into the microwave will do the same: soak up the radio waves and turn it into an electrical charge. Unfortunately, they're relatively large, compared to the interior of the microwave, and the microwave is beaming 500 - 1000 watts of energy into the enclosure. All those watts start building up on the silverware, but unlike the food, the silverware isn't getting hot -- it's building up an electrical charge. That charge is going to arc to ground when it builds up a whole lot of energy; that spark will jump off the pointy end of your utensil to something and cause a bunch of damage at the points it touches. You'll note that microwaves are, well, made of metal, and some microwaves even have a metal rack or thermometer that can go inside; those are there because they are designed for microwaves; your fork is an unexpected thing that hasn't been designed around, so it's going to throw things off."
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5zegyw | What's the minimum number of people that need to survive so that when they reproduce, it doesn't become an inbred gene pool? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"This is called the [Minimum Viable Population]( URL_0 ) According to [NewScientist]( URL_1 ) it's been calculated to 160 (unrelated) people for a space trip of 200 years, but there's no hard number for humans.",
"You need to define exactly what you mean by \"survive\". If you wanted to keep them in a zoo where they get all the food and shelter and medical care they need, there is a decent chance they could survive indefinitely, despite severe genetic problems. If you need them to colonize an alien and inhospitable world, a few hundred might not be enough.",
"Since this is one of the things we're going to have to do to get to other solar systems, there's been a lot of studies. But the number is a lot smaller than you might think. [160 is just one study I dug up.]( URL_0 ) Look up \"minimum viable population\". It depends on what you want the population for - if the goal is to get there and back in just a generation or two, you need fewer. If its to plant a thriving population that will survive 40-50 generations you need more. Incidentally, I just finished Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson which is exactly about this problem. Her population was 2,000 or so.",
"Lower than you might think. But you'll need some harsh eugenics laws to maintain it below about 5000 people. Some Aboriginal Australians managed to create long term groups with low population values (low hundreds total, amongst several small isolated groups.) by using strict marriage laws to prevent unintentional inbreeding. basically, you are assigned a surname based on who your parents surnames are, and you are only allowed to marry a person with a specific other surname (usually one that isn't either of your parents or her parents.) This seems to have been stable over multiple thousands of years."
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5zepsd | How are we able to make boats that weigh thousands of tons float? | I remember reading somewhere once that some aircraft carriers weigh over 100,000 pounds and I imagine most military vessels weigh thousands and thousands of pounds so how are we able to make things that heavy float? Edit: I meant to say thousands of pounds in the title not tons | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As long as the water displaced by the hull weighs more than the boat does, the boat will float. Just look up Archimedes' Principle (of bouyancy).",
"The largest US aircraft carriers weigh in excess of 100,000 **tons.** They float on top of the water because the amount of water they displace (the area of their hull which is underwater) weighs exactly the same amount as their entire structure. Water is **heavy** and it doesn't care if the weight sitting within it is caused by water or steel, it behaves the same."
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5zfyua | Why do grocery stores use huge rows of open refrigerators without doors, while some refrigeration units at the very same grocery store will have doors which would presumably be much more energy efficient? | It turns the whole side of the store into an igloo; making customers cold and uncomfortable would seem to not be a good idea. Or does the laziness of not having to open a door to get to your food product win out over the coldness and huge energy costs? No one has a door-less refrigerator at their house | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The energy costs on an open cold case are not as high as you might imagine. It's very different from simply leaving the door open on your refrigerator. Open cold cases are equipped with air curtains, which are sets of narrow vents that blow cold air from the top of the case into corresponding vents at the bottom of the cases (which draw that air in). This effectively forms a \"curtain\" that helps prevent the cold air inside the case from mixing with the warmer air outside. Cases that are heavily shopped and require frequent re-stocking (many times per day), such as produce and meat cases, are less likely to have doors because this reduces the time needed for employees to work the product, which saves money on labor, and it also makes it easier for customers shop, which invites more sales. These items are also much less perishable and able to withstand greater temperature fluctuations than frozen products like ice cream, which you will never find without doors. Side note: the retailer I work for once experimented with doors on all of our wall coolers, including meat and produce, for a little more than a year, not to save money directly, but to collect some kind of energy-efficiency tax credits. Those same doors came off just as soon as those tax credits expired (or so I was told).",
"The counter height open top ones are surprisingly efficient. In the modern stores, the only ones with doors are frozen foods and easily spoiled like milk. And yes - not having to open a door makes folks much more likely to just buy it. The energy costs just aren't that huge.",
"Most items in the open refrigerated section are things that need to be cold but not necessarily frozen. Like you said, it's easier to see and grab items when there isn't a door in your way. The items in the freezer section (ones with big glass doors) are things that, you guessed it, need to be frozen so they are needed. At night when supermarkets are closed, they actually drape plastic or something similar over the refrigerated section to save energy.",
"Everything everyone said about them being surprisingly efficient is true. They can actually be more efficient then ones with doors. Depending on how often or how long they'll be opened. On a meat case where there's always someone looking through the steaks to find the right one the doors would always be open. Or very heavily shopped sections the doors would always be open. The milk and eggs are often in fidges with doors because there's a whole walking fridge behind the display where the back up is kept, and the restocking is done."
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5ziryl | How does the internet work? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I've been recently making a timeline of computer history. Let me make a short summary of the Internet for you: - 1969: ARPANET network was established - It was the first network that was based on the idea of packet switching. Before this, communication between computers was based on establishing a \"circuit\" between A and B. The idea of packets was that anyone could talk to anyone by fragmenting their messages into small amounts of data - packets - that would be sent into a highly interconnected network, the packets would find their way (thanks to addressing) to their destination where they would be joined again to form the message. EDIT: in the beginning the ARPANET consisted of several interconnected computers at different universities, later more and more institutes joined in. - 29.10.1969: First transmission over ARPANET happened - a letter \"L\" was send over a network that would become the Internet. - 1974: A protocol named TCP was \"invented/suggested\" in a document called RFC 675, to replace the NPC protocol that was being used until then in the ARPANET. The document was also already using the word \"Internet\" at this time. TCP protocol would become one of the foundations of the Internet - it specifies how computers should talk to each other in a network based on packets. - 1983: Paul Mockapetri invents DNS - a system that allows translation between computer (IP) addresses and human friendly addresses - domains (such as URL_1 ). - 1990: Tim Berners-Lee invents technology for WWW at CERN. Note that until now the Internet allowed computers to communicate, but there was no world-wide-web of web pages as we know it today. He made these things: - HTTP procotol: a protocol (set of rules for communication) to request and send websites. - HTML language: a language to create websites. - 1st web browser named WorldWideWeb - [1st website]( URL_0 ) - 1994: Tim Berners-Lee founds W3 consortium to make standards for the Internet, such as new versions of the protocols he made. - 1996: Internet grows bigger and is running out of addresses! As a result, IPv6 protocol is being developed to provide more addresses and features. - 1996: Google starts as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. - 1996: W3 releases the first CSS standard - this allows webpages to look \"prettier\". - 2001: Wikipedia starts. - 2003: 4chan starts, anonymous start to form on the website. - 2003: Mark Zuckenberk writes Facemash, to later become Facebook. - 2005: reddit starts. - 2006: Twitter starts, 1st tweet sent. - 2006: Facebook launches publicly. - 2011: Last IPv4 address was given out. EDIT: but don't worry, we've got IPv6 widely supported now, so we've got more addresses to use"
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5zj0mb | How can some food / diet drinks have 0 calories? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The drinks are usually just flavored water with artificial sweeteners like acesulfame-k that pass right through the body. The konjac pasta is a type of fibre that is not absorbed by the body. It fills up your stomach though so makes you feel full. People who are trying to lose weight should probably not eat them, and instead lots of green beans and other water\\fibre rich vegetables which do the same thing but also provide vital nutrients."
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5zjv3m | How does sound travel through a phone? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"In essence it doesn't. Sound is converted into an electric signal by a microphone which then travels to the destination where it's converted back into sound by a speaker.",
"The phone has a microphone and a speaker. The microphone picks up the sound waves and translate them into an electric signal. The electric signal travels through the phone lines (or in the case of cell phones, gets translated into a radio signal and sent through the air), and the phone on the other end receives the electrical signal, then use them to activate the speaker in the phone, generating soundwaves that are roughly the same as what entered the microphone on the other end."
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5zjzhu | Why does most articles in the internet tend to be cut by a 'Continue Reading' button? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Knowing that the person is actually reading the page allows higher advertising rates to be charged. I mean, if you were an advertiser, wouldn't you pay more for a page that had proof that it was being read over a page that didn't?",
"What the other guy said was true, and they'll also \"double dip\" on ads sometimes. Hitting the continue button may load another blob of ads between the article chunks, or may cause the ads on the page to refresh and change. This lets them sneak in a couple more ad views.",
"They divide an article in several pages so you have to click to see the next page and more ads appear, increasing the chances of someone clicking an add or showing ads more times. This happens because advertisers pay per click or per number of times an ad appears.",
"Put it all on one page, you only show the user one page worth of ads. Put it on 10 different pages, you get 10 times as many ads. Also, subscription-only sites (newspapers are notorious for this). They let you read the first part of an article, then once you've made your way into the content and want to learn more, you're presented with a \"Click here to continue reading\" that takes you to a page that informs you that you need to be a paid subscriber to continue reading."
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5zka75 | Why can't an electric car power itself? | Couldn't you create a system that uses the circular motion of the wheels to crank a generator/alternator to create electricity to recharge a battery? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"No, because taking energy away from the wheels as they're turning will make the car slow down. You can never get back the same amount of energy you put in and still have the car move forward. What you can do is charge the battery a bit when you *want* to slow down. Electric cars can do that, but it cannot ever be enough to actually recharge the battery entirely. You just get a little bit of energy back.",
"One of the fundamental laws of the universe is that you can never get more energy back than what you put into something. The total amount of the energy in the universe is constant--you can't make energy from nothing! Another important factor is that no machine we can make is going to be 100% efficient. This means that some of the energy we put into a system is going to get \"wasted\", meaning that it becomes a form of energy that doesn't do the kind of work we want it to. This is usually heat in a system such as an engine. In electronics, for example, some of the electricity traveling through a wire turns into heat and heats up the wire, meaning you will always lose some energy along the trip. Let's look at this in terms of an electric car. I don't know much about the details of how an electric car engine works, but you can imagine there are lots of places where the electrical or mechanical energy gets turned into waste heat--think of electric wires heating up, or the friction of a drive shaft on its bearings heating them both up and taking some of the rotational energy away. Therefore, the energy that is put out by turning the wheels is always a little bit less than the energy you \"pull out\" of the battery. So, in order to charge the battery, what would you have to do? You'd have to have **extra** energy in the wheels compared to the energy you put into the engine, which is impossible because of the first part up above--you can't make energy out of nothing! You could conceivably hook up a system so that half of the energy going to the wheels goes to recharge the battery, but that's kind of silly, since you would then need to pump out twice as much energy out of the battery to make the wheels spin at the same rate--so it works out to be the same. What about charging with solar panels? Well, now you've added another source of energy--the sun! We're no longer just powering the car off the energy stored in the battery; we're also using the gigantic fusion explosion happening constantly 93 million miles over our heads! Clearly, there's enough energy there. The problem is converting it to electricity fast enough and efficiently enough to power the wheels or recharge the battery in any sort of useful way. I don't know the mathematical details, but somebody on reddit recently did the math and I believe it would take a couple of days to charge the battery of a Tesla with the most efficient solar panels we have if they covered the car. You then have to take into account that solar panels are heavy, and they might make the car less efficient to move in general.",
"This is a perpetual motion machine. They are impossible as they violate the second law of thermodynamics, in that you cannot get out more energy than is put in. No machine is perfect, there will always be losses in the form of heat and motion. If a motor were to drive a generator, the losses come in the form of heat due to electrical resistance and bearing friction, and eddy currents opposing rotation of both the motor and the generator. So all a car can do is try to minimize loss by reducing aerodynamic and rolling resistance, recapture inefficiency through regenerative breaking and coasting, and utilize free energy in the form of solar (though right now no production vehicle has solar panels on the sun bearing surfaces because they're not yet that cost effective, you only see this in solar racers, and those \"cars\" are made of balsa wood and weigh 300kg or less)."
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5zlb59 | Why do we cry when we're sad? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"deyyvuw"
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"text": [
"We also cry when we're happy. It's because there's not enough room to keep all the feels inside, and so they spill over. Now flair your post or you'll cry when it's deleted."
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5zlh3m | how does the Higgs boson give things mass? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The vast majority of the mass in the universe is not due to the Higgs boson. It's actually due to the energy of the strong force. But to answer your question, I'm going to have to go to take a small detour to special relativity and light. Light doesn't have mass, but it does carry momentum and does have energy. Because it has momentum, when a photon \"bounces\" off a reflective surface, it imparts momentum to that surface. This is the way [solar sails]( URL_1 ) work: light from the sun reflects off the surface of the sail and imparts momentum to the sail and spacecraft. OK, so what would happen if you build an extremely lightweight box with perfectly reflecting walls and stick a whole bunch of light inside? If you run through the math, it turns out the box will act just like it has mass corresponding to the energy of all the light inside. It acts in every way like it has mass: you can accelerate the box; you can decelerate the box; the box will be attracted to massive bodies (in general relativity, massive bodies bend the path of light); and so forth. This is the [mass-energy equivalence principle]( URL_0 ). OK, so energy and mass are equivalent. With the strong force, we have something similar to the light box: the strong force creates a \"box\" (a neutron or proton) about which quarks and gluons can exist. Most of the energy in the neutron or proton is actually in the strong field. Very little of it is the mass of the quarks. Since most mass in the visible universe is due to nucleons, most of the mass of the universe is actually the energy of the strong force. So now, we get back to the idea of the Higgs boson. How does it give mass to quarks, electrons, and neutrinos? The theory is very complex, but it basically boils down to the same sort of thing. The Higgs field generates a \"higgs box\" around those fundamental particles where the particles interact with the Higgs field. There is energy associated with this and the result is again that the particles act like they have mass -- they can accelerate, be attracted by massive bodies, etc.... Since they act like they have mass in every way, we just say they do have mass. And I can hear the inevitable question coming: why to photons again have zero mass? They have energy right, so why doesn't the mass-equivalence principle apply to them? So a photon by itself doesn't have mass because it travels at the speed of light. There is no accelerating it. It always just travels at the cosmic speed limit (the speed of light). Once you put a \"box\" around the photon and *force it to interact*, the box gains mass equal to the mass of the photon. Mass then is the ability to accelerate and is a measure about how difficult it is to accelerate things."
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5zlk7x | Why are some companies not profitable, with no proven route to profitability, worth billions of dollars? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dez1bo5",
"dez1jrq",
"dez4zrw",
"dez3zfb"
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"text": [
"Welcome to the world of investing. One unwritten rule is that if enough people believe something is true, it will be true. It's gambling really. These companies live off marketing, dreams and the pockets of people who hope to strike it rich. If you can generate enough buzz and hype it can become self fulfilling because people will buy the stock, thus creating the very value the company balance sheet lacks.",
"Either investors think there will be a path to profitability once a critical mass of customers is achieved, or there are investors who think the company's technology/customer base/business model/etc is a likely acquisition target.",
"You're assuming that there is a \"rational\" relationship between profit and valuation. Rational means different things to different people. A stock is worth nothing more than what someone's willing to pay for it RIGHT NOW. What people are willing to pay for a stock is often correlated with things like profit, growth potential, etc. Don't get confused with correlation and causation. The cause of a stock YOU perceive to be worthless being bought at $100/share? Someone was willing to pay $100 for it. The rest is correlation. And some variables (profit, growth potential) correlate much better than others (news article hype, buyout rumors, product leaks). Successful investors make their millions finding opportunities where the perceived value is either too low or too high based on many of the indicators I just mentioned.",
"Those companies are not worth billions of dollars. A company with no proven route to profitability is very likely going to end up being traded as a penny stock if it goes public. Take, All American Pet Company - actually makes products and sells them, but not profitable and not worth billions of dollars. If you are talking things like Tesla - where the company is worth billions despite making a \"profit\" - you need to understand the numbers and what constitutes \"profit.\" Tesla earns quite a lot of revenue actually. But the thing is that it is a fairly new company with lots of costs, and it is a tech company, so lots of research. If you solely looked at money in for goods sold, costs out for labor and cost of goods sold - Tesla is \"profitable.\" However, it then turns around and reinvest millions into research so it can stay ahead of the curve and invent new batteries, etc. Investors look at the numbers and figure out that by xyz they will have all the infrastructure in place will have all the tech needed, and will be making cash hand over fist and eventually pay out dividends."
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5zlkfo | How are potholes created on an otherwise consistent surface? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dez1c6d"
],
"text": [
"Roads aren't consistent surfaces; they are porous and water can seep through asphalt. Water will soften the soil beneath the road. When it gets cold, water trapped under the road expands and pushes the asphalt upwards. When the water thaws, there is now a gap in the pavement where the ice used to be and the softened soil; frequent traffic will break the asphalt apart and erode a hole into the road."
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5zmb5p | Imaginary Time | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dez9z3t"
],
"text": [
"[Wikipedia sums it up pretty well]( URL_0 ): > If we imagine \"regular time\" as a horizontal line running between \"past\" in one direction and \"future\" in the other, then imaginary time would run perpendicular to this line as the imaginary numbers run perpendicular to the real numbers in the complex plane. Imaginary time is not imaginary in the sense that it is unreal or made-up — it simply runs in a direction different from the type of time we experience. In essence, imaginary time is a way of looking at the time dimension as if it were a dimension of space: you can move forward and backward along imaginary time, just like you can move right and left in space. > > The concept is useful in cosmology because it can help to smooth out gravitational singularities in models of the universe, where known physical laws do not apply. The Big Bang, for example, appears as a singularity in \"regular time.\" But, when visualized with imaginary time, the singularity is removed and the Big Bang functions like any other point in spacetime. We don't have evidence of its existence. Today, it is still just an idea that helps deal with certain mathematical problems we encounter in physics. Whether it's the correct solution to those problems or not is not yet known."
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|
5zmn9o | How does a 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner work | I always thought that shampoo removes some oils and conditioner adds others, so how do these opposite effects get combined into one bottle? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dezcqw1"
],
"text": [
"Not very well, is the short answer. Cosmetics companies did find conditioning chemicals that stay on the hair when used in a 2-in-1, possibly they're more resistant to the cleaning chemicals than natural oils. But they're still not able to match what a separate shampoo and conditioner can do, and product buildup in your hair can be a problem. On the other hand it's usually better than shampoo alone. Of course there are plenty of people who swear by conditioner-only, water-only, and even no hairwashing at all. Do whatever seems to work for your own hair."
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5zmq3h | how artists make money through apps like Spotify or iTunes? | I have Spotify Premium because I like to think I'm contributing to the artists I listen to. But how exactly does that work? Do the musicians receive so much money each time a song of theirs is downloaded? I really don't know the first thing about this so I was hoping someone could enlighten me. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dezc7rd",
"dezmki5"
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"text": [
"As fas as I know, you as an artist get money from Spotify depending on the percentile over the total plays of any song in Spotify that your creations represent. Or something like that. I've got friends with small groups that have their music on Spotify and they get paid peanuts, if anything.",
"Cool story about a band making $20 grand from spotify. The band wanted to raise money to go on a new tour so they released a record that was nothing but silence and asked their fans to stream it while they were sleeping. lol they made 20k for literally nothing. URL_0"
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} | [
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5zndsm | Whats the difference between 32Bit and 64Bit machines? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dezryxf",
"dezjfhc",
"dezue6l"
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"text": [
"For a true ELI5 answer let me try this. It's an incredibly simplistic explanation, but I think it might help. Imagine that you can only count with your fingers. You can only count to 10 before you have to write down your current answer and then keep counting on your fingers until you get to the number you want. So to count to five you just count five fingers. To count to 10 you count all 10 fingers. To count to 15, you first count to 10 and write that down. Then you count to 5 and write that down. Then you add those two numbers together and you get 15. If you had 20 fingers, you could count to 15 all at once and be done. A 32 bit computer has 4,294,967,296 fingers. a 64 bit computer has 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 fingers",
"A 32 bit machine means that it can handle individual things that are up to 32 bits long. That means it can add, subtract, and copy 32 bit numbers. It also means that it can use 32 bit numbers as a addresses. because there are 2^32 (4,294,967,296) possible values that a 32 number can hold, and each byte of memory needs its own unique address, it can only address 4,294,967,296 bytes, which is 4 GB. So even if you have more than 4 GB of RAM, a 32-bit machine can only use 4 GB of RAM because it doesn't handle numbers big enough to address more than that. A 64 bit system, on the other hand, could theoretically address as many as 2^64 (or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616) bytes (or 4,294,967,296 GB). The same goes for 32 bit programs (even if they're running on a 64 bit machine). There are less significant benefits to a 64 bit machine vs 32 bit. If you need to add two 64 bit numbers on a 32 bit machine, the programmer has to split each number into two different numbers, and add the less significant half as well as the most significant half. That's like breaking 25 into 2 and 5 and breaking 46 into 4 and 6, then adding 5 and 6 and storing the result (1), with incrementing the 2 in 26 (because you need to carry), then adding the ten's column. A 64 bit machine could do this in just one instruction, while adding a 64 bit number broken into 32 bit numbers would take at least two instructions. However , most programs don't need to use 64 bit numbers. Also, the 64 bit version of the CPUs the run on PCs have twice as many registers (16 vs 8). Registers are fast places to store numbers on the CPU so that they can be immediately available to do something. If your software is 64 bit, then it can use those extra registers instead of wasting time going to RAM. A 32 bit program can't make that assumption, because those registers weren't there before 64 bit versions of PC CPUs were made.",
"To oversimplify things: The difference is mostly in how much memory they can use. Computers use memory (RAM) to work it is an important part of their \"brains\". The CPU is what they use to \"think\" and the RAM is where they hold their \"thoughts\" (and short term memory) while doing so. The amount of memory a computer has limits the size of things they can think about. If stuff gets to big for their memory they have to do tricks like writing things down like when you have to write down long division on paper when you can't do it in your head. This writing things down (on the disk) takes a really long time compared to just doing the calculations in your head so things start to become really slow if you have to deal with things that don't fir into your memory whole. Some things that are too big for your memory can't even be really worked with even if you use all sorts of tricks. So having a large memory that can hold lots of ideas at once helps a computer. Because a computer's memory works different from a human one the limits of how much you can put into it are much more fixed. Each piece of information you put into the memory needs to have an address of where you put it. You can think of it like a sheet of graph paper with all these boxes predawn on it and each box fits exactly one number or letter. The more boxes there are the more information you can write on the paper. The way a computer works is by numbering those boxes and then specifying that the number it ones is for example in the 137th box. The problem here is that if you number the boxes you end up with some pretty large numbers like box 1,048,576. That information about where the information is needs to be written in boxes itself. Writing out numbers in the millions would take 7 boxes in normal human writing. If you only left six boxes of room to write down the number you can only address the first 999,999 boxes and any additional paper you may have with empty boxes that is leftover is useless to you. Computers don't write things down in number like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 0 but just use two numbers 1 and 0. (we call that binary) One binary digit (usually called bit) can be either a 1 or a 0. Where a normal two digit number can have 100 different values (00-99) and two binary digit number (2-bit number) has only 4 different values (00, 01, 10 and 11). If you use 8 bits you can have 256 different values we usually call these 8-bit numbers a byte. Computer systems using 2 bytes or 16-bits can use them to make 65,536 values. Computer systems using 4 bytes or 32-bits can use them to make 4,294,967,296 values. Computer systems using 8 bytes or 64-bits can use them to make 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 values. When I bought my first computer it had 64 thousand byte of memory which was sufficient at the time. Later computers used different architectures which allowed them to address much more memory than that. Up until a few years ago using 4 bytes to address where in the memory something was stored was sufficient. after all you had over 4 billion places to store things. This worked out to a storage space of 4 Gigabyte. Nowadays it is common to use more than 4GB of memory even in home computers. To take advantage of that you need both hardware that can work with 64bit addresses and software which can do that too. Vendors like Intel and AMD started making CPUs which could do 64-bit and operating systems like Windows started coming out some time ago. Nowadays 64-bit has become the standard for most normal computers."
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5znmcq | Why do people tilt their heads while they're writing? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dezkrhs"
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"text": [
"That was explained a couple of years ago [here]( URL_0 )"
],
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5znvf0 | Why is it that unplugging the WiFi router can fix the problem with slow internet, and what happens to cause it to becomes slower than it should be? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dezm22e"
],
"text": [
"The router has something called a translation table. It's a list of all connections currently going on. When a computer using the router wants to connect to something on the internet, the router writes it down in the translation table so that when a response arrives the router knows what to do with it and to which computer to send it. The router is supposed to know when connections end and remove them from the table, but like all programs, router software can have bugs, and sometimes those bugs cause connections to stay in the table forever. Eventually, the table fills up, and when your computer tries to make a new connection, it fails because the router has nowhere to write it down. This makes your internet work erratically, because most of the time it won't work, but sometimes some space in the table frees up and briefly you can make connections again. Restarting the router empties the table and solves the problem until it fills up again. There are some other possible reasons for this - maybe the router's software crashed, or there is a problem with the connection between it and the internet that will be solved by starting it from scratch - but I think this is the most likely, and the others are too specific to know about or explain anyway."
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5zo86d | How did colors end up with their associations? (Pink/Purple being "girly", Blue for boys, Green with envy). Where did it start? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dezos5m",
"dezpn1i"
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"text": [
"Depends on culture. Romans used purple to signify royalty. Indians view pink as lucky and it is worn by both sexes. Different colors mean different things to different cultures. They aren't universally symbolic generally. As to the specific origin of the symbols you're asking about: I dont know. I'll leave that to someone else.",
"Purple used to be the most expensive dye, being produced from shellfish in the city of Tyre; as it was so expensive only the top could afford it, so it became the colour of Nobility"
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5zox0i | why are photos rectangular when camera lenses are circular ? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dezuph9"
],
"text": [
"Because lenses don't capture photos, sensors and film do. The sensor and film are rectangular. Lenses just focus light. You can even make[a camera without a lens]( URL_0 )."
],
"score": [
8
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"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera"
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|
5zql3z | Why are the really old black and white videos almost always sped up? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"df07xn3"
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"text": [
"Actually, time was faster about a hundred years ago. That's why life expectancy was shorter and smoking was healthy."
],
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5zqmix | How does medication that targets specific areas of the body (such as back/head/sinuses) work? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"df06i8j",
"df06onj"
],
"text": [
"Well it doesn't. Medicine, specifically pills are ingested and spread throughout the body through blood once it hits the liver. It then travels through the whole body and provides relief in problem areas but can also provide side effects in other areas. Thats why there is usually a long list of side effects becauce while it may fix your issue it can create another else where be it minor or major. One pill can reduce headaches but could also cause dry mouth. Sometimes we use medicine for their side effects. There is an anti inflammatory I used to take because one of the side effects were less sweating, I have hyperhidrosis which causes extra sweating of the palms. So while I didnt need the anti-inflammatory effects, the side effects were useful.",
"It doesn't. You notice a change where you have pain and not where you don't have pain. Just like a £5/$5 box of paracetamol (tylenol) works no better than a 16p box. Source: I'm a doctor."
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5zt880 | Why do words we've known our whole lives occasionally look and sound really awkward to us? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"df10nuj",
"df0ucju"
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"text": [
"It's actually a psychological phenomena called Jamais Vu, the opposite of Deja vu, and it's the process of something recognizable becoming unfamiliar with repeated use, such as if you say one word over and over, it will eventually just become sounds to your brain and lose its meaning.",
"Not sure if I'm right but you might be experiencing [semantic satiation]( URL_0 ). If you pay attention to a certain word (such as \"bath\") and repeat it numerous times, your brain starts getting \"tired\" of it and starts thinking it's just \"random nonsensical sounds\" for some time."
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|
5zth0g | Third-Wave Feminism | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The various \"waves\" of feminism refer generally to mainstream feminist movements in Western countries (US/UK, primariily). First-wave feminism focused on basic rights (1800 - 1950s) like voting and property ownership. Second-wave feminism (1960s - 1980s) broadened out to more social rights that were of concern to middle-class women -- reproductive rights, sexual freedom, hiring, domestic violence, etc. Third-wave feminism (1990s - present) broadens out what \"feminist issues\" include, as it starts to include more issues that are of interest outside the world-view of white, middle-class, heterosexual women. LGBTQ and racial issues become more central, and the question of \"intersectionality\" becomes key. Intersectionality says that any individual woman is an intersection of many different cultural identities -- she's not just a woman, she's also from a particular culture, has a particular sexuality, raised in a particular religious tradition, and so on, and that all these intersecting identities are all a part of her lived experience. As this is also the first time that trans issues have been included as a part of feminist issues, the question of \"what is a woman\" is raised in this wave for the first time, or at least defining it beyond genital sex at birth; this has led to a questioning of how many sexes there are and whether or not gender even needs to be a definitive category. There are also some who talk about a fourth-wave feminism, though that's a topic of some debate."
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5ztqo3 | Why do we use English names (Spain, Japan, India) for non-English places (España, Nippon, Bharat/Hindustan)? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"df0ynw4"
],
"text": [
"Many languages have names for other countries in their own language. It's not racism, it's just familiarity. Example : America in Korean is 미국 (mi-gook) which means land of rice (meaning wealthy) and then they call Canada 카나다 which is simply pronounced Canada. It really depends on what language your using, that's all."
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5zwu7i | How do tattoos work? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Tattoos work by depositing a small amount of ink into the dermis of the skin, which is your second layer of skin. The needle being used punctures your epidermis somewhere between 50-3000 times a minute. Every time it punctures your epidermis and enters the dermis, it deposits ink. The cells in the dermis are more stable than those in the epidermis, which is why the dermis is used along with visibility reasons. The ink becomes trapped there and is only subject to fading and minor dispersement over time. As for certain colors of ink hurting more, I've personally never heard that and I have several tattoos and have never experienced it. Hopefully someone else can answer it."
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5zx3ns | What makes up the crust that sometimes forms in our eyes when we wake up? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"rheum. It's dried mucus that has accumulated while you slept, without the normal activity of your blinking eyes to flush it away. It is like runny snot, with some dead skin, dust, and blood cells."
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5zxxpo | How does this [image of CPU die] make a computer work? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> I'm talking more on a physical level. Like, what is actually going on with all those gold(?) pads and traces? That is an immensely complex question. Those \"gold pads\" are not gold pads, they are densely packed masses of transistors and memory structures. They are so small that even that magnified view has no hope of showing them as anything other than a slightly iridescent sheen of material. In this case they are 14 nanometers which is roughly half the length of a ribosome, or about twice as thick as a cell membrane. Ultimately how computers operate comes down to the concept of a transistor, or a solid-state electrical switch that conducts or insulates a junction based upon the presence of a current on a third wire. By combining those structures basic mathematic operations can be performed, and the results transferred on to other similar structures. How that all translates into what computers do on a daily basis is far too complex for such a forum."
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5zy238 | Why do we only define all humans as 1 species compared to animals and insects where very slight differences can define a new species | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One of the main characteristics of a species is being able to mate and produce fertile offspring."
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5zy3bl | Why is an elevated heart rate bad for you when it's due to nerves/anxiety but good for you when it comes from exercise/activity? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Seems more like the anxiety one is a constant thing - your heart pounding away for no reason. While the exercise is limited duration, and more importantly, associated with muscle activity elsewhere - that activity is the healthy part.",
"Very much so. The sudden jump in heart rate and strain on the cardiovascular system is what can cause acute myocardial infarction( heart attack) along with stress. The endorphins released during exercise is what is positive for your body along with the gradual rise, and fall, of heart rate."
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5zzu03 | Why is it that we stretch when we get tired? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Physical activity stimulates blood flow, including to the brain. Increased blood flow to the brain increases wakefulness. Stretching is basically the \"lowest cost\" way your body has of getting that physical activity, and thus the most instinctive."
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601mw0 | What is fire? | I think I know fire is gases, but physically what in the heck is fire? You can't physically grab it, but you can certainly feel it. What in the heck is it? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fire is the rapid oxidation of the molecules in the fuel source (i.e. logs in a fireplace). It is an exothermic reaction which is where the heat comes from. The energy generated from the oxidation of the atoms excites the electrons in the combustible material. When the excited electrons fall back down to their ground state, they release photons which is the source of the light that you see (i.e. flames).",
"Let's say we take a magnifying glass and focus the sun's light on a piece of wood. The focused light \"burns\" the wood. A little bit of white smoke comes off the wood, and a black mark is left on the wood. The black dot is essentially a little black dot of charcoal. The white smoke is volatile and flammable compounds. That white smoke is actually what becomes fire. As those flammable compounds are released from a piece of wood or paper, if they get hot enough, and mix with oxygen from the air, they go through another chemical reaction. They combine with oxygen, turning into carbon dioxide and water, and maybe some other things. This reaction releases a lot of energy, in the form of heat and light. This is what you see as the flame.",
"Fire the rapid oxidation with the evolution of heat and light. What happens is the material are heat so much, they turn to a gas which then can be light on fire Fun experiment to do to understand this, but don't fire is super dangerous and you might burn down everything, Take a big cardboard tube (from tinfoil, paper towel, wrapping paper) and light one end. Hold it up straight or diagonally. Be careful!! Use tongs or a glove, it gets hot!! Smoke will start to come out the top, and it may even spontaneously ignite. The smoke is parts of the tube that became a gas and now are burning.",
"Fire is a process. It oxidizes a fuel source, releasing hot gas and heat/light."
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601txq | how were languages first translated? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You literally have to start somewhere, and the universal understanding of touching or pointing at an object and declaring it is the start of that process."
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6020fd | How do buffets stay in business? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"because if you buy in bulk it's insanely cheap. sure they might lose money on the one or two big eaters, but everyone else eating salads and cheap filler foods more than make up the difference. with the amount of food going through, buffets can buy cheaper cuts of meat and stuff closer to expiration dates since they're insanely marked down. labor isn't as expensive as you think.",
"Typically a buffet will require less wait staff than a regular restraunt which saves some money.",
"Much more efficient to make lots of the same thing than jumping from roll to roll, it's a way to use up what's got less life left(ie. they've got a surplus of salmon, put out more salmon rolls and people will eat what's out), for each person that eats a ton there are two who don't eat that much, they make the mark-up on sake or cocktails, etc.",
"at a pizza buffet, a person needed to eat 40 slices (they're not too big but that's still thousands of calories) in order for the company to break even",
"Some good answers here, but to be holistic, keep in mind that food costs are only a part of a restaurant's business model. For most restaurants, food costs are only 25-35% of total operating expense. Nobody ever eats $15 worth of food costs (although they might waste it. I've seen plenty of that). For a buffet, the volume of people going through helps, but if you average the food consumed, people actually eat a lot less than you might expect. At our pizza/chicken buffet, each guest equates to a third of a pizza for planning what we need to have cooking. The buffet prices tend to be high because there's lot of overhead involved in running a large restaurant (and most buffets are large, particularly the chains. We seat 300.) and the dinner prices encompass all of that. Food cost is only a small portion."
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602j30 | Why is 24 FPS unplayable in video games, but looks fine to me in movies/TV shows? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A lot of these responses are correct but are missing a critical point; That is that games require input and interaction while movies and television are passively observed. When a game renders a low amount of frames per second, *especially* when it dips under ~30 FPS, the player can feel the difference much more because it takes more time for input to be read and then displayed on the screen. In other words, this means that every action a player makes in such a scenario feels sluggish and unresponsive because when our brains are expecting to perceive a change much faster than we do. It can cause an element of frustration and it certainly does not help in immersing the player into the game as they are effectively being constantly reminded that something is wrong. Television and movies on the other hand require no input from those watching it so utilizing lower frame rates - so long as they are constant - is far more comfortable than if we were to play a game at the same FPS.",
"Film has natural inherent motion blur which smooths things out. When played back, each image is actually flashed two or three times which also helps. Standard definition television was interlaced, so the nominal 25 fps of PAL or 30 of NTSC actually meant new image data being displayed 50 or 60 times a second but only half the image each time. Games displayed on a monitor or modern TV have neither of those things. Additionally a rock-solid 24 fps in a game, with a monitor refresh rate suitably matched, probably wouldn't be so bad. The problems really come when an average 24 fps comes with stutter and lag, and momentary dips well below that, and screen tearing because the monitor refresh rate doesn't match. EDIT: The replies show split opinion on that, which is not too surprising. I think partly it's what you're accustomed to. Console gamers are used to 30 fps and don't mind it, but PC gamers who usually play at 60+ will notice.",
"Motion pictures work because of an attribute of our visual processing called persistence of vision. If you are shown a rapid series of still frames that are moved into position quickly (without bluring them which is what a shutter in a movie projector does) then it tricks the eye into seeing motion. 24FPS happens to be on the lower end of the minimum number of frames to fool the eye into seeing motion without causing discomfort however it's not high enough to show all types of motion clearly. There is something called the picket fence effect, where objects panning past a 24fps movie camera, appear to judder or jump past the camera noticeably, making it hard to make out the clear edges of the fence boards. This is why panning shots in movies are generally done slowly and controlled, so the frame rate of the camera isn't over loaded with too much motion. In a video game though it is up to you to control how quickly the camera pans around, and you generally need to look around quickly, which doesn't work so well at 24fps. It might look okay for a cut scene where the game director can slow down the camera so it looks good, but in live play it's not enough. At 30fps, most motion looks acceptable, but panning motions still seem jumpy. At 60fps even panning and strafing shots seem smooth but the eye can still see even more detail all the way out to 100+fps if very fast motion is observed. This is why many gamers prefer 60+fps in games, because most kinds of game motion like spinning the camera around, aiming, jumping, running, all basically look smooth, with higher frame rates having diminishing returns. Ironically when you shoot film at higher FPS, at a certain point it stops looking like film and starts looking more like video like a news or sports broadcast. Movies have a certain look to them that is a combination of the color pallete and dynamic range of the image, but also the lower fixed frame rate which gives movies that 'film' look.",
"Movies are static or low-movement shots. Video games are smooth panning with a constantly-moving camera point of view. Low FPS is most noticeable during panning, making video games much more sensitive to bad FPS.",
"FWIW, 24 fps looks pretty bad in a lot of common movie scenarios, such as panning across the landscape. In those cases, you can easily see how rough it makes the image.",
"Professional game designer here. It really depends a lot on the game. While more fps is always better, it's not always needed. For something that requires twitch based reaction and frame counting, such as fighting games, 60 fps is the minimum acceptable speed. Strategy and casual games usually are a bit more relaxed with 30 fps being fairly acceptable. I haven't worked directly with Sony or Microsoft in recent years, but both used to have a TCR/TRC that stated you game should not fall below 15 fps for any prolonged length of time. Now, \"prolonged length of time\" is fairly subjective, so we always did our best to never fall below 30 fps, but considered it a critical bug if the game ever fell below 15 fps...at least when getting ready for submission (in regular production we didn't care as much). You would be surprised how hard this is to actually accomplish in open world games. Near the end of my first project, we seriously had to pick and choose what bushes/foliage we wanted to leave in and to take out to improve framerate. Foliage is the WORST to deal with. While particle effects can be rough too, foliage is pretty much always around. It usually has to move in the wind, move for the player and be translucent around the edges. Even when we started using professional middleware (speedtree) for our foliage it was still an fps killer. Anyhoo...that was long...Yeah. More frames = good.",
"Movies don't look fine. Watch the edge of the screen, let's say of an aerial fly by shot of mountains. They look so jittery as they pass off the screen.",
"Film has motion blur because that 24 fps (usually) captures 0.5 seconds for every second of footage. So each frame is about 0.02 seconds of motion captured in a still image. Games, on the other hand, create each individual frame as one instant in time and won't have motion blur unless it's artificially added in.",
"You watch movies but play video games. A movie doesn't matter because you just have to sit there and take it in. Video games you need to control. And the faster you are able to receive the information the faster and more accurately you can respond to it",
"When you play a video game, you are thinking of an action to take, you take the action, and you expect instantaneous response from the game. When I'm playing rocket league, I think \"hit the ball now.\" I press the A button and move my thumb stick forward. If the car doesn't instantly flip forward due to lag or whatever else, it's incredibly obvious that something didn't work out. In a movie, you probably don't have any idea what's about to happen and there is no input required from you, so you are a passive observer."
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6030ja | Why is it not recommended to refreeze food that has previously been frozen and thawed? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Condensation/water content/bacteria Doing this can lead to food being incredibly dry or tough. Additionally: if meat sits out for awhile and grows bacteria, that bacteria may not always be killed by the cold that occurs from refreezing and can spoil it."
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6047wl | the concept of bankruptcy | I read the wiki page, but I still don't get it. So it's about paying back debt or not being able to do so? What are the different "chapters"? What exactly happens when you file bankruptcy? Isn't every homeless person bankrupt? [Related]( URL_0 ) | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From the [previous thread]( URL_0 ) - this is a great ELI5 version > Like you're Five: On the day you get your allowance, you buy a bag of candy. The next day, you want more candy, but you spent your allowance, so you ask your brother if you can borrow his allowance, and pay him back with your next allowance. You buy another bag of candy. The next day you ask your sister if you can borrow her allowance, and promise to pay her back when you get your allowance. You buy another bag of candy. > When you finally get your allowance, you realise you're in trouble - you can't pay your brother and your sister. You get so worried about it that you go buy a bag of candy instead. When you get home, you get in a big fight with your brother and sister about it. > When your Mom asks what you're fighting about, your brother and sister tell her that you borrowed money and you won't give it back. She asks you why not, and you say that you spent all of the money on candy, and you don't have any money left. She sighs, and makes you give all the candy you have left to your brother and sister. They want to know when they get their money back, and she tells them the money is gone, and they need to stop fighting with you and forgive you. They say that that isn't fair, and she says that it really isn't, and that they should remember this the next time you ask them for money.",
"Declaring bankruptcy is seeking legal protection from your creditors (people you owe money to). As far as personal bankruptcies go, chapter 7 is what people generally think of when they bankruptcy. The courts allow you to discharge your unsecured debts (credit cards, medical bills, personal/ payday loans, civil lawsuits, repossessed vehicles, foreclosed real estate, etc). The entire process takes a few months to be discharged and you also have to income qualify- if you make more than the median income in your state you would have to pay back some portion of your debts. You can only do this once every eight years, it will bring down your credit score as you have demonstrated that you were unable to pay back your debts and creditors in the future might not want to lend to you or only will at a higher interest rate. A chapter 13 is a bit different and can deal with other debts as well as unsecured. You would file this if you make too much for a chapter 7, if you are behind on a financed vehicle/ real estate that you want to keep, if you have a lot of back taxes to pay off or to freeze student loans. A monthly payment would be determined based on which of those debts are being dealt with, how much the debts are and also on your income. You would make this payment to a bankruptcy trustee for 3-5 years and your unsecured creditors would receive a percentage of their debts, secured creditors receive 100% (generally). You would be discharged of any unpaid debts at the end of the bankruptcy. This is an overview of the type I'd give to a person seeking information about filing. Source: legal assistant to a bankruptcy attorney.",
"Bankruptcy is a highly nuanced area of the law. With that in mind, I provide the following answers in _very_ ELI5 terms. Let's first make a distinction between \"bankruptcy\" and \"solvency.\" The terms \"bankrupt\" and \"insolvent\" are often used interchangeably in common discussion, but they are entirely different (albeit related) legal concepts. \"Solvency\" refers to a person's/company's ability to pay his or her debts. If you are unable to pay your debts as they come due, you are \"insolvent.\" \"Bankruptcy\" specifically means the legal proceedings in which an insolvent debtor pays, reorganizes, and/or discharges its debts. So in any bankruptcy proceeding, you have a debtor (the bankrupt party) and (usually) _several_ creditors to whom the debtor is indebted. The problem is that the debtor has no way to pay back the creditors. Bankruptcy provides an orderly, judicially-administered process by which the debtor partially satisfies and/or reorganizes its debt. In very general terms, bankruptcy seeks to maximize the recovery for creditors in a way that protects the debtor from being constantly mired in an unending cycle of lawsuits and debt collection. Without bankruptcy, creditors would essentially race one another to the courthouse to try to get as big a piece of the debtor's remaining assets as possible. This would create situations where a debtor's credit card company (for example) could get a 100% recovery on the debtor's credit card debt, while the debtor's mortgage lender (who is owed way more money) gets nothing. As you note, there are several chapters of bankruptcy, which include: Chapter 7, Liquidation - In this chapter, a debtor's assets are liquidated (auctioned off for cash) and the proceeds are divvied up among the creditors. In the context of an individual person's bankruptcy, there are several carve-outs (\"exemptions\") for property that they get to keep, in spite of their debts. If an individual debtor obeys the rules of the bankruptcy court (e.g., doesn't try to hide assets), he'll get a \"discharge,\" which means that (most of) his debts are wiped clean at the end of the proceedings. If the debtor is a company, ALL of its assets are sold and it essentially dies. Chapter 9, Municipal Bankruptcy - A rather uncommon type of case, chapter 9 cases involve municipal institutions that have become insolvent. It permits the reorganization of their debts _kind of_ like a Chapter 11 below. Chapter 11, Reorganization - In these cases, the debtor (usually a business) still has a lot of value and income. It just needs a little help to pay its bills. In a chapter 11, the goal is to come up with a \"plan\" that reorganizes the terms of the debtor's debt. If a plan is successfully confirmed, it becomes the new deal between the debtor and the creditors going forward. Chapter 12, Farmers and Fisherfolk - This is essentially a specific type of Chapter 13 bankruptcy (below) available to farmers, fishermen and the like. These are kind of uniquely positioned debtors because these are often blue collar jobs that require very high capital commitments. Chapter 13, Reorganization - Available only for individual persons who meet specific debt requirements, these are quicker and easier proceedings that permit an individual to reorganize his debts. Chapter 15, International Bankruptcy - Chapter 15 permits creditors or debtors in a foreign bankruptcy proceeding to obtain certain bankruptcy relief in the U.S. So that's it in _very_ broad strokes. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.",
"I meet all kinds of people in my line of work. Just because someone is \"homeless.\" Doesn't mean they are broke. They may have more money in their chequeings account than you do. I have met some of these people. They just like the lifestyle of being off the grid and not have to answer to anyone. Weird, but to each their own. One man stands out in the back of my mind the most. Has a cellphone, regular bill and PO Box. Has a Facebook account and is a professional violinist that has seen more of the world than I ever will. He also used to makes violins by hand. And lives on the street. I met him when I arrested him for trespassing into an old factory. He broke and entered to stay warm. As that is not an indictable offence, charges were dropped and he just had to pay damages.",
"Why isn't every homeless person bankrupt? Because bankruptcy is a legal thing: it means that the people you owe money to taking you to court. The bankruptcy \"chapters\" are just the rules the court will use. Homeless people tend not to have money, so there's no point in taking them to court. Are there any creditors who would be happy with a scuffed-up duffel bag and a cardboard sign? Answer: no. There's simply no upside to taking a homeless person to court. They have nothing, so the creditors can get nothing.",
"Can I declare bankruptcy if I only have $100 in debt?",
"One positive thing about the idea of bankruptcy is that it takes some of the risk out of entrepreneurship. If you start a business and it fails and your hundreds of thousands in debt that's going to essentially ruin the rest of your life. Bankruptcy is a kind of safety net so people will be less afraid of taking risks. We want people to start businesses and innovate but it's a big personal risk.",
"Sue someone in civil court for damages. Win. Judge bangs gavel. Makes debt appear. File for bankruptcy in bankruptcy court. Follow all the correct rules and procedures. Judge bangs gavel. Makes debt disappear. Chapter 7 is for throwing in the towel. You sell your assets, except those assets which are exempt. The proceeds are divided among your creditors. You get any change leftover. There won't be any change leftover. All of your debts, except for certain kinds like student loans or debts that you got because you hurt someone go away. Chapter 13 is for hitching up to the plow. You agree to work for 3 or 4 or 5 years and some amount of your proceeds go towards your creditors. At the end, all of your debts, except for the same kind mentioned above, go away. Chapter 11 is for reorganization. Businesses with a ton of assets who got too far in debt to dig themselves out can do this. The creditors may take over the company, or you may get to keep it. It depends on what you can bring in and what everyone, including the court, agrees to. Chapter 12 is like Chapter 13, but for farmers. Chapter 9 is like Chapter 11, but for cities. Source: Lawyer, took bankruptcy in law school. Never had a case, though.",
"Bankruptcy is when someone borrows more than they are able to repay. Typically, someone who wants to file bankruptcy will go to a lawyer's office for a consultation, where the lawyer will ask a series of questions to determine if that person is eligible to file for bankruptcy. If they are, then the lawyer will determine which type, or chapter, of bankruptcy is best for that person to file under. For individuals, there are two main chapters of bankruptcy: 7 and 13. Chapter 7 is when the person sells their stuff to the companies they owe. In return, the companies will use their debtor's assets to settle their accounts. Typically, people who file Chapter 7 bankruptcy have little to no income, either because they're unemployed, disabled and unable to work, or live off a fixed income, and have very few if any valuable assets to sell to their creditors. Chapter 7 bankruptcy provides immediate relief to debtors, meaning that once the court approves the debtor's case, any and all debts mentioned on the debtor's paperwork are forgiven in full, provided that the debtor meets their end of the deal. Chapter 13 is different from Chapter 7 because under Chapter 13, the debtor gets to keep all of their assets. However, the trade off is that the debts are not immediately forgiven, as they are under Chapter 7. A debtor who files for Chapter 13 bankruptcy is said to 'restructure' their debts. This means that the debtor must make monthly payments to a Trustee, someone who is designated by the state to make sure the creditors receive their money each month. The Trustee also helps debtors by providing them with financial literacy courses. Depending on the state the debtor lives in, they may be required to take a certain number of financial literacy courses from their Trustee to help assure creditors that the debtor can make better financial decisions in the future. The amount that the debtor must repay each month is based on several factors, mostly how much they owe, and the debtor's current income. Debtors are usually required to make payments for 36-60 months, or 3-5 years. The length of time is usually determined by considering how much the debtor will owe against the debtor's disposable income, or how much money is left after the debtor pays for important things like rent, utilities, groceries, etc. Debtors are also required to obtain approval from their Trustee if they intend to take on credit over a certain amount while making payments on their bankruptcy. Credit cards are unlikely to receive approval, but a car loan is more likely to be approved, since the debtor might require transportation to maintain their income. Once the debtor makes all of their monthly payments as agreed upon with the court, any remaining debt is forgiven. Under both and all other chapters, the debtor is placed under legal protection by the bankruptcy court once the lawyer has filed the debtor's paperwork. This means that creditors are not allowed to contact the debtor directly, especially to make collections. If creditors continue to contact the debtor directly, then the creditor may face legal recourse, up to and including the amount the debtor owes. The debtor is protected by the court until the judge discharges the bankruptcy once the judge feels that the debtor has met their obligations to the court.",
"I agree with everything said above but would clarify the only time a chapter 13 is 3 years is when the debtor is under median income and would otherwise qualify for ch. 7 but needs to file ch. 13 - perhaps to save a house, car, taxes, etc. Most chapter 13s are 5 year plans.",
"Jesus, guys... not many easy explanations in here. At the expense of tanking your credit rating, you can give back all of your assets to cancel all of your debt. Essentially, *you get to start again from zero*. Credit rating is important for running a business, getting a loan, and generally being an adult, so bankruptcy is a tactic of last resort.",
"One thing I learned personally is this.. If you get over your head in debt,and feel you must do the \"honorable\" thing and pay it back even if it takes 10 yrs. Consider this...you will be called a deadbeat,cheap bastard and every other name in the book.....When and if you manage to pay it back you will still be called those names not to mention your credit may be shit for paying late...plus all the headaches you went thru. On the other hand,bankruptcy allows you to provide ONE signature to dissolve all of your debt. 2 minutes and it's over! They will for sure call you a deadbeat and cheap bastard when you file bankruptcy..but you'll be far ahead and FREE of debt.",
"Bankruptcy is when a court or other body of similar standing recognises that a person or a company can't pay their debt. For a company, the court appoints a lawyer or accountant who figures out how to divide any remaining assets. The previous owners of the company lose their ownership of the company but won't lose more than that, but will be free to start a new company (provided it's a normal type of company). It can get a bit messy, when there is bank debt, debt from other places, pension funds and so on. Often it takes ages to get to a deal and the actual deal is not very good meaning a lot of the value of the assets is wasted. For an individual, I believe the process is similar. The court will appoint an administrator who will work with all the debt holders to the figure out how to divide the assets of the person who went bankrupt. But the court can also impose a penalty on the person, saying they have to pay back X dollars from future earnings, or X% of future earnings.",
"A lot of people have made comments and many have a degree of accuracy but also state things that are patently untrue. I have been a bankruptcy paralegal and petition preparer for 7 years. 1. You will not be forced to sell everything you own. The law provides exemptions to cover most, and usually all, of your belongings (including bank accounts). 2. You do not \"qualify\" for bankruptcy because of unpaid loans. Many people have never missed a payment when they file. The only \"qualifiers\" (and I use that term loosely) are income-which will be a determining factor as to which chapter you might file and prior filings. 3. If you file chapter 7 you cannot file chapter 7 again for 8 years. 4. If you file chapter 7, you can file a subsequent chapter 13 even if you received a discharge in 7. 5. If you file chapter 13 and receive a discharge, you may not file a chapter 7 until 6 years from the date of filing. If you file chapter 13 and are dismissed without discharge, you may refine-multiple times even, unless the court bars you from doing so. 6. Chapter 7 stays on your credit report for 10 years but if you manage your credit properly your credit will rebound very quickly and you can get a mortgage in as little as 2 years from discharge. 7. Chapter 13 with a discharge stays on your credit report for 7 years. 8. Chapter 13 dismissed without discharge stays on your report for 10 years. There were more but those are some highlights.",
"Bankruptcy is a way to deal with owing too much money in an orderly fashion. There are a couple of ways to deal with people and businesses who owe too much money, each in a separate \"chapter\" of the Bankruptcy Code. Because other answers deal with how bankruptcy protects the person or company owing the money (the \"debtor\"), I'll focus on why the people **owed** the money (the \"creditors\") want bankruptcy. There is something called a \"scramble for assets.\" If there isn't enough money to pay off all the debts, each creditor wants to make sure *it* gets paid first. That's especially true when you consider that creditors don't look to sell property they've seized to pay a debt for the highest price—anything over the amount they're owed gets returned to the debtor—so a creditor might squander an asset, leaving less for both the debtor and other creditors. Consider a single piece of commercial property secured by two mortgages. (We'll make it commercial property so there are no problems foreclosing on it, or seizing it to pay the debt). Let's make it a $5 million asset, say that the loan used to buy it has been paid down to $2 million, and that the company then took out another $2 million loan to pay for expansion. So we have a $ 5 million asset securing $4 million in loans. But if the first company forecloses, it has no incentive to sell the property for more than $2 million. If it sells it for $4 million, the second creditor might be happy (there is $2 million left to pay it), but the debtor can reasonably ask, \"Where's my other $1 million?\" Even worse, if the foreclosing creditor sells the property for $3 million, now the second creditor has lost $1 million that really it had a right to. It used to be owed money by someone whose assets were worth more than their liabilities: now it is owed $1 million by someone without any money. So, what we want is an orderly way to decide who gets paid and when. There seem to be some fair rules that we can agree on, and we want to enforce those rules. Creditors who loan money on the debtor's promise that they can foreclose on property (\"secured\" creditors) should not have to worry about a creditor without a mortgage or lien (an \"unsecured\" creditor) taking the property, selling it, and keeping the money. Employees who are owed back wages should get paid before money goes to a company's other creditors. Etc. Also, at some point we want to give individuals a fresh start. Imagine if you owed $3 million because a jury found that the reason a warehouse burned down was because you were negligent in flicking a cigarette butt. You would like to be able to earn some money without having the creditor take it away before you could spend it on food, let alone rent and your children's education. And not everyone who misses a payment needs to have their debts wiped away. Maybe they can pay all their creditors *without* anyone seizing their assets if they are given a little bit more time. So everyone wants their to be an orderly way to deal with a debtor who isn't paying his debtors, and most people want there to be some relief extended to debtors. Thus, the Constitution allows Congress to establish uniform rules for bankruptcy that overcome any state laws (the process for actually seizing property and enforcing debts comes from state law), and Congress enacted the Bankruptcy Code under that authority. The \"order\" bit gets guaranteed by something called the \"automatic stay.\" Either the debtor (or creditors worried that there will be a scramble for assets) can file a \"petition\" with the local bankruptcy court, and as soon as it is filed, no one may try to collect any debt from the debtor. No new lawsuits may be filed, no foreclosure actions may be initiated or continued, and all lawsuits already filed are paused until the bankruptcy court says otherwise. The bankruptcy court will decide what happens next based on which \"chapter\" of the Bankruptcy Code the petition was filed under. Other posters have described the chapters well enough. In any event, unless the debtor really doesn't have any assets to distribute and is only looking to have his or her debts wiped away under Chapter 7, the creditors then file \"claims,\" saying the debtor owes them such and such. Then the bankruptcy court decides what debts are actually owed, which debts are secured by assets and which are not, etc. That is known as the \"claims allowance process.\" Then, everyone gets together and comes up with a plan. The creditors are told what assets will be sold, who will sell them, how the money will be distributed, etc.. The debtor can usually protect some assets if he or she is an individual (e.g., forestall foreclosure on his or her only house). If the debts are going to be restructured, a payment plan gets worked out. Usually, every creditor gets paid less than they were owed (unless there were assets enough to satisfy the secured creditors), but more than they could expect from a scramble for assets. The plan gets confirmed by the bankruptcy judge, the debtor follows the plan, and voila! no more bankruptcy. Now, as you can imagine, that is an expensive process. And one of the groups of people who are assured of being paid (other than employees with back wages and the government owed its taxes) are the lawyers. So, to your last question: every homeless person could probably have all their debts wiped away by filing for bankruptcy. But they have no assets, so there is no real danger of a scramble for assets. And because they will never pay their debts back anyway, no one cares about whether those debts were discharged in bankruptcy or just go uncollected. Creditors don't hound homeless people for the simple reason that hounds are expensive. So, not a lot of homeless people end up in bankruptcy."
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604v52 | What is the trail an airplane leaves behind when it flies through the sky? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Take a water bottle and drink most of the water. Then, close the cap. Twist the bottle so that it is pressurized and split into two sections. Quickly take off the cap, you will hear a loud POP. In that moment, the air goes from high to low pressure. And if you look at the bottle, it will be emitting a little cloud of water vapor. The same thing is happening with the planes. All of the pressure systems about the wings forms water vapor clouds behind the plane.",
"water. URL_0 with a few impurities due from the incomplete burning of fuel, but basically just water. (or ice)",
"Just for interest sake, currently being in Europe I see it a lot. I noticed it in France and now while in the U.K. It was very new to me as I had never seen them caused by planes while living in South Africa. Not to say it doesn't happen there but it's definitely something I had never seen before and I lived about 10km from O.R Tambo Airport (Johannesburg)."
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604ywf | Why do things that are spinning at a fast rate (airplane propellers and car tires) seem to reverse direction? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's something that is commonly known as the \"wagon-wheel\" effect. Cameras record footage not continuously, but by capturing a series of images in quick succession, at a specified frame rate. With many movie cameras, that rate is 24 frames per second. When the frequency of a wheel's spin matches the frame rate of the camera recording it (say, 24 revolutions per second), each of the wheel's spokes completes a full revolution every 1/24 seconds, such that it ends up in the same position every time the camera captures a frame. The result is footage in which the wheel in question appears motionless. So when a wheel seems to spin in a direction opposite to its actual rotation, it's because each spoke has come up a few degrees shy of the position it occupied when it was last imaged by the camera."
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6053lx | What power does the British Monarchy actually hold? Versus the Prime Minister and Parliament more specifically. What can or can't they do with it without the permission of Parliament or the Prime Minister? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The British Monarchy is a great example of the *\"de jure\"* (\"matter of law\") vs. *\"de facto\"* (\"matter of fact\") distinction. The Queen holds power *de jure*. The government is run in her name and on her behalf. She appoints Prime Ministers and criminal prosecutions are brought in her name. But Parliament and the government (\"Government\" in UK politics refers specifically to the prime minister and some of the prime minister's secretaries and ministers) hold power *de facto*. They decide what the laws are and whether to puruse criminal convictions. The Queen has almost no *de facto* power. She can't pass laws, she doesn't have a say in her salary or income (formally), and while she \"advises\" the Prime minister at a weekly meeting, the prime minister is under no obligation to listen to her.",
"The British monarchy owns a bunch of land that they turn over to Parliament to administer in exchange for their annual stipend, though they could, in theory, say \"nah, we'll just manage it ourselves\" (though in reality this would probably not fly). As far as political power is concerned, the political power of the monarch, and this actually holds for most parliamentary systems whether their head of state is a figurehead president or a monarch, is to designate which party will lead negotiations to form a government after an election. In principle, this is really a non-power, particularly in the UK where absolute majorities in parliament are the norm: The monarch just names the designated prime minister from the majority/plurality leading party as the Formateur (person who leads negotiations to form a government). However, in some cases, supposedly toothless monarchs have used this power to affect political change. I know in some cases the monarch has been to some extent involved in the actual coalition formation. For example, in Belgium in 2007-2008 there was something of a constitutional crisis between the Walloon and Flemish populations and there was a ton of difficulty in getting a coalition together. It's pretty widely believed that the King was putting a lot of pressure on the parties to come up with a deal to avoid worsening the crisis."
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605p9j | Why can't we freeze food twice? | I always hear that it's because bacterias can grow faster but it doesn't make any sense, they would grow faster at a higher temperature anyway so why shouldn't we freeze food again after unfreezing it? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is a myth. You can freeze and re-freeze food as much as you'd like, because the freezing process kills bacteria. The optimum temperature for bacterial growth is close to body temperature or higher for many bacteria (40° F and 140° F). This is the \"danger zone\". What you don't want to do is refrigerate food over and over again. Or freeze a giant meal, reheat the whole damn thing and let it sit out on the counter for a while, then refreeze the whole damn thing again. If you take a meal out of the refrigerator, heat it a little, then put it back in the refrigerator, you're bringing the temperature up into the \"danger zone\". If you do this over and over again, you allow the bugs to multiply a lot. Freezing rapidly can kill these bacteria. But you also have the risk of the toxins from the bacteria in your food (which will not be removed via freezing). Check out the [USDA's page regarding leftovers]( URL_0 before Republicans remove it from the website. The best thing you can do is take leftovers as soon as you eat the food and separate them into smaller quantities for freezing. Then only bring out one portion at a time, heat it and eat all of it. Putting it back and forth into the fridge can be dangerous."
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607mk2 | Why does our moon not spin at all? | Ive always been so confused why we always see the same side of our moon when most objects in space seem to spin. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The moon spins at the exact speed where one orbit around the earth (28 days) is the same amount of time it takes it to spin around its axis. It is [tidally locked]( URL_0 ).",
"The Earth's gravity slightly distorts and elongates the moon. This means if the moon tries to rotate, this elongates axis gets pulled back into line with the Earth. The Moon does, on fact, wobble back and forth as this effect occurs. This effect is called 'tidal locking'. A long time ago, the Moon did rotate, but this effect slowed and eventually lockes the Moon in the current position."
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607vxu | how do reality shows record illegal acts in series? | Like moonshiners or street outlaws, those are illegal things people are doing in the show so how do they record the footage and not get in trouble? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You generally can't prove from the footage whether or not the acts are actually illegal, or just fake reenactments for the show. And police generally have more important things to worry about then trying to hunt down possibly-fake moonshiners. You know, like solving actual murders, or responding to victims of domestic violence.",
"It's not illegal to film a crime so that let's the studio off the hook. Most reality shows are fake. Producers either help create situations or suggest reactions. I honestly can't watch much of it at this point. You would think it would be obvious to everyone at this point.",
"Moonshiners and Street Outlaws are both fake. All the drama is 100% scripted and no laws are being broken. Moonshiners doesn't actually film anyone who makes any liquor. You really think cops would leave a note saying \"we'll get you next time\"? Street Outlaws pays local law enforcement to close the street, just like any film set closes down stretches of city road and has an ambulance and emergency crews on standby. They also buy giant lights to illuminate the street so they can film. Not to mention the drivers are all members of NHRA, which is very strict about illegal racing.",
"Reality tv is all fake, police wouldn't bother with people pretending to break laws for crappy tv.",
"The same way they film them for every other film and and tv show, it's not illegal if it's fake.",
"In many countries including the USA and the UK you are generally not required to report any suspected crimes to the police. Provided they do not cross the line into aiding and abetting, the camera crew and TV producers are not breaking any laws even if the stuff they're filming is illegal.",
"There have been reality series that ended because acts aired on tv were investigated and people were charged. As far as film crews documenting said \"crimes\" they fall in the category documentary journalism. A third party that does not partake but is there to merely document events. As long as they do not actively involve themselves beyond this they cannot be charged with accessory, aiding, or any other involvement charges."
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