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6zlq41 | Why do Helicopters work? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The rotor is pitched. If you have ever held your hand outside of a speeding vehicle you have noticed that if you pitch your hand upwards there is a huge force generated pushing your hand up. A helicopter blade works similarly where its pitch allows it to generate lift as it rotates. The pilot can change the pitch of the blades throughout the rotation to generate different lift at different parts of the rotation to control the helicopter.",
"There are two principles at work to provide lift in a helicopter rotor. The first one is that the blade is angled, so that as it \"cuts through the air\" the air is pushed downward by the face of the blade. It's like how you feel an upward sensation when you stick your hand out the window in a car and tilt your hand where your thumb is up. As your hand \"pushes\" air downward, the air pushes your hand upward in an equal force. This is Newton's Third Law in action where an action has an equal and opposite reaction. The second principle is Bernouli's Law. This states that a fluid flowing over a surface has a lower pressure the faster it flows. So with an airfoil, the top surface is longer than the bottom surface. Air flows faster over the top compared to the bottom. The faster air creates a low pressure above the air foil than the air below. This \"pressure gradient\" creates an upward force. You can see this at work if you hold a piece of paper near your mouth and blow directly over the top of the paper (but not below it). The paper will rise a little. This is because you have created a low pressure above the paper and air on the bottom unaffected side pushes the bottom of the paper. And a helicopter rotor is shaped like an airfoil.",
"The rotor is not just flat blades spinning through air, they're angled like a propeller or fan. With large enough blades moving fast enough, that gives you lift. That, of course, just gets you off the ground. There's a fairly complex machinery inside the rotor that makes the blades change their angle (\"pitch\") as they rotate, giving you control over the craft."
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6zmd1f | Why isn't there dry human food with all the needed essentials like there is for pets? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because we don't want it. There is no demand for it and we prefer a varied diet. There is [soylent]( URL_0 ) which is a smoothie type thing which is essentially all you need to eat. It claims to have all the nutrients, fats, calories and whatnot a human needs to be able to survive on it alone. It exists, but it isn't exactly revolutionizing the way humans eat.",
"There are actually several options, but to most people they aren't appealing. 1. Monkey chow. We're primates, it's perfectly healthful. URL_2 2. Famine relief porridge. URL_1 3. Plumpynut. A famine relief food made of peanuts and vitamins. Probably the most appealing to eat. URL_0",
"The military forces use MRE's, meals ready to eat. Better than alternatives. After Katrina I helped guard piles of them at a closed drive through bank. They were free. But you could not take cases home so you could feed your dogs for the next year. There is also a special meal for inmates who are disruptive. It is nutritionally sound and resembles what they produce which they smear on the walls. So they do not seem to be doing much. In the USA MRE's will be made available quickly. In other drought regions basics such as flour, oil and rice are made available, unless the local war lord decides starving the population is in his interest..",
"They do have those but they are not available in most grocery stores so are not something you can pick up just any time. These foods are sold in smaller packages and sold in hunting/fishing stores. Mostly pets understand that food is survival and nothing more.. humans want food to be fun and enjoyable."
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6zmosr | How hushing came to be the sound we use when we want people to be quiet. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I always wondered about the same thing and quite recently I discovered that the hushing sound is the most common sound you can make with your mouth to calm down a newborn baby: they naturally calm down when they hear vibrations and white noises. I wouldn't be surprised it just came out from this: a lot of pèarents who are used to hush to silence and calm their babies and simply go on doing that when they grow up, and, bang, you create the international conventional sound for silencing. ^there ^is ^nothing ^scientific ^about ^this, ^only ^personal ^observation",
"Going \"shhhhhh\" makes broadband (white) noise. It's (1) very audible, even when done quietly, and (2) clearly distinct from voices. I think we made a good choice assigning it as the \"be quiet\" sound. I bet it doesn't work very well nearby waterfalls or steam valves.",
"Unrelated, but me and my friends in middle school used to shhhhh the school cafeteria to a lull. It was kind of a fun social experiment. Pissed off the teachers for some reason.",
"When I was in France people would pour a cup of water from their balcony while we were being noisy walking home from the club. This happened on a few occasions. I was told by locals that this wasn't to try and hit us but to tell us to shut the fuck up. Could \"Hush\" and \"Shhh\" be linked to flowing water and the calming noise it makes?",
"The Shhhh noise is calming to babies. It's similar to the noises in the womb. So we say Shhhh to sooth a crying/noisy baby. Then the idea that Shhh is a noise that indicates people should be quiet is embedded from birth. And we do that because our parents did it. The cycle continues.",
"I was told by a nurse in the birthing center that the \"husssh\" sound mimics the sound a mothers \"white-noise\" that is generated by her digestive tract and circulation system and then transmitted through the amniotic fluid to the childs ear. I don't know how true this is... but it works. I think it is probably something similar or it could just be a \"sensory overload\" for the child and a distraction from whatever is bothering them. Mom: Shhhhhhhhhh Baby:\"Woah!... what's all this information coming from my ears into my brain... wait... I HAVE ears!?... when was someone going to tell me about this...and why am I thinking in English... I can't even talk or comprehend language yet... now... what was I whining about again?\" From there it just becomes a universal human communication pattern to \"hush\" regardless of age.",
"One of the reasons it might be so common and effective is that the white noise generated by shushing might sound similar to the flow of blood through arteries which an infant would have experienced while gestating.",
"Seems like if you want someone to be quiet, and you want to let them know that using a sound, you'd choose the quietest sound possible. I mean, shouting \"HEY BE QUIET!!!\" sort of defeats the purpose if quiet is what you want. Can you think of any quieter sound you could make than shhh?",
"It might just be that \"Shhhhh!\" is the quickest way to get people to stop whatever it is they're doing and pay attention because primate brains have a strong hard-wired response to a snake's \"hiss\". For instance, it's thought that cats hiss and spit and lay their ears flat in order to sound/look more like a snake since so many animals have a strong fear response to them and perhaps without quite realizing why \"hush\" worked so well, humans started using it as a \"Stop! Be quiet/pay attention/danger!\"",
"Harsh hushing is really abrupt. It works on animals too. It shuts everyone up/breaks their focus",
"We make 2 basic sounds, \"hiss\" and \"grunt\", with different mouth shapes. Probably since the first of what you would call intelligent homosapien, if u needed someone around you to be quiet, you would choose the quieter \"hiss\" sound."
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6znk6o | Why do daily multivitamins have more nutritional value than we need? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because were unable to soak up all of it. Like trying to clean up soda with a dollar store sponge some will always be left on the floor"
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6zodhl | Manifest Destiny | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It was the belief by some Americans in the 19th century that Americans were destined and obligated to expand, settle, and develop western part of the US all the way to the coast."
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6zorxk | while on call, my phone is able to remove music so that the other person can only hear my voice. How does it do this? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is the beauty of the *noise canceling microphone.* A second microphone farther from your mouth detects what sounds are coming from the room rather than from your mouth, and these are subtracted from the signal. Yarr! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5: How does the iPhone 5 noise cancelling microphone work? ]( URL_0 ) 1. [ELI5: While on a phone call, how does the other end not hear the video I am playing on my phone? ]( URL_1 )",
"With one or a few extra microphones. The idea is pretty simple, but there is a lot of thought out into making it reliable and useful; If you place an extra microphone on the backside of the phone, it will catch all the ambient noise around you. But it will not hear your voice very well. And the regular microphone will hear you voice AND all the ambient noice. So, in theory all you have to do is to remove all the noise that is heard by the extra microphone, and all that is left should be your voice. For extra accuracy, add not one but TWO extra microphones. And place them differently so that they catch different noice each."
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6zpl0t | Why does the same note sound different between instruments? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The sound from a physical instrument is pretty far from a single-frequency tone; there's a whole medley of higher overlapping frequencies created by the shape and material of the object that are collectively called \"[timbre]( URL_0 ).\" The main note that you hear is just the loudest and lowest frequency."
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6zpro3 | Why does time seem to go by faster as you get older? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I want to imagine it is as if the more time you experience the less a single moment is. so if you are alive for ten seconds, a single second is 10% of your life, after 10 years, one year still seems like a long time, but after 50 years, a single year now is so much less, and that might be why it seems like that way."
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6zq7ad | Why are there identifiers for single and married women (ms. and mrs.) but not for men? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are for men. The honorific term for an unmarried male is \"master\". But that honorific fell out of use in the late 1800s early 1900s. But it has remained in use is some regions and specific places such as with some very proper butler schools (think Alfred with Bruce Wayne).",
"So many BS answers in this thread, apparently from folks fresh out of Gender Studies 101 at your local State U. Misogyny isn't applicable here. Fact is, there are titles for both married (Mister/Mr.) and unmarried (Master) men. The latter is still used, though not commonly (just as Miss isn't super common these days--the professional world often uses \"Ms.\", pronounced \"Mizz,\" for all women regardless of marital status).",
"In less enlightened times, a woman's prospects were determined largely by whom she married. From the time she came of age, she and her family's priority would be to find the best husband they could. Since her desirability was largely based on attractiveness and her ability to bear children, she faced a ticking clock, and every year she remained unwed lowered her stock as marrying material. Conversely, a man's desirability was based on his accomplishments and wealth...he could land a better wife if we waited until he had more of both. Facing less of a biological timetable, men were under less pressure to marry immediately, and instead were encouraged to make their fortune in the world first. For these reasons, it was much more important for a woman to advertise her marital status, by way of a title, than for a man. She wanted as many eligible bachelors as possible to know it, in hopes of attracting the attention of the best. Also, since in polite society, the woman did not initiate romantic contact, it didn't really matter if she knew a man's marital status because she wasn't supposed to act on that information. Many women reject the sexism inherent in these outmoded customs, and choose to uses the title Ms., whether they are married or not.",
"Several comments on this thread have claimed \"Master\" is (or was) an honorific title for unmarried men. This is completely untrue. Master has only been used as a polite form of address for boys under 16 or 18, when they are too young to be called \"Mister\" without it sounding a little strange. This convention was traditionally to do with when one became a \"man\" and entered into society as such, and nothing to do with marital status. Unmarried adult men were never referred to as \"Master\". And when it comes to Bruce Wayne, mentioned in one comment - the whole point is that Alfred has known him since he was a small boy and in a sense still sees him as such, so continues to call him by the title you'd call a boy. It's an affectionate in the way that calling someone \"son\" or \"young man\" would be for an older person.",
"Pretty sure it's Master for unmarried men and Mister for married men. It's only really used in official forms and stuff though.",
"We do men in the uk when you don't know their marital status are called master, it's the reason I'm never getting married :)"
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6zs7x0 | How does a record play all the different notes and sounds of a song? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your ear only hears in one dimension: at any given instant in time it senses the pressure of the air against your eardrum. When an instrument plays a note that produces a rapidly changing pressure--it goes from higher-than-ambient pressure to lower-than-ambient pressure hundreds of times per second. Your ear interprets that rapidly changing pressure as the sound of that instrument. When two instruments play different notes at the same time they both produce rapidly changing pressure waves. What you hear is literally just those two waves added to one another. Your brain then does some amazing processing to be able to identify that it's two different things, to tell what they are, and so on. What this means is that to encode any number of instruments playing simultaneously you just need a single waveform and it'll be as good as your ear can tell. This is accomplished by having a single groove that moves back and forth as the needle traces it. The wiggling of the needle is amplified to go to the speaker. If the groove is precise enough, the amplification is clean enough, etc, then the sound will be indistinguishable from the original to your ear (in practice things aren't perfect, which is a way you can tell it's a recording and not live). The shortcoming of this is that most people don't have *an* ear. They have two. The above description works for older mono records, but people have two ears and want to hear things accordingly: you need two signals at any given time. You could accomplish this with two grooves, but that would be make it hard to get the needle positioned right. You could also set up the groove to wiggle not just left and right, but also up and down, like [this]( URL_1 ). That approach gets you pretty far, but it makes it so that a mono record player will just get one track. You also have a hard time making the up-and-down track balanced with the left-and-right track, since they're different motions and may be interpreted differently on one record player or another. To improve on that design you rotate the whole thing 45 degrees like [this]( URL_0 ). This setup allows a stereo record player to get two equal tracks off of a single groove while allowing a mono record player to get a single track that's influenced equally by both of the stereo tracks."
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6zt3gn | Why does a dead phone have to charge before booting, while a dead laptop will turn on right away? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your laptop is designed to run from 2 power sources: 1) battery 2) direct from AC power adapter Your phone can only run from the battery, and therefore always needs to wait for the battery to reach a minimum charge.",
"Minimum voltage requirements if I remember correctly your laptops max drain won't exceed what it can get from the wall your phone will on bootup however. Also as a data safety mechanism most laptops won't let you go below 5% true battery.",
"I have a PC hybrid tablet that does exhibit the same behaviour: it has to charge for a certain time before it will turn on at all. It's by design."
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6ztewf | How do mountain goats climb up seemingly completely straight surfaces? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Great balance and precise movements. Not unlike how it's kind of miraculous that humans are bipedal. Walking on 2 feet on uneven terrain and up stairs is pretty impressive too.",
"Because it's indeed only seemingly completely straight, a different angle: URL_0 That picture is probably cut in that strange way only to hide what reveals it's not a vertical wall.",
"[because they crave that mineral. ]( URL_0 ) On a more serious note, they have hooves that have evolved to be able to climb these almost straight surfaces and I'd assume a lot more muscles than we do as humans. Also probably a combination of speed + muscles + agility -- > climbing up mountains Edit: \"designed\" - > evolved",
"To start with their hoofs are very sharp and their legs are thin. So even if there is a slippery piece of rock sticking half an inch out from the cliff they can put their weight on it without slipping. They also have a lot of balance and control over their movements so they can balance on those narrow ledges. And of course it does help to have four legs. So just like a rock climber can climb seemingly straight smooth surfaces a goat can use a lot of the exact same footholds to climb up.",
"On top of every one else's mostly correct responses - Practice! Goats climb on and jump off of everything they can from birth. They have a real urge to get up on stuff and as babies they are terrible at it with lots of tumbles but they get better and better with time. r/goatparkour",
"How often do goats fall to their deaths when climbing up weird and vertical walls and cliff faces?",
"Goat hooves have a more rubbery texture than horse or cow etc hooves. They have grippy toes.. Plus, they're super agile/adventurous. Goats get themselves in all kinds of weird places.",
"Rigid, hard-rubber style hooves, and a lot of free food for scavengers at the bottoms of cliffs.",
"The have weird hoofs it's like a horses on the outside but a dogs soft in the middle giving them lots of grip.",
"\"Since this pic was posted a few months ago, I can tell you the consensus then was that the photo is tilted and cropped to exaggerate the angle of the wall. Check out the angle of the trees in the foreground and background. \" \"Yep, this is the actual angle.\" URL_1 URL_0"
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6zvptk | what exactly does "Promise to pay" on a bank note means? Who exactly makes the promise to pay the barer of the bank note, and what does this pay is actually supposed to be paid in? | How about like currency that doesn't have "promise to pay" written on it, e.g. Chinese RMB? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"On the vast majority of banknotes, it doesn't mean much of anything anymore. Historically, banknotes were redeemable (at times practically, at other times only theoretically) for a specific amount of precious metal (usually gold). But that hasn't been true for most currency in decades. For example, the Bank of England has this to say about the phrase on their banknotes: > The words \"I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five [ten/twenty/fifty] pounds\" date from long ago when our notes represented deposits of gold. At that time, a member of the public could exchange one of our banknotes for gold to the same value. For example, a £5 note could be exchanged for five gold coins, called sovereigns. But the value of the pound has not been linked to gold for many years, so the meaning of the promise to pay has changed. Exchange into gold is no longer possible and Bank of England notes can only be exchanged for other Bank of England notes of the same face value. Public trust in the pound is now maintained by the operation of monetary policy, the objective of which is price stability."
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6zx86f | Why does the human eye can see just the colors blue,green and red, while you need yellow,blue and magenta to mix all colors if you're painting? | In my biology class I learned that the human only reacts to blue-violett,green and red rays. But in my art class I learned that you or a printer for example needs to mix magenta,blue, and yellow together to get every other color. So why humans can see all color and printers can print all colors? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We see red green and blue, but since pigments are about removing light from white light, it uses different colored pigments which each selectively *remove* red, green, or blue from the light. Removing red light gives us cyan (which you refer to as 'blue' above). Removing green gives us magenta. Removing blue gives us yellow. Since you are dealing with printing, four color process will also use black because it is difficult to get pure blacks by mixing real-life pigments together.",
"Read through the comments and while they are correct, it's not really the answer to your question. The difference between light colors and paint colors is the way they mix. Light (additive color mixing): Light gets brighter when added to each other. Think of 3 spot lights. The light gets brighter if the spots have the same target. Combining a red spot, a green spot and a blue spot, produces \"perfectly white light\" (Just in theory, as it is fairly hard to produce light of only one exact color) Paint (subtractive color mixing): With paint it's the other way around. There are the 3 cleanest colors, or basic colors, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. As opposed to Red, Green, and Blue when working with light. Everytime you mix a basic color with another, it gets darker. Adding yellow to cyan, makes it green. Adding magenta makes it brown. Where I am from, we call this 'breaking the color'. Adding the basic colors in same parts, would theoretically produce black. Source: Worked as an offset printer and now working as a graphic designer. Had to use these principles everyday for the last 7 years. Edit: Forgot the answer to your last question: Our eyes are far from seeing all colors and our printers are far from being able to print all colors For the eyes: We see in RGB. So everything you have ever seen, is just that. Everything we can see. What we call colors, are just the wavelengths our eyes can detect. Infra-red cameras basically convert invisible light (infra red) to visible light (RGB on the screen of the camera) For printers: Printers have a really limited amount of colors they can produce, compared to RGB. The problem being that a screen shines, producing nicely saturated and bright colors, while paper doesn't. There are specialized systems to increase the color range of a printer, but even then, it's no match for RGB."
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70020g | What exactly happens when a body part "falls asleep"? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You have some sort of pressure applied on an area of that body part, and have caused blood flow to slow. As it slows down, and that part of you isn't given enough oxygen to work correctly. Your nerves then begin to react, telling you to remove whatever pressure is on your arm, and bring the bloodflow back to normal."
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700n3g | Can you explain the fundamentals of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"i recently found this video explaining the topic in great detail but relatively easy to follow: URL_0 maybe not exactly ELI**5** but still..."
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700u7m | How do manufacturers of vehicles make car keys that are unique such that not 1 car key is identical to the other? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Certainly with normal keys, it's more than possible that there do exist keys that will open more than one lock, but the whole security of a lock and key is that you don't know that. Or put another way, if you were to find a random key at the side of the path one day and pick it up, would that make you any more likely, in the grand scheme of things, to be able to get into the house it came from? No, because you don't know which house that is. Could be any one of millions of keyholes. Cars are the same. Odds are with the number of cars in the world, there are certainly keys that are duplicated somewhere, but how do you know where and what cars? You have no way of knowing.",
"Certified Registered Locksmith of nearly 10 years here. Newer cars are getting better about this. Manufacturers are moving away from physical keys, to remotes and push to start systems. This is decreasing the likelihood that a random person will be able to accidentally access your car. For older models that utilized pin tumblers that utilized cuts on the edge of the key as opposed to the face, it was common for manufacturers to only use a fraction of the key bitting for different locks on the car. The ignition would use the most, while the glove compartment might only use three, and the doors use five of a different combination, and the trunk will use a different combination of four or five as well. This worked because many keys had 8 cut positions. Ford, for example had 8 positions, with 4 different depths. This leads to nearly 65,000 different theoretical key combinations. Not all 65,000 could be used to to physical restrictions of the keys. It might not be possible for a deep cut next to a shallow cut on some manufacturers, or some manufacturers have specific rules about their key bittings. With all that being said, car manufacturers do their best to make sure that you are the only person near you with a key to your car. But sometimes you may get an anomaly. But the likelihood of that happening is very small. Plus the transponder in the key is unique and must be programmed into the car. Tldr: it is possible for cars to have keys, other than those with the car, to have identical cuts. However, vehicle manufacturers do what they can to limit this and electronic security is helping",
"Once upon a time I did accidentally open a car of the exact same make, model and color with the key to our family's car. It was in the parking lot of a mall and they were parked just a few cars away from ours. This was two decades ago before car remotes became popular. Nowadays many manufacturers use laser cut keys which gives a pattern unique to each car, nearly eliminating the possibility of producing identical keys.",
"The trick is that they don't. They just need to make them unique enough that most keys do not fit. So there will be less accidents with people taking the wrong car and it is not convenient for car thieves to carry around a full set of keys. But that means that you might just need to make less then hundred unique keys for all the cars. Modern cars with radio chips in the key does have an added level of security as these often have a lot more unique patterns then physical keys."
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7015ck | Choas Theory. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A system is \"chaotic\" if it is strongly dependent upon its initial conditions. Chaos theory is the branch of math that deals with those sort of systems. Say you're throwing a baseball in the air and are calculating where it lands. You know the initial speed and trajectory, and can determine where the ball will land. There are other factors, like windspeed, temperature, etc., but they don't change the outcome much. A little bit of wind will move the ball's final position a little bit, and you can pretty much ignore those if all you want to know is about where the ball will go. But let's consider a classic example of a chaotic system: weather. Weather is totally deterministic: if you know everything about how the weather is now, you could determine exactly how the weather will be later. However, unlike the baseball being thrown, a very small change to the initial weather conditions can dramatically change how the weather plays out over time. If there's just a tiny breeze present, that can be the difference between whether or not it rains in a week, or something like that. We've got weather stations all over the world, but we don't know the exact conditions in between those stations. Because these little unknowns can cause amplified results later on, weather is inherently hard to predict. One of the prime uses of supercomputers is to predict weather, because it's so hard. And this is why weather forecasts are less reliable the further forward you forecast: beyond a week or so, we really have trouble predicting what will happen. When hurricanes form, we can model where we generally think it will go, but because it's a chaotic system, we never actually know, because where it goes exactly is dependent upon all these little initial conditions that are hard to measure. Human lives are chaotic: the most seemingly-unimportant events in your early life can have profound influences on how it ends up. My entire career, for example, occurred because of a single afternoon I stayed late in physics class and my teacher happened to have his laptop out and it was running Linux. I owe my girlfriend to the fact she happened to get off early on a day I was late catching a bus. So... chaos theory is the math that deals with these sort of systems."
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701iz0 | Why does your stomach “growl” when you haven’t eaten? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Your stomach always growls, but when you have food in your belly you can't hear it as much, when it is empty you can hear it a lot more due to it being empty",
"If I remember correctly, it's cause your stomach is always making those noises but if you don't have food in your belly there's nothing to block the noise. Sounds silly now that I write it out though"
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701muw | What purpose do the wheels that don't touch the ground on a trailer serve? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"They *can* touch the ground: the driver can lower them as needed. It saves fuel to have less wheels on the ground, so when a truck isn't carrying enough weight to warrant it, they're lifted up and unused. When it's heavy enough to need them, they're lowered to help support the weight.",
"When the trailer is empty it doesn't need to distribute load on multiple wheels. But driving around wears the tires down so the driver can lift one pair off the ground to save them. Not all trailers have this feature."
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701nmq | How do things go viral on the internet? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's a combination of luck, interesting content, and connections. If your content is really good, on the right platform with a bit of luck, people will see it and it'll grow organically. If your content is meh but you have connections like a popular person with 1M instagram followers, then it can go viral simply by that person sharing it."
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7023va | Why do so many U.S. states have capitals in small and rather insignificant cities? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Yo ho ho! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained that the choices were usually made on geography, or on some historic significance of the place: 1. [ELI5: How come state capitals in the US are usually not the state's largest or most important cities? ]( URL_5 ) 1. [ELI5: Why are so many State capitals in the US not the biggest city? ]( URL_4 ) 1. [ELI5: How is the capital city of a country/state decided? ]( URL_3 ) 1. [ELI5: Why are capital cities often not the largest cities/financial centre in many countries or vice-versa? ]( URL_0 ) 1. [How come state capitals in the US are rarely the largest city of the state? ]( URL_6 ) 1. [ELI5: How are capital cities chosen for a state/province/country? ]( URL_1 ) 1. [ELI5: Why isn't the most well-known city in a U.S. state considered it's capital. ]( URL_2 )"
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22zpda/eli5_why_are_capital_cities_often_not_the_largest/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2oll8q/eli5_how_are_capital_cities_chosen_for_a/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18zagv/eli5_why_isnt_the_most_wellknown_city_in_a_us/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kdhiq/eli5_how_is_the_capital_city_of_a_countrystate/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hekmn/eli5_why_are_so_many_state_capitals_in_the_us_not/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wersu/eli5_how_come_state_capitals_in_the_us_are/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/2dz0fu/how_come_state_capitals_in_the_us_are_rarely_the/"
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702rvf | Why is the advent of the number 0 a big deal in mathematical history? | Based on a recent post, I saw that it is apparently a "big deal" that mathematicians started using the number zero. To me it seems that even during a hunter gatherer society someone would have asked how many blueberries another dude picked, and that guy would say 0, because he didn't find any... | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> To me it seems that even during a hunter gatherer society someone would have asked how many blueberries another dude picked, and that guy would say 0, because he didn't find any... That's kinda it. They didn't say they had zero of something. They said they didn't have that something. There's a subtle difference there, where you treat the zero of something as categorically different situation than some positive number of something. Ancient Greeks debated this, and they ended up concluding pretty much this. And for the most part, to them, this was just a philosophical question. It really didn't have any real effect to their lives if zero was considered a number or not. The great things happened when you got 0 introduced into a positional number system(which Greeks didn't have), like the one we use, where 10 for example has one of tens, and zero of ones. People had used positional number systems before, but without number zero, and as a result, they could not tell apart numbers like 1,000 and 100 because there was just blank space signifying none of that position. Basically, it's difficult to appreciate just how revolutionary the number system we now take for granted really is, and how powerful it is in its ability to represent all numbers using just a couple of different symbols.",
"Zero and negative numbers were a big deal because they gave us our modern picture of the rules of arithmetic, and we no longer had to make awkward exceptions. If you don't believe in anything other than positive numbers, a - b doesn't always exist (it only exists when b < a), and a - b + c might not exist even though a + c - b does. By contrast, in our modern mindset you can do any subtraction, the order doesn't matter, you can make a number stay the same by \"adding zero\", and you can undo addition or subtraction using number pairs that sum to 0, which is where negative numbers come in. Only using positive numbers had all kinds of subtle consequences. I'll discuss one area as an example. If you've ever heard of \"imaginary numbers\" (square roots of negative ones), you may wonder why mathematicians were so unconvinced of them at first that they gave them that name. The reason is that even negative numbers were contested back then. There was a time when we didn't have a single simple theory of quadratic equations, because we felt there were four kinds of them: compare x^2 = 5x + 6 (one solution: 6), x^2 + 6 = 5x (solutions 2 & 3), x^2 + 5x = 6 (one solution: 1), x^2 + 5x + 6 = 0 (no solutions). If you argue I've missed negative roots, that's my point: people didn't accept them back then. If you argue these are all of the form x^2 + ax + b = 0, possibly with a or b negative, that's my other point: people who didn't accept negative numbers couldn't talk about it like that. The axioms of modern arithmetic can be summarised as \"numbers form [a field]( URL_0 )\". Look at how many of those rules can't be true with positive numbers alone; look how much trouble it creates for the notion of subtracting, or of \"solving\" x + b = a. Now \"field\" is one of many terms in mathematics you don't learn in school, but they're the bread and butter of the modern subject. And what a lot of them have in common is that they have rules like, \"There's an object with these relations to every other object\" (e.g. 0 + x = x + 0 = x, for each x there's a y with x + y = y + x = 0). In a way, zero lay the groundwork for these kinds of ideas, by which we can generalise the rules of ordinary numbers to very different-looking structures that, say, are also a field.",
"Zero is not the same as nothing, just as symbolically being able to represent and manipulate \"7\" is different than being able to hold up 7 fingers. Zero was a breakthrough because it allowed us to shift from additive number systems to placed based ones. Additive systems, like Roman numerals, consisted of a bunch of symbols you added together or occasionally subtracted: MCMLXXVIII = 1000 + 1000 - 100 + 50 + 10 + 10 + 5 + 1 + 1 +1 This worked ok, but it was really cumbersome to do math with, especially multiplication and division. 1978 = 1000 + 900 + 70 + 8 Is a lot easier to deal with. But there is a problem, without a zero, you have a hard time representing certain numbers. MCMVIII = 1000 + 1000 - 100 + 5 + 1 + 1 +1 Which is: 1000 + 900 + 8 = ? 198? 19X8? Zero is needed as a place holder to properly express 1908. It doesn't just mean nothing, it is part of the entire system.",
"He certainly wouldn't say zero berries if there was no word for zero. He might express the concept in a different way, however. Having an actual name for zero and the viewpoint that it's just as real as 1, 2, 3, etc. enables more complex math. It allows the shift from very concrete viewpoints (I have three pigs), to thinking hmm, I can create an equation which represents how many pigs I have at any given time, starting with time zero being five years ago. Then you move to looking at that equation and seeing the slope at a certain time can be meaningful, especially if that slope might be zero. I have a lot of pigs, but the slope is zero...I'm no longer increasing my herd.",
"Introducing zero as a number and not just the concept of nothing meant we were moving passed math just being used to calculate how many bushels of wheat you had to give me for 3 lambs. Math became more abstract which lead to a huge number of advancements."
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7034u0 | Why is smiling a positive sign in humans whereas in other species showing teeth is considered aggressive? | Understandably showing teeth is aggressive behaviour in some animals but why do we show them to signal happiness, amicability etc? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"I never smile. Smiling is a sign of submission in primates. So whenever I see someone smiling, all I can think of is a chimpanzee begging for it's life.\" -Dwight Schrute",
"Other animals tend to attack with their teeth. Humans attack with our hands or legs. So, baring our teeth isn't a sign of aggression like it is with other animals."
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703hjp | Why does gasoline reflect so many colours when you see it in puddles or near water? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"dn02kib"
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"text": [
"You're in luck, this question has already been asked and answered: URL_0"
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/369u45/eli5_why_gasoline_puddles_are_all_rainbowy/"
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704bzo | What would happen if a human was microwaved for one minute? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"dn09zbv"
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"text": [
"They'd die a very painful death. Microwaves agitate the water molecules in food to make them vibrate essentially and heat up. That would be happening to ever water molecule in your body, it would boil you alive from the inside out."
],
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704nbm | What is actually "cracking" when you crack your knuckles? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Each joint is surrounded by a capsule, which is filled with the synovial fluid. Its job is to exchange gases between the blood and the cartilage, which covers the ends of the bones and reduces friction. When you crak your knuckles you stretch out this casule and increase the volume, therefore lowering pressure. This causes some of the gases of the fluid to \"undisolve\" since it the soluability is reduced. (This is also why soda starts fizzing more when you open it for the first time: the pressure inside drops and the carbon-dioxide undisolves.) So what you're hearing is the formation of bubbles. And since it takes a while for everything to return to normal, you can't crack the same joint in quick succession. Hope this helps.",
"I could easily be mistaken, but since there are no comments ill give my understanding. Nothing is physically cracking. It's gasses being released."
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705le9 | Why Do Phones Take pictures That Look Further Away Then They Actually are? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Phones use a wide-angle lens which has a different field of view than our eyes, and do not represent distances between objects the same way. This is necessary because without a wide angle lens, selfies would be impossible and you'd need to take several steps back from anything you were trying to shoot, making it useless for indoor use."
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705zeh | Back in the 90s there were a few vehicles that came out with 4 wheel steering. Why didn't this become a thing? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"4-wheel steering is still around. They were a bit more accessible during the Japan techo-fest heydays of the late 80s. Where you can have 4WS Honda Prelude, etc. Unfortunately, the system is complex and the advantages aren't enough to justify the expanse. They are costly to produce and costly to maintain. Look up Honda forums and there would be various threads about how to disable and bypass 4WS for older models. But there is a return to 4WS on high end exoticas. With Porsche GT3 having such a system. Where people are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the ultimate performance, such system make sense again."
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706s6a | How do those special glasses that colourblind people wear allow them to see colours? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"They don't. What they do is *block* some of the colors that they see. Which seems counteintuitive, but these glasses only work on people who have a specific type of colorblindness where they have cone cells that are messed up, and are partially triggered by the wrong color. Your eyes have cells that can detect red, blue, and green light. But what they really do is detect a *range* of light in the general areas of red, blue, and green. Some types of colorblindness cause the colors that trigger those cells to overlap too much with the red-detecting and green-detecting cells. So some wavelengths of red light trigger both the red-detecting and green-detecting cells, and some wavelengths of green light trigger both the red-detecting and green-detecting cells. What these glasses do is block out the wavelengths of light in that overlap, so that green object are less likely to trigger the red-detecting cells, and red objects are less likely to trigger the green-detecting cells. This allows the person to better distinguish between red and green in real-world situations, but it doesn't cause them to see colors that they can't actually see."
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707kov | Why does the setting on most all fans go 'OFF-3-2-1' rather than ascending from the lowest speed? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dn12fd9"
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"text": [
"This was asked a little bit ago. The answer was that the \"1\" setting may not be powerful enough to start up the motor. Starting at \"3\" juices it right up."
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707vq8 | Why do people look so distinctly different in photographs than they do in real life? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"dn14dw0",
"dn16kuz",
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"text": [
"Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5:Why do people look better in person then in pictures? ]( URL_8 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do some people look unattractive in photos, but look attractive when in person? ]( URL_0 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do I look so much better in the mirror than I do in pictures? ]( URL_6 ) 1. [Why do I look handsome on the mirror, but ugly in photos? ]( URL_5 ) 1. [ELI5 Why do we look different in a mirror and in a photograph? ]( URL_1 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do I look different(or better) in mirrors than I do in pictures or videos? ]( URL_7 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do we look different in reflections and in photos? ]( URL_4 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do I look different in pictures of me and what I see in the mirror? ]( URL_3 ) 1. [ELI5: Why does one look ugly on camera, but handsome in the mirror? ]( URL_9 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do I look pretty in the mirror but horrible in photos? What makes someone Photogenic? ]( URL_2 ) 1. [ELI5: is there a reason I like how I look in a mirror but hate pictures and videos of myself? ]( URL_10 )",
"The lens, the camera, f-stop, focal distance, exposure, the ISO sensitivity. The contrast with the backdrop. The distance from the camera. Some facial features enlarged when close enough. Photogenicity: some people have a gift for maintaining just the right facial muscle tone.",
"Whenever someone asks this question I almost never see the actual answer get posted. The primary reason is that we have stereo optic vision. Because we have two eyes when we look at a three dimensional object we are seeing it from two slightly different angles. Our brain combines these images. When you're staring at a flat two dimensional photograph you don't get the same effect.",
"So you're telling me I don't look that good in person? :("
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22gqxw/eli5_why_do_i_look_pretty_in_the_mirror_but/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zscs5/eli5_why_do_i_look_different_in_pictures_of_me/",
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u0x8o/eli5_why_do_i_look_so_much_better_in_the_mirror/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m63k8/eli5_why_do_i_look_differentor_better_in_mirrors/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l02l6/eli5why_do_people_look_better_in_person_then_in/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3peui2/eli5_why_does_one_look_ugly_on_camera_but/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6uu4mi/eli5_is_there_a_reason_i_like_how_i_look_in_a/"
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708p2j | How Do Anti-Color Blindness Glasses Work? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"First of all, they don't work for everyone. (Only for people with red-green colour blindness) Second, they do not let someone see a colour they can't see. So how DO they work? They don't add colour, the actually remove some colours. They filter out the section of wavelength where red and green kinda overlap, which makes it easier to distinguish between the two. People with this type of colour blindness still have some use of red and green cone cells but they are causing an excess of overlap of signals, so if something is red *or* green they basically look the same, mushy orangy colour. Here's an image showing kinda-sorta how they work URL_0 tldr anything red is made REALLY RED and anything green is made REALLY GREEN and anything in the middle is filtered out so red and green are seen as contrasting hues"
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708yd8 | How are teenagers getting addicted to the Blue Whale app and even killing themselves when it seems to have no actual rewards? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because they're teenagers? I'm not being snarky - teenagers go through phases, trying to figure out who they are in a complex world, seeking more independence, re-negotiating their relationships with the people around them: parents, teachers, peers, the opposite sex. I'm not an expert on \"Blue Whale\", but my understanding is that that game provides a narrative, an apparently logical progression that promises to help them with personal problems. The \"narrative\" theory is important - a narrative gives structure and continuity, things that a confused teenager may feel to be missing from his or her life."
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709mwi | Mobile phone radiation and health, is this something we should worry about? Why/why not ? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"No, it's not something you need to worry about. People hear the word radiation and they immediately think about atomic bombs. The reality is that there are two kinds of radiation: ionizing and non-ionizing. Ionizing radiation is the scary kind from atomic bombs and nuclear reactors. Ionizing radiation leaves a trail of irradiated material in its wake and this can cause serious, long-lasting damage to living cells. Non-ionizing radiation includes things like visible light and the radio waves from your cell phone. This type of radiation passes through an object and doesn't cause any long-term damage. Enough of it could cause immediate damage just like enough light can cause a fire. But, it doesn't irradiate the material."
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70al9d | If sharks have to keep moving to breathe, what happens when they get tired? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Similar ELI5: * URL_0 punkinholler posted: For one thing, not all sharks have to keep swimming to continue \"breathing\". Nurse sharks, for example, can and do sit on the bottom all day with no trouble. As for the sharks that do swim all the time, a quick Google search suggests that there's no clear answer on whether or not they sleep at all or how to even define \"sleep\" for them. However, dolphins have similar breathing troubles as sharks because breathing is always under conscious control for them (i.e. they only breathe when they think about it) so they'd drown if they fell asleep like humans do. Since dolphins are so much easier to study than sharks (sharks can't be trained to cooperate with researchers), we know that dolphins get around that problem by only sleeping with half of their brain at a time. At such times they have only one eye open, they tend to hang out at the surface, and they can and do move around sluggishly. I know you didn't ask about dolphins, but since there's no answer for the shark question, I figured I'd throw it in as lagniappe. Source: URL_1",
"Sharks have a unique swimming pattern. Imagine them as a plane. They burn energy taking off, get to top speed and altitude, then cut the engines, gliding down under minimal power, only kicking the on engines just before they hit the ground and starting the cycle over again. Sharks swim hard to surface, and can rest as they glide down to depth. This keeps them moving with minimal energy, so they have plenty in reserve when it comes to murdering time. If they run out of energy to burn to the surface, they die, because nature is metal."
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70bppr | How did Facebook know my shower drain was clogged? | I have 4 daughters, so I go through a few [Hair Snares]( URL_0 ) a year. As it gets used, I cut it down with a pair of scissors, because the little barbs get worn out. A few weeks ago I noticed the snare was short and worn, so on my lunch break I went to Home Depot and picked one up, paying with my Bank of America Visa debit card. I didn't mention it to anyone via text, phone, social media, anything (because it's not really a thing you need to tell anyone - "holy shit remember Sean from high school? He has to clear a hair clog every damn day!"). I also didn't search for it online, because I knew exactly what I was going to buy. Later that day I signed into Facebook and all my ads were for plumbers, Roto Rooter, Drano, and the very Zip-It brand hair snare I bought. The only logical explanation is that some weird combo of Visa, Home Depot, the Apple free Wifi at Home Depot (I checked Instagram while walking), Bank of America sold my info to Facebook. In pretty much hours. **ELI5: how the heck did my purchase get turned into Facebook ads when I didn't text or search or publicly declare my need for clean drains?** | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A series of things are happening. Home Depot is collecting data on you when you swipe your card. They know who you are from your credit card and they know you bought your hair thingy so they know you have clogged drains. They can then sell that information to marketers. Those marketers have already gone out to companies that clear drains and said if you pay us, we will target your drain clearing ads to people we know have clogged drains. Now the marketer goes to Facebook and says we want to place drain cleaning ads to this person because we know he has a clogged drain. All of this set up is done beforehand. So the guy behind you that bought potting soil gets logged by Home Depot as doing some gardening, who then tells that to the marketer who has contracted fertilizer and garden tool companies, and the marketer tells Facebook to send that guy ads for gardening supplies."
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70bsga | Why does the reverse gear sound so much different in cars? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because it isn't used much it is a straight cut gear to save cost. The other gears are helical cut. The helical gears are quieter because they mesh more gradually rather than flat surfaces against each other",
"In a manual transmission the reverse gear is \"spur cut\", basically straight teeth like you think a gear would have. The rest are helical cut, the teeth spiral around the gear instead of being straight. Helical cut gears are both stronger and quieter because there is more surface making contact. Helical gears are always \"meshed\", touching, but they are not always locked to the shaft they turn. When you select a gear the synchronizer makes both shafts turn at the same speed so the dog teeth and collar can lock the gear to the shaft. When you go to reverse you are changing the direction of rotation of the output shaft, you cannot use a helical/synchro setup to do this (the input shaft would always be locked tight) so you have to use a spur cut gear that can be meshed for reverse and then disengaged to go forward again. These issues can and have been solved, but it is very expensive. In automatics the sound is different because you are using a gear ratio that is not normally available to the forward gears. It is pretty much between first and second gear, ratio wise, so think gear 1.5."
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70gzhz | How does a song that's sung in English or any other language get translated to a different language? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Interesting question. Generally, songs use a lot of phrases and sayings that don't make sense when directly translated, and if they do, they rarely line up with the syllables and rhyme scheme. So instead, they basically write a new song with roughly the same theme, that makes sense in the language. For instance, *La Mer*, by Charles Trenet, has lyrics in French with the following direct translation: > The sea, > We see dancing along the shores of clear bays, > Shimmers with silver > The sea > Changing shimmers > Under the rain > The sea > With the summer sky > Mix up her white horses > With the angels so pure > The infinite azure shepherdess > Sea > > Sea > By the ponds > Those big wet reeds > See > Those white birds > And those rusty houses > The sea > Has cradled them > Along the shores of clear bays > And with a love song > The sea > Has rocked my heart for life But if you actually [listen to the song]( URL_1 ), you'll recognize the tune as Bobby Darin's [Beyond the Sea]( URL_0 ). The original song was just a nice little snapshot of a beautiful sea on a cloudy day, while the American \"version\" pays homage to the sea, but abandons the original meaning entirely. Another example, possibly more in line with what you were asking, can be seen in the lyrics to, \"Liberée, Delivrée,\" (\"Liberated, Delivered\") which is the French version of \"Let it Go,\" from *Frozen*. > Winter settles gently into the night > It's the snow's turn to be queen > My place will always be > in the kingdom of solitude > The wind howling in me no longer thinks of tomorrow > It's much too strong > I've fought in vain > Hide your powers, don't speak of them > Pay attention, the secret will survive > No hesitation, no torments > of sentiments > > Liberated, Delivered > I'll never lie again > Liberated, Delivered > It's decided, I'm leaving > I've left my childhood back in the summer > Lost in the winter > The cold is for me > The price of liberty > When we look down from above > Everything seems so small > The sadness, the anguish, and the fear > Left me long ago > > I want to see what I can do > with this mysterious magic > The good, the bad, I say 'oh well' > Oh well! > > Liberated, Delivered > The stars extend their arms to me > Liberated, Delivered > No, I won't cry > Here I am! > Yes, here I am! > Lost in the winter > > My power came from the heavens and invades the space > My soul expresses itself by drawing and sculpting in the ice > and my thoughts are flowers of the frozen crystals > > I'm never going back > The past is in the past! > Liberated, Delivered > Henceforth, nothing can stop me > Liberated, Delivered > No more perfect princess > Here I am > Like how I've always dreamed! > Lost in the winter > > The cold is for me, the price of liberty. You can see that this version has roughly the same themes, but they're spoken about very differently. Because it was a Disney song, it needed to fit into the context of the movie, so they didn't have full autonomy to change lyrics around like witg *La Mer*, and you can also find some nuanced differences in these lyrics and the original. Elsa actually seems more confident and actualized in the French lyrics than she does in the English ones (which are essentially about her losing control over suppressing her powers and accepting it, rather than truly embracing them). Hope this answers your question"
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70hjs1 | Why can you only check your credit score in the us without being penalized once per year? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Why can you only check your credit score in the us without being penalized once per year? You can't even check your credit score once a year. What you can check is your credit *report*, which is a list of all accounts and billing activity tied to your identity, so you can look for things like fraud and identity theft. > How come if it is your credit score it doesn't work like an online bank account where you can log in and check it whenever you want. Because your credit score is proprietary data created by the credit reporting agencies as a product that they sell to other companies to categorize how risky it is to lend you money. It's not something that is particularly useful for you to know in most situations, and allowing people to access it freely would result in people reverse-engineering the algorithm behind it, which would make it useless since people would start being able to game the system.",
"You can if you pay for it, and checking your own credit never hurts your credit. You get one free full report a year because there is a law that requires it. The credit agencies are businesses, so they charge for their services."
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70hypr | The UK education system and the order it goes in. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basic order in england is (Preschool / nursery school / kindergarten) Primary: 4-11 y/o Secondary: 11-16 y/o [finish by taking GCSEs] Sixth form college: 16-18 y/o [finish by taking A-levels] (Uni) You do fewer, more specialised a-levels than GCSEs: the latter you have to cover the spectrum of compulsory stuff, the former you dont. So you have to do GCSE maths for example but at a-level if you hate STEM and want to do dance, french and history then fine. But bear in mind there is no \"uk education system\" really. Scotland i know is different to England, dont know about NI, Wales i think is legally mostly the same as England but even within England there is loads of variation. Some people (esp in private education) have prep schools and middle schools. Some people's sixth form is part of their secondary, other people go to a separate institution. Some people do alternative qualifications - international baccalaureat, vocational ones (stuff like welding) instead of academic alevels, etc. Some places call them high schools, grammar schools, academy, village college, etc instead of secondary school. Sometimes this actually means something is different for the student; sometimes it is a technicality of funding or governance but little difference to the student; sometimes it's basically just a historic name but it's no different in practice to any other secondary."
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70i9ck | Why do we get eye crust when we wake up in the morning? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Finally when I can answer, so if you look closely at the corner of your eye where your eye boogers form there's a small hole that hole is called a punctum it is directly connected to your sinuses that's why if you pinch your nose and close your mouth and forced air up from your lungs air will come out of your eyes so as you sleep secretions from your sinus flow through this punctum and out your eyes so quite literally your eye boogers are boogers",
"I was told that it's mucus, skin cells, dust and other crap that your eyes are trying to get rid of so they will not be damaged.",
"Crusty eyes is caused by oils, dead skin, miscues, and other stuff that comes from or around your eye. Usually the eyes are good at dispersing the gunk or only leave a little bit in the morning. If you have pink eye the crustiness gets much worse"
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70ihla | Human babies are a luxury? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Our large brains mean we have to be expelled from the body before we grow too large to fit through the birth canal, so as a result we have to do a lot of our growing outside the body. Our brains are also the reason why we have and can use weapons to prevent being eaten by a lion."
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70iieo | How are concrete bridges built in deep water? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Concrete doesn't dry to harden, it cures, which means it can be poured into a form underwater and still harden.",
"I'm a construction engineer, and I actually studied a bit of this in school! If there is bedrock, they may try and drill down to the bedrock and have the foundation rest on that. When concrete cures, it is a chemical reaction, so it isn't \"drying out\". It can cure underwater. A lot of bridge foundations are done that way. If there is no bedrock, it's common to use a pier. Piers are long columns that are driven into the ground. You can think of them like giant nails that are hammered into the earth. They can be made of concrete, steel, or wood (think of a boardwalk near the ocean). There is friction between the sides of the pier and the earth, which is what prevents them from sinking.",
"The water in Florida isn't that deep. It's just sand, you can use normal footings. Sometimes you just drive a precast piling into the sand. Or build a coffer dam if you want to pour concrete. I think I've seen coffer dams made from large pipe sections dropped end-downward to the bottom. Any time the water is deep, you'll have a suspension bridge or a floating bridge."
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70iimp | If the main goal of our brain is survival, why does it let get depressed and in some cases commit suicide? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Psychologist and Suicide Counsellor. If you see the brain as a tool for solving problems then suicide is adaptive. Problems solved, pain ended. I do not condone suicide - there is usually another option... But reading through this thread, maybe it's society that contributes to depression and suicide by shaming people who are down and out with labels like 'maladaptive'. No one is an island. I prefer to see thoughts of suicide as the last recourse of a mind trying to cope with a huge problem. People usually feel a bit better about their issues (and I think less likely to kill themselves) when they hear that. Edit: Grammar",
"Our bodies don't have \"goals\" per se, they are how they are because it has worked \"well enough\". Of course our bodies tend toward efficiency because it tends to survive harsh times better, but the fact is that occasional depression and suicide are malfunctions at an acceptable level for the continuation and proliferation of the species. Evolutionarily speaking the individual is irrelevant.",
"I'm not a scientist, but I have battled anxiety disorder in the past and learned enough about anxiety and depression to give an educated answer on this! It all has to do with human nature and it's relationship with environment. I know that sounds vague, but stick with me... Humans, as hunters and gathereres, had a drive for survival that was constant--running from dangerous animals, hunting animals, gathering food, procreating, etc. A lot of natural stimulation. But, as civilization is now, many people have easy access to food, aren't running from anything and have rooted stimulus in things like television, music, sex, social environments, etc. With complex society comes a lot of social constructs that are abstract ... made up, to put it lightly. You have to have a car, a wife, a job, a kid, money, happiness exterior to your desk job, friends, a successful favorite football team, a cool hobby, etc. We don't actually HAVE to have these things, but in a life where we aren't in immediate danger or starving our brains begin using these arbitrary social constructs and reacting to them chemically. With anxiety disorder, the central issue is that sufferers enter the \"fight or flight\" response for things like...idk...not getting a text from a crush after texting them, or misinterpreting something your boss said, or not having money. Our body reacts the same way it would if you were backed into a corner by a bear, but there's no actual danger. Depression is the other edge of the sword. We can get overstimulated too fast because of the complexity of our society. Remember your first roller coaster ride? Think about all the emotions you felt beforehand, right? Now think about how you would feel if you rode one each day for your entire life. Eventually the feelings of anxiousness subside. It's kind of like how birthdays were awesome as a kid, but eventually they're just...bleh. We live lifestyles where repetition and routine can leave us surrounded in a world that we find, eventually, not interesting at all. This is why people with seemingly no \"major issues\" end up depressed. Also, we put a lot of worth in other things, so that when we lose them it's depressing. Example: at 13 my Dad took my Xbox away. I was actually depressed for weeks. When we get to more complex things like breakups, or losing a job, or a friend, or financial trouble, we lose our sense of self worth. That's not right...we are all very lucky to live in the time and place we do, so ironic it is that we get jaded and self deprecating so easily. And social media is a category in itself. We are operating in a daily lifestyle where there's constant need for recognition and we are constantly comparing ourselves to others. TL;DR -- our fight or flight instincts are not compatible in a modern lifestyle, so our brains literally recalibrate to our surroundings -- often with unhealthy results",
"The main goal of life is to reproduce, not to survive. Survival is a byproduct. Mental disorders are disorders, as in, not the norm. Anomalies happen.",
"Suicide is more like a solution to a problem than self destruction per se. I used to suicidal....so I can tell you it becomes something we fanatsize about. Something we look forward to. In a way.....I guess we don't see it as death.....just as a solution. We go over solutions in our head and that is the one the solution that surely \"works.\" And if we get sad we think \"well....I know suicide will work for sure....\" Our survival instincts kick in when we go to kill ourselves. I tried twice in my life.....and both times scared the shit out of me. Every person who has killed themselves regretted the moment it was too late....remember that. I tried to kill myself at 16....and again at 22.... I'm 27 now....and had I died I would have been missing out on some of the most wonderful things life can offer. I'm not a psychologist.....but I figure I would chime in with my personal experience anyway.",
"Depression is a physical illness of the brain which causes adverse effects such as suicidality and isolating behavior. It is not normal and just like when any other organ is afflicted with a malady we should treat it as though it is malfunctioning. The terrifying and confusing thing about the brain is that it controls our personality which we like to think is separate from the body but is very much connected to our physical state.",
"The answer's in your question. It's because the brain isn't working right. That's practically the definition of mental illness, which is an underlying cause of a lot of suicides.",
"I suffer from depression since five years and asked me this myself. Note that depression is a bunch of symptoms and is different for everyone. E.g. some people cry for days, since can't cry at all, some eat like a whale some loose weight. However most mental illness has external influences, though we found some Genetics. See those illnesses as reactions of the brain to it's surroundings. So, assume your life is shit. Like so bad you are constantly sad. After a while your brain can't deal with that anymore. It reduces all emotional reactions, good and bad. That's depression, a loss of emotional response. One point about biology: the more you use a strain of thought the faster it gets (mathematics, language etc.). If you constantly use your \"I'm shit\"-thoughts you get really good/fast at thinking you are shit Assume you are in life threatening situations: rape or military operations. People often suffer PTSD from that. And some of ptsds symptoms are - an extreme level of awarness your surroundings: my ex-bf was working in kindergarden and was able to know every childs position at every time. - split yourself from your own experience: many describe it as watching someone else in their bodies. - uncomfortable to human touch, loss of trust etc.",
"IIRC, the goal of evolution is survival of the species, not of the individual. If an individual person is in a situation where they feel that they are not contributing to this end, they may feel inclined to eliminate themselves in order to preserve resources for the rest of their society. I don't know if this is accurate or not, but it seemed to make sense at the time that I heard it.",
"It's believed that depression is a first world disease. If you're concerned with surviving, you don't get depressed. There have been studies of indigenous people, and depression doesn't show up in them, and when asked about suicide, one group laughed, asking, \"why would anyone kill himself?\"",
"A brain is like any other organ - it will malfunction. But our knowledge of the brain is very little as compared to other parts of the body.",
"Your brain is not designed to function in a modern civilized society. Artificial light, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, improper diet, none of these were problems for humans pre-civilization. Survival is only a goal from an evolutionary perspective, it's not something your body is purposefully doing. All the things that keep you alive are pre-programmed.",
"Gad Saad said something about this once (iirc) and basically revolves around the fact that depression stems from not being able to contribute to the group. From an evolutionary standpoint the groups survival is more important than the individual so an individual that cannot contribute is effectly a drain on their species. This in turn makes their brain trigger a depression so they recuse themselves and possibly terminate themselves to eliminate the drain on the group. It's brutal, but a valid theory. Another theory is that depression stems from inflammation of the body so when you become injured or diseased your body will make you become depressed. This will make you more prone remove yourself from the group to reduce the risk of transferring the disease or endangering anybody else until you are healed. The problem is, if your body stay inflamed for any reason chronically (diet, lack of exercise, etc...) Then you never return back to normal and the depression deepens. Its all speculation because the human mind is one complex motherfucker.",
"As someone else mentioned, the goal of evolution is not survival of an individual but survival of the species. In other words, reproduction of viable offspring. But to add to that, it may be better not to think of it as a \"goal\" at all. It's more of a natural consequence. Why does wood float on water? It's not because wood *wants* to float on water. It just happens because of the materials' densities and the laws of physics. Similarly, it's not that every species *wants* to reproduce and perpetuate its genes (I mean, we have other reasons to want to engage in reproductive acts, but there's no built-in motivator as a species... you know what I mean). However, the species that are around today are the ones that were more likely to reproduce. Because the ones who didn't like reproducing just died out a long time ago. Wood floating on water. Edit: put another way: We don't reproduce because we like sex. We like sex because our ancestors were the ones who reproduced the most, and in a group of animals where some happen to like sex and some don't (much like some people happen to like blue and others don't), those who liked sex would have reproduced more. It's very circular and I'm not explaining it very well, but the point is, a person's brain does not *want* to survive. It's just a collection of genes and characteristics that exist because all its ancestors happened to survive *long enough to have kids* and that's it. Any traits that don't affect surviving long enough to have kids will have no effect on evolution, and sometimes they combine in weird ways to produce glitches.",
"Lack of meaning in a post-(post?)- modern world. Maybe there is no need to survive, no need to forage , to hunt, to gather , to build , to journey. We weren't meant to sit inside at desks for 8+ hours a day. We are animals. And consciousness is our tragedy. But what do I know",
"We evolved with the concept of \"pain.\" Pain is something that tells your brain something is wrong, that something is happening to your body which needs to stop or or will kill you. It's suffering. Our ancestors (and nearly all animals) suffered throughout evolution as a means of survival. Brain: \"That hurts? Don't do it.\" The problem is that this feeling of suffering is often misinterpreted by the brain. Like a child that won't take medicine because it tastes bad, the brain *thinks* it's making the right decision because the terrible taste is clearly poison or inedible. And when the body survives despite this thinking, the brain believes it did something right. **The brain knows it's supposed to suffer.** Now, after millions of years of evolution, our society gets to a point where a huge part of the population has no reason to suffer. We have shelter, food, medicine, love, entertainment- everything humanity has struggled to attain throughout its entire history. It's all here. There's nothing that makes us suffer like our ancestors did. Predators, disease, hunger, sexual gratification, natural elements- all under control. But the brain knows you're supposed to suffer. And nothing outside of your body is causing it. So the brain *makes* you suffer. It interprets things to make you suffer. You aren't suffering, so those people don't actually care about you. You aren't in pain, so you don't deserve the life you have. Why are you happy? You should feel bad- you haven't felt bad enough to earn your existence. You're a piece of shit. You're so worthless. Depression. Finally. Pain. Good. But your life does one of three things- it gets worse, and your brain was right. You don't deserve it. After all, all these bad things are happening. (And they may not even be bad things, but your brain convinces you they are because it needs something to go wrong). So you still feel horrible because your brain was right- you don't deserve this and you're finally suffering. Or your life stays the same. Nothing changes. Your brain was right- you haven't done anything to deserve this. So it continues to search for suffering. Or your life gets better. But you didn't suffer enough for it, did you? You didn't actually earn this, or the life before it. We need real suffering. Or. An escape. A healthy diet and exercise can help you deal with it. But that's work. And work isn't suffering. Video games, or a movie. Temporary but effective. You distract yourself. No suffering. Drugs. Drugs can block out that part of your brain. Alcohol, heroin, antidepressants. Drugs, drugs, drugs. The good ones can help your brain realize it's okay to not suffer. The bad ones can lead to actual suffering, which is what your brain wanted the whole time. Your addiction forms. Finally, suffering. An addiction to the drugs- an addiction to the suffering. And sometimes it's not enough. Your brain becomes so exhausted, so tired, so full of pain that isn't caused by anything but itself that it just wants everything to stop. No more suffering, no more pain- nothing. It has to stop. Suicide. There's nothing actually wrong with you- your brain is just trying to cope with the suffering it's never experienced. It thinks it's helping. But sometimes you need someone else's help. National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255",
"First time poster, very long time lurker. But for once, I know a thing or two about the subject and I'll try to participate in this great community. The brain is like any other organ of our system, it has a role and has to fulfill certain tasks. Like the rest, it has evolved to do these in the most adaptative way up to date. Today, we understand quite a lot of what it does but to say the ultimate goal is survival, we don't know really. The psyche, the mind, is something else. It's who we are, what we remember (and what we forget), what we experienced, what we think. Our brain does not think, we are. Of course, there is a very close intricacy between the two, as brain activities are often started by a thought. But the brain didn't create the thought. Psychic life is built on losses and separations, and our capacity to integrate them goes with our capacity to create. You could say that's how we grow up, how we change. Some authors talk about the \"depressive capacity\" as something invaluable and depression would be the failure of it. Depression occures for someone when an inanimate state becomes the only way for him/her to stay alive. Something (not necessarily someone) has died and to keep it, one identifies as the tomb. This impossible grief neutralises the depressive capacity. Antidepressants have a cortical action that erase some of the pain. This action on the brain alone will not solve the depression, but it will restores a minimal psychic well-being that allows the creative capacity to come back. I tried to stay as ELI5 as I could, also please excuse my English as it's not my native language. Edit: typos",
"Strictly speaking, I don't think the brain has survival as a goal. It has developed several mechanisms to avoid/seek relief from things which are painful. It just so happens that things we identify as painful also tend to be things which are actually hazardous to us. This gives the appearance of a goal. I'm guessing it seems so universal because things that didn't have the ability to feel pain and react had no motivation to keep themselves away from potential danger, so their genetic configuration had a lower likelihood of being inherited. It may be that suicide is just an extension of that desire to avoid pain or seek relief from it. Since we can understand that pain can last beyond the immediate circumstances, and that frequently the things we do to relieve it will only provide temporary relief at best, it can look like there is no end to the pain. This doesn't stop you from wanting relief, so your mind keeps working until it arrives at a solution.",
"First of all, not the brains goal is survival, evolutions goal is survival till reproduction. We are able to produce kids at the age of 12. Most people died before 20 historically and the rest made losts of kids, so our numbers grow, evolutionary we are winning. Evolution doesn't really care about anything else. We did select for stuff ourselfs as humans over the time we lived, but we can't really select for brain chemistry that might go awry at some point in the future, because it hasn't happened yet. People get depressed at different ages. Also we are not in a natural enviroment. Everything we created is artificial. It might be that we are actually doing something wrong as society. In nature you have to work everyday and get immediate gratification. You search for food, you find food, you eat food, you are happy. You find a suitable mate, she accepts you you are happy. In modern society everything is a lot more abstract, in many decades and still in some countries today, if you weren't able to do something that other people really need and appreciate, you have a miserable existence (especially when you compare yourself to others). Often you really can't do much about that.",
"I feel as though living in today's advanced society lends itself to depression and suicides in individuals who might have otherwise made a happy hunter-gatherer human or something. It's not the environment which our brain adapted to survive in. Of course depression before civilization may have been a positive adaptation, but in our new societal environment, depression festers and doesn't help the individual hardly at all. In other words, our brains do what they think they're supposed to in order to survive, and usually what the brain does is the right thing even in our new modern environment. However, modern unfamiliar territory seems incompatible with the brain not just for the obvious case of suicides, but also for the general happiness among people. This is what happens when we take a system optimized to do one thing and tell it to do another. Given the rate of pharmacological and neuroscience advances, (and since I can't see us changing the status quo to conflict less with what our brains evolved to encounter anytime soon), I'd wager we will have drugs effective enough on the brain to eradicate most issues of severe depression and suicide by 2100. A synthetic adaptation if you will, simulating hundreds of thousands of years of evolution all in a few pills.",
"While somewhat contentious as it's hard to scientifically prove, meme theory may play a role in this as well. From an evolutionary standpoint, you're right - it makes no sense to have things like depression or suicide. It also doesn't make any sense to evolve a brain our size from a physical standpoint. So we must consider the possible ideas a brain like ours harbors, memes (the technical term for such ideas, not a joke). Basically, it looks like suicide and depression are not developmental side effects of evolution directly. Evolution only caused us to have a big brain and comprehension as to allow for more memes. Such memes indirectly happen to cause more existence thought, in addition to everything else that makes humans just so darn good at surviving.",
"It's not normal, it's your brain fucking up. There's a reason why depression is considered a disorder/illness. Your brain is just an organ so depression is just like a heart attack or kidney failure in that sense. It's just not working the way it's supposed to. Weather it's due to life circumstances or genetic predispositions, depression can be treated in many cases if the individual seeks help",
"the brain simply is what it is. The statement that the main goal of the brain is survival is an assumption. An organism is simply a biological machine that maintains its form and propagates it's form. It's a physical object that has no agenda and just so happened to reproduce itself because reproduction is a positive feedback loop and a series of occurrences caused evolution. A body's main goal isn't to survive. It just so happens to have mechanisms that facilitate preservation of it's form. it's an object. Emotions are not perfect survival mechanisms in every sense of the word. They are merely mechanisms. For example fear causes us to run and preserve our lives, but we can also become frozen in fear, which is a counter productive behavior. We can allow ourselves to get pricked by a needle full of medicine can't we? Organisms are not as utterly bound to their survival instincts as your paradigms suggest.",
"Our brains were not designed. The do not have a \"survival goal\" set in advance. Instead, we have evolved somewhat haphazardly over thousands of millennia in ways that depended on the particular set of pressures at the time. Evolution is a process of (unguided) trade-off and compromise. On average, the human that have survived until now must have some advantage over the ones that did not. That's tautological. I'm just speculating from here on but maybe the flexibility of a problem solving brain (which is evolutionarily beneficial) just has an unavoidable side-effect that it can (at the extremes) descend into fatal obsessiveness; or maybe slightly more resources were diverted from brain activity to immune systems, or muscle growth or bone strength or blood oxygen; or maybe (as /u/doppelwurzel said [in this comment]( URL_1 )), the habits of a person with depressive tendencies lead to a net gain because it led to more focused problem analysis. The problem is that our brains have a complex set of feedback signals with mind-bogglingly (heh) intricate chemical-receptor interactions. If the balance of the chemicals tips a little too far, it can switch the decision making process from \"super-obsessive but effective problem analysis\" to a crisis of \"[analysis paralysis]( URL_0 )\".",
"Ooh! I can answer this for once. Firstly, we must understand the role that sadness plays in human lives and society. It is a biological response to something bad happening in our lives. It is a way our body tells us, hey, this isn't good for you. It allows you to take a step back and reconsider certain aspects of your life. It also plays a role in \"social signalling\". Being as social creatures as we are, we have the capacity to empathize and support others in need. Being sad will evoke that support from society. This is actually best shown in post-partem depression. Women who recently give birth are weak physically and emotionally. By inducing that kind of sadness, we fellow humans will go out of our ways to support that woman. However, that is a very special case that is generally considered different from unipolar or bipolar depressions. So now to depression. Depression is surprisingly prevalent in society and one would think that it would be evolutionarily selected against. However, depression is considered the result of the insufficient regulation of hormones, typically responsible for sadness. At the same time, we still know very little about this subject. Humans are so complex not just biologically but also cognitively and socially. It's the combinations and interactions of these factors that result in our behaviours. TLDR; Humans get sad. But sadness is good because it helps us understand what is bad in our lives. Depression is the result of our body not handling sadness correctly. But as always, humans are much more complicated than this.",
"Because the main goal of our brain is not survival. It's \"a\" goal. It's one of many, albeit a very, very strong one. In a brain, we have a variety of different motives and emotions and thoughts. There are so many that our brains can abstract from logical thinking that many are divergent and contradictory thoughts. Who has never thought, at different times, \"I hate life\" AND \"I love life\"? Who has never thought \"That music is great\" and after hearing it 100 million times, thought \"That music sucks.\" We can hold many different thoughts and feelings at the same time. Nothing is really an either/or situation. It's not all about survival. Giving one's life so that another may live is not unusual at all, from all walks of life. Firemen make a profession out of potentially dying so others may live. It is not even a uniquely human instinct to \"not survive.\" *Most* mammals will give their lives for their young - not just humans. We also give our lives for many other reasons - for an idea or philosophy or whatever. One may kill themselves due to extreme and constant and never-ending pain. It is understandable. And, of course, mental pain is much worse than physical pain. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but they'll pretty much the bones will heal in 6 weeks, but words may stick with someone and cripple them their whole life. With people with mental illness, this is amplified. As far as why people get depression and mental illness, I guess that is just natural selection. The luck of the draw. The brain develops in a way that is not conducive to the current environment. But the brain is a physical structure, no different than a leg or an arm. Go google \"deformed babies\" and look at the images, if you have the stomach for it. If we are \"supposed\" to survive, why does a body get born with birth defects? Just natural selection, fetal development, and the effects of the environment. There is not just one goal of the brain. There's not one or two or three. There are hundreds and hundreds of goals/aspirations/etc. Under a set of particular circumstances, any one of them can come to the fore and subsume or quash the rest. **TLDR:** Survival is not the sole goal of the brain. There are hundreds and hundreds of goals, and under different circumstances, any of them might outweigh all others, and be acted upon.",
"What makes you think our brains main goal is survival, I think its more along the lines of \"what can I do to not be bored\"",
"That is assuming the brain is functioning at the level it is capable of, however, when someone commits suicide they are not functioning properly mentally. Basically, you're assuming rationality in our brains goals but we are irrational beings.",
"Your brain doesn't have a goal. It's just a collection of functions that have turned out to be really useful in the whole survival-of-the-fittest thing. Like a function, it has expected inputs and its evolution has been predicated on assumptions about our environment and lifestyle. Our idle, sedentary lives are a proverbial wrench in the brain's system. The damage is expressed as neurotic mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety.",
"Well, when programmers designed a bot to play Tetris for as long as it could without losing, it eventually just paused the game indefinitely when it was about to lose. The only way to beat the game was to not play at all. It's a bit the same with humans- when things are so bad and they never seem to get better, we just stop playing the game of life. The problem is that it's a short-sighted solution: things usually do get better but only in the long term. The brain is too focused on short term solutions than long term ones. I'm sure there's an evolutionary explanation like: \"we didn't get depressed in the old days so natural selection never weeded out the suicidal gene,\" but I wouldn't know too much about that to explain it through.",
"In a maybe somewhat philosophical vein, our brains hardwired will to live long before we gained consciousness of death. So we have all these survival instincts but are now also faced with knowledge of this inevitable fate. Awareness of death came as surprise to our psyche, evolutionarily, right? On one hand, you can be convinced you keep living after death (perhaps due to strong survival instincts), making suicide trivial. On the other, consciousness of death may convincingly let one overpower their instinct to live as we can overpower other instincts we might consider ourselves burdened with. From this perspective, any justifying reason will do, doesn't matter, whether or not it overrides that instinct is up to/depends on the subject. To escape pain, to escape punishment, curiosity, nihilism, whatever. Not to mention, suicide itself may be an instinct. Cells in our body undergo a process called apotheosis, where they basically self-destruct if they determine themselves to be malfunctioning I guess, for lack of a better word. Also, it's interesting to wonder if an AI that gains consciousness or omniscience might just shut itself off -- maybe without instinct for survival (something all living things have at this point, all else being easily filtered out through natural selection far early on if it ever was there to begin with) the best course of action is just to abandon consciousness. Just an interesting thought experiment at this point I guess, but not an irrational idea in those circles.",
"In my opinion, its not the \"brain\" its the mind. It has to do with lot of things, but lets look it deeper: Survival: back in the tribe days, people would get more stress, and with that stress they got more action, the mind would fuel them to do all certain things and to take action towards those things to survive, which include: - Saving family from other tribe members or \"attackers\" - Killing an animal to survive - Going on a dangerous journey And people were always in DANGER, they lived dangerously right at the edge. For them it was normal to expirience danger almost everyday. You see, when you're body is faced with a feeling of \"you are going to die\" or some sort of danger, it so much influences your nervous system that with all that action you feel, YOU MUST FIGHT, OR RUN. And after that body is REWARDING YOU, giving you dopamine, the body, mind brain will give you good emotions which are saying \"BRAVO YOU DID IT\" Those people who don't have them are doomed, they are gone - dead. People who don't expirience danger or some sort of fear, are bound to be depressed. Now in a society, this is exactly what is happening, we are not feeling stressed and in danger as tribe people were. We are shutting ourselves down. The whole point and diffrence is in ACTION. Depression is just that, lack of action. Depression (and it depends which) CAN be cured by taking action, moving, doing something, planing something. I truly believe if depressed people were to be put in wilderness for 1 week and needed to survive, or if the bear would chase them - some sort of danger - they would be cured. Its just a closing mechanism we all have. Fist you close to all the people you don't care about, then you close up to your friends, then to your family, and then you close to yourself, and after that when you do it, its just a matter of time when you will close to the World. When you do that, suicide is after that. But depression (+ suicide) and survival are in my opinion diffrent things.",
"This is my take on why people become depressed and ultimately hopeless and giving up. People eat shit food and find little meaning in their life because they're a cog in a machine. No real goals, nothing to strive for. We are goal oriented towards thing we have a passion for. No passion, no directiom, nothing to look forward to. In the West we see the most \"exquisite\" of lives all around us. On internet, tv, movies, everywhere in our culture. We reflect this fantasy upon or own lives and draw imaginary short comings. Traditionally, cultures have taught that to find peace is through some form of enlightenment. Our culture promotes chasing the dollar. Their is no fulfillment in materialism. It is in pursuing what we love to do that leads to true happiness. For most people, living a menial life with a menial job filling their daily schedules 9-5 does not lead to this satisfaction. Most come home from these jobs and relieve themselves with a drug of some sort, whether it be sugar or alcohol, and everything in between. The perpetuity pushes many further into their mental abyss. I speak as someone with experience with years of being diagnosed with Bipolar, suffering many lengthy downs. I found that while my brain does have extreme chemical imbalances and this is not often looked upon optimistically, this can often work towards my benefit. The energy that the sensitive person can exhibit is a mechanism that has been used my brilliant minds throughout the ages to come to brilliant conclusions. From science to art, Van Gogh to John Nash(A Beautiful Mind), these minds experienced horrific tears in their psyche ripping away their reality from the common mind. These minds have dipped their toes in hell and stabbed their hands into the heavens returning with remarkable intuition and expression. It is my belief that these minds occur in the human species to further evolve culture and civilization. They question the norms because, to them there is no normal . Their mind is not the reality we know. This disconnect plummets these minds into a somewhat nihilistic depression, for lack of a better word. Because of many factors, the human mind reacts to its environment in a way that cause turmoil of the psyche, this can lead to intuition and discovery. Today's society puts people in boxes and prescribes no other remedy than anti-depressanta, anti psychotics, and mood stabilizers. Very infrequently do doctors take in to account environment and diet. This results in a massive depressed population. There is no hope in this current school of thought we have pertaining to the human mind. There is no solace in a pill, only numbing crutches. All minds are beautiful and have great potential to love and create in unique ways. It's unfortunate that so many potentially brilliant minds boxed into a room too small for them, having questions with no hope of answering and an environment with no hope of recovery, decide to end their life. I've been on the ketogenic diet for about two months now. I've never felt better in my life. I've been on every pill on the doctors note pad. They made me fat, slow, and more isolated than every before. Many times I found myself in positions wanting to end my life. I found myself making the plans. Suddenly, all this is gone. For some god damned reason this diet change has made my brain take a 180 keeping me consistently baseline with reality. I've never been more driven and I've never been determined. The one thing I have a lot of thanks for is drugs. Illegal drugs helped me get through my hard times. I numbed the pain and it let me stretch out my pains. It let me look at my demons frame by frame. It showed me the edge of this existence. Many illegal drugs have remedies, that I am certain, when combined with with healthier dietary conditions(NOT THE STANDARD AMERICAN DIET), Could drastically reduce depression and suicide rates. Old cultures accepted the use of drugs for spiritual and enlightenment purpose. Now you goto jail for doing this. This cultural change has played a key roll in changing the perspective of approaching your psyche. The drugs I speak of in a positive light in this context are, visionary substances, psychedelics, and empathogens. TL;DR: this is my opinion . Lots of bad food, unrealistic standards, no life goals, it takes a toll . our culture is the personifcation of materialism. Drugs are a crutch. I have bipolar my self. Van Gogh, John Nash. Brilliant, depressed minds. Questioning the norm brings in innovation. Psyche drugs should only be used on extreme cases and are dangerous. I use the Keto diet, used to be fat and suicidal; not the case anymore. it gave me life again. Drugs being illegal stop the use of man's oldest psychological tool. This post is referencing anecdotal evidence and my limited understanding of evolutionary psychology EDIT: sorry for not explaining quite like I would to a 5 year old, but this is difficult for me because I never would share the dark points the human mind could reach to an innocent mind. Nonetheless, I felt my experience should be shared. Also ,sorry for these long ass sentences and grammatical errors."
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70jblc | when the modern day calendar was created why did they opt not to have 13 months? Seems more tidy to have 13-4 week months. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That would make sense if you were just starting from a year and inventing a way to divide it. But months come from observing the phases of the moon. Full moons are about 29.5 days apart, so we \"should\" alternate between 29 and 30 day months to line them up with the moon. But then you look at the year and realise that there are about 11 days left over at the end of your 12 months. So you add an extra day to most of the months to use those days up. Other calendars stick with months which track the full moon better, and add a 13th \"leap\" month to some years to deal with the 11 spare days."
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70jv3o | What keeps people who work at KFC/Coca-Cola from stealing a sample of their secret recipes, reverse engineering them, and then selling them? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not a huge amount, really. We already pretty much know what's in these products (I mean, with Coke, you can basically just read the label). The difficulty is only getting the exact formulation and mixing right. For most people, the prohibitive part of that is not knowing how it's done - it's having access to the kind of production chain that can produce that product consistently and cheaply. Nobody buys KFC because their recipe is so much better than anywhere else. They buy it because it's convenient and consistent. Stealing or even improving on the recipe isn't (relatively) difficult, but entering the market as a competitor is."
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70leqy | How do zero calorie energy drinks provide energy? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't. They have a ton of caffeine in them. Which makes you feel energetic, but doesn't actually provide you with any more energy."
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70letx | Why do fan knobs go from 0-3-2-1? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is hard to start a motor, it would take a long long time to start on low. Going 0 3 2 1 let's the fan start on High which gets it up to speed in a timely manner"
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70lrlt | why do we get food comas after a satisfying meal? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your body has a limited supply of blood. Your arteries are constricted all the time to keep the pressure. When your muscles need more you receive sympathetic stimuli that dilates the arteries in your muscles and contract the ones where you don't need, the bowels. Your body wanna be ready to run from a lion. When you eat your body receives parasympathetic stimuli. Now it's time to digest, your bowels need a lot a blood and your muscles better not try to steal it. So it's a evolutionary strategy to make you feel sleepy so that you will only move if really necessary. If you try to move you may vomit, that happens in swimming pools often. You can see other signs of these stimuli: you need to do number 2 after eating, you pee when nervous. There are more, but I don't recall now."
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70m5gq | Why do we yawn, and what does it do to our bodies? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The reason why we yawn hasn't been proven yet, but there are some speculative answers: * We yawn because we are bored/tired and this causes us to not take in as much breath as we normally do. So we yawn to help bring more oxygen in and take out carbon dioxide. * Another theory is that we our brain gets hot and we yawn to cool it down, this can actually be proven in many ways: 1. When we open our jaws that wide bloodflow to the brain actually increases which means more oxygen will be traveling upwards. 2. When individuals held a hot pack to their heads they yawned 41% of the time however when it was a cold pack they yawned 9% of the time. Scientists aren't actually sure why yawning is contagious however, but it seems to be linked with empathy and mimicry. This is because yawning may be a product of a quality inherent in social animals. In humans, it’s the ability to understand and feel another individual’s emotions. When we see happy people we tend to smile and imitate the same goes for unhappy people. So when we see someone yawning we imitate not purposefully but it's just a byproduct of how we work."
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70mb7m | Why does body hair seem to reach a certain length and stop growing while head hair gets really long? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hair follicles go through a 3-phase cycle: * **Anagen** - the active phase, where the old hair falls out and the new hair grows * **Catagen** - transitional phase; hair growth stops and the outer root sheath attaches to the base of the hair * **Telogen** - resting phase; nothing happens. The length of the anagen stage determines the maximum length the hair can grow. Hair grows about a centimeter per month. Body and eyelash hair stay in anagen for 30-45 days; head hair stays in anagen for 2-6 years.",
"Life, death cycles. All hairs go through the process of living and dieing at which point they fall out. 'Short hairs' just have shorter life cycles. AFAIK."
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70mdco | If the Internet is basically a network of wires and computers, how does data navigate itself from one specific computer to where it needs to be? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"_[rolls up sleeves]_ As others have said, it all comes to addresses, but there's a bit more to it than that, and it's sort of, kind of, magical when you understand it. This is long, but I'm writing it because I love talking about this stuff, and I hope it entertains somebody. First, you have to realise that a computer network is split into multiple layers. When engineers talk about these different layers, they normally do so in the terms of something called the \"[OSI model]( URL_2 )\", and as you can see, that has 7 layers. On the Internet, we normally only talk about some of them, because we group some together. However, all networks (including the Internet) at the bottom layer are physical, you're right. You are most likely to be using a wireless connection (WiFi), so there is some stuff going on there at a radio transmitter/receiver level in the gigahertz-range. If you're on your phone and not on WiFi, similar concept, you're just using 4G or 3G, or whatever. Wired stuff is normally in your local network going to be Ethernet, but the link to your ISP is probably going to involve copper cable, fibre, and a few other things (including, perhaps, microwave links - fancy!). Over the \"top\" of that physical layer is another layer called the data link layer. You will know some terms from this - if you've ever heard of a \"MAC address\", there you go, that's data link. Simplifying greatly, this is a way for all the devices on the same shared physical network to identify themselves and for communications to be clearly routed. A network router can say \"I have a message for this MAC address\", and whilst all the devices on that network might hear it (unless it's a \"switched\" network), only the one with the right MAC address will actually process it. And yes, that does explain how network interception can work, and why WiFi is considered insecure for a bunch of reasons. Now, above that, the Internet uses, as you may have heard, \"IP\", or the internet protocol. The thing you will be most familiar with is the \"IP address\", which normally looks like 4 numbers between 0 and 255 separated by periods: 192.168.0.1 or 127.0.0.1 for example. At this layer the stack looks something like this: +-----------------------+ | HTTP, DNS, etc. | +-----------------------+ | TCP or UDP | +-----------------------+ | IP | +-----------------------+ So for your HTTP (i.e. web) traffic get across the web, that protocol sits on top of TCP, which sits on top of IP. When you type in \" URL_3 \" into a browser, that gets turned into an IP address first using DNS, which uses UDP (normally), which goes over IP. When you collect email via IMAP, that goes over TCP, which goes over IP. Same for SMTP: goes over TCP over IP. With me? So this IP thing is sort of a big deal. Your local network has special IP addresses (they start 192.168... or 10.... probably). That gets into public IP addresses using something called NAT which is worth a post all by itself and is the bane of many an Xbox, Playstation or Nintendo Switch fan. However, the public internet, that's where magic happens. This is the point where all internet technologies - web, mail, Skype, your games console - ultimately have to come down to, and how your small little local network gets to play on the big open World stage. IP addresses are scarce. We sort of ran out of them some time ago (which is why more ISPs are moving to IPv6, something we won't cover here, but I can cover in a follow-up post if you want), but broadly this is how they get allocated. They're carved up into ranges or blocks and assigned to organisations that represent some part of the World, called [Regional Internet Registries]( URL_0 ). There are five of them in the World, and they are responsible for issuing IP address blocks to organisations in their territory who ask for an allocation. We have to get a little technical here: an IP address that looks like 4 numbers - a.b.c.d - is actually one number that is 32 bits (ones and zeroes) long. Each of the four numbers represents one byte (8 bits) of that number. If you're struggling with understanding that [this article might help]( URL_1 ). The reason I mention this is because allocations are described as the number of bits you can put into your \"net mask\". If I assign you 192.160.1.0/24 what I'm saying is \"24 bits of this number are fixed, you can vary the remaining 8 bits\", and that variation gives you 256 theoretical addresses (in practice, 255, and because one of them will need to be a gateway address, actually 254, but that's another discussion again). So when somebody says \"[ISP] has got a slash 8 allocation\", that means they have something like \"4.0.0.0/8\" and that is 16.7m IP addresses. A huge amount. In fact, 4/8 is a bit of an infamous block, but again, time, I'm digressing... If you're running a largish organisation, you can go to your ISP and say \"I need some public IP addresses\". They'll require you to justify the needs. If successful though, they'll give you a /30 (4 IP addresses) or a /29 (8 IP addresses). Now, how does my IP traffic find your IP addresses over the internet? We can finally talk about the clever bit: BGP. Your ISP has links to other ISPs. Physical links, with fibre optic cables, and network switches and all that jazz. Those connections will be regulated a little with a protocol called BGP which is basically what makes the internet work. Let's suppose you've been allocated 4.0.0.0/30. Your ISP will make sure everything in that range of IP addresses gets to you. They will then \"advertise\" via BGP that they have a route for that IP address range to their neighbours. Those ISPs they \"peer with\" will have other connections to other ISPs, and they will say \"Hey, I can get you to 4.0.0.0/30, with one hop\". Those ISPs _they_ peer with then re-advertise the range with 2 hops, and _their_ peers re-advertise with 3 hops, and so on, and so on. It might look something like this (with the numbers being hop counts incrementing as we get further apart via that route): 1 2 3 A ---- B --- C --- E | 2 \\ / 4 | D ---- Me You 3 In this example, I peer with 2 ISPs so when I want to get to you I have two possible routes via D or via E. My router hears from E \"I can get there in 4 hops\" and from D \"I can get there in 3 hops\", so my router goes via D. But if D goes down, I still have the other route, so this is a very fault tolerant setup. And this scales up, and up and up across the whole Internet. Every ISP that does BGP peering (called an AS or Autonomous System), has a routing table for every IP address on the planet and knows how many hops away it is via the peers they interact with, and sends traffic accordingly. This means any IP address can reach any other IP address, and the whole thing can route around outages. If you wanted a second ISP like me, you would go to your RIR and ask for an AS number, get a BGP router, and ask your ISPs to advertise your range like that. In practical terms it's a lot more complicated, but this is ELI5, and I've just tried to explain BGP4 AS peering... And that, in short (I know this is long, but I've missed a lot of detail), is how a bunch of wires and computers works across the planet, and why you can read my words that I sent from a machine in London to Reddit's servers in milliseconds, and how they can send them to you, wherever you are, and on whatever type of network you are using locally. I hope that makes you feel a small sense of wonder like I did when I first learned it. **TL;DR: the sort of marriage between mathematical graph theory and engineering that is indistinguishable from magic.**",
"In short, addresses. Your computer has an address. The router it talks to has addresses for your computer and your ISP to use and all the systems the info passes through have addresses too. The data from your computer gets wrapped up in a Packet, with info about the data, and some addresses for where it is going. The router gets the packet, checks the address against a list of address ranges that it keeps and if the packet is going to a network it is on, it sends it to the right place. Rinse and repeat. If the address isn't one it knows what to do with, or is told to ignore, it drops it. It gets more complicated the more you look at it, but it's basically just a metric ton of addresses and directories working really really fast.",
"It's pretty much like the post Office\\USPS. You post\\send a 'packet' out to an address (a bit like a post\\zip code). If it's local (on your network\\the postman's round) it gets delivered by the postman. If not, it sends it to the next distribution centre (router) that it is attached to. The routers have a list of, regularly updated addresses it knows about and where to send it to. So, once there, the same thing happens. This happens again and again until delivered - if it knows the address is local it delivers it, if not it sends it to the next link in the chain."
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70mndx | Why do we get bad breath when we sleep? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you snore or breathe through your mouth at night, you’re more likely to have bad breath in the morning than those who don’t. In both situations, your mouth is even more prone to drying out, setting the stage for bacteria to grow. Some medications can cause your mouth to become dry overnight, worsening your halitosis. That’s why older people, who are often on many medications, frequently find their breath more unpleasant in the morning. Smokers also may find they have bad morning breath. Smoking not only causes your saliva to dry up but also can raise the temperature of your mouth, making it a breeding ground for bacteria that causes bad breath."
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70oi6x | Why 78 degrees inside the house feels much less comfortable than 78 degrees outside | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is little to no air movements in most homes which means your body does not cool as efficiently as warm air forms a pocket around you and stops easily absorbing body heat. As such temperatures have to be colder indoors to be the same level of comfort."
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70q28f | Why is recall for which is Left and which is Right so hard for some people? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My left or your left? Also, in a mirror, or not? Facing which direction? Left/right aren't as intuitive or natural as up or down. It's entirely relative, heavily context based. Whereas up/down is dependant on gravity, and a lot more intuitive. Also, stick out your hand. Extend your index and thumb. Which one makes an L. That's your left."
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70qcvl | What does an orchestra conductor do? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Along with giving cues for certain parts to enter, the conductor also interprets the piece through the score. That's why you can listen to Beethoven conducted by one conductor, then through a different conductor you will notice some changes regarding the interpretation of certain markings. The conductor also helps the orchestra stay together for things like a fermata, which means the orchestra will hold one note for an undetermined amount of time. For things like this the conductor has to let the orchestra know when to release the note, otherwise everyone would release it at different times. This is also just one example, there are many spots in music where just looking at the music wont be enough to keep the ensemble together and at the same tempo."
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70r3du | -Male Seahorses | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> So what makes the male a \"male\"...is it that he has XY chromosomes or is his contribution is more sperm-like? His contribution isn't \"sperm-like\". His contribution is sperm. He produces sperm, so he's male."
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70uidj | Why do so few storms happen in the morning\daytime? | I feel like I see way more in the afternoon or night time than during the day. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Meteorologist here. You are sorta correct. Thunderstorm activity, ignoring all other factors, is linked strongly to surface heating, which itself reaches a [maximum of around 4 pm]( URL_1 ) and a minimum of about 7 am. It is common for thunderstorm activity to closely follow this temperature curve. When temperatures are hot at the surface, there is lots of instability, meaning the lower levels of the atmosphere have lots of energy that can combine with moisture and release kinetic energy. If there is enough moisture, we see storms; if not, we might see turbulence, gusty winds, and in some places, dust storms. However there are significant variations. [This map]( URL_0 ) is from a 1980s study (Easterling & Robinson, 1985) that shows the hour of the day when summertime thunderstorm activity is most common, so 02 = 2 am, 15 = 3 pm, etc. This shows there is tremendous variation depending on where you live. The above map is based on human observations at federal sites. It's possible to develop a climatology differently using lightning strike data. [Here is the chart]( URL_2 ) (Holle 2013) color coded by time of day, broken up into PM (top) and AM (bottom) and covering all seasons. It follows a very similar pattern. Some findings: \\- Kansas and Missouri gets lots of storms around midnight because of support from upper-level systems and organization into long-lived complexes of storms. This is an important source of moisture for the corn belt because it tends to falls overnight and soak the ground. \\- The Gulf Coast gets storms early in the day because of the sea breeze, which replaces it with cool stable air in its wake. This sea breeze works inland and brings showers and storms with it. \\- The Rockies is tied closely to peak heating times, but you can see things fire a little earlier in the day along mountain ridgelines because of the higher terrain. Storms then spread out into the valleys later in the afternoon. \\- Offshore lighting in the Atlantic is probably due to Gulf Stream and land breeze interactions.",
"Depends on where you are. I used to live on the coast and we had daytime thunderstorms almost every day (at around 2pm...You could practically set your watch by it). Exclusively nocturnal thunderstorms are an inland thing (though proximity to large mountain ranges also contributes to daytime storms). The driver is hot air from the land/sea. The heat from the ground produces a heavy updraft of hot relatively high-pressure air. This forms convection currents in the atmosphere, stirring things up, and \"priming the pump\" for a big rainstorm. However, that same hot air tends to prevent storms in areas without an overabundance of water. When it cools off at night though, the charged up clouds can \"fall\" into that low pressure area created by the cooling earth, and thunderstorm."
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70v15f | How is it possible that scientists can tell us about hundreds of planets light years awayt from us, but can't confirm the theorical 9th planet in the Solar System? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We can detect exoplanets (planets in other star systems) by the way they affect the light that comes from their Sun. When they pass in front of their Sun, they block a tiny bit amount of light from it, which our delicate instruments are able to detect. The theoretical 9th planet doesn't lie between us and any Sun, making this detection method impossible.",
"Planets we discover in other solar systems are either: A) Enormous, and producing clear gravitational disturbances of the parent star. B) Transiting, so they pass between us and the star and cast a small but measurable shadow. C) Rapidly orbiting a small star, so multiple tiny gravitational wobbles from multiple orbits can be observed and confirmed because that planet's \"year\" is only 25 days. A theoretical planet 9 is none of those. It doesn't transit, is too small to produce significant gravitational influence on other planets, and has only completed a tiny fraction of a centuries-long orbit."
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70vdi0 | Christmas music really just seems to be the same 20 or so songs covered by 100s of artists. Why does no one ever release new Christmas songs? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nostalgia is a big part. [Our buddies over at XKCD point out]( URL_0 ) that the big chunk of christmas pop songs came out right then the baby boomers were born, making these tunes part of their childhood.",
"Christmas music occupies this weird space in the musical industry. It's all about the songs and the tradition. It all stems from singing carols. (Which has roots in religious hymns) The rest of the music industry is driven by the artists. \"Taylor Swift's new album!\" is generally how these things are advertised. New Christmas music does get made. There's *Believe* by Josh Groban, which is a \"new\" Christmas song. Relatively speaking. It was written in the last 20 years.",
"I tried playing some more modern stuff a few years ago and immediately faced wholesale revolt from my family. Everything about the holidays is ritual, and tradition. It's not about new things, it's about doing the same old things. Occasionally new songs will make it into the Christmas canon, but for the most part tradition rules the holidays.",
"A big factor no one has mentioned yet is that the majority of instantly recognizable Christmas songs are part of the public domain. This makes them much cheaper to use in any sort of medium so they perpetuate through the public consciousness. You don't have to secure rights (unless you want a specific artist's rendition of the song), so no one can deny you use of a public domain song for whatever purpose you want.",
"They do, and they're all terrible. I heard a song called \"Text me Merry Christmas\" last year that made me want to slash my wrists.",
"There are hundreds of Christmas songs but the most popular ones self-perpetuate as they are the ones people most associate with Christmas, so the radio & TV & stores play them to death to get everyone in the spirit. Artists do release new xmas songs every year and a few do catch on (The Darkness \"Don't let the bells end\" seems to get rolled out every year these days) but a lot are just quite poor (as with a lot of pop songs - for every solid gold #1 there's 1000 forgotten ones that sank) or awful cash-ins or novelty singles that have very limited appeal. Bad Religion and Bowling For Soup did xmas albums, XFM's \"It's a cool Christmas\" CD has some great tracks by indie artists, and Smerins Anti-Social Club did a great cover of Walking In The Air. I actually have a USB stick full of alternative xmas tracks precisely because I get sick of the usual stuff - there's more than 100 tracks on it. if I remember I might even post a list when I find it.",
"probably because the classics make them a lot of money as compared to making a new song which is a gamble as to if it will catch on.",
"Because that's how you get \"Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer\". Is that what you want?",
"Trans-Siberian Orchestra has put out some great albums, Christmas Eve and Other Stories being my favorite. Lots of symphonic prog metal in the spirit of a Christmas concept album. Some absolutely great songs like An Angel Came Down. Good production and excellent vocals and musicianship. The overall vibe for me is that the writing dates to the days before the Christmas holiday was overly commercialized. The whole message is about kindness and redemption, not buying stuff. Some cynics could say that I have missed the point because they sell a ton of albums, concert tickets and get some airplay around Christmas, but that's not the point. It makes me remember what it's about, not want to go to the store. Their live show is absolutely wild, too, with a free merch signing afterwards. The band members come from all over the world and they are good. The Ravonettes had a good original Christmas EP out a few years back.",
"Yea seriously. I tried making a modern Christmas play list a few years ago and it's super difficult. Plenty of artists and Bands do release Christmas songs, I just can't think of them. And I'm pretty sick of that Mariah Carey song. Lol Personally, I like \"Merry Xmas\" by dragonette"
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70wvsj | if cameras take square photos, why are the apertures round? | Is it that it TAKES a round photo and crops it? Or is the actual photo array a square? Bonus ELI5: how do digital camera technologies differ from older film cameras | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You've sort of got it the wrong way round. The camera LENSES are round, because round lenses bend light much better. But the film the image is captured on is rectangular, for the same reason that all pictures are usually rectangles, easier to frame and they are easier to put onto walls. Modern camera sensors have just continued this. Also when light is bent by a round lens, the images around the edges are often distorted, by using rectangle sensors you are just cropping these out and getting a better image.",
"There is a square area at the back of the camera that opens and exposes the film when the shitter is released, with digital the mirror lifts up when you press the shutter, and a square digital photo sensor is exposed. The aperture only lets in light and the image, what goes on the film/sensor is the final square insane",
"Lenses are round, because round glass elements transmit light the best and provide the clearest image out the other end. (Most) apertures are round because round apertures work well in round lenses, and also provide pleasant looking results in photos. A [square aperture would cause square shaped blurry objects in out of focus areas in the shot]( URL_0 ) which is distracting and somewhat unpleasant. A round lens puts out a cone-shaped beam of light that resolves the image into a circle behind the lens, and then the sensor/film that captures the light is rectangular shaped, and sits in the center of that image circle. Images are shaped the way they are because of roll film, generally. A circular piece of film/sensor would technically capture more area out of the total projected image circle, but it's hard to make a roll of circles that tie together the way that a roll of rectangular frames of film does. They're also a lot harder to print and display. The outside edges of the projected image circle also suffer from vignetting and issues with diffraction and fine detail, and generally the crop provided by the rectangular film/sensor inside of that image circle crops out the best portion of the image, and leaves the dark/blurry/aberrant portion of the image."
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70xael | What is gerrymandering? What are the advantages, disadvantages, criticisms, and solutions? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yarr! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5:Gerrymandering ]( URL_9 ) 1. [ELI5: Gerrymandering ]( URL_2 ) 1. [ELI5: Gerrymandering ]( URL_3 ) 1. [ELI5: What is Gerrymandering? ]( URL_0 ) 1. [Eli5: \"Packing\" and \"Cracking\" in Gerrymandering ]( URL_8 ) 1. [ELI5: Why is gerrymandering so common? ]( URL_5 ) 1. [ELI5: Examples of when gerrymandering _is_ necessary ]( URL_6 ) 1. [ELI5:Gerrymandering ]( URL_4 ) 1. [ELI5: How do you prevent/fix gerrymandering? ]( URL_7 ) 1. [Eli5: Why is gerrymandering an acceptable practice? ]( URL_1 )"
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lk79p/eli5_gerrymandering/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jji31/eli5_gerrymandering/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/319m3w/eli5gerrymandering/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63ppp0/eli5_why_is_gerrymandering_so_common/",
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5s3xte/eli5_how_do_you_preventfix_gerrymandering/",
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70xefn | Why is Mexico so underdeveloped compared to the US and Canada? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yo ho ho! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5:why is mexico a third world country while the U.S and Canada are first world ]( URL_1 ) 1. [ELI5: Why is Mexico so poor compared to the US and Canada? ]( URL_4 ) 1. [ELI5: Why is Mexico so underdeveloped in comparison to the US and Canada? ]( URL_5 ) 1. [ELI5: Why is Mexico so much less developed than the other two North American countries? ]( URL_2 ) 1. [ELI5: How did Mexico end up poorer than the US and Canada? ]( URL_6 ) 1. [ELI5: Mexico is on the same landmass as USA and Canada. Why is it much poorer and more corrupt? ]( URL_0 ) 1. [ELI5: Why is Canada so much more developed as a country than Mexico? ]( URL_3 )",
"The US fighting and defeating Mexico in the middle of the 19th Century didn't help Mexican development. I'm not an expert on Mexican history, but losing half of your territory (including Texas and California, which eventually became enormous wealth-generating states for the US), was a big blow. That was in turn followed by French meddling in Mexican affairs that further held back development, and finally years of revolution, civil war, and banditry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Taken altogether, while the US was consolidating its power, and faced no real external threats (save the Confederacy during the Civil War), Mexico withstood most of a century of conflict and turmoil. And more recently, the domination of areas by the cartels and other criminals has continued to impede progress. All that said, all of Mexico is not an impoverished wasteland - some areas are more well developed than others (with the flip side being that their are areas of the US and Canada worse off than the norm as well).",
"Central and South America have a long history of American backed coups. If there's a leader who wants to improve life for his people at the expense of American industry they are removed.",
"Cartels control the police in a number of places (not gonna estimate), multinational corporations exploit the poor, and governments (intentional plurality) suggest it's the citizens faults for the state of their nation - effectively sidestepping responsibility or understanding."
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70y8dz | How does a rail gun work like the one the Navy just tested? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"dn6tfv0"
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"text": [
"Magnets. The rails that give railguns their name are lined with a series of powerful electromagnets. By flipping the magnets on and off in sequence, they are able to propel a slug at extreme velocities without the use of the explosive propellant found in traditional rounds."
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7126oh | How can a company owe hundreds of millions, file for bankruptcy and then just start from 0? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"They filed for bankruptcy protection, which allows them time to try to restructure the debt. If that fails they will go bankrupt and assets will be seized to try to cover all their debt(which will most likely just cover a small part of it) which is actually around $4.9 Billion Dollars, the $400 million is just the part of the debt that has payments due in 2018, $1.7 Billion due in 2019. They could re-start a company but would most likely be starting from scratch with no assets. Found an article that explains it pretty well; URL_0",
"Toys R Us are filing for a chapter 11 bankruptcy. What this means is that all the owners who have invested money in the company hoping for a profit now loses all their ownership and all their potential profits. Instead the creditors that are owed $400M is given all the shares of ownership in the company instead of the money they were promised. All the company assets is valued at $400M so the new owners is likely getting most their money back. However they will likely try to restructure the company and maybe only sell off parts of it."
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|
713bd9 | Why is water desalinization not more prevalent? | I believe there is technology still being developed that would optimize turning sea water into fresh water. However, would you not be able to just evaporate sea water to turn it to fresh water? That would separate the water from everything else, right? And could we not use renewables to provide the heat for evaporation, providing a green source of water to the dryer parts of the world? EDIT: I realize now that this is under economics. Not sure how to fix that... | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Salt water is cheap and prevalent. The energy to turn that salt water into fresh water is not so cheap. As you point out, it's could be done by evaporating the water, but to do that with any significant speed you need to boil the water. That takes an *enormous* amount of energy. To get an idea of just how bad this is, raising 1000 gallons from room temperature to boiling takes about [1.5 MWh]( URL_0 ). Subsequently boiling that water takes a further [2.3 MWh]( URL_1 ), for a total of 3.8 MWh. With electricity at an optimistic $0.05 / kWh that's $190 per 1000 gallons. You can bring this down some by recycling some heat, but it'll still be tens of dollars per 1000 gallons just in the distillation step; you still have all the normal delivery costs. By comparison, typical water costs are less than $10 per 1000 gallons. The economics just aren't there for mass distillation of seawater. Other processes like reverse osmosis are less energy demanding so they're less terrible from an economic standpoint, but they're still not attractive compared to just using fresh water and performing relatively inexpensive filtration and treatment on it.",
"It's an incredibly expensive and long process to build desalinization plants, and the plants require a lot of ongoing maintenance (all that removed salt has to be cleaned from the filter and dealt with), so it ends up being really expensive way to produce clean water.",
"> However, would you not be able to just evaporate sea water to turn it to fresh water? That would separate the water from everything else, right? And could we not use renewables to provide the heat for evaporation, providing a green source of water to the dryer parts of the world? It turns out that it's more energy efficient to force the water through filters in a reverse osmosis process than to boil the water. But, it still takes a lot of energy.",
"Because it's really expensive to do. You need a lot of energy to evaporate water and a country need a LOT of water. Country that are lacking water and usually also country with not a lot of money.",
"Distilling water (boiling it) is the simplest, but not the most efficient way to desalinate water. But that's not what's stopping this... As others pointed out, even the cheap options for desalinization are energy-intensive given the immense volume of water we use. And it's not just the treatment that's difficult: the vast majority of the world relies on gravity to bring water to cities. If we desalinated seawater, we'd end up with a lot of drinkable water at sea level, requiring active pumping to deliver it pretty much anywhere inland, much less the places that could really use some water. Yet another cost on top. This would only become feasible with some unrealized energy source like nuclear fusion. Desalinating water on a wide scale would take up a huge chunk of our total energy use, so we'd have to have so much free, spare energy that we could afford to use it to do this. Currently, even if we wanted to, we simply don't make enough energy to carry on and desalinate all our water, and our current energy production methods couldn't expand enough to handle it. That said... I think it would be awesome! Think of all the rivers in the world that we have dammed up, drained, or destroyed in order to get water. The impact on fish, riparian habitats, etc. etc. We could drastically reduce our dams (just enough for flood control), stop pumping from all these rivers, and open these rivers up if we could all desalinate water and pump it where ever we needed to. It wouldn't be hard on the ocean (we sequester this much water out of the ocean already, just by holding back rivers instead of taking it directly), and our wastewater would eventually find its way to the ocean again, so there's no danger of like, worldwide saltwater concentration increasing. Entire ecosystems would return to huge parts of the world."
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715jxt | Why do words spelled correctly sometimes seem to look like they are spelled wrong or "weird" after I focus on the word or multiple repetitions of the word for a long time? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dn89roi",
"dn8fe83"
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"text": [
"It's a phenomenon called \"semantic satiation\". You can look it up on Wikipedia. The basic idea is that a specific group of cells in your brain is involved in recognising each particular familiar word. If you repeatedly read a particular word that is familiar, the cells associated with that word get tired and your brain instead uses the group of cells it would normally use to decipher unfamiliar words",
"I used to get this at high school, but I'd get it when I'd stare at the teachers head - I absolutely swear the teachers face became unfamiliar once having been stared at for a time. I told my friends and said to try it, they thought I was weird. Would this be the same thing? I'd guess it would."
],
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|
715yhd | How are movies shot at 24 frames per second and have high visual quality? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"dn8cczp"
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"text": [
"Movies have motion blur because of the way the film was developed, even films shot digitally have motion blur because of how the camera sensors work. Video games are perfect renderings (typically) of an exact scene. If an object is moving at 24 feet per second, it will look blurred in a film, which is realistic because that's how we see things. The same object moving one foot per frame will look choppy because in one frame it's at a location then the next frame it essentially teleport a perfect copy 1 foot from where it was. If your game supports motion blur, this is less notable but still a problem."
],
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|
7169zu | When a train makes a turn, isn't its outer wheel covers more distance than the inner one? How come the train doesn't come off the tracks? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"URL_0 The wheels aren't cylinders, they're cones. The side that has to cover less distance in the turn rides up on the narrower end, so it makes more turns in less distance. Meanwhile, the other end does the same number of turns (solid axel), but since it is larger, it can cover the greater distance in the same number of turns.",
"Train wheels have conical edges, not flat ones like say a car wheel. When the track turns left, this will cause both wheels to pull rightward. For the right wheel that makes the point of contact with the track a larger circle since it's pulling towards where the cone is broader; for the left wheel the circle gets smaller since it's pulling towards the thinner part of the cone. Now even though the shaft connecting both wheels spins the same amount, the inner wheel covers less distance than the outer wheel.",
"< |-----| > Above is a simple diagram of a train axle with wheels either side. The important bit is the ' < ' shape of the wheel. When in a car going around a bend you feel yourself being pushed 'outwards' away from the direction of turn. This is a *centrifugal force* that always works in the same way. This exact same force 'pushes' a train outwards as it moves around a bend. The conical shape of the wheels ensures that the circumference of the particular point in contact with the rail is bigger on the outside(the side you feel you are being pushed against) than on the inside. . < |-----| > (turning left) . |_____| (track) . < |-----| > (turning right) . |_____| (track)",
"The train wheels are not flat like car tyres: they have a conical shape, and this helps keep the train aligned through a process called [coning] ( URL_0 ). when a train hits a bend, its inertia forces the wheelset outwards, and then the outer wheel has a larger effective diameter than the inner wheel. This allows the outer wheel to travel further round the outside of the bend. It's not perfect and some slippage can still occur - which increases wear on the wheels but is not fatal, since the wheels have the \"lips\" to keep them on the tracks.",
"I've been in the industry for 20 years... Contrary to popular belief the wheel actually steer around curves . There is usually a set of \"trucks\" that bolster a two axel set . The car body ( of many different types ) sits directly into a \"bowl \" on the trucks . The bowl has a pin in which the car body pivots and more or less turns while curving. It is a simple act of physics ... Weight distribution and gravity , not any fasteners of any kind ( believe it or not) hold the body of the car to the truck.",
"The best explanation I've ever heard on this... URL_0"
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|
71adk8 | How do people train pigeons to deliver messages and how do they know where to go? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dn98kid"
],
"text": [
"Homing pigeons have been bread to always return home when they are released. So in order to use them you have to keep them at the destination from birth. Sometimes take them out on training flights to let them familiarize themselves with the environment to navigate quicker. Then you send the pigeon in a cage to the source of the message. There they can attach a note to the leg of the pidgin and release it. The pidgin will then fly home where the note can be retrieved from the leg of the pidgin. So the destination of the message have to be determined at the time of the birth of the pidgin."
],
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|
71ehaw | Airplanes are large metal birds much higher in the sky than anything else. Why aren't there more reported cases of planes being struck by lightning? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Um. Planes are struck by lightning all the time. In fact they're designed to be struck by lightning and carry on as if nothing happened. Back when the skin of the aircraft was aluminum, the plane just became part of the lightning discharge path. Now that a lot of aircraft are carbon fiber and other composites, they have to be careful to leave metal conductive paths for the lighting to flow through/around the aircraft.",
"Lightning strikes planes all the time. But they are manufactured with lightning protection, so there hasn't been an accident caused by it since 1967. They are designed so that the aluminum frame of the aircraft is insulated from the interior, fuel tank, engines, etc. URL_0",
"Aircraft will often divert around storms rather than flying through them. The actual conditions to get lightning around a cruise altitude (say 20k feet and above) is actually very rare due to the height being above most layers of cloud. Finally when aircraft get hit it's nornally a non event, planes are designed to deal with lightning strikes so the pilots will report it to atc and then the ground crew but other than that nobody really need no. Passengers may not even notice anything other than the fact that they are flying through a storm."
],
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|
71ekrx | How are we able to 'sense' when someone is looking at us or that "gut feeling" of something being wrong? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dna6obl"
],
"text": [
"Your brain processes a lot more information than you are consciously aware. So you may see something in your peripheral vision or some noise that you didn't realise you noticed. This makes your subconscious uneasy as it is a base survivor instinct."
],
"score": [
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|
71flqn | How are old black and white movies remastered to technicolor? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dnadx93"
],
"text": [
"It's essentially someone painting colours over the black and white image. These days with software, of course. Open a black and white image in Photoshop, set the brush tool to 50% opacity or to Hue/Color instead of Normal, and start painting colours over the image, and you're doing the same thing. They have to guess or decide what colours to make things, so the colours you see aren't accurate at all, and it can be slow, painstaking work. These days, there are algorithms that can try to automatically do this, analyzing the image and making guesses on appropriate colours. In fact, there's a subreddit and bot for doing that right here: /r/colorizebot. It works by analyzing existing colour images and trying to determine similar shapes and textures -- oh, that big flat thing with wavy shapes must be the ocean, which in other images is always blue, and that tall thing that branches out is a tree, which in other images is green. Sometimes it does a pretty good job, but it's still just making up guesses. You can never get the actual accurate colours, because that information isn't in the picture."
],
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|
71g1wa | When the Federal Reserve increases or decreases interest rates, what does that mean? | URL_0 How does this effect the deficit and budget, who benefits when there is a decrease and vice versa? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dnah54n"
],
"text": [
"they change the lending rate, the rate that the banks pay to borrow money overnight. this raises the cost of capital for companies, makes them less likely to borrow to fund their operations, they slow their roll a bit. Sounds bad, but it causes civilians to save their money and it reloads the govts \"gun\" for spurring economic activity in a recession."
],
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71gt6f | Why do different countries use different power outlets? Why isn't there a universal outlet? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dnanpct"
],
"text": [
"Well, because basically, nobody wants to change their outlet design to another's. Neighboring countries have similar if not the same designs anyway. For example, my country has Japan's design because most of our imports come from Japan. It is easier too for imported products to just include adapters rather than change the dozens of outlets in millions of homes worldwide. It is not really necessary either. For example, the UK outlet have many safety measures that ensure that children will not be easily electrocuted, but if you insist that disposable chinese-made christmas lights must have the same precautions and cost of making, and essentially double their price, then you don't know economics."
],
"score": [
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|
71iclk | is eating meat really bad for us and if so, why? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dnax8cr"
],
"text": [
"Yarr! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [What are the verifiable advantages and disadvantages to being a vegetarian? ]( URL_6 ) 1. [ELI5: Why is red meat bad for us? ]( URL_2 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do bad things happen when we humans or animals eat food from our species? aka Cannibalization ]( URL_4 ) 1. [ELI5: Why is red meat reportedly so unhealthy? ]( URL_1 ) 1. [ELI5: Is it really unhealthy to eat human meat as a human? If so, why? ]( URL_5 ) 1. [ELI5:What makes red meat so bad for you? ]( URL_3 ) 1. [ELI5: Is a Vegan diet objectively healthier? Not concerned about the morals behind it... ]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wydt1/eli5_is_a_vegan_diet_objectively_healthier_not/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lqxfe/eli5_why_is_red_meat_reportedly_so_unhealthy/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2f46u3/eli5_why_is_red_meat_bad_for_us/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1a92px/eli5what_makes_red_meat_so_bad_for_you/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33ngfs/eli5_why_do_bad_things_happen_when_we_humans_or/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6r7bgi/eli5_is_it_really_unhealthy_to_eat_human_meat_as/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAskReddit/comments/1kmg28/what_are_the_verifiable_advantages_and/"
]
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] | [
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|
71igmg | What happens to your vocal cords when you lose your voice? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dnaxuex"
],
"text": [
"Yo ho ho! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5: How does losing your voice work? ]( URL_1 ) 1. [ELI5: What happens when you lose your voice? ]( URL_5 ) 1. [ELI5: What happens when you \"lose\" your voice? ]( URL_3 ) 1. [ELI5: What happens to our vocal chords when we lose our voice? ]( URL_7 ) 1. [ELI5: what happens when you \"lose your voice\"? ]( URL_0 ) 1. [ELI5: What's actually happening when you lose your voice? ]( URL_9 ) 1. [ELI5:What is happening when you \"lose your voice\"? ]( URL_4 ) 1. [ELI5: what exactly happens when you lose your voice? ]( URL_2 ) 1. [ELI5 what happens when you're losing your voice. ]( URL_8 ) 1. [ELI5 What happens medically when you lose your voice? ]( URL_6 )"
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2r0fb5/eli5_what_happens_when_you_lose_your_voice/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6z6dxk/eli5_how_does_losing_your_voice_work/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jvaki/eli5_what_exactly_happens_when_you_lose_your_voice/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ocj4n/eli5_what_happens_when_you_lose_your_voice/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3767ku/eli5what_is_happening_when_you_lose_your_voice/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32dv1c/eli5_what_happens_when_you_lose_your_voice/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/sdhft/eli5_what_happens_medically_when_you_lose_your/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6uwg6d/eli5_what_happens_to_our_vocal_chords_when_we/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15beaq/eli5_what_happens_when_youre_losing_your_voice/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fgg9k/eli5_whats_actually_happening_when_you_lose_your/"
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|
71j9y3 | What part of the sleep cycle cause "morning wood" and why does it cause arousal? Is there a similar phenomenon that women experience? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dnb51ep"
],
"text": [
"To my knowledge, as a vagina-haver, we don't have anything similar to morning wood. But our urethra is also separate from our sex organs."
],
"score": [
5
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"text_urls": [
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|
71k9px | Why do babies like being rocked back and forth? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dnbc9zp",
"dnbc61b"
],
"text": [
"Before they are born, they get used to being rocked in utero when mom moves around. Rocking post-birth is familiar and, therefore, comforting. This is also why swaddling and saying \"shhhh\" calms babies: They mimic the tight spaces and sound of mom's insides.",
"From what I've heard. It mimics the rocking motion babies feel when still in the womb. This gives them comfort."
],
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|
71odbn | How is sound transferred onto a vinyl record? How is it capable of stacking all the sounds (bass, guitar, percussion, vocals, etc.) and still sound so clear? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dnc9r9m"
],
"text": [
"All the various sounds we hear ultimately vibrate a single membrane in our ears. So if you are hearing the low rumble of a motor cycle driving by and the shrill sound of brakes being applied, both sounds vibrate your single ear drum but your brain can still tell them apart. For this reason we can layer sounds together into a single varying signal. In the case of a vinyl record it's in the form of 3 dimensional grooves that cause a tiny needly to vibrate. Those vibrations are converted into a pair of varying voltages along a wire."
],
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|
71p3eh | Why do cleansers (or other products) label that they can remove "99.99% of germs" as apposed to 100%? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dnceizy",
"dncek2z"
],
"text": [
"Yep, pretty much. There will always be that *tiiiiny* percentage of germs that the sanitiser either missed or somehow had managed to survive the sanitiser. So to cover their legal asses, companies that make hand soaps/sanitisers say 99.99% rather than a full 100%",
"There will always be some bacteria that resists. If that bacteria ends up being the next plague, ain't nobody gonna wanna take liability for not killing that."
],
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|
71pgly | How does the the human brain ignore the second “the”? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dnchaib"
],
"text": [
"A part of the brain remember all the thing we have already read starting by \"How does the \" and it automaticly skip the second \" the\" cause it would make no sense based on our reading memory."
],
"score": [
3
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|
71pw3p | why is it that we always see so many new awesome ways to fight cancer and yet it seems nothing of it is ever being used? | I mean, I see articles every week here on reddit about a new way to kill cancer cells etc. And it's been like that for years and yet none of these ever seem to be used to actually treat people. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"There are three main factors here. One is that medical treatments tend to get most of their news coverage when they're in early development, since that's when they're novel. It takes years for a new medical treatment to get from \"we're pretty confident this will work\" to mainstream usage, both because there are a lot of processes to follow to make sure it's actually safe and effective, and because when it's new it's really expensive and so the existing treatments continue to be used in some cases. The second is that unless you're an oncologist, you probably have no idea what methods are actually being used to treat cancer. Some of them are things you heard about a decade ago and now are the best choice and are used routinely, but there's no reason for you to know that. Survival rates for almost all kinds of cancer have gone way up in the last few decades, and while some of that has been due to improved detection, a bunch of it is new treatment methods. The 10-year prostate cancer survival rate has gone from 25% in 1971 to 84% in 2011, for instance. The third is that cancer treatment progress is incremental. It's incredibly rare that a new treatment or prevention method comes out and cuts the mortality rate for a kind of cancer in half or more. More commonly, a new treatment will come out that cuts the mortality rate by, say, 2 percentage points. For a common kind of cancer, that can be thousands of people per year that live when they would previously died, but it's not going to make that kind of cancer a non-issue. Cancer research is largely about stacking up a bunch of advancements like that, though, so that it can incrementally become less and less deadly.",
"A quick explanation of drug development is necessary. Translational research takes place at different levels; basic, preclinical, phase I, phase II, phase III, and phase IV. At the basic level, the properties of compounds are studied. Potentially useful compound proceed to the next level of research depending on the data. At the preclinical level, potential drugs are tested in cells and small mammals like mice. This is considered pre-clinical research. If results are promising, an expensive clinical can be considered. Phase I clinical trials test for toxicity in healthy people. They test the range limits to look at side-effects. If positive results, next level trials proceed. During phase II trials, efficacy is tested in the disease model patient. Patients with the disease are treated with potential drug within levels established in phase I are observed. If positive results occur, a larger scale study begins. The larger scale study is actually phase III. At this point, the FDA will clear the drug if phase III trials show that new drug treats the disease better than what's currently out. If approved, a drug enters the playing field and is continually observed for what's known as phase IV trials. Phase IV trials are not the same, but play an important role to observe very rare side-effects. It is impossible to track 1:1,000,000 effects in trials with only 50K patients. This ensures safety of patients. See the history of zimelidine for an example of a drug that was pulled during phase IV. The whole process costs 100s of millions of dollars and takes 10-20 years. If the drug fails anywhere along the process, there often no recovery of the investment. This is why new drugs cost a lot. 1. Sensationalized media coverage of early research: most basic science doesn't make it to the end of clinical trials. The number is very slim that anything gets to a phase I trial. If they do, 9/10 of those will fail somewhere along the process. If you get early work in the news, you're not getting an accurate representation of what's actually going to make it. Look at phase II successes to get more accurate results. The drop off in phase III is much lower then anything before it. By then, you've weeded out a lot of unsafe drugs. 2. Drug development is slow: from beginning to end, a drug will take 10-20 years of development before we can see it in the market. 3. Cancer isn't a single disease: cancer is actually a bunch of diseases, depending on where you get it and what subtype. Each is different and can't be treated the same, unless we're talking systemic delivery like dox or other cell poisons. A study for treating pancreatic cancer is only for that type of pancreatic cancer. If it works, it'll work for that type of cancer, not brain cancer or any of its subtypes. 4. Cancer evolves: the scariest part of cancer is that even if a drug makes it to the end of phase III trials and it is effective at killing cancer, it isn't all-encompassing. Cancerous cells divide fast and introduce errors at the genetic level and eventually produce resistance to the drug developed to fight it. One-single cell left behind by a therapy (99.99999% effective) can result in recurrence years later, meaner and stronger than before. Why? The drug that didn't kill it is now unable to kill the new cells with an ability to resist it. Combination therapies are the fad in literature because of this. I'm firmly behind it. TLDR; news likes to exaggerate or reports on things early in development. Most therapies don't make it to the end for various reasons. Cancer treatment is specific. One treatment doesn't work on others so what you read is not universal if it gets past phase III. Finally, cancer can evolve to resist new therapies even if they work.",
"Obligatory [relevant XKCD]( URL_0 ) Randall did a great job of identifying the problem with new drugs - sure, they kill cancer, but they also kill you. There are a million ways to kill cancer that we already have, but killing cancer while leaving the host alive is another problem. There's also the little problem that various types of cancer are weak to different things. It's like pokemon, in a way : you see a grass type, you use a fire move. You see a lymphoma, you use radiotherapy. There are many, *many* types of cancer, and they all demand slightly different methods of treatment. Back to the subject. So we find this new magic drug *VAPE420* that supposedly kills... idk, renal cell carcinoma cells really well. Eureka! Call the news! VAPE420 hits the headlines. We now have to make VAPE420 into an actual clinical drug. First, we make sure it doesn't kill too many normal cells in a petri dish. We then move on to mice. Does it kill them? No? Good. We then test them on healthy human volunteers. Phase 1. Does it harm them? Hopefully not! Good, they seem to be okay. We now test them on patients. Phase 2. Does it seem to work? Good. We now test it on even more patients. 3. Are there any major side effects etc? No? Great. We finally are able to sell the drug to the public, which starts Phase 4 of drug testing : feedback. This whole process can easily take 10+ years for *a single drug*. Congrats, you now have a single fire-type drug. We now need to make a water-type, a grass-type, a ground-type, etc etc etc. ------- Tl;dr 1. There are many types of cancer. 2. Different drugs are used for different types of cancer. 3. Drugs that kill cancer can also kill you. 4. Testing takes a long time so they won't kill you. 5. Many types x long time = ?",
"It may not be obvious but it is happening. My brother had lung cancer (never smoked a day in his life) 12 years ago. Through debilitating rounds lasting 6 months of then standard chemo and radiation he achieved remission. The cancer returned last year with a vengeance, it had metasisizdd in half a dozen places through his body and this time they did some crazy shit where there took some of his T cells, reprogrammed them in a lab and then grew some more copies, and injected them back into his body. He was in remission 1 month later, all traces of cancer gone, with one freaking injection. It was some astounding, straight up Star Trek medical technology. In full disclosure, the first two days after injection his body had a severe reaction to the reprogrammed cells, and he had nausea and high fever, but that was it. He walked out of the hospital and felt normal for the rest of the month. Sure as hell beat chemo!",
"Oncology BioPharm employee here: Awesome research is done every single day. Some at my company, some at the university level, some at government labs. Finding the 'cure' is relatively easy. Developing it, is not. You need to do ph0 or tox trials, this involves animal studies. Many great drugs die right here due to high toxicity. Remember cancer cells ARE human cells. The key is to be able to remove only cancer cells. Lots go away here. Then you need to do ph1 trials, this takes data from tox trials and starts dosing people, here you'll find out if the animal models predict toxicity to people. Lots fail here due to unexpected things. Then ph2 comes up, now you're looking to see if this treatment actually works. \"works\" is the key point. You can't do a null placebo, so you need to 'work' better than the standard of care. Lots fail here. Then ph3 which expands on dosing knowledge from ph2. Lots fail here. All of this takes years. Typically from discovery, you need a good 10+ years to do the trials above, plus the insane amount of characterization of the molecule and ALL of the degradation pathways with complete stability profiles for the drug expiry period.",
"There is a huge lag time between treatment discovery and actual usage. Not to mention probably 90% of the discoveries you see in the papers never make it to the hospital, after testing reveals significant side effects, or that it doesn't work in humans only mice, or some other reason. Also the non-science media likes to hype up discoveries far more than the researchers are comfortable with. Headlines like \"miracle cure\" and \"life saving treatment\" are rarely that, and even the researchers discovering them wouldn't describe them like that.",
"One analogy: Imagine the cure to cancer is like a long complicated staircase up a mountainside that we want to build. If we contact a bunch of carpenters and saying \"I need stairs up that mountain\", we're going to end up with 100 separate staircases being built at the same time, and maybe one of them will make it to the top. Many will fail though, and even the successful ones will take years and years to complete the job. Then there's also the fact that each type of cancer is different. Not every mountain is the same, and eventually we'd like to have stairs up *every* mountain. The good news is we can apply some of the same designs in each new staircase we build. We know this isn't the best way to get the job done. Instead, the way the treatment research works is \"We need stairs up that mountain, everyone build a piece and we'll put it together later.\" This way, no single person has to complete the whole task on their own. Also, the pieces that aren't useful for one mountain can be useful somewhere else. \"Curing\" cancer is a complicated process. I'm not in the medical field at all, but here's some layman examples of what those pieces of the staircase might look like. Some of these are more \"solved\" than others: 1. How do we identify cancer? *How do we make sure we avoid false negative and false positive tests? 2. How do we identify how \"bad\" the cancer is? *How do we determine urgency and severity of treatment? 3. How does cancer grow? How do the cells divide and multiply? What makes it so much different than regular cells? 4a. How do we tell cancer *cells* apart from other cells? * What sets them apart from other cells? The recent article about Poliovirus being used to fight cancer notes that the CD155 protein is more abundant in cancer cells than normal cells. That's one example. 4b. What can kill cancer cells *selectively*? * How do we kill the cancer cells without killing the normal cells? Is there something we can introduce to the body that ignores regular cells but still attacks cancer cells? How many mistakes does it make? Is it good at killing 50% of the cancer, or can it kill all of it? 4c. Is there anything capable of finding cancer cells? * As far fetched as it sounds, things like nano-bots are a brainstormed idea for this. If you can introduce a tool that is capable of searching out cancer cells and ignoring regular cells, then you can try and use them to kill the cancer cells. * Again, the recent article about Poliovirus mentions that the virus uses the CD155 protein as a receptor - which means it latches onto it. Since CD155 is more abundant in cancer cells, this ends up making Poliovirus \"target\" cancer cells more often than normal cells. The virus then does it's normal virus thing and starts a fight with the cell. Eventually white blood cells step as the club bouncers and throw both out the door. 4d. What is reliable at killing cancer cells? * IF we can find the cancer cells, what does it take to completely kill them? Some treatments just stop them from growing, and the tumour remains there until the cells die naturally and (maybe) get carried away. A benign tumour can still be a health issue. 5. How do we fix the damage the cancer caused? * How do we keep the cancer from killing the patient? 6. How do we fix the damage that the cure caused? * Whether we send in an army, a single spy, or a targeted strike-force, there's going to be some amount of collateral damage. How do we fix it? Chemo is an example of sending in an army. 7a. How do we prevent cancer from reappearing? * The poliovirus article has some information about the polio virus \"sticking around\" and helping the white blood cells identify cancer. It's like a snitch pointing out the problematic cells at the party so they can get thrown out before they hurt anyone. 7b. How do we make sure the \"prevention\" isn't damaging normal cells? 8. How do we prevent cancer from manifesting in already healthy patients?",
"They are being used. Look into the death and survival rates of cancer over time. There has been a significant improvement in our ability to treat and cure cancer over just the last 20 years. Cancer isn't really the big C word anymore. If you catch it early you are fine in almost all cases, now.",
"Mostly because when it comes to science, journalists are idiots. \"Cure for Cancer Found!\" makes a great headline, so that is the article they want to write, and that will color their view of the facts. The reality is novel treatments effective in a lab are found **all the time**. A blowtorch will kill cancer cells in a petri dish. Most will prove ineffective or impractical in people, and a few will become new treatments for very specific situations. Since that sort of steady, incremental change doesn't fit the cure for cancer narrative the reports are going for, they don't write a lot of follow-up stories.",
"Because it looks MUCH easier on paper. It can costs millions if not billions of dollars into researching that “new method”. Unless you’re bill gates, you’re going to have some trouble. Not to mention getting government authorization to conduct trials with experimental medicine and procedures, which can also be a problem. Also, people seem to forget that cancer is not just one disease. It’s just a term that covers 100+ diseases, a “cure all” cancer drug is like saying we have a “cure all” mental illness drug or a lung disease cure drug. It’s harder than it seems. A breast cancer cell is not the same as a brain cancer cell, they are completely different cells that just happen to divide uncontrollably.",
"I work for a clinical research organization and here’s what I can share. First off, before a drug or treatment can be released to the market, it will have to undergo 3 phases of human clinical trials. These phases can last for months or years. Phase I will assess the safety of the drug. This phase includes the study on Pharmacokinetics (movement of the drug inside the body - absorption, metabolism, excretion) and Pharmacodynamics (how the drug affects the body, i.e. side effects). This phase also includes identifying of the drug’s proper dosage. At this phase, the drug will only be tested on a small group or population. Phase II will test the efficacy of the drug. This is usually done on a bigger population than Phase I. Most studies in this phase are with one group receiving the experimental drug while the other group receives a placebo. Phase III is large-scale testing and usually provides a better understanding of the efficacy of the drug. Once the experimental drug successfully passed this phase, the sponsor or company can now request for FDA approval for marketing. An additional phase, Phase IV, is done once the drug is released to the market. This phase studies the long term effectiveness of the drug. Note that in this phase, a drug may be removed from the market depending on the findings. Based from my experience, most Oncology studies I have been part of are currently on Phase I and II, very few are now on Phase III. This is why it seems nothing of it is ever used because technically, the treatments are not yet “clinically proven” for public use or marketing. Also, I noticed that the studies’ experimental drugs are very specific to a type of cancer. Haven’t really encountered one that is more general. An additional difficulty as well is finding or meeting the number of patients who are willing to undergo the clinical trial. This is why it takes years to complete the 3 phases and also the reason why the drug is expensive once released to the market.",
"I heard a great quote about this from a cancer researcher \"If you're a mouse, and you've got cancer, we can cure you\" The wonder drugs work great on mice, which is when the media jump on it. Most don't work on humans. Those that do, don't get released for human use for another 10 years.",
"'Cancer' is not one disease, it is a group of many different varied and complex diseases, one of the issues with calling it all just cancer is that in pop science it is often assumed that all cancer cells are the same. There are hundreds of different factors and as we are learning more and more in the age of personalized medicine, the disease can vary from person to person even if it is the same 'type' of cancer. We know a lot about a few different pathways that can lead to carcinogenesis and are learning more every day, but usually these findings lead to more questions. Cancer is your body's own cells and genes malfunctioning, so blocking or trying to affect the pathways in cancer cells can, like many others have mentioned, affect your normal cells too, which is why lots of people have secondary malignancies after treatment to kill cancer cells- radiation may kill the cancer, but it can also mutate the DNA in your normal cells. Others have already mentioned the lengthy and expensive process to get drugs to a clinical use stage, so I won't go into that. **TL;DR** cancer is incredibly complex and pop science gets a lot of things wrong & sensationalizes treatments Edit: Wow! Thank you for the reddit gold, kind stranger!!",
"There is a long time from discovery to market, with tests, certifications and so on. Then, not all ideas pan out in practice. But, there is a bright side. We are getting better and better at fighting cancer. We have not found the silver bullet that cures all cancer yet, but we are improving on all fronts. Leukemia, which used to be a death sentence, now has a 95% survival rate. This moves fast. If you ever get cancer, don't look at any information older than, say 6-12 months, because it's outdated.",
"Cancer is a strange thing. There are many things in cells that can go wrong that cause them to divide uncontrollably. We currently don't have a one cure for all cancer, but several cures and treatments depending on what causes it. New treatments are in the early stage of development and there are many hurdles to overcome. The most important hurdle is to make sure that while killing cancer cells that the side effects, if any (usually there are), aren't more harmful to the patient. It's a lot like coding where a bug is found, is fixed, but may cause other bugs that then need to be fixed. There is also a level of success rate. Some people react to some treatments very well while others do not. Cancer cells are tricky, and can sometimes hide from a treatment and the body's own immune system. Progress is still being made, though slowly.",
"Stuff that works a certain way in a petri dish often doesn't work quite the same way in a functioning human body.",
"If you are asking this question you probably can't afford the treatment. People are being healed. Just not people in your income bracket.",
"Much of it is already being used. Just that they aren't as effective as you think, far from a cure all. Biggest problem is, every cancer is different. So it's hard to target it.",
"I would argue the initial question. You do see them coming out but you have to watch for them. For example Novartis just got their new CAR-T technology approved which was heralded as a break through 5 or more years ago. Unfortunately, not all of the treatments do make it to patients for limited efficacy or toxicity.",
"There's a lengthy time between Discovery and Application of these Therapies. Many of them are concerned with how they affect the Body after the treatment. Often these require Long-Time Studies that take, as the name implies, a really long time. Sometimes they are used on what I understand is called \"Low-Risk\" Patients. Which basically means their situation cannot get much worse but they are at the moment healthy enough and thus they can apply for medicinal studies and experimental treatments. *One of the Doctors I frequently talked to was quite a cynic and I really enjoyed his \"No BS\" attitude. He told me once: \"You know, we could have 100% Success Rate with Chemo- and Radiation Therapy if we stopped the Treatment only after all of the Cancerous Cells were gone. Sure, most of my patients would be dead but I guarantee that there wouldn't be any cancer cells in their bodies when we are done.\"* Source: Most of my next of kin suffer(ed) from Cancer, spent many Days in Hospital on Visit, asked this Question many Doctors. *Also I do want to note that at least in Middle Europe and from personal Experience the Quality and Success Rate of Cancer Treatments has come a quite long way (ignoring the fact that each patients case and type of cancer changes the survivability rating drastically).*"
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71tp8e | Why does a familiar word sound unfamiliar after you overly repeat it? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is a phenomenon called semantic satiation. When you hear a word, your brain isn't really paying attention to the sounds, it is translating those sounds into an idea, and is primed to put it together with other words to form a more complex idea. When you repeat a word over and over, your brain stops recognizing it as a word, and it breaks down into sounds that really have nothing to do with what the word means.",
"Others have already explained this accurately; I wanted to add a bit about things related to this. Consider the brain. Natural selection has determined we need to process things very quickly to react to them. In this way, the brain abstracts an output of senses into a \"symbol\" that it can process readily. When observing children's pictures of houses, you will notice that after five years old or so, they will nearly *always* put a door knob on a door. Even if it's more of a handle or something else, they will put the thing there that their mind associates with \"mechanism for opening doors\". This makes drawing difficult because you need to see the world without abstraction in order to replicate it. One exercise to do so is to draw the \"vase or two faces\" picture while saying the part of the face you are drawing until you can do both sides without messing up. It forces you to remove the association of the words with the image you are making. As you get into this mental state, you will begin to lose the symbolic association your mind makes with the items in the world and see them for the shapes and colors they are. This is like a grander scale of losing track of the meaning of a word. It's losing track of the meaning of everything you see while simultaneously really seeing it for the first time. If you're interested in more, the book \"Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain\" is a great read. Sure, left/right brain stuff is scientifically inaccurate, but as a metaphor for linear vs abstract thought, it works.",
"You have stumbled on to a very deep question about how we understand the world. This issue is a major concern for AI studies (Artificial Intelligence, since this is for 5 year olds) The human mind has an amazing ability to take a single word and understand a complete concept. Take the word \"chair\" for example. We all just know what a chair is. Size, color, shape and many other features may be in the background but your mind instantly has the idea \"chair\". This is the default position in your mind as it is most likely what you need. However if you start repeating the word \"chair\" your mind refocuses on the actual word. The sound, the intonation, the break down of the parts of of the word. This feature of the human mind, the ability to move from a lager abstract concept of a single word to a specific breakdown of the same word is very interesting to anyone trying to create computers that actually \"think\" like humans.",
"To add to this, it is similar to when you're eyes look at something for too long and don't focus as well on the thing you are looking at. The receptors in your eyes start to get too used to the stimulus and send less new information to the brain. That is why eyes move around a lot when looking at anything such as when reading and looking at television. Sounds will be similar because it would be the receptors receiving the same exact stimulus over and over again so your brain begins to focus less on the whole words and the meaning becomes fuzzy much like an image becomes less focused.",
"It's basically the same confusion and irritation you experience realizing you are manually breathing, manually holding your jaw up (neither closed or fully open), manually blinking, your ears pop when you swallow, you have to find a good resting place for your tongue, what direction your pupil is facing when you sleep, etc. The trick is to not think about it, but now that I mentioned these things, you are thinking about them all.",
"It's called semantic satiation! There were some experiments done in the '60s and apparently what happens is a specific pattern is triggered in your brain by a word/phrase as you're parsing its meaning. If you do this repeatedly, the intensity of the reaction decreases",
"It is actually something called Jamais Vu, a similar phenomenon to Deja Vu. Semantic satiation is the end result of the process. heres a simple video that explains it. URL_0",
"In a word: uniqueness. When teaching a dog a trick with a word, like to sit, or to lay down, the dog doesn't *actually* understand what the word(s) mean; they realize the unique sound that the command makes relative to the sound of everything else, and those unique combinations of sounds \"to sit\" trigger a part of the dog's brain to react to it. It's very primal, but the same effect applies to humans: we choose different sounds for different words because unique sounds allow us to separate meanings for the different particular sounds. We do this for THOUSANDS of sounds and attach more *meaning* or *command* to these sounds whereas you would only teach a dog a few sounds with probably a single command that the dog should react with. When you mess with the \"uniqueness\" of sounds, by repeating it over and over again, it starts to lose the reason why it was a word to begin with, and, to your brain, reverts to nothing more than a generic sound that your brain has very little remaining synapse connections to (at the moment) but also intensely trying to understand because it does know what it should mean as the few synapses do trigger a larger understanding in your brain (\"it's on the tip of my tongue\" phenomenon)",
"Probably because you start incrementally realizing how absurd the word is, and how it sounds. Then language itself starts breaking down and you wonder what you sound like to people who don't speak your native tongue. Then you start feeling sorry for the dog who has to put up with it all day.",
"I... Have some learning disability and this doesn't effect me. Can someone explain how this feels? I've seen this talked about a lot and I can repeat a word 100s of times and never get to this point.",
"the neurons in your brain which encode the meaning of the word stop firing, so you do not \"feel\" the meaning anymore, because they have adapted (the same underlying mechanism which causes you to see green when you close your eyes after looking at red) but the neurons in your brain which encode the sound of the word are still firing so your brain feels the sound but not the meaning",
"I don’t recall experiencing this audibly, but i do know if i write a word repeatedly i start to question it’s spelling even if it’s correct. Probably the same phenomenon though.",
"a podcast called \"a way with words\" has a good term for this. they called it the \"gnarly foot\" syndrome. essentially, the longer you look at your foot, the weirder it seems we have such an odd appendage on our body. Search for that episode. explains this pretty well - better than we can do here.",
"So, I've a question in-relation to this one: who else out there doesn't actually experience this? I can't imagine I'm alone in that regard.",
"Many of the top answers are incomplete. The answer is neurologic. Here's a true Eli5 answer. Neurons are used for your senses. Neurons are kind of like guns firing. When you continuously expose yourself to a sensation, a neuron cannot continuously fire, just like a gun cannot continuously shoot a bullet. Just like the gun has to reload, the neurons also have to take some time to reload. There are several other examples: Try staring at something for a long time. You will eventually stop seeing it. When you wear a cap, you eventually stop feeling it. Throughout the day you adapt to your clothes being there and are not continuously \"feeiling\" them. Try smelling some perfumes. As you smell one a few times, you start to get used to it. Many perfume places have a coffee bean scent, which helps to reset the neurons.",
"There's a great video on this that explains it far better than I could, ( URL_0 ) but basically, when you overstimulate the neurons necessary for recalling something (A word for example) they get exhausted and can't continue to be stimulated. That's why when you say pencil once, it's normal, but when you say it for the 67th time, you're like \"How the heck is this even a word?\""
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71xs7q | Why might it be so hard for me to fall asleep again after waking up, but once my alarm goes off and I'm supposed to wake up, I suddenly can't stop hitting snooze and going back to sleep? | Been experiencing versions of this pretty much my entire life, including now since I just moved into a new space and I'm not used to the light streaming in or the sounds of traffic in the morning yet. So I always wake up a few hours early, and, despite being still exhausted, can't fall totally back asleep. I'm always in a half-asleep state where I'm not totally aware of time passing, but still very aware that I'm not asleep. But when my alarm actually goes off and I HAVE to get up, my body suddenly stops tensing up and my brain stops running and I have no problem hitting snooze over and over again just to catch a few more minutes of sleep. Why does this happen? Is there any method I can use to alleviate this issue? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It basically has to do with your sleep cycle. Through the night, you come in and out of very deep (REM) sleep 4 to 5 times. When you wake up naturally, it’s because your body was already at a point of very light sleep so it was easy to wake up and stay awake. By contrast, your alarm is probably waking you up at a deeper point in your sleep cycle so your body doesn’t want to wake up yet. There are apps on the App Store that will track your sleep patterns just by setting your phone on the nightstand next to you and it will then wake you up at the lightest point of your sleep within a 30 minute window. I won’t name the one I use because I’m not here to promote but it has been extremely effective for me."
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723jzu | How do those huge construction cranes that are tens of stories high get to where they are? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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723nra | Why do your legs fall asleep when you sit on the toilet for a long time but not when you sit in a regular chair? | Edit: Thank you for all the advice on why it takes me so long to shit. My problem, however, is getting distracted by my phone and just sitting there after the business is done thus causing tingling legs. Guess that's more of a personal problem though. I could have googled but thought of y'all instead- take that how you want. (: Edit 2- I'm strangely proud that a question about the shitter has been my most viral post. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The toilet seat puts pressure on the nerves leading to your legs by allowing your butt to sink into the giant hole in the middle. This puts the bottom of your femur (thigh) under a lot of pressure, when that area would normally not be because our butts are designed to carry fat to protect our sacrum (tailbone) and the nerves that go through it/ around it. What happens is essentially the same thing as if you were to lean on one arm for too long- it's not so much a blood flow issue, although that can contribute in a minor way, but rather the compression of nerves. We discussed this in a class in my nursing program (I'm studying to be a registered nurse) because they make a pillow referred to as a \"donut.\" It's supposed to help older adults feel more comfortable in a hospital bed, (especially because they don't have butt fat anymore) but instead it has the same effect as sitting on the toilet for hours on end. Companies try to market it to prevent pressure ulcers on patient's rear ends, but it's actually bad for them. Now you know! Edit: wow guys! Thanks for all the upvotes, and your wonderful comments :) Other users have pointed out the actual muscles and nerves involved: the toilet seat puts pressure on the piriformis muscle, which then compresses the sciatic nerve. That nerve compression is what causes the unpleasant feeling.",
"Toilet seat has a rim. Smaller surface area means it presses on your legs with higher force. So has higher tendency to slow down blood going into your legs. Regular chairs on the other hand are flat, have higher surface area, so less pressure, and less force pressing on your legs. So less tendency to slow blood flow. Edit: the comment below me corrected me. The higher force presses on the nerves, not blood flow. thank you.",
"Doc here, I know it's late but here's an actual explanation: The feeling that you get is due to what we call neuropraxia, which is the mildest form of nerve injury. When you sit on a regular chair, your weight is distributed primarily on your ischial tuberosity(i.e. \"sit bones\") and other soft tissue meant for weight-bearing. When you sit on a toilet seat, the weight shifts to where it's putting your weight onto your sciatic nerves(the major nerve in your leg). This compression of the nerve causes this mild, reversible nerve injury and is responsible for the \"falling asleep\" feeling you experience.",
"same amount of weight, smaller surface area. you know how a bed of nails works? if all of your body was on one nail, that one nail would hold all of your weight and poke into you with all of your weight. (this has a name: normal force is the force that pushes you back when you push on something.) on a bed of nails, you're suspended on many, many nails, and even though theyre ALL sharp, each nail only holds a tiny fraction of your weight, so it pokes into you less. (also the reason snowshoes work. more surface area > each inch of snow is holding less of ur weight and is less likely to crumble.) so, all of ur body weight is on the seat of the toilet, so a larger fraction of ur weight is on each inch of rim, because there's less seat, so it's \"poking\" you more. where a normal chair has more even weight distribution. more force on each inch of ur body > more likely itll fall asleep. (ive also had my butt fall asleep after sitting on a chair for a looong time. it just takes longer.)",
"Wouldn't the concave shape of the toilet seat cut more circulation off than say the convex shape of a proper chair? As far as I can tell, most toilet seats including the one I sit on this very second, has a concave shape",
"Have you ever had someone sit on your lap and thought, \"wow, they have a boney butt!\" What you're feeling are the ischial tuberosities, the lowest part of a bone of the pelvis. When sitting on a flat surface (in this case a chair) these boney projections prop up the body away from the nerves that run from the spinal cord down into the legs (the sciatic nerves). Because the ischial tuberosities of the pelvis are fairly centrally located, when sitting on a toilet seat they don't prop up the body - and as a result you compress the sciatic nerves. Nerves really don't like to be pinched, pulled, or compressed. I think everyone has \"hit their funny bone\" enough to understand this quite nicely. Note: the reason the answer to this question has nothing to do with blood flow is that the main blood supply to the lower limbs are from the femoral arteries, which are located on the front of the legs, not the back.",
"Also I think due to the angle you're getting more direct pressure onto your sciatic nerves",
"Do you reddit on the toilet (of course you do, don't bother answering). Your elbows are probably digging into the tops of your thighs and the hard seat rim into the bottom, and the combination is enough to reduce blood flow, causing your numbness.",
"Piggybacking to say: also why does my ass hurt/fall asleep after 1 hour of a flight across the US but feels fine after 6 hours on a computer chair",
"The rim at the edge of the toilet seat puts pressure on a nerve that runs along the back of your leg called the sciatic nerve.",
"The same reason being stabbed with a pencil will penetrate skin but being hammer punched with the same force doesn't. The weight of the body is evenly spread out over a chair, but when on the toilet the weight of the body is concentrated on a smaller portion of the leg, which also has major blood vessels running where that pressure is applied.",
"You don't notice it but you reposition and adjust on a regular chain frequently. On a toilet you don't really have that luxurie as your ass is inside of a hole. You can move your legs a bit but that's it. You have to move your butt from the hole to unpinch those nerves. Lots of people get distracted by their phone and don't even realize their legs are gone until they try to move them. Your legs will fall asleep in a regular chair if you keep them still long enough",
"Because my arms are rested on my legs while I visit Reddit cutting blood flow to the lower legs making me paralyzed and my legs useless.",
"Actually, my legs fall asleep even when I sit on chairs and sofas too. As long as whatever you're sitting on reduces your body's circulation it can make your legs fall asleep.",
"I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that there is a hole for you ass in the toilet seat, for obvious reasons. This put more stress on the back of your thighs which blocks off blood flow. That's my logic anyway.",
"Because your legs are way more inclined in the toilet (for you to dump easier), and you are literally sitting on a hole so the blood in the area that is in the border has a difficult time trying to reach your legs due to pressure.",
"I think leaning forward creates more pressure as well as the relatively thin surface your legs are supported by. I have crappy posture to begin with and I think it gets worse in there. I also spend too long sitting like that. I spent the first 30 seconds going, the last minute cleaning up and the other 20 minutes playing games on my phone in the one place in the house where nobody can come bother me. Except for the cat. That motherfucker follows me everywhere and bites my toes while I poop.",
"It’s because when you sit on a chair, your gluteal muscles (butt muscles) and the ischium (butt part) of the pelvis take most of the weight. When you sit on a toilet, your gluteal muscles and ischium are suspended by the basin of the toilet and most of the weight is beared by the semitendinosus and bicep femoris muscles (big parts of your hamstring). Coincidentally these hamstring muscles are right behind the sciatic nerve, which is the largest nerve in the body, and is solely responsible for almost all of the feeling and motor function of the leg. So when you sit on the toilet, after a while, those muscles put pressure on that nerve and cause your legs to go numb. EDIT: spelling"
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7241u8 | how does the us government spend so much on healthcare and still doesn't have a single payer system? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The 18% GDP are *not* spent by the government, that's the whole point. The reasons why US healthcare spending is so high are: * Insurers are for-profit companies, their profits have to be paid for. * Going through med school is very expensive, so doctors need a very high salary - the healthcare system is also paying for their student loans. * Due to the many insurers, pricing and billing end up being horrendously complex, and the system has to employ tens if not hundreds of thousands of people to negotiate bills. * Since many people are uninsured and poor, they cannot get preventative care, so things that could be healed easily and cheaply early on often go untreated until the people end up in the emergency room, where the hospital has to treat them (very expensively) even if they can't pay, so everyone else ends up paying for them. * The healthcare system also pays for billions of marketing dollars spent by drug companies to convince people to ask their doctor for their product over a virtually identical cheaper competitor."
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72461k | How can we know that the observable universe is 46.1 billion light years in radius, when the furthest object we can see is 13.3 billion light years away? | The furthest object from our point of reference is [13.3 billion light years away]( URL_1 ) from us, but we know that the universe has a diameter of [92 billion light years]( URL_0 ). I know the reason for the universe being bigger than 28 billion light years (or so) is because space can expand faster than the speed of light, but how exactly can we measure that the observable universe has a radius of 46.1 billion light years, when we shouldn't be able to see that far? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"First off, while its true that the furthest object is 13.3 billion light years away, we can actually see stuff 13.8 billion light years away. This \"stuff\" is the beginning of the universe, back when everything was just one giant hot soup of matter and energy, rather than distinct objects. Second, when we say we see something \"x billion light years away\" what we really mean is that we are seeing light from something x billion years ago. This is relevant, because it means that the thing we see is not happening in \"real time\". So, its location in space that we see it right now is, say, 13.3 billion light years away from us, but that was (roughly) 13.3 billion years ago. In that time, the empty space between us and that galaxy has expanded, meaning if you could send an instantaneous probe to wherever that galaxy was now, it would have to travel much further than 13.3 billion light years to reach it. We just get the number 92 billion light years by assuming the universe expands at a constant rate, and calculating how far away the edge of the observable universe is today (instead of back in time when we see it). Also, the universe is *at least* 92 billion light years. It could definitely be bigger, but 92 billion is just the largest we have a reference point to calculate from.",
"Imagine someone (Alice) standing 14 meters away. They roll a ball toward you at 1m/s. It takes 14 seconds to reach you. That would be light in a universe that isn't expanding. Alice was 14 m away when they rolled the ball, it took 14 sec to reach you, and they're 14 m away now. Now imagine next to that person, a second person, Bob, standing on an infinite treadmill moving away from you. Bob also rolls a ball toward you. Imagine both balls reach you at the same time. The first thing you'll now is that Bob must have been closer to you than 14 m because his ball has been moved backward by the treadmill. (Remember that all balls (light) move at basically the same speed) So we can figure out that light we see from 13.8 gya (giga years ago) was actually emitted by objects closer than 13.8 billion light years away. However, Bob is also on the treadmill. On an arbitrary treadmill where different regions move at different stores, it would be possible that Bob is still less than 14 m away. For example if the area near us were moving faster. However, our treadmill (i.e. universe) is actually moving faster the farther away it is. We can calculate therefore that Bob is now actually about 47 m away. So, the way we can know about objects 47 billion light years away is that they were much closer to us when they emitted the photons we're seeing.",
"The radius of the sphere that is the cmb/observable universe is 13.8b ly. That makes the diameter 27.6b ly. The things we see that are 13.8b ly away aren't happening live, it's in the *past*. To see those things as they are *today*, we would have to wait 46.5b years because space is expanding/increasing the distance between us. Greater distance being traveled means longer wait. The radius of the sphere that is the cmb/observable universe that will allow us to see those things as they are right *now* will be 46.5b ly. That makes the diameter 93b ly. I used [this]( URL_1 ) for radius to diameter calculation. Scientists use [Hubbles Law]( URL_0 ) to calculate expansion, it's tricky but sharing in case you're interested.",
"The universe is expanding, so while we may see light from 13+ billion years ago, the galaxies we are seeing it from have moved away from us a greater distance than that. We know this due to the Doppler effect on the light from those galaxies",
"So what’s the current theory of what’s outside this? Just empty space?",
"This will sound weird and also a bit off topic, but for an audiobookI had the idea of a ship that could 'move' space instead of itself movinh through it, how impossible is this really?",
"What is at the edge of the universe?",
"How do we know that that light is 13billion yrs old? I know Im stupid.",
"What the top comment said, to simplify it when we are looking at stars we are basically looking back in time"
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7248ig | How did our ancestors deal with deteriorating eyesight without glasses/contact lenses? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You could do a lot of what needed to be done with deteriorating eyesight. Plowing, harvesting, cooking, cleaning, etc. don't really require great eyesight. Things like sewing and carpentry might be harder, but managing a household or a business would be a team effort most of the time and you could shift those tasks to someone with better vision. Note also that there'd be fewer people with failing vision due to Type 2 diabetes, which is so common now.",
"I think it didn't matter as much back then...sharp eyesight isn't really important when you can't read.",
"The reason wearing glasses is associated with being smart, is because in olden days only people who were able to read would need them, since most other jobs were physical labour where 20/20 vision was not required.",
"It really didn't matter. If you don't know how to read and you're not spending your life working in a factory, working on small parts, having blurry vision isn't that big of a deal - as long as you see well enough to not get eaten by a bear, you're doing OK.",
"There are accounts of chinese sleeping with small weighted bags on their eyelids to impart a temporary deformation of the eye and some correction, though imprecise. Anyone got any links?",
"First off, not all myopia is detrimental. I have 20/25 vision and I don't need correction at all. In fact, my optometrist says that is beneficial with the amount of work I do on the computer. However, you're probably referring to myopia where correction would be beneficial, in not necessary. That severe of myopia was very uncommon before the last 100 years or so. In fact, it's so much more common today that it is considered a modern epidemic. [This video] ( URL_0 ) does an excellent job of going through the evidence. Basically, it's not computer screens or time spent reading that causes nearsightedness. It's spending *too little* time outside. Your eyes need exposure to seeing long distances in the sun to counteract the time you spend viewing objects up close."
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725o5a | Why does 0! equal 1? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sometimes working with 0 and/or infinity in mathematics boils down to asking questions like, \"Which way of looking at this is the most consistent with what we've done with non-zero values? Of the values that might make sense here, which one breaks the fewest rules?\" One of the arguments for 0!=1 is based on the fact that n! represents the number of ways you can arrange *n* objects in a row or in a line/queue. There are 24 ways I can put 4 coins in a row on a table top, 6 ways I can put three coins in a row, two ways I can put two coins in a row, one way I can put one coin in a row, and the only way to represent zero coins in a row is to remove all coins from the table. Since that's the only representation of 0 coins in a row, 0!=1. Edit: recommended YouTube videos: [Matt meets Jordan Ellenberg]( URL_1 ) (deals with a different question, but still makes good points about how we approach hard math questions) and Numberphile's [zero factorial]( URL_0 )",
"It is defined to be that for consistency. There are a number of reasons for that. For example, for any factorial of a number n, we can write n! = n*(n-1)! And if we set n = 1 we get 1! = 1*0! therefore 1! = 0! = 1 Another reason is that a factorial expresses the amount of combinations that can be made of a set of n objects. If I have 2 objects (like a red and blue ball) I can arrange them 2 distinct ways: {red, blue} and {blue, red}. If I have just 1 red ball I have 1 arrangement {red}. If I have no balls (lol) then I only have 1 arrangement: { } which is just having nothing.",
"n! is the number of different orders you can arrange n items in. 1! = 1 { red } - > red 2! = 2 { red, blue} - > red, blue; blue, red 3! = 6 { red, blue, green} - > red, blue, green; red, green, blue; blue, red, green; blue, green, red; green, red, blue; green, blue, red There is only one way you arrange a set with no items in it, so it makes sense to define 0! = 1. It also makes other math using factorials work out better."
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7285za | Movie Volume - Action scenes VS dialogue | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's more of a side effect when converting from surround sound to stereo. Because surround has 7 speakers around you, each one requires less volume to make a large total sound. When you compress these 7 speakers into 2 for stereo, the action sequences that use all 7 speakers normally, get compressed into two speakers and are made very loud. While the dialogue scenes with only 2 speakers being used initially, are not compressed so they are at their initial volume which is very quiet compared to the action scenes."
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72alpf | How can someone have an artery cut and bleed to death within minutes, but someone loses a limb and they can survive for a considerable amount of time? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, if a limb was completely severed, the person probably would die quickly. The reason we hear about soldiers in the middle east getting hit with an IED and surviving, but loosing a limb is because of field medics and a wonderful thing called tourniquets. If a limb is completely removed, the arteries and veins will obviously be severed, too. This of course means that if the body cannot shunt the blood from the extremity, the person will go unconscious very quickly and ultimately die. If you were to puncture an artery in your leg but someone applied a tourniquet quickly, you'd most likely survive it."
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72asky | Why do dentists tell us to not brush too hard to protect the Enamel, but they take sharp tiny hooks and scrape your teeth with it. | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"IANAD but I was told that you can't really brush off the enamel. It's more to prevent gum damage from over-scrubbing.",
"In addition to what others have stated, you also (should) brush your teeth twice a day, whereas they use their metal tools maybe twice a year on you. (Though it is mostly because hard brushing causes damage to the gums, while the tools are used on the teeth and don't scrape your gums.)"
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72awjn | What actually happens during brain-freeze? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nerve endings in your mouth become cold and numb and the heat from your body warming them up causes the pain in your head."
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72b829 | How do we know that the speed of light is the fastest possible speed? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not that the speed of light is the maximum. It's that there has to be a maximum speed for our physics math to work out correctly (and thereby describe the results of experiments correctly that we can check). Light just moves at this maximum speed, because light doesn't have mass. If the maximum speed would be different, light would move at that speed instead. Light doesn't dictate the speed, it follows it.",
"It's nothing to do with light. It's simply that our universe appears to be constructed in such a way that the fastest two objects can change position relative to each other is that speed. That's difficult to get your head around, but it's best way scientists have of explaining some very odd things about the universe. In particular, some scientists trying to measure the speed of light got some very weird results, and at first thought their experiments had gone wrong. But then Einstein gave scientists a theory that would make sense of those experiments. His theories also made sense of the way the planet Mercury moves, which isn't *exactly* how Newtonian theories predict. Einstein's theory made some predictions of its own, which could be tested. For example, if you had two atomic clocks, took one of them up in a very fast jet fighter and flew it around at high speeds for a while, the prediction was that the clocks should then be very slightly out of sync. So that experiment was conducted, and the prediction was confirmed (it's a phenomenon called \"time dilation\"). Einstein also predicted that gravity would affect light, while Newton's theories predicted that it wouldn't. Einstein's prediction was proved correct when scientists carefully observed a solar eclipse and were able to see a star that in a Newtonian universe should have been hidden, proving that the sun's gravity had very slightly bent the light from that star. As long as experiments and observations continue to support Einstein's theories, those theories will continue to hold water. You cannot make any two objects in the universe move towards or away from each other at more than the speed of light."
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72fjph | What exactly is a game "engine" and what is its purpose? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Things you care about as a game designer: the plot, the art, how the graphics look, the music. Things you don't care about: how the graphics are rendered, how input from the keyboard gets to your system, etc. The engine, ideally, gives you a nice and simple interface to access common game functionality, without making you care too much about the details of it. Pretend you're taking a road trip. You want to look up the route and some cool places to eat or sights to see. You don't want to have to care about how the gears in your transmission work, or whether the ECU in the engine is supplying enough fuel.",
"When you're programming a game, there are a huge number of things that have to be taken into account - especially in modern games. There are of course the very obvious things - the characters look like this, the main character's health regenerates that fast, this gun shoots x bullets per second and does y damage, etc. But along with that there's a lot of stuff that's more \"under the hood.\" How do objects interact with gravity and other physical forces when they hit a wall, or roll down a hill? Where is the light source, and how does it reflect and scatter off of a lake? How does the computer or console actually take a button input and transfer it into a game action, how does it render textures, how does it generate the world and populate it with characters when you load up the game? The game engine is what handles most or all of that \"under the hood\" stuff. And many games start with an already-made engine (like the Unreal series) because it saves a *huge* amount of time and cost that would come from building and testing a brand-new engine. With that as a starting point, they can make changes to it as they see fit and add the details of their game of top of it. Dishonored 2 used a heavily modified version of an engine called ed Tech 5 - so they started with that and made lots of customizations to it. Since they changed it so much, they decided to name their version of the engine, and so they named it something that was significant to their project, \"Void.\"",
"I won't repeat the other posters here but I will use an analogy. A game engine for creating a game is similar to Photoshop for creating/editing an image. Without Photoshop (or similar software) perhaps you want to increase the contrast of the photo... well you would have to literally go through all the pixels and slightly modify their numerical color values and it would take a really, really long time. Photoshop knows that this is a common thing that people want to do, so it has a simple button that you can click, drag, whatever to perform this action in seconds. A game engine, like other types of software, is essentially just a large collection of things that game developers might want to do that are pre-programmed so they can be done easily and quickly rather than painstakingly from the ground up. Sometimes developers build an entirely new game engine from scratch, and usually that is because they want to do things that no other game has done before and therefore no existing game engine has it pre-programmed in."
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72ftkb | If I only get three hours of sleep over night but take a four hour nap is it like I got a full nights sleep? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most likely, yes. Your sleep cycle is divided into parts like deep sleep and REM, and you go through several such cycles every night during a normal eight-hour rest. Now, if your three-hour rest was interrupted halfway through a cycle, that can be very disruptive. But as long as you are able to get a high quality of sleep for your nap you should be fine. Disclaimer: I am not a sleep doctor and wouldn't make a habit of it, because a four-hour nap is likely to be lower-quality sleep than what you really need. But once in a great while won't do too much harm.",
"There are different types of sleep cycles. What you are describing is similar to a biphasal sleep cycle where you break your sleep up into multiple parts. Throughout college I lived on a sleep cycle of four hours at night and 2 in the afternoon. By breaking up your sleep you don't need as much overall."
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72hdqi | If Nazis were socialist, why are they considered far right and not far left? | Repost | explainlikeimfive | {
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"**Nazis were not socialists**, anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or stupid. They had \"socialist\" in their name but there was nothing socialist about their ideals - it was just a holdover from the popularity of socialism among the working classes when they started out -like how the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) is not at all a democracy. The Nazis *hated* socialists and communists and killed them in the Holocaust. [This guy says pretty much the same thing]( URL_0 ).",
"While the Nazis did get support by promising to use the power of government to end the miserable suffering that many Germans experienced after WWI, that was about the limit of similarities with Marxist socialism. The biggest difference is that Marxist socialism seeks to abolish elite control over the means of production while Nazi national socialism sought to make party-loyal Germans the elite class.",
"They weren't really socialists. The way they used the term \"Socialism\" differs quite a lot from any other use of the word. They were pretty much trying to re-define the term completely, into their ideology. Socialism as a term was fairly popular at the time, and they made use of that popularity.",
"Pimarily because of their 1.) Racist ideologies, and 2.) Elitist social structure Both of which are counter to socialist theory. Never underestimate people's ability to ignore the obvious, especially when they're being ordered to ignore the obvious....",
"They were not actually socialist. Nazis actually seen socialists as a threat, and hated communists more than red scare era America. They called themselves socialists in an attempt to draw the workers vote."
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