title stringlengths 0 299 | text list |
|---|---|
why do states like alabama not have a lottery | [
"I don't know this to be true, but it's probably BECAUSE of the casinos.",
"Alabama's casinos are run by Native Americans on their soil. As such, they enjoy a loophole in federal and state laws that allows them to be run, although as I understand it, there's no table games, just slot machines and such. Texas is constantly fighting with this same loophole regarding casinos, although it has a lottery much like Georgia.\n\nBut continuing, lotteries would be a state wide thing, and the state of Alabama does not run lotteries, pretty much the end of the argument on why it's banned.\n\nNot only is the thought process about poor families and getting people into trouble with debt (and furthering the argument, causing them to be robbers, in effect, if desperate enough), but there's a religious aspect of it that considers gambling to be a sin. Plenty of votes to be won/lost on that.\n\nReality is, there's no technical or logical reason to have or not have either a lottery or casinos (or casinos with table games, for that matter), but there are always religous and emotional reasons, and because they can make or break a voter's decision making... \n\nThere ya go."
] |
Why are chips and salsa generally given for free at most Mexican restaurants? | [
"It's like bread and butter at an Italian restaurant. Something to snack on before your meal gets out, cheap and generally likable.",
"For the same reason pubs give out free nuts. They're all incredibly salty, which dehydrates you, and because of that you're very likely to buy more drinks than you would otherwise."
] |
Why does brightness and staring too much at a screen produce eye fatigue and headaches? | [
"This is what's known as computer vision syndrome. \n\nWhen you're staring at the computer screen for hours at a time, your eyes have to stay focused on it. The muscles that focus and move your eyes are fast-twitch muscles, and aren't really designed to focus the way we do on computer screens. \n\nIIRC, when using a monitor, our eyes have to focus and refocus thousands of times an hour. We also tend to blink less, so our eyes dry out\n\nAs far as the light goes, it's the blue light that gets ya. Blue light penetrates father into the eye than red light. \n\nTo help reduce this, there are things you can do:\n\n1. Make sure you have the correct eyeglass prescription. \n\n2. Every 20 minutes look at a point 20ft away for 20 seconds and blink 20 times. \n\n3. Get a pair of computer glasses that filter out blue light. Gunnar makes good computer glasses, and your optometrist probably has a coating that has the same effect. \n\n4. Place a light behind your monitor. \n\nSource: semester long report I had to do about Computer Vision Syndrome.\n\n It's totally possible I got some things wrong since Im on mobile and don't have my report handy or access to the journal articles I used to write it.\n\nEdit: [Here is a pretty good source on Computer Vision Syndrome](_URL_0_)"
] |
Tourettes Syndrome. | [
"I have mild Tourettes, although it has almost entirely gone away as I got older. My ticks are entirely physical, and are all related to stretching some part of my body (including weird parts, like my rolling my eyes back to stretch the muscles that limit their movement). I never had anything remotely similar to a verbal tick.\n\nFor me at least, a \"tick\" is essentially like an itch. Its an irresistible physical urge you can feel in the part of your body affected. It builds slowly, until the desire to relieve the urge is utterly consuming. I remember trying to fight it as a child, hoping if I was strong enough I could \"will\" it away. Eventually, you always give in. What this means though, is you can exercise a limited degree of self-control to minimize social awkwardness. For example, if I need to roll my eyes, I try to make sure my eyes are *closed* first. \n\nI rarely get the urge to tick anymore. It first manifested in elementary school - I was told that taking Ritalin for ADHD triggered it. Over the years, the urges became less and less powerful. By high school, it only happened if I was extremely nervous, or happened to think about ticking. Thanks to this post, I am ticking like crazy at the moment. But it will pass, and it is worth it to educate people on a misunderstood issue.",
"I don't have it myself, but I've always heard that it's been likened to feeling like you have to sneeze, but instead of having to sneeze, you have the urge to say something (words, phrases, sounds, etc.) or do some sort of physical action (twitching, rocking, fidgeting, etc.).\n\nMost people with TS don't swear. It's very rare that they do so, but TV shows and movies have lead people to believe this is much more common than it really is. From some quick research, a few scientists speculate that tics forming in the aggression centers of the brain cause people to tic with verbal aggression (curses, slurs, and the like).",
"I've never been diagnosed with tourettes but growing up I've always had various tics. Like scrunching my face up then stretching it out again. More recently in my teenage years I've had odd breathing patterns that feel like tics but are affected by anxiety. It feels like if I don't take the big breath I need to real soon I might pass out or something. If i try and suppress it and breathe normally my heart starts beating real fast and I feel all dizzy and panicky. I went through a phase of only being able to get the right breath if I yawned. Having to yawn constantly got me in trouble with work and college.\n\nEdit: spelt tics wrong :(",
"Apparently It is caused by misfirings in the brain (feel the urge to move without you wanting to, say something involuntarily). Oftentimes stress exacerbates it."
] |
What do we actually know about the Bible, as a piece of historical literature, separate from modern Christianity? | [
"We know a surprising amount, actually: since it forms the basis of one of the world's major religions, which also happens to be the major religion of the currently dominant culture, it's been very extensively studied.\n\nThe Bible isn't one book, but a collection of many different books, written at different times for different purposes. The oldest parts of the Bible are something like five or six thousand years old, the most recent parts are nearly 2,000 years old.\n\nThe story of how the different parts of the Bible came together is a very complicated one and difficult to reconstruct: there are conflicting theories and a lot of argument, but real theologians (those who try to take a scholarly approach, not the loud-mouthed Evangelicals who grab all the headlines) have tried to piece together as much as they can.\n\nFor example, the first five books of the Bible are themselves made up of many different sources, all thrown together, edited and connected in a vaguely chronological fashion. The story of Noah's ark is an interesting example: if you separate out the bits of that story that refer to God and the bits that refer to the Lord, you get two different, but complete, versions of the same story (for example, in one version Noah takes a pair of every kind of animal, and in another he takes a pair of every kind of \"unclean\" animal and seven (or seven pairs) of every kind of \"clean\" (i.e. \"kosher\") animal.\n\nIf we take the four Gospels, the currently accepted theory is that Mark's Gospel was written first, Luke and Matthew both used Mark's Gospel and another document which has now been lost to write their versions, while John's Gospel was written much later and has little in common with the other three.\n\n > Yet, the faiths still endure.\n\nWell, theologians never had a problem with looking at the Bible objectively (as best they could). Traditionally, the various churches have, for example, always taught that Genesis is allegorical; and contrary to popular belief, didn't have that much trouble with the theory of evolution (their main objection to it was actually that it suggested the natural world was random and uncaring).\n\nSince then, however, some radical Christians have felt the need to fight back against \"science\", and we now have a noisy argument in which one group of people attacks science as blasphemous and absurd, holding the Bible to be the literal truth (this is a relatively new idea), and another group attacks all forms of religion as supersitious mumbo-jumbo that's the cause of all the world's ills. Most religious people actually don't much care whether the stories are true or not, they just want to be told that everything's going to be all right in the end.",
"You have a very broad question. Too broad to answer.\n\nIt is not the oldest book in the world. There are older books and other stories. Some of the older stories in that region are remarkably similar to stories in the Bible.\n\nSome of the old testament stories have camels mentioned in them before camels were introduced into the middle East.\n\nGenesis is a collection of two creation myths which are dissimilar.\n\nThe books in the bible were selected by St. Jerome who had doubts about some of them. He asked the pope. The pope said only learned priests would read it so put them in anyway.\n\nIt includes permission for slavery."
] |
How Virtualization works? | [
"Ahoy, matey! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: Server Virtualization. ](_URL_5_) ^(_25 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Virtual Machines And Virtualization ](_URL_1_) ^(_7 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: what exactly are virtualization technologies like Hyper-V, App-V, MED-V? What is a \"hypervisor\"? ](_URL_0_) ^(_10 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: What is a Virtual Machine? How does it work? ](_URL_2_) ^(_6 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: virtual servers ](_URL_3_) ^(_15 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: What is Virtualization? How does it work under the hood? ](_URL_4_) ^(_17 comments_)",
"I hope this wikipedia article helps you understanding virtualisation _URL_6_\n\nIn short... you simulate hardware to run different Operating systems simultaniously."
] |
Why has pizza delivery in "30 minutes or less" become uncommon? | [
"About 20 years ago, there was a multi-million dollar judgement against Domino's (who was most famous for the 30 minutes or less thing) when a woman was hit by a pizza delivery driver who was not operating the vehicle safely. This caused a lot of bad publicity for the \"fast pizza delivery\" deal, and as a result Domino's dropped it's \"30 minutes or free\" guarantee, and other pizza companies backed off delivery guarantees as well."
] |
Why are Mountains triangular in shape (or at least similar to a triangle | [
"It's the result of gravity and erosion. Mountains are shaped over millenia, and in that much time the force of wind and rain wears down and breaks apart the rock that makes up the mountain. As the mountain crumbles, gravity shapes it into a rough cone: the mountain falls away radially around the peak. The \"triangle\" image of a mountain is because looking at a cone from the side looks like a triangle.",
"When you crash two sheets of paper from opposite direction they will collide and form a triangle.\nUpper crust of earth is like a sheet of paper colliding into each other."
] |
Why are donuts considered a breakfast food? | [
"They are highly caloric and sugary, so it's best to eat them in the morning because then you're active for whole rest of the day and you can burn off that excess energy from the sugar and burst of calories."
] |
Why detox water if I am already having fruits, veggie and drinking water everyday? | [
"Detox is a scam.\n\nYour body does not accumulate \"toxins\" and there is no amount of drinking/fasting/pooping you can do to \"detoxify\" anything.",
"They are making money, pure and simple. Why don't you read up on groups of people who live longer than average and imitate their diet?",
"Detox water makes sense if you assume two things are true.\n\n1 - Lots of people are idiots\n2 - Idiots spend money\n\nYou don't understand the logic of detox water because there isn't any outside of marketing. It's the modern day snake oil dream. Here's a product that's easy to make, easy to charge a lot for, and completely impossible to verify it does anything. You think someone drinking detox water is going to analyze their piss, shit, and sweat to detect the level of toxins they're excreting? Of course not. Good luck suing them as well, they never claimed what toxins you were supposed to get rid of, so they can just as easily claim that the toxins were what your body already natural gets rid of whether you're drinking their swill or eating nothing but Taco Bell."
] |
In uncertain times, is it better to have your savings in the form of money? Or precious metals? | [
"during recession - currency\n\nduring extreme meltdown of society - precious metals",
"If you honestly think civilization is going to collapse, gasoline, food, and water would be what you hold. Precious metals won't amount to anything more than paper currency would.\n\nNow, if you aren't pushing the fringe panic button, having money isn't going to hurt you if economies weaken in an extreme recession. It may not have the value it did today, but entire nations aren't going to convert to some other exchange of currency (like gold), simply because that was what was used in the past.",
"If you are on your own and mad max maniacs are afoot what good is gold? It just sits there. Tools, supplies, gas, things with intrinsic value are where its at if the fit hits the shan."
] |
What getting a "tune-up" on your car consists of. | [
"The basics of a tune up are fluid changes of a majority of components such as oil, trans fluid, brake fluids, power steering, coolants, and window wash fluids. The filters for the components should also be replaced at the same time. Spark plugs should be checked and depending on the carbon buildup they may be changed or just be gaped. Most places check brake pads and rotors, wheel alignment and wheel balance are recommended if you want a perfect ride. The only thing you can check yourself would be the fluids. You can check the oil dipstick and measure how much oil you have as well as the power steering. If your going to check your coolant make sure the car hasn't been driven for at least 20 min because the heat build up causes the fluid to expand and its extremely hot. I would recommend you wear eye protection from rust and fluids Brakes should be done in the shop because if anything goes wrong you can mess your breaks up and you can get into a car accident."
] |
drone attacks controversy? | [
"Basically drone strikes kill a lot of civilians, are operated by the CIA and not the army, and are done without Pakistan's permission which is why it's a source of controversy. More detailed answer below:\n\n\nThe high number of civilian deaths in drone attacks when compared to ground level attacks is a cause for controversy. [Before 2007, an average 0.66 combatants were killed per civilian death, this number improved to 62 combatants per civilian death in 2012.](_URL_1_)\n\nAnother issue would be the fact that these srikes are a CIA initiative and are not carried out through the Army which have their own \"moral\" rules of engagement compared to the CIA.\n\nFinally, drone strikes are not approved by the Pakistani government who see it as a threat to their sovereignty and a recruiting tool for the Al Qaeda but of course are powerless to resist Uncle Sam. That being said, the government seems to be split on the use of drone strikes as certain Pakistan's army chief has (unofficially) provided intelligence for the strikes and even [called for more in 2008](_URL_0_)."
] |
Surrogacies...if Donor A fertilizes Donor B's egg, and it's implanted in Donor C, does the baby have any of Donor C's genetic characteristics as a result of the incubation? | [
"Genetic characteristics? No, not as such. The surrogate does not contribute any genetic information to the zygote.\n\nBut does the surrogate not matter at all? I think that might be too much to claim. If nothing else, the womb environment in a surrogate mother will be at least ever-so-slightly different from that in the womb of the woman who supplied the egg to be fertilized. \n\nThis is important. DNA isn't computer code, i.e., the same genetic sequence will not always produce the same physical expression the way you always get the same result if you execute the same section of machine code. External stimuli contribute to the way that cells implement genetic instructions, either by the introduction of errors or simply because the code doesn't spell out the result with exactitude and leaves some portion of the final product to chance. \n\nFor instance, even identical twins are usually at least a *little* different in appearance, and that difference is attributable to environmental differences that the twins experience because they are not numerically the same person. Given that, it seems reasonable to think that an embryo that gestates in Donor B's womb would have at least a *slightly* different outcome than one in a surrogate's womb, even if the resulting baby doesn't actually have any of the surrogate's genetic information on board.",
"The fertilized egg will have A and B's chromosomes. Because all cells are then produced from this egg, all the baby's cells will have A and B's characteristics. C has nothing to do with the baby genetically."
] |
Student loan jargon. Read the papers, still confused. (So much for a college education right?) | [
"Head to your local bank or (preferably, IMO) credit union and explain your situation. With a 4-year degree and steady (albeit not super well-paying) job you should be able to get some decent refinancing options. You'll pay a higher interest rate on your debt, but you should be able to take your monthly payments down significantly."
] |
Why when I'm tired do I turn the TV down really low, but I'm still able to hear it? | [
"It's a combination of factors.\n\nWhen you're tired, you're not up and about causing noise in your immediate vicinity or distorting the sounds of the TV by moving around. You also lose your capacity to focus on several things at once when tired; you're focusing on the sounds coming from the TV and not simultaneously juggling some thoughts about your day, or diverting your gaze to another happening.\n\nHave you ever heard that tidbit about how blind or deaf people have heightened faculties as it pertains to their working senses? I think the concept is similar here."
] |
Why we are told to consume some medicines before food and some after food | [
"As well as the gastrointestinal pH affecting drug absorption some drugs are purposely given with or immediately after a meal to slow down absorption or to provide short term protection against the acidic nature of the stomach contents (the presence of food raises the stomach pH towards neutral). Drugs mixed with food pass into the small intestine more slowly than drug mixed in stomach secretions alone. For some drugs it is necessary to control the rate of absorption to stop large quantities of the drug entering the blood stream quickly and giving what are known as peak plasma level side effects (typically nausea and vomiting from high plasma levels being reached quickly). Slower absorption from mixing with food can still let the same amount of drug into the blood but the levels do not get so high as those that cause the nausea and vomiting experienced by some patients.\n\nThis is a very simplified picture (source: pharmacist involved in drug development for more than 30 years)."
] |
Why do soap operas look the way they do? What is the camera/production technique that makes them look different? | [
"nice video of a side-by-side comparison of it on and off.\n\n_URL_0_",
"They're shot at a higher frame rate. Even some newer TVs try to up the frame rate of movies from 25fps or so to about sixty and it also gives that \"cheap\" appearance. Here's some more info on the soap opera effect.\n\n_URL_1_"
] |
Power generation -- please help me to understand the 'monthly average real-time locational marginal price for energy at the commercial node.' | [
"So the monthly average real-time locational marginal price for energy at the commercial node is quite a mouthful, so let's break it down. Monthly average is pretty easy to understand the average price for the month. Real-time refers to the energy demand for a specific time period (they might do this by 15, 30, or hour intervals as well), and then the price associated with it. Location of the marginal commercial node refers to the power plant that services your subdivision/region. \n\nIf I am understanding this correctly you can essentially get some money back by supplying energy at the same rate that it would cost the power plant to generate the energy at the time, so giving more during peak commercial hours would net you more money than late at night when there are less people using electricity.",
"Most wholesale electricity is priced in terms of dollars per mega-Watt hour. To convert those to cents per kilo-Watt hour divide by 10 (100 cents per dollar divided by 1000 kWh per mWh which reduces to 1/10), or 2.541 cents/kWh. \n\nKeep in mind that wholesale energy varies in price throughout the day, and the price may not exactly match the LMP (there may be other factors that mean the price you get isn't the exact LMP, in the fine print)."
] |
How do companies determine the cost of acquiring a customer? | [
"1) Time and material spent on sales & advertising. If you spend $1 million on an advertising campaign and it averages 10 new customers, then that's at least $100K to acquire the customer.\n\n2) Time & Material getting the new customer set up. This covers any kind of material that you have to give the customer (such as a device to use your service), the time it takes to create the customer's back-office information (automation is a good thing here), and any time/material it takes training the customer on the use of your service before they can start giving you money on a regular basis."
] |
Why do businesses with double doors usually only unlock one? | [
"For the same reason a lot of convenience stores and gas stations modify their doors to be harder to push open (they seem heavier). It makes it harder for people to run out and take off in a snatch-and-grab or other criminal situation.\n\nYou'll especially notice this in pawn shops that have two sets of doors and a little hallway in between -- they'll usually unlock only the doors diagonal from one another so that anyone who runs out has to go through one door and cut across to the one diagonal from it. This gives security more time to respond and apprehend.",
"i manage a shopping mall, and the reason we keep one locked is to keep the cold air in or out (winter or summer). Why bother having double doors then? well, first of all, just a single door entrance into a mall would look kinda funny, and second, for when we have to move stuff bigger than 36\" in or out.",
"Yes, someone please explain why business owners feel the need to make me look like a jackass when I go slamming into the wrong side of a one side locked double swinging door. Do they do it for the lulz?",
"Well, it remains locked for the safety of the store's assets. As others have said it deals with loss prevention. Sure, you look like a total idiot whenever you push or pull the wrong door, but it helps the store in terms of thieves.\n\nOnce, when working a retail location, there was a guy in the store who attempted to shoplift one of those personal hotspot devices... Except we noticed him and he tried to go out the locked door which gave us just enough time to stop him.\n\nPro-tip: if you're robbing a store, remember which door you came in.",
"This is just a question, it doesn't require a simple explanation for something complicated.",
"Older double doors sometimes have a flange on one to seal the gap. Closing them in the wrong order keeps the flanged one from closing and it flaps back and forth. Having to fix that sort of thing 500 times a day will make you nuts, and cost you heat.",
"heating and cooling a large indoor space that is constantly open to the outdoors is more costly/less effective than it would be if there was less air being freely exchanged",
"Not sure if this is the correct answer for all cases. But as a security tech installing cameras, I've had situations where the business owner only wanted to pay for one height strip camera rather then two. So as to prevent people from walking through the door without a camera on it they just keep it locked.",
"When I get to my office in the morning, I unlock just the one door. This is mainly due to the fact that it means I only need one to lock up when I leave at night. So the answer is just me being lazy.",
"Most double doors in the US can be opened from the inside, whether they are locked or not, because of fire codes. This means the locked door becomes the de facto exit door, alleviating congestion around the entrance.",
"You can probably just have that one explained like you are an adult.",
"why are there locks on the doors of 24/7/365 stores?"
] |
How can a hash, resulting from a fixed-length algorithm, always generate unique results if there are a limited number of possible results, but much more inputs? | [
"No, you're definitely correct. Because you can hash a message of any length down to a hash of a finite number of bits (e.g. 512), there are an infinite number of hash collisions. Part of the \"security\" of the hash is how difficult it is to go find a collision. A huge focus of modern cryptographical research is to find ways to collide hashes.",
"The simple answer is that hashes *aren't* unique.\n\nThat does, in theory at least, mean that if you chose to set your password to something really secure - incorporating a decent number of characters, symbols, numbers, mixed case and so on it could in theory have the same hash as \"password\", meaning that someone could get by it by just typing \"password\" at the prompt - but the odds of that are pretty damn remote.",
"Duplicates are possible. It doesn't have to be unique, it just has to be sufficiently hard to crack. There could be two different strings that hash exactly the same way. But that doesn't make the system any less secure, because it doesn't help you to find an unhashed string from the hash."
] |
The whole Charlie Manson/Manson family thing | [
"Charles Manson was a serial killer. But instead of killing people himself, he had his \"family\" do it for him. He brainwashed/manipulated/indoctrinated a bunch of women (18 of them iirc). They loved him and would do anything for him. Well, \"anything\" meant killing people, so they did. He's currently serving life in prison."
] |
Why do our bodies rock back and forth when we sit? | [
"Redistributing load on muscles and joints prevents harm and aches that would occur more frequently in a prolonged loading scenario.\n\ntl;dr feels good man"
] |
Einstein's reasoning referenced by Brain Cox in this video on gravity | [
"He's referencing Einstein's theory of spacetime.\n\nIssac Newton proposed that gravity was a force wherein two bodies attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.\n\nIn simple terms, that means that when he saw the apple fall from the tree, he proposed that the apple was being attracted to the earth, *but at the same time, the earth was being attracted to the apple*. However as the earth has considerably more mass than the apple, it appears as if the earth is stationary and the apple falls towards it. In his theory, the earth does move very slightly towards the apple.\n\nEinstein's theory proposes gravity works in a very different way. He proposed that time and space are one in the same thing and called it 'spacetime'. He saw spacetime as a 'fabric' that exists throughout the entire universe. It's hard to accurately describe in a few sentences, but if you image a sheet being stretched tight from all four corners with an even grid drawn on it. Every line is parallel to it's neighbour one one axis and all the lines on the other axis are perpendicular as you'd expect. Imagine each of these lines represent gravity.\n\nNow, imagine a bowling ball being place in the middle of the sheet. This ball represents earth. You can imagine the ball weighing down the middle of the sheet right? You can also imagine how this affects the appearance of the grid lines too? They'd appear to 'fall' towards the ball from all directions. This is the effect of mass on spacetime - it 'bends' spacetime.\n\nNow imagine you drop a ball bearing on the edge of the sheet, what happens? The ball bearing rolls towards the bowling ball right? However, is the bowling ball attracting the ball bearing? No - the ball bearing is travelling along spacetime (the sheet), but as it's been massively distorted by the bowling ball, it appears to fall towards the bowling ball, but it's simply travelling along spacetime.\n\nNow, I use the image of a bowling ball and ball bearing as it's easy to visualise the ball bearing rolling along a taught sheet. However, imagine the ball bearing travels not by rolling, but simply sliding along the sheet at a constant speed. It would still fall towards the ball.\n\nSo, going back to Brian Cox's reference at the end of the video, what does he mean? Well, imagine the feathers and the bowling ball are travelling along spacetime at a constant speed. As they're released in the vacuum, they travel through spacetime, but as the mass of the earth is massively bending spacetime, their direction of travel is massively distorted and they appear to fall towards the earth. In reality, they're just travelling on their spacetime path. That's what he means about \"if you remove the background, they're not falling\".\n\nHope this has helped rather than confuse the issue!"
] |
Why spicy foods don't lose their heat when they're deep fried if capsaicin is fat soluble? | [
"Two reasons. First, the oil is never in contact with all that much capsaicin. Most of it is in the food, behind batter, or behind other capsaicin particles. So even if the oil does dissolve some of it, there is still a lot of capsaicin that is inaccessible to the oil. Second is kinetics. Soluble molecules can take their sweet time getting into solution. Try dumping a spoonful of sugar into room temp. water. The sugar will dissolve entirely, but not quickly.",
"Fat soluble doesn't mean fat will come and suck every single drop of something out. It would at best wash the stuff off the surface and basically do nothing to any of the stuff inside the object",
"The capsaicin has to have contact with fat in order to be absorbed by it. Deep fried things with capsaicin generally only have their outer layers touch fat, and most of the time that is protected by badder."
] |
Why aren't rich nations closer to Syria, like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates being pressured into taking in any refugees? | [
"It's hard to pressure a country that beheads people for sorcery in 2015. \n\nThey aren't exactly rational actors."
] |
How is it people find out which towns are doing events on certain nights (trick-or-treating/fireworks a day early/late) | [
"Once upon a time, in an age before computers, people had to figure out a way to share information and let the town know about events.\n\nThese were dark times and information was hard to come by, but every morning a boy on a bike would drop you off a bundle of information that would tell you about what had happened and what was soon to happen in your local area. There would be spots for upcoming events in all the near by towns so you'd know about events without just talking to people\n\nIn the era of light and information it's now often posted on the town website or Facebook page, but many still get that bundle of news dropped off on their doorstep every morning\n\nTLDR - Newspapers, but now Facebook too",
"You could check out the website of the specific venue which hosts the event. Or perhaps the town's .gov website. Or the local news sites. Or follow the town or venue's social media accounts. These may all be hit-or-miss depending on who is in charge of managing them."
] |
Why do some planes leave a trail of condensation/mist behind? What causes these trails? | [
"It is water vapor. When the engines burn fuel, they put out exhaust gases, and part of these gases is steam (hot water vapor).",
"These Con-Trails are made up of water particles put off from the exhaust of the jet engines. 30,000ft up it is very cold, so when the engines burn off fuel, it heats and vaporizes what water is in the air.\n\nThat water, then turns to steam and is released in visible trails behind the aircraft as it flies through the air.\n\nSince there is such a distinct temperature difference in the trails, the water quickly evaporates back into the air becoming water vapor again due to the relative humidity and temperature of the environment."
] |
why does a car driving through the hot sun not get as hot as a car parked in the hot sun? | [
"Convective cooling.\rThe shell of a moving car is going to be air temperature mostly while a stationary car since it has much less convection can be quite alot warmer."
] |
Why is Slovakia's capital at Bratislava at the outskirts of the country? | [
"Slovakia wasn't always Slovakia. It used to belong to the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy, later Czechoslovakia. Bratislava has always been an important centre for education, religion, bureaucracy, trade etc. so when we became independent, it was chosen to be our capital. Also, it's not like we're the only ones... Ottawa, Washington or Canberra aren't that \"central\" either just to name a few.",
"Fun fact: Bratislava and Vienna are the two closest European capitals.",
"Because the most of the cities in Europe are waaaaaaaaaay older than the countries they belonged to. The borders change, but the citie's influence only grows. It just happens its proclaimed their's capitall."
] |
What were the Yugoslav wars about and why was America involved in them? | [
"If you want answers to questions like this that are \"unbiased\" and without conspiracy theories, one of your absolute best bets is to submit your question to /r/AskHistorians. They have very strict journalistic integrity and the moderators take it very seriously. Jokes and quack stuff gets deleted almost immediately.",
"The wars were about the disintegration of Yugoslavia due to attempts by Serbia to control Yugoslavia and to promote Serbs as the favored ethnic group. During the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbian paramilitary groups funded by Serbia began ethnically cleansing ares of other ethnic groups - mostly through targeted violence like killing some of the males, burning down houses, and otherwise just driving people out of the Serb controlled areas. After the fall of Srebrenicia, Serbian forces murdered about 10,000 military aged Bosnian males. The US had been trying to stay out of it to that point, but after that NATO decided to provide military support against the Serbian paramilitaries to try and force them to the peace table, under a peace-keeping and 'responsibility to protect' doctrine, that says the Western nations should be willing to use force to prevent atrocities and war crimes. \n\nThe US and NATO, in addition to airstriikes, helped arm and train Bosnian and Croatian forces. These forces then launched a counter-offensive in 1995 that pushed many of the Serbian forces back and turned the tide of the conflict, and led the Serbian forces to come to the peace table. \n\nAfter the signing of a peace treaty, NATO forces deployed into the country to keep the peace. It was initially about 60,000 troops and has gradually drawn down; in 2004 it was handed over to the EU and American involvement mostly ended; right now there are only about 900 troops, who also help look for war criminals from the civil war era."
] |
Why do scrapes and other injuries feel more painful when its cold outside? | [
"When it's cold, your body draws blood in from the limbs to conserve its warmth by constricting the veins in those limbs. This causes the skin and flesh to press on the nerves, increasing their sensitivity."
] |
How was it possible that OJ Simpson was not charged with either murder when the prosecutors had such compelling evidence against him? | [
"Charged with means the prosecutors formally begin a trial. OJ Simpson was charged with the murder of Nichole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. \n\nHe was not convicted, meaning the jury voted unanimously that the prosecution could not prove its case (or charges) beyond a reasonable doubt. Some of jurors have provided details in [books](_URL_1_) (some points from the book in this [review](_URL_0_)) about their reasoning for coming to the decisions they did. They appeared to have substantial concnerns about the evidence collection and handling practices of the police (which were a major portion of the prosecution's case).",
"OJ Simpson was charged with murder. There was a big trial, it was a huge thing at the time. He was eventually found not guilty, with most of the Jurors who've spoken up citing either police misconduct, or that they thought he was probably guilty but the case wasn't proven beyond a reasonable doubt.",
"He was charged with both murders. He was found innocent by a jury. By their own admission, some jurors were at least partially motivated by the racial climate of the time, which was extremely divisive in regards to law enforcement. Others were unconvinced by the evidence as it was presented (things like DNA testing were relatively new and unfamiliar) and to some extent the case of the prosecution was tainted by events such as Mark Fuhrman's perjury, allowing the defense to create a narrative of a police frameup that was compelling to jurors.",
"he had one hell of a team of lawyers, and the los angeles defense attorneys/LAPD fucked up big time. Cultural and racial tensions at the time played a big role as well. i would advise you to watch ESPN's OJ: Made in America, it does an incredible job of explaining the context as well as the trial.",
"He didn't get away with murder since, officially, he was not guilty of killing Nichole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.\n\nOJ Simpson was absolutely charged with both murders - he just wasn't convicted.\n\nThe evidence was strong, but found to be insufficient in its handling and presentation."
] |
So humans regenerate skin cells and all, and that's cool, but if we constantly make new skin cells, why do I still have freckles, when birthmarks might fade over time? | [
"Because freckles are constantly being created as the melanin(sp?) in your skin reacts to the sunlight \n\nWhereas a birthmark is more of a 1 time event and can be \"overwritten\" with fresh new cells. Much like a scar"
] |
Why do trees/coral constantly grow while humans and most other animals stop growing as adults? | [
"What you think of as coral is not the animal, it is the bone like house that the animal makes. The actual living part of coral is tiny."
] |
What is a web scraper and what can they be used for? | [
"A web scraper is a piece of software that goes to a website, grabs pages & then parses out the interesting/useful data. Let's say you want to follow the price of items at Amazon - your web scraper would request the page, find the item name & price and return that to you in a clean, easy to work with format. Some of them get more complicated because you have to handle form submissions or horrible HTML but the idea's still the same - an automated tool to extract information from a web page.\n\nThese days, most sites that *want* you to have their data have some sort of public API for getting just the info out (eg - [here's the Reddit API](_URL_0_)). Scrapers are still needed when you're trying to get information that people don't really want to hand out or they're just too cheap/lazy to provide a clean view of the data."
] |
When they say that we move at a finite speed through space-time, what are the denominator and numerator of the rate? | [
"I think what you're asking for is what units we use, as in \"kilometers per hour\". If that's correct, you could separate the space and times components and say \"meters per second\" for space and \"seconds per second\" for time, although this is simplistic.\n\nThis may not be the best ELI5, but I'm not sure how else to explain it without talking about things like worldlines, relativity, and proper time, which are definitely not ELI5. You should ask this in r/askscience. You'll probably get a much better explanation."
] |
How do I buy stocks, bonds, etc? | [
"There are lots of complexities here, but we'll ignore them for sake of simplicity. We'll deal with stocks, because it's *pretty much* the same for bonds.\n\nWhat most people do is find a *brokerage*. A brokerage is a business that specializes in the buying and selling of shares of stock on behalf of their customers. The people who work for a brokerage and handle the buying and selling of stock on their customers' behalf are called *brokers.*\n\nIn some very superficial ways, a brokerage works kind of like a bank. In particular, you start by opening an *account*. Just like a bank account, a brokerage account is something into which you put money, and out of which you withdraw money. The similarities end there, though. Once you've moved money into your brokerage account, you can issue a wide variety of *buy* and *sell* orders for shares of stock.\n\nFor example, say this was last Wednesday, and Netflix stock just took a major dive. You're smart, so you know that's a good time to buy. So you move about $50,000 into your brokerage account, then place a *market buy order* for 600 shares of Netflix stock.\n\nWhat happens then is the order you placed goes to your broker — you might've placed this order over the phone, literally telling your broker to buy the shares for you, or these days you might've placed it online — who is responsible for putting that order into the stock exchange. There the order goes to a stock *trader*, who has been instructed to buy 600 shares of stock for you at *whatever* price they're currently going for at the time the order comes in. He buys the shares — let's just say for sake of argument he got them for $77.84 apiece, just to put a number on it — they get transferred to your broker, who puts them into your account.\n\nNow you have a lot less *money* in your brokerage account — you used almost all of it all to buy stock — but you do have 600 shares of Netflix. You can hold on to those shares for a week, wait for the stock price to climb to (Hapax checks the market right quick) $82.78, then you can put in a *market sell order*. The same basic process happens in reverse: the order goes to your broker, who puts it on the exchange, the trader sells your shares to whomever happens to be buying at that moment for whatever price he can get. The money from that trade is then credited to your brokerage account. Congratulations, you just cleared about $3,000 by making two trades a week apart.\n\nOf course, the brokerage firm needs to keep its lights on, so you're charged a fee every time you do anything. In your case, let's say those fees were $30 for each of your two orders: you paid an extra $30 to buy the stock in the first place, and then you paid $30 to sell the stock a week later. Different brokerages have different fee structures, but that's eh more or less typical.\n\nThere are lots of different kinds of orders you can place — market-price orders, limit orders, open and close orders, et cetera. There are also other ways of buying stock, like options — buying the option to buy or sell a stock at a future date — and short-selling — borrowing shares from somebody else to sell them on the open market, then buy them back at a later date and return them to the person you borrowed them from. But the basic process is the same: Call your broker or use an app or something, put in an order, then wait and hope for the best.\n\nBonds are similar, but they have their own set of complexities we won't bother going into here because this is already long enough.",
"Sign up for a brokerage account. I have a free one through my work, so I haven't researched any, but ETrade seems to be popular.\n\nThen, fill your account with some money.\n\nThen, choose some stuff to buy.\n\nThen, buy it (your account will have a web interface.)"
] |
Why do Homeowner Associations hold such tremendous power? | [
"HOAs are entirely voluntary. If you don't want to join one, you simply don't purchase property governed by an association. That'll be pretty hard to do if you want to live in a place with shared property (like a condo building), but it's quite easy if you want to live in a house.\n\nThere are plenty of horror stories about HOAs on reddit, but the good that a lot of them do goes mostly unnoticed.",
"Because you voluntarily enter the agreement. No one forced you to buy the house, and you may sell the house according to the rules you yourself agreed to when signing that contract. They wield the power the contract gives them, and can pretty much put in whatever they like as long as it doesn't conflict with existing law.",
"> I mean, it is basically impossible to get out of it once you have signed with them.\n\nYes. That is how contracts work. You sign them, and they are legally binding.\n\n > And if you don't want to be in one when buying a house, tough luck, you can't opt out because it's written into your contract when you buy the house.\n\nYep. So buy a different house.\n\n > What makes them any different than any other service, club, association or union, where you can freely quit or give up the service when you no longer want to take part?\n\nThe fact that you knowingly signed a contract that said that you can't quit. Again, the entire *point* of contracts is that you're not legally allowed to violate them.\n\nThat said, HOAs are not inherently evil. They exist to provide resources to the community. Maintaining landscaping in shared areas. Plowing the streets during the winter. Making sure that no one can leave a rusting car up on blocks in their front yard or paint their house neon pink with lime-green accents, bringing down everyone else's property value.\n\nMost HOAs are perfectly reasonable. It's just the very few bad ones that become noteworthy."
] |
Keep Calm and Carry On | [
"I don't think those particular posters were publicy used, but they were certainly prepared and would have been used, I think, in the event of an invasion.\n\nThey've got popular because they're pretty indicative of the British attitude towards any crisis - not to fuss or panic, just tut and go about our business. They also lend themselves to amusing variants, such as \"Now Panic and Freak Out\""
] |
Why is the news of China cutting domestic interest rates causing the U.S. stock markets to surge? | [
"Mainly it's that people who were investing in China are seeing the lower interest rates as indicating lower returns on those investments. Those investors pull money out of Chinese investments and put it in US investments instead. That causes the US market to surge since there are many buyers (and prices are set by supply and demand)"
] |
Was WW2 propaganda (posters, movies, etc.) blatantly and widely referred to as "propaganda" at the time or is that just the description we give it in retrospect? | [
"The enemy's propaganda is always called propaganda. \n\nAlthough, its interesting that the word didn't always have such negative connotations. The root of the word is the same as 'propagation', and it began in a religious context. Even as recently as WW1 the British would charmingly refer to their own propaganda coming out of the Ministry of Information, though lately the use implies a negative.",
"Same as today, find something like \"American Sniper\", you will see tons and tons of stuff that does call it propaganda but it's not like the poster says 'come see this new propaganda!\""
] |
What is the unit of viscosity and how is it measured? | [
"The SI unit is the Poise, and it's measured by applying shear stress to the liquid. A typical viscometer has the liquid sandwiched between two concentric plates that the fluid sticks to, and measures the torque needed to turn one of them, then you calculate the viscosity from that. The plates can't be smooth, of course - the liquid needs to stick, not slide over them. There are different types of viscometer."
] |
The S & L crisis in the 80's... | [
"So, back in the 19th century, banks were for rich people. Unless you had a certain amount of money, they didn't want to deal with you, and they certainly wouldn't lend to you. Some reformers got the idea of getting poor people to club together and pool their savings and make small loans with it, allowing poor people to earn interest on their savings the same way rich people could. At the start, every person who joined the pool got a vote on who the group lent to and pretty much all the loans were for houses. In the UK, these groups were known as \"building societies\" and in the US they were called \"savings & loans.\"\n\nThe difference between an S & L and a regular bank is that they tended to have much less money (capital) and they tended to be very cautious when lending it --- mortgages, yes, business loans, no. Basically, they were baby banks for poor (or poor-ish) people. Jimmy Stewart's bank in *It's a Wonderful Life* is an S & L. \n\nBack in the 1930s where tons of banks were going under because of the Great Depression, the federal government started a bunch of programs to get lending back to normal. One of the big things they pushed were ways to let more ordinary people buy houses and so forth, and one of the things they did to encourage that was to create the Federal Home Loan Banks (there's I think 12, scattered across the country). \n\nThe FHLBs were like a big bank who *only* lent to baby banks --- that is, S & Ls. The advantage was, instead of having to rely solely on the pooled savings of their customers --- which there weren't a hell of a lot of, in the Great Depression --- the S & Ls could now get capital at low rates from the FHLB and lend it out to their customers. As a result, hundreds of new S & Ls rose up across the country. \n\nCut to the late 1970s. By then, the regular banks have kind of woken up and smelled the coffee and are now a lot more willing to lend to small-time customers, so S & Ls are competing with them, and S & Ls are losing customers. (In part because there were caps on how much interest S & Ls could offer for their savings accounts, and larger banks and money market accounts didn't have such caps.) \n\nThey also have another problem: Like I said, all S & L loans are extremely cautious 30-year-fixed-rate mortgages to good borrowers. When they want to make a new loan, they go to their FHLB and get some money, and then find a customer to lend it to. \n\nBut in the early 1980s there were some problems going on the broader economy. Inflation was high and every day stuff was costing more and more, but economic growth was slow and people weren't getting to many raises or new jobs (stagflation). In order to fix the problem, Jimmy Carter appointed this guy Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve Bank --- the big bank for big banks, the Biggest Bank of Them All --- and he responded by cranking up the basic interest rate level to 20%. When interest rates are that high, a lot fewer people can afford to borrow money, and the economy slows down --- but so does inflation, which was the main thing Volcker was trying to fix. \n\nIn the meantime, though, the S & Ls were up shit creek. They have all these old loans on their books, and they're gonna be waiting, 10, 15, 20+ years for them to get paid back --- at interest rates of between 7% to 11%. But if they want to make any new loans, they have to get money from the FHLBs at 20%. You see the problem? Basically, the level of money flowing in from the old loans isn't enough to support new loans flowing out, and the S & Ls can't make any profits. \n\nSo, what did the S & Ls do? Well, they bitched to Congress. They said, \"Listen, we know that back in the '30s you set us up with all these rules about how safe our loans had to be so that ordinary folks would feel safe keeping their money with us. And that's great. But here and now, these rules are choking us. We're dying over here. You've got to let up, and let us go out there and get capital from places besides the FHLB (like, say, Wall St.) and start offering other kinds of loans than just these plain old mortgages, or we're gonna go under.\" \n\nAnd Congress said, \"Sure. These are the Reagan Years. Clap your hands three times and the De-Regulation Fairy will appear and bless you with her magic wand and you will be free of these terrible rules.\" And it was so.",
"An S & L is a type of bank that must now legally do 80% of its loans to mortgage and consumers. \n\n\n\nIt is like you [the S & L] have lots of money in your piggy bank. You want to save enough to buy a bike, but your allowance is small. You want to let other kids use your money to buy things they cannot afford until their next allowance. When their allowance comes in, they agree to pay you back, plus a small extra amount to help you make more money. Your parents allow you to do this, but most of it must be with your siblings and cousins. These kids in turn can only buy school and bicycle supplies with the money. They must give you a toy to hold until you get paid back [collateral]. They must also pay you back an extra 5¢ for every $1 they borrow [interest rate cap]. Your parents let you do this with the intent of you teaching your relatives about savings and investment. They will only allow you to loan a $20 for every $100 in savings to the older neighbor kids to buy candy and baseball cards. You also aren't allowed to lend to classmates. This is disappointing because the older neighborhood kids want to borrow more and can pay it back easily because they make larger allowance than your relatives. You would profit more from loans to the neighborhood kids, but you do what your parents [regulators] say because they're always watching you. They also want to teach you that life isn't free and give 25¢ of every allowance $1 into a fund to pay for pizza and soda on Friday nights [taxes].\n\n\n\n\nYour parents make you write down all your loans and calculate how much you have in your piggy bank vs. what is loaned out. Once you can account for $500 total, they will get the bike for you. You must keep $5 of every $100 savings in the piggy bank. One day, you get a new daddy [new prez deregulates banking with reform act]. You're able to talk him into letting you keep just $3 in the piggy bank for every $100. He also doesn't limit you to charging a 5¢ for every dollar you lend anymore. You write a loan to yourself and buy pop rocks, but your parents think it is a legit loan.\n\n\n\n\nThis is nice, but you aren't making money as fast as you want because you don't have a lot to lend. You really want to get a new bike as soon as possible. You need more money fast. You talk your siblings into letting you use the money in their piggy banks too. You give them some money to help cover the $3 in the piggy bank for every $100 lent with the agreement that they pay you 6¢ for every dollar you help them lend [loan origination fee]. You write another loan to yourself and buy pop rocks, but your parents think it is a legit loan. You take them to school and share with your friends.\n\n\n\nYour new daddy still makes all the kids write down all your loans and calculate how much you have in your piggy bank vs. what is loaned out. A lot of new kids move into the neighborhood and they want to build tree houses, but need money for nails and other supplies. These kids will not let you hold onto their toys, but you've always wanted your own tree house. So you agree to pay them $5, but they still need more money. So you lend them more money to help you build your tree house with the understanding that one of the tree houses is for you. You tell your dad and he doesn't make you pay 25¢ for every $1 allowance dollar [tax] if you can show him you are spending time and money to keep the lawn mowing tools clean and in shape [depreciation]. \n\n\n\nYour sister sees these tree houses and wants one too. You tell one sister that she can get the one you are building if she gives you ten dollars from her savings. She agrees. You take $5 and mark your loan to yourself as paid and write another loan from your sisters piggy bank for $10. More kids in the 'hood want to build tree houses. Your old dad would have been concerned about how you would get your money back if there isn't a finished tree house, but your new dad isn't as concerned and just make you take your brother to the site where the build will happen. If it is OK with your bother [appraiser], it is OK with your parents. Your brother isn't really into it, but you offer him a 5¢ for every ten dollars you help loan out [kickback]. Pretty soon, he's gushing to your folks about how great the tree house are going to be. Your parents are proud of you.\n\n\n\nThe numbers you are calculating still aren't looking good for you to get a bike anytime soon. So you start lending out more money than people are asking for so they can build more tree houses and use the extra to pay the 5¢ per each dollar loaned. This looks good on paper to your dad. The next thing you know, it is a full on fad [the boom] and all the kids are trying to build tree houses. You end up taking every last dollar out of every one of your siblings piggy banks to maximize your loans. Your brother now really wants a tree house. You and your sister agree if he will pay $15. You mark the loan from your sister's piggy bank as paid and write a new loan from your brother's piggy bank. You take the profit and spend it on pop rocks. You need more money to lend out, so you talk some classmates into letting you save their money in your piggy bank. You tell them that you will pay them 7¢ for every dollar they let you hold onto for 3 months. 15¢ for 6 months and 25¢ for a year [raise interest rates to attract depositors]. \n\n\n\nThe next hot new gaming system everyone wants has a big price drop right in time for Christmas [the slide]. No one wants to play in tree houses anymore, so the kids stop building them. The kids that were building tree houses to sell can't find anyone to buy and lots of tree house work just stops. Your dad finally notices all these half finished junky looking tree house and hints that he wants to look at your records. \n\n\n\nYour dad starts to become irritated with all the records and the lack of actual cash in the piggy bank. He makes you start paying for pizza night again and for all the pizza nights you didn't pay in the past [new reform act that rescinds previous act]. This is shocking to you. You have already spent the money. You start to go around trying to collect on the money owned to you. Parents of these kids talk to your dad and make agreements to pay 25¢ for every dollar loaned [bankruptcy]. \n\n\n\nYour dad is irritated even more and says that he wants you to sell all tree houses that you have lent money out to be built. He doesn't understand the gaming system means no one wants a tree house right now. You stop trying to collect and start making deals with your siblings to move most of the remaining tree house loans off of your records and onto their records [daisy chains]. When your dad finally looks at your records he sees some of the tree house loans are paid off. He writes down the value of the loans for the tree house loans that are still open because they look so trashy.\n\n\n\nNext week he will check your sister's book, so your brother pays of her loans and moves them to his books. It will be another week before he looks at your brother's, and you will just move the loans to your piggy bank before that. Your classmates start wanting their money, but you don't have enough to pay them all. You pay off a few and convince the others not to collect just yet.\n\n\n\nYou realize this won't keep up forever and kids are starting to look for money to help buy the latest game. You offer them more than they want if they will buy some of the tree houses too [cash for trash]. You don't have much too loan out anymore so this only helps so much. So you find a piggy bank in the attic. It has no money, but add a record sheet and start to move the unsold tree houses to that [holding company]. You mark the loans as paid on you and your siblings records. The money you do have to lend, you make make the kid get 25¢ worth of stock in the attic piggy bank for every dollar lent. \n\n\n\nOne day you notice a call coming in from school, but you hang up before your mom notices. A few days later, your current dad move out and your mom [new prez] announces that the trip to Hawaii has been canceled because she has had to pay off all the money you took from your classmates. You are directed to the closet and told to pick out a belt for what you assume will be worst spanking ever."
] |
How fast will transactions be once all the bitcoins have been mined? Also, will miners have any purpose after that? | [
"The short answer is \"likely thousands of transactions per second, if not more,\" and \"miners will still secure the network and will be paid for their work.\" Let's take a look at how Bitcoin works so that we can arrive at that answer.\n\n*******\n\nLet's say you have a bunch of friends that decide that they want to have their own currency between just that group. They don't want to print paper notes to represent this currency, so instead they designate you as the official bookkeeper of your currency. You make an entry in your books beside each person's name and you keep track of how much of your new currency everyone has. You come up with some way for the original units of this currency to come into existence, and from there it's easy for one person to pay another person: just tell you, the bookkeeper, to deduct the amount from your account and add it to the other person's account.\n\nThis may sound like a somewhat contrived example, but it's actually incredibly common. We see it all the time in video games, even when there is very real value attached to the digital currency. ISK in EVE Online would be a great example. CCP Games (the publisher of EVE) keeps track of each person's name and their balance, you can get ISK by completing quests in the game, and you can transact with other people (who place real value on the ISK) by carrying out actions in the game.\n\nWhen someone decides to make a transaction it needs to be verified. A currency isn't very useful if someone with a zero balance can send someone else money and it arrives with no problems—there's no reason to value money if you can buy everything without it. Thus, every time the transaction comes in it is your job as the bookkeeper to check and make sure that the person sending the money has the money in their account to be able to send it. You also make sure that the person sending the money is who they say they are.\n\nWith this centralized setup it is very easy to handle a lot of transactions. A single modern computer could handle a database of all transactions in the world. It would place a strain on that computer, granted, but it could still handle it.\n\nCentralized currencies like this are all over the place, though, and Bitcoin sought to make things better—to decentralize things. Instead of having just one person with the books Bitcoin is designed to have hundreds or thousands of different people each with a full copy of every \"account\" and every transaction in the history of the currency. Remarkably, this is only a few GB (~23 GB right now).\n\nAs long as everyone has a copy of the ledger everyone can check to see if a transaction is valid—check to make sure that it isn't trying to \"overdraw\" an account, make sure that it is properly authenticated, etc. Each \"node\" (person with a copy of the ledger) can do this incredibly quickly; the estimates I've seen are that a single core of a relatively modern processor could get around 500 transactions per second, give or take. Advances in computing will only make this speed go up. Other strains on a computer work out to allowing a few thousand transactions per second on consumer hardware—~8 Mbit/s of internet speed for 2000 transactions per second, for example.\n\nThe system described thus far has one fatal flaw, though, and this is the flaw that Bitcoin was innovative in fixing: while any node can check to see if any one transaction is valid, it is quite possible for a malicious person to create two transactions where either one is valid but they can't both be valid simultaneously. For example, if Alice has 10 BTC then she could author one transaction that sends 10 BTC to Bob and another that sends 10 BTC to Carol. It's critically important that every node picks the right one of these transactions. With centralized setups this is easy: whichever one arrives at the central authority first gets approved, while the second one gets rejected. This approach isn't workable in a distributed system because one node may hear of one transaction first while the other node hears of the other first. If the network gets out of sync then it can quickly fall apart.\n\nThe solution here is that the network \"elects\" a representative about every 10 minutes. It is akin to having everyone interested write their name on pieces of paper that get thrown into a bag, then one name gets pulled and that person gets to specify a bunch of transactions that are officially valid. They aren't allowed to validate fraudulent transactions—anyone could see that fraud and would just ignore the person. All they do is resolve the race between competing transactions. The rest of transaction validation is trivial for everyone to do on their own.\n\nNow, I've simplified the mining process a lot (and some accuracy has gone out the window to do so). One thing to note, though, is that it's not practical for everyone to put their name in the bag just once—it's too easy for one person to pretend to be a bunch of people on the internet. Thus, the system just embraces that and tells everyone that they can put their name in the bag as often as they like, but it has to be hand written. This means that you can enter as fast as you can write. If someone wants to come along and do bad things to the network then they need to be able to with the drawing more often than they lose, which means they have to have an army of people writing their names on slips of paper faster than everyone else in the world combined. This is where mining gives security—the real cost of entering the drawing (computing a hash function) is non-zero and in order to take over the network (which doesn't even give you absolute power over the network) you have to race the rest of the world.\n\nThe designer(s) of Bitcoin realized that this process is critical to the security of the network, but it's expensive for people to do. Thus, it is also used as the method by which new currency is introduced to circulation. There was a desire to not have an infinite money supply, though (inflation is seen in a very negative light in the community from which Bitcoin was born). Thus, it was set up so that the people securing the network would be paid a lot initially but less over time.\n\nThe network still needs to be secure, though. Thus, the newly generated coins are not the only payment given to the \"miners\" (which is a term I despise; it really misses the point of what they're doing). There's also a small fee included in each transaction—a few cents worth; it's far less than what credit cards charge merchants. The idea is that over time as Bitcoin becomes more widespread there will be more and more transactions and *eventually* there will be enough fees being paid that this makes up the majority of miners' payment.\n\nSo, to finally arrive at the answer to the question, with this system you should see that the speed at which transactions get verified is not based on how much the miners get paid. If you only have a few miners then that just means that the drawing is between fewer people, but that one miner can stand up and identify transactions to be officially valid just as well as any other miner. The only real limits are in hardware (which is ever improving) and a temporary limit in software to prevent people from intentionally filling the ledger with worthless transactions.",
"Your question suggests that you actually understand that bitcoin mining is actually the process by which transactions happen, and the more people \"mining\", the faster transactions can happen. (More computing power can discover appropriate hashes faster.) When people discover a hash that allows transactions to happen, they are allowed to claim some number of bitcoins out of the æther for themselves. This is the incentive to mine bitcoins and helps to increase the speed at which transactions happen. \n\nAs for when all of them have been mined? First off, the rate at which bitcoins are mined follows exponential decay; each time a transaction happens the person who finds them gets fewer and fewer of them. The good news is this means that all bitcoins likely won't be found for a very long time. The bad news is that even before that, there will be a point at which it's no longer cost-effective to mine them (relative to the hardware costs, electricity costs, and the inconvenience involved). \n\nHowever, bitcoin has a system in place where people making transactions can offer a tip to whoever makes a transaction. Currently it's not very common to do this. However, as the rate of return on mining bitcoins diminishes and people stop mining, the transaction rate falls. Because each hash can only include a certain number of transactions, people will start adding tips to their transactions to ensure their transactions are included. (Presumably, people will start by including the transactions with the highest tips.) This additional incentive, will keep people mining. If enough isn't offered to keep people mining, people will leave, transaction speeds will suffer, and people will offer more money as it becomes even more important to be included in a hash.",
"The last bitcoin is scheduled to be mined in the year 2140, I don't think you need to think about it too much."
] |
What is the purpose of the spirals painted on airplane engines? | [
"So that people (ground crew) will know if the engines are turning."
] |
How will this "businesses can buy your internet history" work? Can you buy an a specific persons? | [
"No, you can't buy Donald Trump's browsing history. There are very few people for whom there would be a market, and they would sue the ISP.\n\nWhat you will be able to say is I have two versions of this ad, A and B. If someone goes to more republican sites than democratic ones, when you get the URL for my ad, put up version A. The other way around, put up version B."
] |
How are chip-readers more secure than magnetic strips? | [
"It's not necessarily the reader, but the card itself. \n\nIn an eli5 sense, a magnetic stripe says \"I am X\" when swiped. It is extremely easy to create a copy of the card that also says \"I am X\". \n\nA chip card, when read, initiates a conversation like \"If you say you are card X, please complete this math problem using your secret ID number and give me the result\". Because the whole card's information is not transmitted during a transaction, it is much harder to create a copy.\n\nIf a second authentication factor (such as a PIN) is not used, chip cards are still weak to physical theft and malicious usage of a card, neither do they protect against fradulent online usage.",
"If done correctly, they are chip+PIN. You need both the card and the number, that is how it was developed initially.\n\nEven without it, it's slightly better because a chip card is a bit harder to clone than a normal card."
] |
Why Can't We Tell Our Bodies to Ignore Pain During Torture? | [
"Pain is your bodies way of telling you something is wrong. When you're being tortured your body is being damaged, so your body is letting you know. If people were able to turn off pain then the body could be seriously damaged and can cause death",
"Pain is subjective. Most people don't believe that, but think about it for a second. \n\nTwo guys: each separately smash their own finger with a hammer with the same force and weight. One is feeling more pain than the other, guaranteed. One's crying, the other is laughing.\n\nEver been in a situation where you had a stomach ache, heart ache, head ache and then you got distracted by a movie or a friend and you forget about your physical ailment for a while? That's willful ignorance of pain. That's because your brain can only process so much information at a time, including pain. \n\nYour body is a scumbag who literally likes to bug your brain with every little nuisance, \"Hey you brain--we got an itch, do something.\" \"Yo, we got a slimy feeling, DO SOMETHING!\" \"We're feeling extreme discomfort--alert all pain receptors. NOW!!\"\n\nHowever, your brain can be trained, on purpose or by chance, to have higher pain tolerance. The best example of what's possible with focus is Thích Quảng Đức. He was a Bhuddist monk who burned himself alive as protest and held the upmost composure. Read the **Self-immolation** section here: _URL_0_\n\nThe issue with torture is that most people that are tortured are not in control of their environment. To be able to get the most out of our brains for focus, we need good nutrition, good rest, good hydration, and a stable psychological state. All these things are taken from most prisoners and torture victims. Thus, that leaves very little room for channeling the brain into Burning Monk focus. (It's still possible, but most people break long before Thích Quảng Đức capabilities. Also, take into consideration that Thích Quảng Đức meditated for decades to gain that level of skill, it wasn't something he willed at 18 years of age just because he wanted it.)",
"I imagine it has something to do with the fact that if we're being tortured, that is ALL we have to focus on. Whereas, say, if you're running away from an abusive man, you're in fight or flight, and you are focusing on running away, not the pain in your right ankle.",
"> We have a very advanced brain, why can't it understand that we are under going unavoidable physical pain?\n\nIt can and does - if it didn't we'd never be able to think it.\n\nWhat it doesn't have, however, is such conscious though controlling the sense of pain. Pain is a very primal thing controlled in a different more basic part of the brain.\n\nThe brain isn't a single entity working together, it's a complex system of interconnected sub-systems that was sculpted by evolution to work, not an engineering team aiming for what made the best design decisions or added the best features.\n\n > I know during extreme circumstances the body CAN choose to ignore broken bones until you know you are safe.\n\nOnly when you're in the act of escaping from something you at least believe to be a bigger threat than the injury. Generally being tortured you're tied down or something, and in that situation feeling pain fully makes sense because it prompts you to do anything in your power to flee or make it stop.\n\n > Seems like the brain has some very specific criteria for pain blocking.\n\nIt's not perfect at it but the brain has a single goal given to it by evolution: continued survival.\n\nYou feeling comfortable is thrown out the window readily if making you really, really want to run or give up your secrets - made up ones or otherwise - is going to prevent more grievous damage.",
"We can but it takes a lot of mental training and meditation to accomplish.",
"Why Is Every Word Capitalized. ELI5.\nAlso, P1 - We have an advanced brain. That's a loaded statement. Evolution doesn't imply advancement, we evolve to compete for niches. Many features of our brain to do with pain are highly protected from mutation and therefore very, very old. Children who can not sense pain are at high risk of injuring themselves. In modern instances these children often burn themselves without realising what damage is being caused. \nThere is also a mind/body presupposition that might be confusing you. Mental states are physical states at all levels and that our conscious experience has a relationship of supervenience with what is physical. \n_URL_1_\nAll that being said, there are examples of people suppressing pain responses during tortue. Hitchens article in Arguably about waterboarding talks of jihadis able to resist the urge to end the torture and let themselves die. Their motivation here was to humiliate their american torturers. \nA slightly more scientific answer maybe be to do with how negative feed back loops react in the brain. I am less of an expert here than I am on the previous points, but imagine the ability to ignore stimuli is always there, but is being blocked down the chain to sensation by something that is natural and always happening. Now imagine this blocker was removed, and the pain ignoring pathway was allowed to operate. Thats my best guess on the how of pain suppression."
] |
why can't we bundle our health insurance with our other mandatory insurances like car, home and renters? Or even combine it with life insurance and other insurances? | [
"There would be no real benefit. The money you pay for your car and home insurance premiums doesn't go in some account with your name on it. \n\"This is Yolo20152016's unused insurance money\" \n\n It goes towards the profit and operating costs of the insurance company. Most importantly It pays the claims of other people that also have insurance. \n Poof, it's gone.",
"Car ins. Really bugs me. I think it should be set up different. I am 67 years old. I have never made an ins. Claim. Really never. Yet I have to pay 160. A month to insure a 1998 and a 2000 car. PL & PD only. A lot of money to me for absoutly nothing. Last year I got rear ended sitting at a stop sign waiting my turn to pull out. Totaled the rear end, rear side panels, trunk lid. $3000. In damage. Guess what, the guy who hit me did not have any insurance. Could not even get the $1000. Torte coverage because he was not insured. On and on it goes."
] |
Why don't horsepower and torque correlate? ELI5 | [
"Horsepower and torque do correlate. The formula for horsepower is:\n\nHP = (Torque * RPM) / 5252\n\n(This assumes torque is measured in ft-lbs.)\n\n\"Horsepower is torque corrected for RPM.\""
] |
What happens to all the extra food in shows like "MasterChef"? | [
"It depends on the show. Usually, the crews get first pick of the food. MasterChef specifically donates leftovers to OzHarvest, and many other shows have similar arrangements with charities.\n\nIron Chef (the original one) would let the chefs take home food, so occasionally competitors would \"accidentally\" open packages containing expensive ingredients and then take them back to their restaurants."
] |
high-end celebrity endorsements | [
"Scale it down - would you help a friend move for a case of beer? What about helping a stranger move for $100? What about gardening? Or driving a friend around a city for the day? If you'd do that, why not become an Uber driver?\n\nWe're all different. Some need the money, or at least think they do. Others see an opportunity to do something that looks fun. Sometimes, it's about asking at the right time - maybe someone at Nespresso met Clooney at a bar after a few drinks, and he thought it would be fun to say yes... and then it was so fun, he's committed to a few more.",
"Clooney apparently does Nespresso ads to fund humanitarian projects such as a satellite in Sudan.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Clooney does Nespresso ads because it means he can be choosy with the films he appears in, which can be even more damaging if, say, they involved bat-nipples. \n\nThere's a quote from the Extras special explaining this - actors can be respected by picking good roles (Daniel Day Lewis is an extreme example), or they can do bad films (see Al Pacino in Jack and Jill) for the paycheck (by necessity or otherwise)."
] |
Why there are really absurd laws in different countries? | [
"There are really absurd laws here too. Most of them come from silly things, like a court case that boiled down to \"I'm innocent because it's not illegal to walk your pet alligator on the sidewalk\" so the guy gets off free, and they pass a law making that illegal so that defense won't work again. Usually started on a very small scale.",
"The citations you see are actual laws, created in one of two ways, generally. The first is to expand on an actual law on the books. For example, you see on the internet that in Miami, Ohio, that it is illegal to hitch an alligator to a parking meter outside a barber shop on Sunday. The actual law on the books may be intended to keep people from tying their dogs to fire hydrants outside Starbucks while the owner goes inside to grab a cup of coffee. However, to cover all instances, the law may read something like: It is unlawful to tie secure any animal by means of a tether or similar device to any signpost, fire hydrant, street lamp or the like for the purposes of engaging the services of a business establishment. See how the law could be interpreted to cover the alligator tied to a parking meter? \n\nThe other way is someone writes his representative regarding a situation that offends him greatly. Representatives like doing what people ask of them, so the city councilperson may decide to craft a law so as to secure a supporter in the future election. Here is an example: Suppose you are driving down a dark country highway late at night when you approach a pick-up truck hauling manure shoveled and uncovered in the bed of the truck. The truck hits a bump and some of the manure flies out and lands on your windshield. You write your representative and tell him that if it was daytime, you would have known to pass the truck or not follow so closely and that it should be illegal to carry manure after dark. \n\nYour representative decides to help you out and stays late at work one night when there are only a couple of other representatives there to vote. He begins reading the proposed laws into the record, votes on it himself, and since there is no one to object or vote against, your law may be read into the record, creating a law along the lines of: Manure may not be transferred along public highway by means of flatbed or pickup truck between 9pm and 4:30 am. The law is on the books, but unenforced because no one knows it is there."
] |
What is a joke, how do you classify a “joke”? | [
"(Written for a 7 year old)\n\nA joke is a little bit of talk or writing that makes people laugh in a specific way. \n\nThey aren’t laughing at the person who tells/wrote it, because she sounds weird or is making a silly face. With a joke, it’s the words themselves that make people laugh. \n\nWhy do they laugh? This is a tricky question. Sometimes what is funny to one person is not funny to another. But most of the time, people laugh because the joke makes them imagine something in a surprising new way. Maybe a word is used to mean something that it usually does not. Or the joke might be a little story that you think will turn out one way— but it turns out some other way, and you have to quickly figure out why it happened like that. It’s like a little puzzle, and the listener gets a feeling of happiness when they figure it out. \n\nPeople usually only find a joke funny if they’ve never heard it before! So new ones are always being made. But since it isn’t easy to make up funny jokes, lots of people memorize ones they read or hear.",
"It sounds like she's doing fine figuring out jokes on her own, I think what's most important is your response. \n\nIf she says something that you don't think counts as a joke just say something along the lines of \"interesting but I don't quite think it's for me\"\n\nTry explaining it as \"a joke is something that catches you off guard to alleviate stress and worry\"",
"Maybe watch the scene with her from Borat when he goes to see the woman who teaches him how to tell jokes. Just explaining why it’s a funny sketch would probably be a good vehicle for explaining how jokes work. Don’t be surprised if you hear a lot of ‘not’ jokes after the viewing tho.",
"To add a joke can be anything that is intended to illicit a laugh from other people. Whether a story about something funny or a play on words intent means a lot",
"A joke can be many things, usually the best jokes are playing on the words, or is a story with a twist"
] |
What is a Flexible Spending Account, and how can I take advantage of it? | [
"I'm going to assume you're talking about a medical flex spending account (though they often offer childcare ones too) offered to you by the company you're working at. If that's not the case, feel free to ignore me.\n\nThese are accounts that you can send a certain portion of your money each paycheck into tax free. The trick is that this money can only be spent on certain things (Medical expenses or child care). The basic idea is that you don't pay taxes on money you spend on medical expenses. Flex spending accounts help you do this quickly and easily.",
"With the advent of the Affordable Care Act, a lot of insurance companies are offering high deductible policies, where you pay the first few thousand dollars of costs out of pocket.\n\nTo help bridge this cap, the gov't lets you set up FSAs, which are tax free accounts designed to cover these large deductibles."
] |
My Almost 5 year old brother wants to know what the internet and a website IS | [
"The internet is a bunch of computers, wires and software all working together. Some computers do different kind of things. A website is a page that is written in a special language so people can show videos music write things and show cool applications. To get to a website we use a web browser that talks to computers that are especially made to find things(Servers) You can send this request by either typing in a websites address directly or using a search engine that will help you find it.\n\nThat shouldn't be too hard to understand",
"You're at school and you want some information from your teacher. But your teacher isn't in the same room as you are, so you go to the hall monitor and give him a piece of paper which asks for some information from the teacher. The hall monitor only knows that the teacher is on the other side of the building, so he folds your note into a paper airplane and sends it on to another hall monitor on the other side of the building.\n\nThe second hall monitor knows that the teacher is in the common room, but doesn't know which desk he's at, so he throws the paper airplane to another hall monitor who can then go in the common room and find the teacher. He gets the information for you and sends it back through all the other hall monitors.\n\nIn this example, you are the web browser, the hall monitors are your internet provider (and the routers that link all the internet providers together), your teacher is the web server and the paper airplane is a packet of data.\n\nSometimes the information you ask for is simple, and the teacher can just make a copy of a page he already has, and give that to the hall monitor to send back to you. But sometimes you ask for more complicated information, and the teacher has to go look it up from all the books that he has, and write a page specially for you, and then he gives that page to the hall monitor.\n\nIn this case, the books are called a database, and this is how you get web pages which list, say, all the Spongebob Squarepants toys on sale at the local store. The store doesn't keep a page listing every combination of items it has, but instead it writes a page every time someone asks for a list of items.\n\nSo you might ask for a list of all Spongebob toys, but someone else might ask for a list of all Spongebob toys that cost less than $5. The web server has to do a lot of work putting all this information together and sending out all the different web pages.",
"A website is a file, just like a song or a video. Specifically, it's a file written in a combination of languages, including HTML and often Javascript. Your web browser is a translator that reads the language and shapes it into the webpage you see. What the internet is? Well, ultimately, it's just about connecting computers through an internet connection. The files of a website are all hosted on a server, which is a special type of computer meant to communicate with a large number of other computers. The \"internet,\" is the term for all the connections between all the computers that can share files."
] |
Seeing as mosquitos are some of the biggest threats to continued human development, would there be any significant consequences to driving them extinct? | [
"(This is all based on \"assuming you could without killing every other insect too\".)\n\nAn analysis I read about this had a basic \"not anything drastic\" as an answer. \n\nThey are a major component of the insect food chain and they don't heavily compete with other insects for their food so many mosquito-eaters - bats, fish, dragonflies - might have reduced populations due to a reduction in their food supply. \n\nAnd they act as disease carriers to species other than humans (example: malaria affects animals, and heartworm in dogs can be transmitted by them), so some animals would be less affected by them. \n\nFinally (this is speculation) it might open up options for less protected animals to move into mosquito-rich areas such as the northern tundra because they'd no longer get eaten alive there, as mosquitos can actually kill animals through bloodloss if enough of them feed.\n\nBut these wouldn't be enough to bring the overall food chain to its knees. Some species would suffer more than others, but eventually something else would either just move into, or evolve to fill, their ecological niche."
] |
How do lobbying groups control advertisers? | [
"Usually lobbying groups are advertisers themselves, as in, they pay to have a commercial made supporting a certain opinion...or conversely they advertise the hazards of a certain action (MADD, _URL_0_)."
] |
Why do different operating systems require different versions of the same software? | [
"Software developer here,\n\nThere is a thing called a system call, and this is basically the program asking the operating system to perform some work, for example, reading data from a file. A program doesn't know how to do this, it's not part of its program to know what a hard drive is, or how different manufacturer hard drives work, or what a file system is - all that is abstracted away.\n\nMost operating systems offer a fairly standard complement of system calls, but there are minor variations and different conventions behind how they are called.\n\nThe majority of the binary instructions in a program from one OS platform to the next will mostly be the same for a given hardware architecture, but program setup, tear down, and when the program has to reach outside itself for resources, these things are different between operating systems.",
"Every seen those children's toys where you have to put the square block in the square hole, the round block in the round hole, and the triangle block in the triangle hole?\n\nOperating systems are built differently, and so you need to tailor the application to work effectively for the operating system it will be running on.\n\nPeople try to build things that let you run apps from one system on another (Wine for Linux/MacOS X), VMWare to run virtual instances of operating systems, ports for particular functions (Bash Shell for Windows), etc.\n\nCompanies make the operating systems different so you have to go to them if you want repairs, similar products, more stuff, etc. People who are familiar with Windows often have lots of trouble moving to Mac or Linux at first, and are more likely to stay with Windows products in the future. Apple can sell you all sorts of proprietary software and peripherals.\n\nLinux, on the other hand, supports lots of open source stuff, and provides the user with lots of control over the computer. It tends to be more than most casual technology users are willing to learn or deal with, though."
] |
Do air marshals really spend most of their time flying around in random planes? How are they assigned? Or is that just something for the movies? | [
"The Federal Air Marshal Service is part of the Department of Homeland Security. They are trained law enforcement officers who train specifically around planes/aviation. They go through the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), which all federal LEOs go through, and a secondary training specific to their role. They are assigned to specific flights, both domestic and international. Long international flights can have multiple Marshals on board. The flight crew knows of the Marshal's presence on the plane. The agency chooses which flights to have Marshals on board. They tend to increase if a large sporting event is taking place or a major political event is occurring in a city. If you fly frequently, you probably have been on a flight with a Marshal and never knew it.\n\nEdit to answer a few more items:\nMuch of their time is spent in the air or at airports, but they also can have desk work.\nThey carry SIG p229 chambered in .357 Sig. For those not familiar, it is a hybrid between a 9mm (the bullet) and .40 (the case). Think 9mm magnum for the easiest description.",
"There are also other federal LEOs that have air marshal qualification/certification/status (e.g. FBI agents or DoD employees) who are used as kind of air marshal militia.\n\nSay a major holiday is coming up, they get a call/email and are told they can leave for X holiday early, go see some family, but they have to take 20 flights to get there and carry a gun.\n\nI have a relative who used to act in this role. He was a federal LEO, but had gotten air marshal qualified at some point. He'd randomly come visit for thanksgiving, xmas, 4th of july on short notice (a few days, maybe a week or two). We'd pick him up at the airport and he'd be strapping. Pretty crazy, but pretty smart. I mean, he was not your average federal LEO... more like walter from Big Lebowski. Fat older guy that worked as an administrator day to day, but yeah he was qual'd to pop a would-be terrorist if they tried anything. He did a career with the feds and only started acting in this role post 9/11. We also lived in a major city.",
"Related: do they carry a weapon, or something that would show up in the hand-luggage scanner?\n\nIf so, either the scanning people know who they are, or they must get into the boarding area through an internal route.",
"Former federal law encofrment here. When I was at fletc ( federal law enforcement training center) there was a former air marshal in my class. They do carry weapons and are usually asigned to a specific area ( read flights). If there is an air marshall on your floght, you wont know.but they are assigned specific seats and there are always two in case some shit goes down. The first or primary marshall reacts while the partner waits in case its a diversion.",
"I ended up traveling with a guy from Birmingham to Pittsburgh via Atlanta. Nice guy. We ended up missing our flight in Atl and waited a couple of hours for another. Turns out he was a senior DEA agent in the area. When we went to board the next plane he had triplicate forms that he had to give at the gate and to the pilot. I asked him what it was - he said (sotto voce) \"I'm carrying a gun.\" Since he was in shorts and a shortsleeve shirt, I didn't ask him where.",
"Assignment is based off of game theory. Imagine there are two flights: one is really high risk (New York to Houston), and the other is really low risk (puddle jumper from Sioux City to Fargo). If you always protect the high risk one, then the bad guys will just always target low risk flights. Might not be as worth it to the bad guys to hijack the little plains in rural areas, but it's much safer for them. On the other hand, if you switch over to always guarding the low risk flights than it's even worse.\n\nSo a utility is assigned to each flight. Not sure how that's calculated (it's probably not public), but marshals are assigned random flights based off of that utility. A high priority flight is going to have a higher chance of getting a marshal, but every flight has at least a small chance of getting a marshal. Special software is used to figure that out, since a marshal can only take a flight if they're in the right airport. For example, the software might make it more likely for a marshal to take a low priority flight if they end up in an airport with several high priority flights coming out.\n\nSimilar software is used in quite a few places, like the boats guarding the Staten Island ferry.\n\nI don't have a direct source I can point you to, but check out [this guy](_URL_0_). He's the one who's developed all this software, and he has a lot of papers you can take a look at. I heard a presentation from him a few months ago, that's how I'm familiar with it.",
"I seems like I can always spot the marshal. traveling alone, very little luggage, baseball cap, jeans, always looking around, studying the other passengers nonchalantly, a familiar bulge at the hip.",
"Are air marshalls needed? How often are they utilized to justify the cost of having multiple on a plane, or hoping that if something happens, it's on a plan that was assigned a marshall?"
] |
What does our body use trace metals (eg: iron) for? | [
"Iron is used in haemoglobin, for binding oxygen in our erythrocytes (red blood cells).\n\nMagnesium is used as a regulator in hundreds of biological reactions in the body.\n\nThey are mainly used to help other reactions either happen at all, or progress faster."
] |
The differences between (Mandarin) Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages | [
"Chinese word order is Subject-Verb-Object like English. Chinese languages are tonal. In Mandarin, there are [four tones](_URL_1_). So based on how you say the word \"ma\" - it could mean \"horse\" or it could mean \"mother\", etc. Chinese writing system is primarily hieroglyph, so one symbol = one word. \n\nKorean is fairly modern language. Unlike English, it uses Subject-Object-Verb word order. It borrows a lot from Chinese and Japanese - and they're not tonal. Korean writing system is very scientific and *very easy*. In fact, you can [learn to read Korean in 15 minute](_URL_0_). \n\nJapanese is a completely different language base - and is actually pretty easy to pick up. Word order is Subject-Object-Verb. It's non-tonal. There are three writing systems: kana, kanji and romanji. \nKana writing system is most common, its 1 symbol = 1 consonant and 1 vowel. ナ = na. バナナ = Ba-na-na. \nKanji is hieroglyph and somewhat shared with Chinese. There are thousands of characters. \nRomanji is increasing in popular. It's English-letters (romanized!) as Japanese words. \"ABC\" = ei-bi-shi.",
"I speak Cantonese, so I'm still an outsider, but I can tell all 3 apart immediately - partially because I've heard them often and can distinguish it just from hearing them so much and partially because I'm used to distinguishing a ton of tones with Canto. The written languages are very clearly different stylistically, so I won't bother explaining that.\n\nAnyway, Mandarin is pretty high pitched to me (especially in Taiwan, Youtube a Taiwanese news segment), with a lot of \"sh/s\" sounds. The say \"ma\" at the end of a lot of phrases (the same from ni hao ma), mostly \"jun da ma\" (really), in convos I feel. Mandarin from people from Beijing is very garbled in the sense that it's throatier and deeper/lower in its pronunciations, but the tones are still higher compared to Canto. Hard to explain, but there's other Mandarin speaking people who have a tough time understanding the Beijing accent. \n\nJapanese is cutesy sounding to me, I always think \"kawaiii!\" and anime voices. It's pretty romanized since they have the basic sounds \"aeiou\" - > \"ah ee eh oh u\". I guess the biggest giveaway is that most of their words (as in each individual word bit/sound) seem to end in a vowel sound? I don't know the language too well though.\n\nKorean sounds much closer to Japanese, but has much lower tones overall, and possibly the slowest spoken of the three. Not to say can't Korean can't be spoken fast, but it's more relaxed and not often as rushed as Japanese and Mandarin.\n\nThe Korean music industry is seriously branching out into the other major Asian countries (China, Japan) so they're learning the languages and coming out with songs in those languages. Since I pick out these three based on tones, sometimes I don't realize until I really listen which language is actually sung in some songs. The style and pronunciation by non-native/fluent speakers add to my not realizing it though."
] |
if public IP addresses are dynamic, which means they are constantly changing, how is internet activity able to be tracked, logged, etc.? | [
"Dynamic IPs aren't really all that dynamic. You keep the same IP as long as you renew your lease (ie - have your computer on) every 2-3 days. Some systems may give you even longer before recycling your address.\n\nBeyond that, it's not unlikely that your ISP logged the information about who was assigned the IP & still has the data sitting around.",
"In order to have internet service your Modem has a unique address called a MAC address. When you are assigned a Dynamic IP it is logged by your ISP as being assigned to your MAC address. Your IP address can change completely, but your MAC address for your modem will never change.",
"ISPs, your providers are required to keep records/logs of what network device (your cable modem) aka customer had what IP address in time."
] |
Why do video game companies make games that you can't pause offline? Mainly zombies in black ops 3 | [
"To make the game more tense. They could easily add pause, but but bring able to gets some people more immersed. Dark Souls did that to me."
] |
Can you briefly explain Dr Who? | [
"Doctor Who's main character is The Doctor himself, he is a Time Lord (its a race, like humans) and he nicked a time traveling spaceship called the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space).\n The Daleks are a genetically modified race that lost the ability to feel pity, compassion, or remorse and they consider themselves a superior race and have a desire to \"purge\" the Universe of everything non-Dalek. The Time Lords had a huge war against the Daleks called the Time War where their home planet and their race got destroyed (spoilers, not gonna go into that), and the Doctor is the last of the Time Lords. He travels around, has adventures, both in the future and the past, both on Earth and on non-human planets.",
"The Doctor is a time-travelling alien. He travels in a TARDIS (the blue box that makes noises and is bigger on the inside). The TARDIS can travel through time and space. He goes around solving problems and fiddling around with situations as he finds them, often with one or two companions.\n\nThe Daleks are a race of highly aggressive, cyborg aliens. Their modus operandi is (they being highly aggressive) to kill everything that isn't a Dalek while screaming \"EXTERMINATE!\" in a very loud and repetitive fashion. The Daleks are mortal enemies of the Doctor, as the two races fought a very long and drawn out war over the fate of the universe.",
"since the other comments nicely explained it, I'd also like to add that you should try a few episodes yourself. it's meant to be suitable to an adult audience as well, though it may take a few episodes to get into. most of it is quite enjoyable to watch, compared to pretty much any other show suitable for children."
] |
How is it that the distance between Earth and the moon can supposedly fit all of the planets, but pictures show the moon relatively close to Earth? | [
"[Well here's a picture of the Moon and Earth drawn to scale.](_URL_0_)\n\nMost of the picture is just black space, which is useful in situations like this where you want to gauge the distance between them, but for most illustrating purposes you usually just want to show the two bodies together with the moon slightly further away to represent orbit.\n\nDistances in space are *crazy.* [This is a map](_URL_1_) showing the distance of planets and moons in our solar system, scaled down so that the moon is displayed at a size of 1 pixel. Since that's the smallest a computer monitor can show, this website is the smallest map of the solar system that can be drawn at scale while still showing the moon.\n\nThat's why we usually have to get a bit abstract with the pictures, because any scaled map of celestial bodies is going to be almost exclusively empty space.",
"The distance between the Earth and the Moon is about 400.000 km. But the distances to all the other planets are so, so large, that when you plot the distances to scale, the Moon couldn't seem closer. \n\nThe closest planet, Venus, is 40 million km away. Mars, is 56 million km away. \n\nThis means, Venus is 100 times further away from the Earth than the moon is. If the distance Earth-Moon on a piece of paper were 1 cm, Venus would be at the end of the (big) table, 1 m away. That's why it seems to you that Earth-Moon are so close.\n\nNow, for the size of the planets: the largest one is Jupiter, it's diameter is about 140.000 km. Saturn, about 110.000. Neptune, almost 50.000 km. Those are the gas giants (they are called *giants* for a reason). The rest of us, rock planets, are really, really small: Earth and Venus, 13.000 km, Mars, half of that (7.000 km), Mercury is really tiny too (5000 km).\n\nIf you add all those numbers: 140+110+50+13+7+5 = 325.\n\n325 thousand km. That's less than the distance to the Moon. They do fit. Even including Pluto with its 2 thousand km diameter. And all of the asteroids.",
"If it was to scale, you wouldn't be able to see details of either object. This is the same reason images of the solar system aren't to scale: it would be a small sun with barely recognizable dots a long distance away from it.",
"If you want to make a picture of the solar system, you have two choices:\n\n* make the distance between planets to scale, and draw a tiny dots very far apart\n* don't make it to scale, and show the planets with their customary details\n\nMost people opt for the latter."
] |
Why is it when I drive my work truck around town everybody else with a work truck waves at me even if I don't know them? This doesn't happen when I drive my normal car. | [
"Uk here. Bikers wave to each other, and as i drive a liveried van for a roadside assistance company all other drivers from different companies in the same industry wave to each other too. Some i know, most i don't. Think its all because we do the sane thing., camaraderie and all that.",
"I get the same thing in my area when I ride my motorbike.\n\nI guess it has to do with there being a small number of people doing what you do and it's nice to be nice to other people with similar interests."
] |
tea bags in the US politics | [
"There is a party in American politics called the [Tea Party](_URL_0_). Making fun of them by calling them tea bags tea baggers. I can elaborate on tea bagging if you want."
] |
how long does person have to be dead before it’s considered archaeology instead of grave robbing? | [
"It is not a matter of time, it is a matter of intent and legality.\n\nA graverobber illegal takes objects from graves to sell them.\n\nAn archaeologist legally (usually) takes objects from graves to study them.",
"It depends on who owns the burial site. Archeologists must get permission from the landowner and get an excavation permit from the government. Grave robbing is a crime, so no permission necessary. What must be done with any finds are dictated by the laws of the country. The IS has the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, for instance. In Switzerland, all \"ancient artifacts\" found belong to the state, though the finder must be rewarded. \n\nArcheologists worked on the site of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and their finds are on exhibit at the 9-11 museum.",
"I don't know as a whole but there was a case of someone retrieving a well preserved and *ancient* native american body that was eventually returned to to contemporary native american people, so in some cases it seem like an indefinite amount of time.",
"Time is not an element here. \n\nIt's the same difference between illegally harvesting a person's kidneys and going to a hospital to have a surgeon remove your kidneys.\n\n1) You must be a trained and licensed professional. This involves years of education followed by government overseen licensing procedures.\n\n2) You must have explicit permission from the owner of the property.\n\n3) You must have explicit permission from the government in which the property is located.\n\n4) You are bound by explicit rules, laws, and obligations that vary from country to country. Breaking any of these rules, laws, or obligations will likely result in losing your license to perform the task, which means all of that training, licensing, and education will go to waste."
] |
What makes the Millennium problems so difficult? | [
"There are several different types of problem there. Like any problem the solution seems hard until someone figures it out the first time. Unless many people try and nobody comes upon the key. Then they get noticed, and in the case of the millennium prizes, they get collected together and publicized by people willing to pay just to know someone has solved them.\n\nMore directly, it's usually a case of there not being the right kind of math invented to solve them yet. Which is another way of saying we can logically understand the question but we can't symbolically get from there to the answer. Until someone does. And then we add a course to graduate science or mathematics programs and move on to wondering why we can't solve the other problems so simply..."
] |
What do Ant & Roach killers that kill on contact such as Ultra-Kill or Raid actually do to the ants? | [
"It is a matter of debate whether insects like ants feel 'pain' in the sense that we do. Their nervous systems are much simpler and, in a lot of cases, much more autonomic than ours. Cockroaches have [hairlike appendages on their bodies which act as sensors](_URL_0_) and detect air flow changes, alerting them to impending danger; the impulse to run moves directly from these sensors (called *cerci*) to their legs without traveling to their brains, which is why they're so fucking fast to zip out of the way of a shoe or newspaper. Flies and many other insects are similarly equipped.\n\nAs others have explained, the sprays and foams act as nerve agents, disrupting the insects' nervous systems. What you are interpreting as \"writhing in pain\" is more likely just their nervous systems misfiring as they collapse.",
"Raid paralyzes the nerves of insects. Nerve paralysis for more than a minute means death from any number of things.",
"I was actually wondering this the other day as I sprayed a cockroach. In the end, what's important is that the fucking thing suffers as much as possible before it does forever",
"So I have heard spiders don't die as quickly with these agents as ants , etc.. do, because of their harder shell, right? I know bug companies will use a powder or something where the spider will get it on its body and transport it back to the nest. Is that accurate?",
"They probably absorb the poison through the skin. Nerve agents work in insects a lot like they work on people. The agent disrupts the nervous system which causes seizures, which is what you see when they are writhing, vomiting, and eventually paralysis of the muscles that cause breathing to happen, and the insect, or Kurd circa 1988, dies due to lack of oxygen.",
"has to do with the nervous system usually as far as i know."
] |
Rational Emotive Behaviour Theory or R.E.B.T | [
"It's a form of [cognitive-behavioural therapy] (_URL_1_) that espouses rational, logical thinking, flexibility, and acceptance as the antidote to dysfunction (poor mental health/mental illness). Essentially, the practitioner is there to help the client challenge self-defeating or harmful perceptions of a situation situation, examine evidence of a particular assumption more pragmatically, and then gain insight from the unhelpful understanding of the situation. Unlike \"pure\" CBT, which sees the thinking/feeling/acting parts as relatively independent parts that influence each other, REBT sees thinking/feeling/acting as shades of the same thing.\n\nIt's pretty trendy right now, but of course it has many of the same criticisms of CBT. \n\nThe Albert Ellis Institute [has lots of info.] (_URL_0_)"
] |
Whats the point of circumcision? | [
"This is an episode of Penn & Teller - Bullshit - Circumcision.\n\n_URL_0_",
"These days it's mostly about religion and social norm. Some people say it's because of cleanliness, but there is really no problem in cleaning an uncircumsised penis. There is also the argument of cutting it before any potential problems with the foreskin appears.",
"It is because of some incoherent verses in Exodus 4. God comes across Moses in a hotel (?) and goes to kill him for no reason (??) then Moses's wife cuts off her son's foreskin (???) and rubs it on Moses's feet (????) and that placates God (?????). I am not making this up.\n\nObviously that is a very good reason to mutilate innocent children so we still do it today.",
"Here are some of the explanations I've heard, in no particular order. Please note that my intent is to explain what people believe, not to comment on whether these views are accurate: \n\n- Religious reasons. In some religions it's pretty much required that you do.\n\n- Disease prevention. Some people believe that circumcision reduces the transmission of pathogens between sexual partners. There are also claims about it being easier to clean the genitalia if you're circumcised. \n\n- Disease treatment. There are some medical conditions where circumcision becomes a necessary treatment, such as phimosis. \n\n- Personal preference. Perhaps the father was circumcised and thinks that worked out well for him. Perhaps the parents think it looks better that way. \n\n- Cultural reasons. If you live in a place where circumcision is considered the norm, you may be more inclined to go with that option."
] |
Why do men get morning wood (even if they didn't have erotic dreams)? | [
"Morning wood (aka [nocturnal penile tumescence](_URL_0_)) occurs in healthy men 3-5 times a night regardless of what kind of dream they have. NPT is theorized to help prevent bed-wetting and stretch out the cavernosum muscles (what fills with blood to cause erection) to prevent erectile dysfunction.",
"The physiological effects of the erection effectively block the pathway from the bladder, safeguarding you from wetting the bed.",
"Erections are controlled by the parasympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system, and suppressed by your sympathetic nervous system.\n\nYour sympathetic nervous system becomes active when stressed or scared, which is why nervousness and fear are boner-killers. Your parasympathetic nervous system is the opposite and becomes most active when resting and digesting and controls a variety of functions related to being relaxed. Guess which is more active while sleeping.\n\nIncidentally, the parasympathetic system sends a signal for critical arteries to *relax* and open up. If you cut all nervous system control (e.g. sudden death) then those tissues relax by default, resulting in a corpse with a boner!",
"I've always understood it (and I have no source for this so take it with a grain of salt) that since you have to pee your bladder is full and this pushes up against your prostate which in turn gives you an erection. \n\nNow that I said it out loud, I doubt that's true, but whatever",
"Have you heard of circadian rhythms? I'm going to explain this as if you haven't, but the short answer is \"circadian rhythms of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems\". Just ignore the other answers; they're misleading and mostly outright incorrect.\n_____________________________________________________________\n\nYour body produces a wide variety of chemicals, and some of this production shows timing effects. The words to describe some of these timing effects are: 1) infradian= more than a day, usually used to describe monthly variations, for example the chemicals in the menstual cycle, 2) circadian= 24 hour cycle, timed to the light/dark cycle, for example melatonin which makes us feel drowsy and ready for bed, and 3) ultradian= usually refers to hourly cycles, but technically this means \"cycles in less than a day\", for example some of the chemicals that give us hunger signals. There's also a term for \"annual cycles\", for example the chemicals triggering hibernation, but I can't think of it right now.\n\nOk, so if you're still with me, all humans go through circadian sympathetic and parasympathetic cycles. For simplicity's sake, you can think of sympathetic as being equal to cortisol/adrenaline/\"fight or flight\", and parasympathetic as being equal to \"rest and digest\". Both men and women get these, and they happen at the same time, but the response to the chemicals are a little different. For example, men's peak sexual arousal corresponds with the circadian adrenaline kick that happens roughly around 6AM, and although women get the same kick, their peak arousal corresponds to the circadian adrenaline kick happening around 3:30PM. \n\nBoth the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are necessary for sexual arousal and orgasm. Parasympathetic activation is needed for engorgement, and this is the system cycling most during sleep. Sympathetic is needed for ejaculation/orgasm. The pneumonic device we were taught in both anatomy and physiology courses was \"***p***oint and ***s***hoot\"-- > ***p***arasympathetic leads to erection or \"pointing\", ***s***ympathetic leads to ejaculation or \"shooting\". \n\nThese circadian cycles are biologically timed, so you have no direct control over them. Anyway, this explains both erection cycles at night, and occasional wet dreams.",
"> Just a question i woke up with\n\nI'm assuming you woke up with something else too",
"Men get erections on and off throughout the night. It's simply to keep the penile tissue healthy.",
"Yesternight I dreamt that a robot chick shrunk me to miniature size. To get back to normal I had to kiss her all over and destroy a mountain with my erection.\n\n\n\nI didn't wake up with morning wood so I guess I failed :("
] |
How does VLC remember where you were last watching? | [
"The Mac version uses a dictionary called recentlyPlayedMedia in its preferences file. Each entry contains the file path (URI) and the time offset in seconds."
] |
Why do movie/music/book critics revise their original rating of a particular film/album/book and give it a better score than they originally did? | [
"Sometimes it's hard to realise the true worth of a work after a single viewing, which is what the majority of journalists will see of a film before having to do a write up. They're working to a tight schedule, so often they'll watch it once and do a write-up on their initial response.\n\nSome films/albums/books need to be experienced a few times before being fully understood and appreciated.\n\nAlso, some works are better when viewed in retrospect. The works of H.P. Lovecraft for instance, when they were released in the 20s, received next to no praise or appreciation simply because it was too different from the contemporary trends. These days, now that we can look at his work in a historical context without our judgement being clouded by current fads, he is regarded as a genius.",
"Judging art depends on what is called \"context.\"\n\nContext means the exact way you feel at a specific moment. Much like snowflakes no two contexts are ever 100% **exactly** alike. More to the point, one can never be fully aware of everything that affects his or her context-- you might have a stomachache when you watch a movie, and confuse your stomachache with the movie making you sick or just feel \"bad and not pay as much attention to the movie.\n\nWhen you see a piece of art for the first time you are only judging it through one context. This means you have to rely on your first impression to form your opinion, and first impressions are often wrong. \n\n**Thus many critics who watch a movie in a different context will often form a different opinion of what they watched. Their context can be so different that it allows them to see the movie in an entirely new way.**\n\n---------------------------------------------------------------\n\nContext is also dependent on peer pressure. While no true art is what we call \"objectively\" good (that is to say that no one would *ever* have a different opinion about something than anything else ever), humans are what we call \"tribal\" and come to what is called \"group consensus.\" \n\n\"Group Consensus\" means that most people have a shared opinion and those that think otherwise are at risk of being made to feel bad or have to defend themselves for having their opinion. This is why people will almost always tell you Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived, even though individual opinions on that matter vary a lot.\n\nArt criticism is no different, and subject to similar group consensus that can affect how you view new art. In professional criticism you have four major group consensuses that will affect your opinion:\n\n1. The amount of art you watch: the more art you watch the more particular your tastes become, and the harder it can be for new art to make a good impression on you due to what is called a \"saturation effect.\" Saturation just means that you've taken in too much of something to process any more, and a saturated art critic may find their job easier to be dismissive than to search a new work for praise.\n\n2. Your peers: Like I said earlier humans are herd animals, and while everyone should have their own opinions going against the majority consensus too often can be dangerous and scary. Also, critics find a shared bond in being able to appreciate more \"esoteric\" (or limited appeal) pieces of art that most people never see or care about. This is where you get stereotypes like \"movie critics only like black and white foreign films.\" \n\n3. Their bosses. Art criticism plays a role in the art world as it provides a filter for people to determine what to spend their money on. As such the people who create and manage Art often pressure critics to be \"nicer\" to their works so they have a chance to make more money. Critics are also encouraged to be \"nicer\" to art as the don't want Artists and their Managers to stop sending them material to view. This can create a \"bias\"--or influence--on a critic to be nicer to people who pay him more (this is a problem in every industry). \n\n4. The audiences/readers: These are the people that watch art and read reviews. They form various social circles, and put certain artists on \"pedestals\" or \"treat them like royalty.\" Critics will often attempt to endear themselves to one audience and/or distance themselves from another by being extra-nice or extra-nasty to a piece of art. They might then revise that opinion years later if they want to endear themselves to another audience.\n\nNone of these necessarily mean that a Critic's opinion is **entirely** determined by other groups of people and *their* opinions, but it does influence them to one degree or another. \n\nWhen you are trying to determine if a Critic is biased or not, you have to stop looking at **what** they are saying and determine **how they arrived at their opinion**. This is a difficult process and often more trouble than it is ever worth, so if a Critic seems to have a stupid opinion they changed for arbitrary reasons, then just ignore them. \n\nThat said if you **do** want to analyze a Critic's opinion the first thing to do is look at their **stated** reasons for having an opinion. Analyze their logical structure and determine if they make valid or invalid arguments to arrive at their conclusion. Many don't, and base their opinions on \"gut\" or emotional reactions to the material--which as I said before is heavily dependent on context.\n\nA good and humble (or \"self-aware\") Critic is aware of everything I just said and will be able to talk about any issues that would affect his or her opinion in an extreme way after the fact. As a Critic it is a mark of integrity (or \"honesty and humility\") that one keeps track of their opinions on prior works and references the change in opinion in the new review."
] |
Why does audio rapidly repeat itself when a computer crashes? | [
"At a high level, sound cards playback sound by reading digital data from a buffer and converting it into an analog signal to transmit to the speaker. When a normal stream of audio is being played back, its data is written into the buffer as a stream so there's no hops or skips - as the digital audio converter scans back and forth over the buffer, the buffer data is overwritten as its being played.\n\nIf the audio controller crashes but the hardware is still going strong, it begins to simply replay what happened to be in the buffer at the point of the crash, causing the effect you describe. \n\nThe audio will fully stop if the OS can catch the program going unresponsive and eject it from memory, which frees the audio controller."
] |
What is a magic eraser and why does it work? | [
"It's melamine foam, which is a really hard material made into a sponge. It's basically really fine sandpaper, so be careful what you clean with it (shiny things like mirrors or chrome will dull after a few uses)."
] |
How is it that we are the most advanced species on the planet, yet our young take so long (much longer than most species) to be self-sufficient? | [
"That's just it. It takes a while to amass information and use it.\n\nAn animal just does whatever comes natural, aka 'instinct'. But humans are taught and trained and learn and practice and... and...\n\nLayers and layers of information and training to get us to the point where we can actually achieve more than the previous generation.\n\nNone of that comes easily, nor quickly. For to run, one must learn to walk. Apply that to any activity in life. Building. Theorizing. Testing. Proving.\n\nAll these require layers of previous knowledge. For we are not animals, just here to eat and procreate. \n\nWe are more than animals. But it takes practice to stay that way. Years of it.",
"Because our brains need to develop to a point beyond any other animal, they start off a lot smaller which makes birth easier. We're very social animals so having slower developing, vulnerable young isn't an issue.",
"Most animals are born fully developed, they have the ability to walk and join the heard very quickly. The only think left is for them to grow larger and learn from the heard. Their limited capabilities only require so much time in the womb.\n\nHumans take a long time to fully develop our brains because they are so complex. After 9 months the baby is about as large as it can get and still be birthed naturally. In fact the baby skull is made of plates that compress during birth allowing the baby to pass. As the baby grows the plates fuse to a solid skull. After birth the baby continues to develop and grow. By the time a human is fully developed, it would be impossible for them to be birthed.",
"Indeed the reason we're so advanced as a species is because our young take so long to be self-sufficient. Part of the requirements for our bipedalism is that our offspring are born premature, so they can fit out of a narrower pelvis. Many animals, even advanced mammals are born and within hours are walking, playing, interacting socially. Human babies can't do a single thing, they can't even hold their own heads up. Literally the one skill a newborn baby has is the instinct to suckle. Everything else is learned and takes time. But because it takes so long and parents invest so much time, resources, and affection in the child, we can grow to have hefty brains that are more capable than any other in the animal kingdom. For animals that mature quickly, there's a hard limit to how smart they can get. For us, you have fifteen to twenty-five years to become a highly intelligent being.",
"It is a built in evolution trait. The more time a mammal protects and nourish the young means more time for developing the brain. Without that step in evolution we would never have gotten to where we are."
] |
Monsanto and the public's (generally) negative opinion of the company. | [
"It seems like this question is asked weekly here\n\n***\nI have been following anti-GMO activists and the Monsanto haters for couple of years and here are some thoughts.\n\n* Anti-GMO beliefs are mostly on the left, which is unusual because the left tends to be more aligned with science. (at least in comparison with the political right)\n\n* These beliefs seem to stem from a few areas of activism: environmentalism, natural/organic movements, anti-corporatism, and surprisingly anti-war\n\n* The connection with environmentalism is pretty obvious. Agriculture does effect the environment in large and small ways. However most of the anti-GMO arguments tend to be about all modern agriculture and not specifically about GM-crops. It doesn't help that major environmental groups (green peace) promote conspiracy theories about GM crops.\n\n* Natural/organic movements: These movements tend to fall into the naturalistic fallacy, that is, natural good/man-made bad. These people also tend to romanticize more primitive times and see technology as stealing or corrupting the perfect human nature which they imagine existed when we were hunter-gathers. The problem of course is the natural things can be really bad and man-made things can be really good. Consider antibiotics vs leprosy. People who hold these views would have agriculture go back to 1900 where 90+% of people worked on the farm to feed 1.5 billion people; they would prefer to trap billions in hard labor and starvation. \n\n* Anti-corporatism is also pretty obvious. The idea here is that big companies are monopolizing food sources and driving the (romantic ideal of the) farmer out of business. However it takes a large company or university to fund research into crops (genetically engineered or not) and those organizations have been able to patent their research since 1930 (plant patent act) to recoup the costs. These big-ag companies generally do not farm, they are not monopolies, no farmer has to buy their products and their patents (such as RR corn and soy) expire. \n\n* The anti-war sentiment is pretty interesting and is tied to the anti-corporatism, which also coincides with the rise of the environmental and anti-corporatism movements. Generally the argument goes that companies that made products in previous wars are tainted and cannot be trusted with something as important as food. The most extreme version of this is the idea that companies are actively trying to kill people. This is relevant to agriculture because there were several Ag companies that manufactured Agent-Orange during the Vietnam war and are thus tainted by this argument. The problem is that the companies that made Agent-Orange were compelled to under the War Powers Act. They didn't invent it, and the certainly had no say as to when, where or how it was to be used. Additionally, the assumed danger of Agent Orange (surprisingly still unproven) was from a Dioxin contamination which the companies informed the government about... and were ignored.\n\n***\n\nConsidering the sources of the anti-GMO sentiment you can see that it stems from the political and social movements in the 1960s. It is likely fostered by people who grew up in that time (baby boomers) and it will continue to be a major political issue until baby boomers leave public life. As it is, boomers are still a major factor in politics, education, activism and journalism... so I suspect that we will see strong anti-GMO activism for at least another decade.",
"Interestingly, a lot of the protestors against Monsanto get stuff wrong. There's a YouTuber called MylesPower who goes to the protests and fact checks them. That's consistent with Monsanto still being shitty of course."
] |
wtf is a 'noun clause'' and why would I use it? | [
"It's a dependent clause that acts as a noun. For example: \"Whoever thought of that idea is a genius\" \nThe noun clause in that is \"whoever thought of that idea\" this entire phrase is subject of that sentence."
] |
When looking into a mirror the reflection is effected by my glasses. glasses on = far away objects are clear, glasses off = far away objects blurry. The image in the mirror is close to me so why does distance in the reflection matter? | [
"It's the difference between looking at a mirror, and looking at a TV. With a mirror, you are looking at the actual light waves coming from the distant object, so your eyes must focus distantly.",
"The image in the mirror is a virtual image. So you have to think about the distance as also being virtual. You aren't seeing a real image that is just a few inches in front of your face. You're seeing a virtual image that is a virtual distance from your face that is equal to the distance between the object and the mirror + the distance between the mirror and your face.",
"The image in the mirror is close, but the light still hast to travel all the way from the object, bounce off the mirror and hit your eye. The path of light is actually further when you look in a mirror"
] |
Why are earthquakes with a high magnitude appearing frequently? | [
"They're not?\n\nEarthquake frequency has not noticeably increased. Here's [all 7.0+ earthquakes in the last 5 years](_URL_0_). They're pretty evenly spread over that time. Yeah, there were several big ones today, but random events clump up... it's the nature of randomness.",
"This article explains what you're seeing in the media right now: [Summer of the Shark](_URL_1_)",
"They aren't. The earthquake that just happened in Nepal was 1 quake with aftershocks. The news sees it as a finincial opportunity and is blowing it way out of proportion. Earthquakes happen no more often that 10000 years ago, we just have an annoying media that sells sad stories.",
"In my opinion it's about what gets reported and what does not. We're much more likely to hear about an Earthquake that happened overseas now than we are 20 years ago because of the wealth of information we have access to today."
] |
What does one have to do to be able to make a subreddit | [
"You have to have a 30-day-old account and an (unknown) amount of positive karma. \n\nYou basically have no karma at the moment, so I would say that you should comment on some threads to build it up.",
"What sub do you wanna make? I'll make it for you, and you can be a moderator"
] |
Why are people so against ResponsibleOhio's plan for marijauna legalization? | [
"The main complaint is that it arbitrarily limits the production and sale of cannabis to 10 state-chosen companies. This is good for the state (higher tax revenues, easier to inspect) but bad for consumers (lack of variety, perceived loss of \"local\" growers and sellers who help the local economy.)\n\nImagine if the government, coming out of liquor prohibition, had made it legal to drink alcohol again, but only let Jack Daniels and Budweiser make it. In the eyes of the government that would be great, because they'd only have to regulate two companies, and those two companies could operate more efficiently and thus have higher, more taxable profits. Most drinkers on the other hand would view it as an unfair handout to those companies and an entrenchment of their monopolies.\n\nThe city of Oakland, in California, ran into a similar issue a few years ago when the state was first really looking into legalizing. They announced they would only let 4 companies grow for the entire county, in massive indoor factory farms with huge tax-funded subsidies. A lot of local medical growers (already operating legally in CA, to be clear) would have been out of work to these huge companies, and the fallout from that plan in large part led to the failure of the ballot proposition that would have made California the first state to legalize recreational use.\n\nTL;DR: Many cannabis users / growers / sellers view the current plan as too limited, and dislike that a handful of large corporations would hold a monopoly in what has so far been an industry dominated by smaller local growers."
] |
Can someone explain to me Quantum Mechanics/The string theory | [
"This question is better suited for /r/askscience (unless you're not at all interested in actually understanding QM at any level.)\n\n*\"I'm not going to simplify it, I'm not gonna fake it. I'm not gonna tell you it's something like a ball bearing on a spring.\"*\n\nThis was said by Richard Feynman during one of this introductory lectures to Quantum Electrodynamics, and there's a lot of truth to it. The thing is, no one understands QM in the sense that they can clearly picture what it is, and how it affects the world. Scientists understand it in terms of mathematics.\n\nBy all means, it's not a bad question. Sure, you wont really understand QM from reading a Reddit post, but it's possible to get a general idea of what it entails. However, it's much better suited for /r/askscience, where legitimate scientists can answer the questions in a better way.",
"Through the wonders of science, we've found out that everything which we can see in the universe is made up of the same things known as elements. We have a very good understanding of how all of these elements respond to one another, and using technology, we've been able to see what makes up elements on a very tiny scale. We can see that they are made up of extremely tiny parts called atoms. In the recent past, we've been finding out more and more information about how atoms work, and what even they are made of.\n\nSince everything that we know of is made up of these atoms, and every seemingly strange thing we see (like gravity & magnetism, for example) is based on the interaction of these teeny weeny parts, it is thought that we can come up with some way of scientific thinking that can explain how all of this works rather than having to use different explanations depending on the situation. Some of our scientific ideas don't work as well on the very big scale versus the very small scale, and people think that we might be able to come up with something useful on all levels.",
"Quantum Mechanics is the science that says \"weird things happens at really small scales\" (but ONLY at small scales! Don't fall for pseudoscience that say you can do whatever you want on big scales with Quantum Magic)\n\nString \"theory\" is beautiful math without any basis in reality (so far at least)\n\nTo explain more than that will take much longer and is much harder to understand, so r/askscience is probably the best place to ask :)",
"Essentially, it's this:\n\nEverything in the universe is made up of the same things - inconceivably small particles, and forms of energy. Knowing this, we can deduce that every physical movement, motion, phenomenon, and occurring that ever happens with anything in the entire universe; is because of these tiny particles interacting with each other by means of those forms of energy. \n\nTL;DR Everything is made of the same fundamental stuff.",
"Use the search bar or use [this method](_URL_0_) to search before posting. Many people have posted this or similar questions. (Note that the google search may not be too helpful yet as the subreddit is so new, google has not indexed too many answers from it yet.",
"I actually have a 5 year old. I don't think I would try to explain this to him. Right now string theory is getting him to tie his shoes!"
] |
How come this scan of the chromosomes are in multiple colors? | [
"False-color image. Its colored with the intent of making parts more easy to tell apart, to highlight certian features, etc. that would be unclear in just its normal color.\n\nEdit: here's a good example: _URL_0_ Normally it'd be very tricky to see which mountains were which sizes on a picture of Mars. but using false color it becomes obvious."
] |
Why are Gatling Guns called "Miniguns"? | [
"The \"Mini\" in the name is in comparison to designs that use a similar firing mechanism but larger shells, such as General Electric's earlier 20-millimeter M61 Vulcan, and \"gun\" for a caliber size smaller than that of a cannon, typically 20 mm and higher.\n\"Minigun\" refers to a specific model of weapon that General Electric originally produced, but the term \"minigun\" has popularly come to refer to any externally powered Gatling gun of rifle caliber. The term is also used to refer to guns of similar rates of fire and configuration regardless of power source and caliber."
] |
How is the blood from meat removed before it goes on sale? | [
"Blood is removed by hanging the animal upside down and draining it. Muscle tissue (what we eat) contains very little blood anyway. \n\nBlood rots much more quickly and hosts many nasty diseases without the living host. Also it can it used extensively in the medical field.",
"the animals are killed, then hung to let the majority of the blood drain, then the animals are skinned, gutted, then washed and then butchered into cuts of meat.. \n\n[my source.. a pretty thorough rundown](_URL_0_)"
] |
How The Geneva Convention relates to war crimes. | [
"The Geneva convention exists to stop war crimes. Lets say I was a nation, and I declared war on you. My troops massacre some civilians, or I use WMDs, The Geneva convention exists to stop that happening. Simply put, the Geneva convention exists to stop cruel or excessively damaging (on infrastructure and civilians), and guarantees Prisoners of war fair treatment. A war crime is when a nation's military breaks the rules laid out by the Geneva convention.",
"Yes, but realistacally how can these rules be enforced? It's like me saying to you that you have to stop posting on Reddit, and if you don't I'm going to tell everyone on Reddit you're a bad person. (Overly simplified example)"
] |
How do some people operate on such little sleep? | [
"Being in the army for a while I'm use to running on 4 hours or less of sleep and still doing 16 hours a day."
] |
Why is YouTube getting steadily worse? | [
"I'm sure there is someone who can explain it better but I'll try.\n\nYoutube uses DASH playback, it loads the video you watch in chunks. When you watch till a certain point, they will load the next chunk. What it does is save Youtube bandwidth so they won't waste it when you buffer the whole video but only watch part of it. At least, this is to my knowledge on how the new Youtube buffering works. \n\nWhat you can do is install Youtube Centre on your browser to disable DASH playback but you will be limited to a maximum video quality of 720p, which I find rather acceptable. That way, you can buffer the entire video then watch it, instead of having to pause and let the video load every few seconds when on a bad internet connection.\n\nI am no expert but this is what I could gather. I hope it helps!",
"It's the \"not available on this platform\" that confuses me, why is a video watchable on a PC but not a tablet?",
"Why do the Ads load/buffer without any wait but as soon as you try to watch something you can't play it till it loads. :(",
"ALOT of legitimate users are being ghosted in the comments not by channels but by the google spam filter, if you comment too much now on youtube or reply to comments too much you may get ghost banned from every channel for a period as youtube thinks you are a spammer not matter what you are saying. Ghost banning means you can see your comments and replies but no one else can. Originally this was intended for channel owners but since the google+ merger and subsequent updates its now being used on entire accounts resulting in people thinking they are being ignored even if they had valid points or creative input to a subject in the discussions. To see if you are ghosted post a comment on youtube or google+ then log out and see if still there, suprisingly this is becoming more common and in reply to your question its rather simple, google bought youtube"
] |
Why do balloons explode, there is a loud sound like gun shot? | [
"The air is under pressure in the balloon, because the skin of the balloon is tight. When it pops, the compressed air starts to expand. This generates a compression wave, what we call sound. Guns burn gunpowder in a confined space, and when the bullet leaves the barrel the pressure is released in a similar (though much louder) sound wave."
] |
What's happening when you want to sneeze but just can't get a sneeze out? | [
"You become aware of the sneeze before it happens which puts you into manual mode, you consciously try to finish the sneeze but you don't know how. Kinda like when you start breathing manually but the difference is that you don't know how to sneeze consciously so you just stay with a half sneeze face and that feeling of dissatisfaction."
] |
Why are they still making cars with manually rolled up windows? | [
"They:\n\n* break less often\n\n* Are cheaper to fix/replace when they do break\n\n* Are cheaper to produce\n\n* Are cheaper to fit into a car\n\nInexpensive maintainability isn't always the selling point car manufacturers go for, but it's certainly a selling point....",
"Many people prefer manual windows because they are much less likely to fail and much less expensive to replace if they do.",
"Why do they make anything but manual windows? How lazy do you have to be to need electronic windows?",
"Because this allows a car company to have a 'base model' price which is as low as possible. This is the price used in the marketing for the car.",
"Because they are Better. Flat out better. More Comfortable, better speed. More Control. They are less likely to fail.\n\nGod! I hate motorized windows."
] |
Why do some job applications require a questionnaire with the same "strongly agree/disagree" questions that make me feel like they're all trick questions? | [
"They ask you the same questions in different ways to see if, after scoring, they were all answered the same way. \n\"I don't lie\"\n\"It's always important to tell the truth\"\n\"If little Timmy asks if Santa is real, I tell him No\"\nIf you're not consistent, they score you lower.",
"Not quite the same, but I remember I had a question like this that was phrased something like:\n\n\"You see a coworker who is not working to their full potential due to a personal issue. Do you get involved?\"\n\nI hated this question because the answer was simply Yes or No. To me, both answers are right or wrong, depending on the context.\n\nAs a general rule, you should leave personal shit at home when you come to work. However, if your coworker is doing shotty work because of an obvious distraction, then it needs to be addressed.",
"Most are derivatives of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThey are used to screen for jobs in law enforcement fairly often. They have been around since the 40's in one form or another. I have taken them many times over the years. The primary purpose of the test is to identify patterns in your responses.\n\nAllegedly, the tests can be quite good at uncovering the taker's \"tendencies\" towards a variety of psychological conditions/characteristics. (i.e. hypochondria, depression, defensive, etc.)"
] |
Why/how does covering a bomb with one's own body 'muffle' the explosion? | [
"The most deadly aspect of a grenade is the shrapnel, the metal case of the grenade that is sent flying away at high speed, essentially thousands of little sharp metallic bullets.\n\nJumping on the grenade is going to cause most if not all of that shrapnel to get sent into you, if any does manage to make it through you it will likely be traveling at less than lethal speeds."
] |
How was the SHA1 encryption algorithm broken, and what does it imply? | [
"The sha-1 collision attack exploits a weakness in the algorithm, allowing a input, that results in the same output, to be created far easier than brute force. \n\nThe possibility of such an attack being used means that sha-1 is not a completely dependable method, and is essentially broken. With this attack, it is potentially much easier to create a malicious file/string with the same sha-1 hash as the original input. \n\nMany newer, stronger methods have been in use for a long time."
] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.