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is there a scientific explanation for homosexuality? | [
"Not really. There have been various hypothesis but none of them has stood the test of time.\n\nAt this point in time (Western) society has accepted homosexuality as a \"you are what you are\", just like your skin colour and the colour of your hair.\n\nAccording to _URL_0_, searching for the cause of it is not a path we should take: If we find it a single cause in during development in the womb, then it's a birth defect and the choice of a (possible) gay/lesbian child becomes suddenly choice of the parent. If we find a cause after birth, then it's a learned habit and people are going to offer solutions for it. \n\nAs a last, enjoy who you are and who you love. It's that part which counts."
] |
What causes that feeling in joints that makes you want to crack your neck? Why is cracking your neck so satisfying and addicting? | [
"Yo ho ho! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [Why does cracking / popping your back feel so good? ](_URL_4_) ^(_47 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why does cracking your knuckles/back/neck feel good? ](_URL_7_) ^(_29 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: why does cracking your neck and fingers feel so good? ](_URL_8_) ^(_4 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: What cracking your neck actually does. ](_URL_1_) ^(_2 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: What happens when you pop your neck and is it dangerous to do to yourself? ](_URL_5_) ^(_5 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: What exactly happens when you \"pop\" your neck or any other body part? ](_URL_3_) ^(_26 comments_)\n1. [ELI5:What happens when I crack my neck/back, and why does it give me relief? ](_URL_6_) ^(_2 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do we feel relief when we \"crack\" our knuckles/joints? ](_URL_0_) ^(_20 comments_)\n1. [ELI5:What happens when I crack my neck? Why does it feel better than just stretching? Is it harmful or helpful?? ](_URL_2_) ^(_1 comment_)"
] |
How did eunuchs urinate? | [
"Castration generally only removes the testicles, not the penis. So they would urinate the same way as any other man.\n\nIn the odd case that the penis was removed, there would still be urethral opening that they'd pee out of sort of like a woman pees.",
"Also in some cases after the genitals were removed a metal tube would be inserted into the urethra and bandaged up this would then heal over leaving the hole open or in some cases leaving the tube as a spout of sorts"
] |
Why do we get bored? | [
"The ability to get bored is evolutionarily advantageous. To be bored often means to be unmotivated, unstimulated, and our brains need constant stimulation, so we are used to the fact of being constantly stimulated\n\nThere's [a great video by Vsauce](_URL_0_) on the topic that will probably make it easier to understand.\n\nA fantastic quote by Louis CK that I'm sure we all have heard at least one time is:\n\n > \"'I'm bored' is a useless thing to say. I mean, we live in a great, big, vast world that you've seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless: goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you're alive is amazing, so you don't get to say 'I'm bored'\".\n\nOn the other hand, animals who lay around all day every day would eventually get used to it, specially if born in such circumstances.\nBut the point is that animals such as pets don't have the notion of time that we do. Most of us get bored when we're doing nothing at all, right? We are thinking about what we should be doing at that time and how to fill that gap with some activity, animals don't *exactly* do that. \nNotice how a dog that hasn't been out all day gets very excited when you take him to the park, a dog that has been out several times in one day most probably would react differently to stimulating activities, since it would be tired and not in the mood for going out again, just like humans, tho that doesn't mean they get bored the *same* way we do.",
"I know you didn't ask for this, but [here](_URL_1_) is an emotion chart. I thought it was peculiar that boredom was described as a very mild form of disgust. At first I thought it was untrue, but the more i think about it, this chart is very accurate. I had never thought of boredom as a negative emotion, just kinda, you know, *boring*. But whenever you're bored you feel ever so slightly disgusted in the fact that you're wasting time and doing nothing entertaining or peoductive.",
"Shortest possible explanation: Novelty is pleasurable. \n\n When you're experiencing something new for the first time, your brain is very stimulated as it tries to process the experience and deal with the new stimuli. If you're playing a brand new board game, your brain is racing trying to learn all the new rules, to formulate strategies and basically 'understand' the game. When it succeeds at understanding, it rewards itself with chemicals that make you feel 'happy.' When it doesn't succeed, say you get stuck or keep losing and can't tell what you're doing wrong, you can also get frustrated.\n\n Most relevant: when your brain does comprehend something, it becomes familiar with it and future exposure to it are less stimulating. So when you know all the rules to the game and know all the strategies, your brain doesn't find as much to occupy it when you're playing. So it stops rewarding itself and you no longer get the pleasurable feeling from playing it. If the pleasure you gain from the game drops below a certain threshold, your brain will basically prompt you to find something more stimulating to do to get more pleasure. That feeling is what we experience as 'boredom' and since its generally a negative feeling, we try to alleviate it with new, novel experiences. Just think of how you get 'bored' of Reddit, leave it for an hour, then come back and feel all that pleasure when you see a page of blue links.\n\n There are a lot of ways your brain derives pleasure, however, so if we're receiving pleasure from some other source (could be drugs, could be the sheer bliss of laying in a comfortable bed on a cold day) then the feeling of boredom is less pronounced even if the brain isn't being directly stimulated by some external experience.",
"There is an excellent [article](_URL_2_) on boredom, with influences on meditation but I'll quote from it\n\n > Boredom is useful in terms of survival. It’s boredom that makes people really get interested in their environment. There’s nothing to do; so, they go out and explore. Being interested in our environment helped us survive. That’s how we learn. Even though it’s a beautiful spring day, instead of just laying there, maybe you figure out where’s a nice place to stay warm for winter, or where there might be some hidden food source that you might not need on a nice spring day. So, boredom is something that keeps you wanting to learn something new all the time. It’s kind of built into us; we look for stimulation, for a way to expand our ability to interact with the world around us.\n\nand another but with more spiritual advice\n\n > So, to finish this, boredom can be expressed as a lack of capacity to enjoy being: being without having to be any particular way. With practice we learn to deeply value being. It’s through meeting boredom mindfully that we can get free, not by avoiding it or trying to get rid of it. I really like this quotation from Gil, he said, “boredom is a stepping stone to realizing that life is enough as it is.” It’s through actually facing those quiet moments of boredom, those unsatisfying moments of boredom, and really experiencing them, looking at them with what I’d like to call, “affectionate curiosity,” into those moments, those unsettled feelings of boredom.\n\nIf that doesn't satiate you, here's another [article](_URL_3_) on boredom. I HIGHLY recommend reading both because they really made me appreciate just silence. Both for my mind and senses, it's incredible.",
"Because survival is no longer the full time job it had been for millions of years.",
"boredom is a form of frustration from not getting the stimulation you crave. You can be busy at work, but find it very boring because it's not exciting or interesting. You crave stimulation that relieves stress or stimulation from a big reward.",
"I'm not answering the question but I do have a story. When I was younger, I was at home one day on the summer break from school. My dad was on his way out to work and as he left I told him I was bored. He answered with \"Enjoy it\". I asked him how he wanted me to enjoy being bored and he said that later on in life, I would new so busy that I wouldn't have time to be bored. Now, with school and work and stress and life I understand what he means. Hope this resonates with someone else out there.",
"I heard a radio program about boredom. Pretty interesting show. People actually research the stuff and back in the day(I think it was the forties) They tried to come up with a way to make really mundane jobs less boring. If you have to tighten screws for ten hours your gonna get bored.\n\n\nSo the smart minds of the time experimented with amphetamines -which did a great job at keeping boredom at bay, they actually stopped the brain from being able to become bored, but resulted in numerous other problems, as you can imagine. \n\nAmphetamines were out, but these smart minds had discovered another chemical that destroyed the minds ability for boredom -caffeine. \n\n~~I'll try to find the link~~ -it was a CBC radio program. \n\nFound it:\n_URL_4_",
"I'm always a but suspicious when questions like this are confidently rubber-stamped with 'Explained'. There is the tacit agreement that something as both universal yet idiosyncratic as boredom, both can, and has, been explained. And I'm never surprised that the answer usually draws upon a positivistic, cause-effect model to do this. Culturally fashionable, framing up an explanation in this pseudo-scientific way is the best guarantee of approval and upvotes. People are comforted that the puzzle has been solved. Isn't there something much more valuable in exploring the interplay and tension between boredom, and whatever its opposite might be?\n\nIn this case, the top answer frames boredom as a kind of side-effect of apparently 'needing' constant stimulation, which again is tacitly understood to be evolutionarily beneficial. If it's just about 'stimulation', then why do we 'need' to be constantly stimulated? Isn't there another persuasive argument which says that humans also 'need' to be in a state of homeostasis, or non-stimulation and rest? Are these two 'needs' mutually exclusive, or perhaps in conflict? This might explain why boredom is actually quite, well, interesting. It isn't rigidly formulaic, it can come and go seemingly at its own whim. We are both persecuted by it, but perversely, often seem to seek it. What about bringing in terms like 'unsatisfied' or 'meaningless' or 'unhappy' into the equation, if you think it's an equation in the first place? Boredom has a lot to do with these feelings, after all. Humans are surely more than animals who self-regulate their levels of stimulation. And we very often fail to do this anyway, finding ourselves bored when we least expect it, and thrilled by the ordinarily mundane. We're awful judges of why we get bored.\n\nReddit - seriously, I know that evolution and neuroscience and a generally positivistic approach to problem solving have great explanatory power. For instance, we might discover that whilst bored, people exhibit certain physiological correlatives, perhaps certain hormones, or brain-wave patterns. I'm no expert but I'd like to point out that very often nowadays, we have a strong preference for this kind of answer - as if these quantifiable correlatives 'explain' why an experience occurs.\nI think boredom can also be examined fruitfully from a phenomenological perspective, one involving meaning, a life's story, how things seem, what we want, how that might be being frustrated, where we are from, other people, conflict, the psyche, the unconscious mind... This is as much for the philosophers as evolutionary scientists. There is no final objective explanation, not for five year olds, not for anyone. Living well with a question like 'Why do we get bored' might involve holding a great many more issues than merely brain chemistry in tension, and accepting boredom as a complex, multifaceted artifact of a whole human life.\nLiving badly with boredom means treating it as a problem and trying to eradicate it with an explanation that a five year old could understand. Now that is boring.",
"Shopenhauer on boredom (excerpt from Vanity of Existence)\n\n Life presents itself first and foremost as a task: the task of maintaining itself... If this task is accomplished, what has been gained is a burden, and there then appears a second task: that of doing something with it so as to ward off boredom, which hovers over every secure life like a bird of prey. Thus the first task is to gain something and the second to become unconscious of what has been gained, which is otherwise a burden.\n\nThat human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence. For if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, then would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfill and satisfy us. As things are, we take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something - in which case distance and difficulties make our goal look as if it would satisfy us (an illusion which fades when we reach it)- or when engaged ill purely intellectual activity, in which case we are really stepping out of life so as to regard it from outside, like spectators at a play. Even sensual pleasure itself consists in a continual striving and ceases as soon as its goal is reached. Whenever we are not involved in one or other of these things but directed back to existence itself we are overtaken by its worthlessness anti vanity and this is the sensation called boredom.",
"It's possible you're interpreting anxiety as boredom too. For example, in the midst of procrastinating (internet, games, etc.) or walking to the fridge you might feel restless and bored, but there can be addiction issues underlying these things.",
"Pretty late here. When we get bored it is because our minds are not being stimulated enough. I think boredom is a good thing in some cases though, it brings about creativity.",
"While I can't offer much enlightenment on this topic, Vsauce did a video answering this exact question.\n_URL_5_",
"I'll throw in my two cents. Here are two different concepts to help you understand:\n\n - Conditioning. People get used to things. If you imagine a poor child in Africa, they get used to their atmosphere. They were given a doll as their only toy, they play with it a lot, they also learn to use what they have around them, from sticks outside or plastic cans inside. This is how it has always been to them, this is what they are used to. Everybody is used to different stuff, its normal to them. \n\n - Interpretation. Why do we get turned on when we see a person with a certain look. Mental processes are very complex and not very well understood. But everything, from emotions to our senses are run through the brain, and go through several different levels of interpretation. If you had a psychotic episode a normal room could suddenly change shape. Reality isn't as rigid as you make it out to be.\n\nIt is definitely a side-effect of the new generation, as we have computers and TVs with such a wide array of possibilities for stimulating our senses and mental states. \n\nTry to go for a walk (a dog if you have one, or go somewhere), without music or anything like that. You will see how it occupies your mind. You simply look at the things changing around you. You think about what is happening around you or things that have happened. You might pick up blade of grass and chew it, the motion will keep you stimulated. Pick up a stick and throw it, it wont explode or do anything dramatic, but trying to get it to land in a certain spot, or seeing the way it interacts with whatever it hits or the physics of the flight will keep you occupied.",
"Just a person's opinin:\n\nBoredom only happens to me when I am doing something, or nothing, and there is something else that I want to be doing instead. It is my mind saying: \"That other thing sounds way more interesting!\" rather than \"This is terrible.\"\n\nI can, and have, spent days by the beach doing nothing but getting up, sitting in a chair near the water, and thinking/reading/napping/observing/ and other rather passive tasks. At those points in time there was nothing I would have rather been doing than nothing. I have sat for 8 hour car rides quite happily with nothing to do but snooze and look out the window.\n\nThere have been other days when the mere idea of sitting for 5 minutes in the sand doing nothing sounds about as pleasant as getting an acute case of tinnitus or going for a 40 minute drive sounds like a monumentally boring task.\n\nIn the case of \"new information\" you propose, my brain tells me this: It would rather be hearing something else and it is trying to get the rest of your body to go along with it and find that something else.",
"Boredom could be a contrived, convenient label for a whole slew of \"emotions\" (a term I use loosely) at play. In a behavioral sense, perhaps one of boredom's requisites is to realize that one is bored. \n\nThis act of realization I could then consider a discrete behavior that is reinforced by whatever one does to quell that boredom.\n\nIn other words, you realize you are bored (the **behavior** of boredom) in order to be not bored (the **emotive** phenomenon).",
"I've always heard, boredom is your mind's way of telling you that you should be doing something else. You're discontent with your surroundings, and your ability to react to them meaningfully.",
"Doubt anyone will see this at this point, but I'll put it out there anyway.\n\nThe best explanation that suck with me was from my high school French professor. When one says \"I'm bored\" in french, its done in the reflexive -- i.e. \"je m'ennuis.\" Taken literally, this mean \"I bore myself.\"\n\ntl;dr We get bored because we allow ourselves to be.",
"There is nothing I abhor more than hearing someone say they are bored. Being bored is a choice, not a consequence. It is a sign of laziness and egotism to expect the world to entertain you. Grow up and seek out the world.",
"It could also be due to how automated our lives are now. we use computers and smartphones to complete what used to be series of small tasks. Isaac Asimov actually [predicted](_URL_6_) boredom would plague the future generations for this reason.",
"**Short Answer** - Humans feed on information and sensory stimulation. A lack of these or becoming accustomed to the same information or same stimulation over and over becomes dull, and thus we're bored.",
"Vsauce did a piece on this exact question. Here's the link:\n_URL_7_",
"Best explanation I've hear is this youtube video: _URL_8_"
] |
Why doesn't reddit utilize 'search internet for this image' functionality to prevent numerous reposts of the same image? | [
"A) A lot of people like or don't mind reposts, as is evidenced by the shitload of upvotes they get.\n\nB) The people posting them often know that they're reposts.\n\nC) If you really think this needs to be done, you should be posting in /r/ideasfortheadmins/",
"see the people who've been here for 6+ years? Everything is a repost to them. A whole generation of redditors join every year, they've never seen any of the reposts\n\n\nalso, it would probably fuck up /r/adviceanimals ...wait.. OP i think you're on to something!",
"It does exist. [Example Here.](_URL_0_) And if something is used -way- too much people will complain and it will get downvoted, but it's not strictly enforced..."
] |
Why is there not an anonymous bit-torrent protocol? | [
"There is, sort of. It's called [Freenet](_URL_0_), but it can only be accessed using their client software (not your regular torrent client), and it is extremely, extremely slow. Proper anonymity is extremely difficult to achieve, especially in a peer-to-peer context like bittorrent."
] |
What would it feel like to not be able to experience any form of sensory stimulation? | [
"Well, if you were born this way, you would essentially be brain dead. If you were alive and had experiences you can recall, I'm guessing it would be like having a dream. It would probably induce some kind of dementia or delirium."
] |
Why does a punch hurt even after I've been hit? | [
"Your body releases chemicals that cause your ions to discharge in your nerves, there are still residual effects and chemicals along side your nerves are still discharging ions basically waves of reaction after the hit."
] |
Why do we "speed up" when falling until we hit terminal velocity? If gravity isn't getting any stronger, why wouldn't my speed remain constant when jumping out of an airplane? | [
"Gravity is a force acting upon you. It doesn't just 'yank you' once and then quit. It continues to pull the entire time you are falling. So there is a net force downwards for the entire period of your descent, which causes you to accelerate.\n\nIt's only when you reach terminal velocity that there is a counter force, effectively cancelling out the downward force and leaving you with (roughly) no net force.\n\nIf no force was acting upon you, you'd continue at the same velocity.",
"You mean why wouldn't your _acceleration_ remain constant, going faster and faster?\n\nWind resistance is a function of your velocity (in fact, velocity^2). When you jump out of the plane, you're not going very fast (downwards). So gravity acts in its consistent (and inevitable) fashion and accelerates you downwards at 9.81 m/s^2. But at a certain velocity down, the acceleration up (drag, due to wind resistance) equals the 9.81 m/s^2 down and so your downard velocity remains constant - terminal velocity."
] |
Do submerged submarines rock or bob? Why, why not? | [
"Most of the wave action is on the surface. So the bobbing and rolling that surface ships experience is minimal.\n\nThere are still some currents under the surface that can push the sub around, plus as water is pumped into and out of the sub to cool various equipment the trim of the sub changes.\n\nPlus a perfectly neutrally buoyant sub is not stable, so the forward and rear ballast tanks are constantly being adjusted to point the sub up or down as necessary. Same for the control surfaces. So there are some subtle changes."
] |
How do theatres get movies? | [
"These days, it's (almost) all digital. For the most production companies, they use \"DCP\" or Digital Cinema Package. This is a specially prepared / packaged harddrive (in a fancy plastic enclosure) that is shipped/couriered to the theatre. The content on the drive is encrypted. It is transferred to the theatre's server via USB. There is a decrypt key tied to the DCP file bundle and the theatre (actually, the projector)...that way things are tracked very closely. The same DCP bundle is sent to each theatre, but the DCP producers know what projectors it can be played back on. I'm not sure of the key structure, other than it's 128bit. \n\n I suspect that there is no obvious way to grab the decrypted files for piracy purposes...but I presume there is a way, and the film industry just keeps their mouth shut.\n\nI also suspect that most leaks are done long before the DCP is created and shipped to theatres. \n\nEdit: [Here](_URL_0_)is a drive in the Pelican box"
] |
Why do cats love seafood so much? | [
"For cats, protein is essential to their diets. They're carnivores, afterall. \n\nFish is a great source of protein and cats are attracted to foods high in protein. In fact, cats can't even taste \"sweetness\" - only \"savory\" flavors. This helps them avoid fruit and berries."
] |
Why is it that when I'm trying to sleep, and someone has left the window in the room next door open, that the draft slams the door closed, opens it again, then slams it again, ad infinitum until I get up and close the bloody window. | [
"Air from outside strikes the window. Since it's not locked, it can move, and thus opens. This is like blowing air out of your mouth against a napkin: it moves away.\n\nOnce the window or door is open, air travels through it, and the [Bernoulli effect](_URL_0_) (\"the faster a liquid or gas flows, the lower the pressure in that liquid or gas\") causes the air pressure in the gap to slightly decrease. Now you have lower-pressure air on the outside-facing face of the window, and normal-pressure air on the inside-facing face of the window. Both push against the window, but the normal-pressure air pushes harder against the window than the lower-pressure air. This forces the window to slam shut, and the cycle can start again.",
"Air pressure from the wind outside does this."
] |
What is the difference between a soundtrack and a score? | [
"A soundtrack is the compilation of all the sounds in a movie: the dialogue, the sound effects, and the music. The music includes original music made for the movie, or the songs chosen from existing material.\n\nThe score is the original or adapted music made for the movie. The film's composer creates the music to correspond with the action of the movie. The score is a part of the soundtrack.",
"Scores are often written specifically to accompany a movie/show. \nSoundtracks offer the songs played in a movie, including ones written and produced by artists. \nFor example, Twilight has music that plays in the background a lot, that's part of the score of the movie. \nBut when they play the song \"Decode,\" I think it is, by Paramore, it's part of the soundtrack."
] |
How does my body clear alcohol out of my system, and what actually is a hangover? | [
"First off, hope your hangover gets better.\n\nNow, on to the explanation. When you drink alcohol, a good portion of it (15% or more) is absorbed directly through your stomach wall into your bloodstream and starts to affect you brain. The rest of it hits a few minutes later, when it passes through your small intestine, like carbs or protein or any other nutrient.\n\nAlcohol in your blood will affect your brain (you'll feel this as being tipsy/drunk), but it's also toxic. It's not going to kill you immediately, but in high enough quantities it can cause alcohol poisoning, which is why your body wants to get rid of it. That's where your liver comes in. It breaks down the alcohol molecules in a few steps into molecules that your body can use for energy (if you're curious, it looks like this: alcohol -- > acetaldehyde -- > acetic acid -- > acetyl-CoA). That stuff - the acetyl-CoA - can be used for energy, so it then goes to your cells and is used for fuel.\n\nThat's what happens to alcohol in your system. Hangovers merit their own explanaition. \n\nHangovers have a few different causes (and we aren't exactly sure about all of them) but the number one cause of a hangover is dehydration. Alcohol causes your kidneys to get rid of water at a much faster rate than they would normally. This is why you have to piss like a racehorse after drinking alcohol. The next morning, you're very dehydrated and this gives you a headache, which can be severe.\n\nLike I said, there are other causes. Alcohol irritates your stomach lining, causing nausea and vomiting. It makes you sleepy but disrupts your natural sleep, so you wake up groggy and tired. It can also cause an immune response, which can lead to an inability to concentrate or remember things.\n\nThere are other theories as well, but those are most of the main ones. The number one cure for a hangover is hydration before - and during - alcohol intake. Make sure you've had plenty of water before you go out, and keep drinking water while you're drinking. AT LEAST one glass of water every couple drinks. You'll feel way better in the morning. Also, don't drink on an empty stomach.\n\nOkay, that was pretty long but hopefully you got the idea.",
"When you drink alcohol, it passes through your liver where it reacts with enzymes that metabolize it into things our body can eliminate more easily.\n\nFirst, it is converted to acetaldehyde by alcohol dehydrogenase, and then to acetic acid by aldehyde, which then is turned to acetyl CoA by ACSS2, and then it enters the citric acid cycle which is a metabolic cycle that metabolizes acetates from various things we consume like proteins, fats, and carbohydrates into carbon dioxide.\n\nThe hangover is caused by metabolites like acetaldehyde that are still lingering in the body. This is why it is good to stay hydrated while drinking, as well as throughout the night afterwards.",
"I dunno exactly *what* a hangover is, but I can tell you this- January 9th will be 20 years since I had a drink. At the times where I think I would like to maybe try it again, the first thing that pops into my head is the hangovers I would get. 20 years later and I still remember the hangovers like they were yesterday.\n\nThanks, but I think I'll just stick to weed when I want to catch a buzz.",
"Bulk of it is destroyed by your liver, and some of the alcohol is lost via sweating, urinating and so on. \n\nAs for hangovers, it's more complicated. Your kidneys have been working overtime so you're dehydrated. Your liver has been equally busy burning through all that ethanol and it is lacking sugars, as does your brain. On top of that the remains of the alcohol are still in your body, namely in the form of acetaldehyde and formic acid, both harmful substances.\n\nReally, ethanol makes a helluva mess of your body, we still don't know all the contributing factors."
] |
Why are there "old, abandoned castles"? If I was rich, I would kill to refurbish one and live in it. But it seems nobody wants them | [
"Because if you were rich and decided to refurbish and live in an old abandoned castle you would find yourself becoming considerably less rich with the amount of money it would cost you to do so. It would cost a LOT of money to refurbish most of those castles, and then you would constantly be spending money on it's upkeep as well.\n\nA lot of them are also degraded to the point that they would be close to impossible to actually refurbish (and meet building codes) and/or have historical protections on them preventing people from doing anything with them. \n\nIf you were rich and wanted to live in a castle you would be better off just building a new one.",
"The first challenge is to refurbish it. It would probably cost more to do that than it would to build something from scratch.\n\nAnd generally speaking, a country that has old, abandoned castles lying around likely has slapped preservation orders on most of them. Any work you do will typically have to be officially approved and of the highest standards, and of course in keeping with the period and region. Want to repaint the ballroom? Here's a range of specialist paints you're allowed to use, here are the colours you're allowed to use, here's a list of qualified workers who are allowed to carry out the work, here's somebody who will restore the fresco we found on the south wall, and allow me to introduce the guy who's going to come round at regular intervals with a clipboard and a tape measure. Oh, you knocked a hole in that plaster without our permission? Here's a massive fine.\n\nYour new castle will feature electricity and plumbing, but that's the extent of the modern conveniences you can reasonably expect. You probably won't have heating in every room, and you can count yourself fortunate if you have internet, and even more fortunate if it's broadband. Mobile phone signal? Usually, depending on the weather.\n\nBuying furniture will be stupidly frustrating. Modern furniture is designed for modern buildings which are built to specific standards, so that, for example, you can buy kitchen units and know they will fit exactly. In a mediaeval castle, you can't even count on having any right angles anywhere, so anything that's not stand-alone will have to be tailor-made at great cost.\n\nYour castle will probably be on top of a hill about an hour's drive from the nearest grocery store. Sounds idyllic, but in the winter you'll be learning how to fit snow chains on your tyres, and in the summer your garden will dry out if you're not careful. The wind will be much stronger up here too.\n\nRunning costs and maintenance will be very expensive as well, and it will be a huge drain on your bank account no matter how wealthy you are."
] |
Why aren't antibiotic-resistant bacteria taking over the world? | [
"Well, they are in some cases, but slowly. When I started out, MRSA was caught only in hospitals, and was very rare. Now, it's in the general population, and it's very common. KPC and XD-TB are real problems that we should be very worried about.\n\nSo, as to the resistance. \n\nImagine you're going to have a race. One guy has a bulletproof vest. The other guy doesn't. If you're going to have your race and nobody shoots at you, the guy with the vest is going to lose, because those are heavy. But if people are shooting at you, he's going to win, because the other guy is probably going to get shot.\n\nOne thing you have to realize is that everything is a tradeoff. Take penicillin resistance. A bacteria is resistant to penicillin by making an enzyme called \"beta-lactamase.\" That enzyme turns off penicillin before it can work. But that means that the bacteria is using food and energy to make that enzyme all the time, even if there's no penicillin around. It could be making other things, or growing faster. So a lot of the time, it's actually not a good thing to be carrying around a bunch of genes for resistance.\n\nNow lets add in that not every bacteria is as good at others at learning resistances. Some bugs like Acinetobacter or Serratia, are really, really, good at learning how to be resistant to antibiotics very quickly. Other bugs like Streptococcus are very bad at learning how to be resistant. Luckily, Acinetobacter and Serratia aren't very good at causing infections. It happens, but it moves slowly and isn't very aggressive.\n\nSo then we just have to worry about the bugs that are: very good at learning, are very aggressive at attacking people, and are in an environment where it's better to be resistant than not to be. Those are the bugs we worry about.\n\nFun fact: MRSA is actually associated with a bacteriophage that infects Staph aureus. So MRSA is caused by a virus that infects a bacteria that infects a person. Scarlet fever is the same thing, but for the bacteria that causes Strep Throat. Infectionception.",
"That's a mis-conception. Generally antibiotic resistance occurs on plasmids. Plasmids are circularized, generally small, pieces of bacterial DNA. These plasmids are only able to transfer to other bacteria of the same genera, usually. It has to deal with a lot of genetic signals and protein interactions. These cells need to come together and form a \"bridge\" between the two to transfer their plasmid, this is conjugation. Bacteria can also pick up pieces of extra cellular DNA, transformation. Or a virus can actually integrate the gene into the chromosome, transduction. I placed these most to least likely. \n\nIt really comes down to how massive the microbiota of the globe and the ability for the resistance to be picked up. It's unfeasible for all bacteria to communicate at this massive scale to convey the resistance. Also not all antibiotics work on all bacteria. Such is the case with penicillin. It attacks cell walls of bacteria, so bacteria with very little to no cell wall, gram negative and mycobacteria, for instance have basically built in resistance.",
"The ELI5 is answer is that it takes time for them to take hold. We overuse antibiotics so much now that resistant strains are already starting to appear. We are just quite good at recognising when a bacteria is resistant and taking steps to prevent it from spreading."
] |
Why can't aircraft manufacturers make a fly-by-wire system so pilots could fly a plane/helicopter the same way gamers fly them in video games (which is really easy)? | [
"There are some UAVs that do it. But they're flying themselves and you're making suggestions. If something goes wrong, you may lose the UAV, but the damage and loss of life will be minimal (other than the loss of the UAV, which is kind of their purpose anyway, to take risks so soldiers/people don't have to).\n\nBut with larger aircraft, even though they have sophisticated autopilot systems, there are still times when you need/want to have a human take full control. The main problem is those tiny little sticks, compared to the travel distance of the yoke.\n\nJust imagine fighting the wind, and you need 12 degrees yoke up when you have 9 inches of travel, versus 12 degrees up when you have half-an-inch. (Though really, you'd just adjust your trim if it was constant, but same point.)"
] |
Why is the Filibuster still legal? Are there any actual redeeming factors to it? | [
"The problem isn't the Filibuster, it's that the filibuster is being abused. What you're seeing with Rand Paul is EXACTLY what the Filibuster is supposed to be. You hold up Senate business because there is an issue you feel extremely strong about and want to draw attention to it.\n\nThe problem is that the filibuster is being used to make a 60-vote majority needed to pass ANY legislation. Not just the most contentious issues, but the minority is even Filibustering Motions to Proceed. We need 60 votes to even GET TO the debate anymore.",
"The word \"illegal\" cannot be applied to the US Senate filibuster. The US Constitution gives the Senate the responsibility to make its own rules of procedure. Currently, those rules allow for the filibuster. The Senate can change that any time it so chooses."
] |
Why can my internet easily load a 1080p YouTube video but then struggle to load a _URL_0_ stream on low quality? | [
"When you download or stream something off of the internet, you have your own connection line and you are connecting to a server with its own connection line, the maximum speed of this connection is as fast as the slowest line. In most cases, you have the slowest line, because most websites are hosted in dedicated data centres. But sometimes, due to poor maintenance, high traffic or (most commonly) low budget, you are the faster, so the connection is slower than the maximum speed of your line.",
"I recently had this issue and found out that my ISP was throttling my video download speeds. You may want to check out some online tests for detecting traffic shaping, or try out a free VPN like VPNGate to see if it provides better results.",
"There can be multiple causes and some of yhem can coexist. \n\nThe largest issue at play when it comes to twitch is that Twitch does not have the time to compress video very well. Twitch barely has time to compress it at all. \n\nYou see, the whole thing with streaming is that people expect to se the video live and as such they expect to be able to interact on the fly. This means that Twitch has to minimize the delay between them recieving the stream and them sending it out to you. \n\nCurrently the delay is about 10 seconds. In that ten seconds they have to recieve the stream, transcode and compress it, and send it back out. \n\nIt is very difficult to transcode a compress a video by any significant amount in ten seconds. It is even more difficult to compress a high bitrate stream down to youtube bitrates in ten seconds. \n\nThis is why you can watch a 1080p youtube video so easily compared to a twitch 1080p stream. There is a verly large difference in the amount of data being sent to you. \n\nWhat's more is that Twitch is not as big an operation as youtube is. It may not have as much bandwidth to play with as twitch does. Considering that it has to send out a data stream to every person that is downloading the stream, they really freaking chew up bandwidth. \n\nYoutube's bitrate is lower because they don't have the same restraints in terms of transcoding. They can encode their videos more efficiently. I suspect that they also have a lot more cpu horsepower to play with. Perhaps also more server locations which allows for more efficient routing of data. \n\nNow one other issue you might face is thatthe internet is inneficient. The servers that handle the internet traffic send data on the most direct route between two points. They don't do much in thr way of load balancing. This means that the second and third most direct routes may not have much traffic despite the most direct routes being nearly saturated. \n\nThis can be solved by using a vpn. Vpn's change the routing of traffic and make it more efficient. It means that while you might have slightly higher latency, you won't have to deal with packets of data being dropped being the most direct route is full. \n\nOn the other hand, if the various service providers would put load balancing on their servers, the effective bandwidth of the internet would increase. They probably do this to an extent, but obviously not enough. If they did enough then vpn's would lose a major selling point.",
"Though most previous answers are true in most cases, twitch is a special case. \nI watch a lot of LoL event related streams on twitch and have to switch from FireFox (which is my main browser) to chrome, specifically for twitch. \nThe site is insanely resource intensive and it has nothing to do with bandwith/routing in most cases. \nFor example, try turning the twitch chat off and you'll nice the stream suddenly becomes a lot smoother if you were having problems before (note: none of these issues are present on chrome). \nSomehow FireFox can't handle twitch well at all where the other browsers can (I can probably speculate on it but that would do no good, for example outside of the dev build firefox has no multicore support that's one thing). \nAnother fun thing I noticed was watching streams on Youtube and not being able to fastforward/rewind properly on any browser but Chrome. \nAnyway, if you're watching event related streams and you have a Youtube option you might want to check that out instead of twitch since they support 60fps nowadays (when the source is streaming at 60fps). \n \ntl;dr: twitch in itself is quite a heavy webapp to run especially when you're watching a top viewed stream where the chatbox is flooded with text. In my experience FireFox deals with this site the worst.",
"Because Youtube is compressing the video quite heavily, unlike twitch, which has to stream it right away.",
"In the ELI5 form: youtube has many dedicated servers and high quality connections that allow multiple users to use their servers at the same time with not much problem on their end but twitch streamers are generally people with just normal home internet and depending on the amount of other people watching and the kind of internet they have also combined with whether or not they even have a good router to constantly send enough data out to the twitch server it can take some time. Tldr; youtube saves it on its servers and you view it easily where twitch streamers stream constant update to servers for you to view",
"Depends on which Twitch channel you're trying to view.\n\n\nTwitch and Youtube have a download/upload speed on their Internet connection. Youtube will give everyone the same amount of their upload, making it a good experience regardless of which video you're viewing.\n\n\n\nTwitch on the other hand, will offer less of their upload to channels that doesn't have a partnership. Watching a Twitch-stream with 5-10 viewers will be laggy on low quality. But watching a partnered streamer in 'high/source' with 1000 viewers will be flawless.",
"\"Your comment has been removed since it has been detected as a personal anecdote.\"\nWow, bull. The top commenter isn't even right, he's just not technically wrong. He basically just said it's because youtube has faster servers.\n\nThe real reason is because youtube splits up the video into chunks, and gives you a lower quality so that it's always fast. They have state of the art algorithms that compress the data into high quality but low data. each image chunk starts with a picture, then the rest of the frames are pixel deltas (black images with the only pixels being the changes from the first frame to what the next frame should be) that, combined with multiple computers streaming multiple qualities to you helps a ton. Twitch's main problem is that their algorithms are bad at retaining quality and compressing data, so they don't want to make the quality really crappy, and the speed suffers. That, and the connection depends on the streamer, which will usually be slow, as your upload rate is way slower than your download rate.\n\nThis is obvious to most programmers, including myself, but here are some links:\nVideo frame refrence patent from google:\n_URL_0_\nSplitting of their audio and video (to keep high quality audio with low quality video, because audio uses more bandwidth)\n_URL_2_\nMicrosoft version of low quality to high quality (couldn't find google's)\n_URL_1_"
] |
Why do towels absorb the water | [
"It is caused by Capillary action (sometimes capillarity, capillary motion, or wicking). Capillary action is the ability of a liquid to flow in narrow spaces without the assistance of, and in opposition to, external forces like gravity. The effect can be seen in the drawing up of liquids between the hairs of a paint-brush, in a thin tube, in porous materials such as paper, in some non-porous materials such as liquified carbon fiber, or in a cell. It occurs because of intermolecular forces between the liquid and surrounding solid surfaces. If the diameter of the tube is sufficiently small, then the combination of surface tension (which is caused by cohesion within the liquid) and adhesive forces between the liquid and container act to lift the liquid. In short, the capillary action is due to the pressure of cohesion and adhesion which cause the liquid to work against gravity."
] |
How do you get from 1s and 0s to actual meaning? | [
"Simple answer:\n\nThere are different levels of COMPLEXITY in computers. You want us to explain how to go from complex to less complex. But let's start fron the begging.\nAs a highest level of complexity in computers we consider the electric pulses, that go through the wires in a computer (we can go even deeper to atomic, and subatomic level, but that's physics and we are not getting into it.\n\n\nThen we can translate these pulses into binary system (pulse = 1, no pulse = 0).\n\nAnd this is memory, all the memory you have in computer.\n\nNow going higher is pretty hard. You have to use logical gates and other mechanical things to read memory, change memory etc. so let's leave that as it is.\n\nBut when we have this, there is this programming language that is native to computers called assembly. Then from assembly you make other, easier computer languages, then you make operating systems, graphical interfaces and programs.\n\nWhat i just said is pretty brief, because how computerd work is a very wide topic going through physics, mathematics and engineering (and more). To know everything i reccomend you buy a book. Always the best solution to such topics.\n\nPeace",
"Computer components are made to mechanically respond certain way to certain bits, as they are input to them.\n\nProcessor for example is built out of physical arrangement of logic gates. You put certain string of bits into memory, CPU physically retrieves those, and the arrangement of logic gates leads to CPU doing something with them.\n\nYour display device basically probes the cable to see if there is data on some memory buffer, and if there is, it retrieves those bits. It then again is set to mechanically change displayed picture based on those bit values, as they are entered as electric signals.\n\nThe great thing about computers is that you can actually ignore the physical or mechanical aspect of it all. Because every part is built so that they react predictably to bits as they are input, you can just ignore all the underlying structure that enables display or cpu to work, and just think in terms of bits and their meanings."
] |
What mechanism of action gives marijuana it's psychedelic effects? | [
"I don't have quite the answer you want, but it's worth noting that THC is only one of more than 20 cannabinoids found in weed. Acetylcholine and serotonin are also affected.",
"THC binds to receptors that respond normally to an essential fatty acid called [anandamide](_URL_0_). This particular fatty acid creates a response in the brain to release dopamine, serotonin and other mood-boosting biochemicals into the bloodstream. That's pretty much the process to THC inducing the euphoric effects experienced while high.\n\nNot really an ELI5, and I may have oversimplified or something."
] |
Why does video on my HD TV always look awesome and flawless, but video on my HD laptop is always buffering and looks crappy? | [
"The quality of video isn't determined by the quality of the screen you view it on. It's based on the quality of the original video file. For example, you might watch a Blu-Ray on your TV, which has a bitrate of around 35Mbps. However, if you're watching Netflix in HD on your computer, it has a maximum bitrate of around 4Mbps- barely 1/9th the quality of the Blu-Ray file!\n\nEven broadcast HDTV is still going to be at around 16Mbps- four times the quality of your HD Netflix stream.",
"In principle, Internet video displayed on a laptop can look every bit as good as, or even better than, cable, satellite, broadcast HD or DVD on an HDTV. The only format that it can't match or beat is Blu-ray.\n\nHowever, achieving this quality requires many things. It requires a streaming service willing to serve video of that quality to your computer — for instance, Hulu reserves HD streams for paid Hulu Plus members. It requires a recent-model sustem or fairly high-end older model, as many mid-range older models can't decode a 1080p H.264 stream fast enough for smooth playback. It requires a good screen — you'll certainly be giving up some quality with the 1366x768 screens that have emerged as the 'standard' on a lot of Windows notebooks, as full 1080p is 1920x1080.\n\nIt also requires a fairly fast Internet connection — faster than your might think. Consumer Internet connections are rated based on their maximum capped speed, not a minimum guaranteed speed. The actual performance both of your connection and of the links between you and the video stream provider is variable. Personally, I found that my old 10 Mbps cable Internet connection was not sufficient to reliably stream the highest quality streams offered by Netflix (about 4 Mbps) — the player would usually settle on a stream one or two steps down from the highest quality. So I saw video quality improve quite substantially moving to a 50 Mbps cable connection, despite the fact that superficially 10 Mbps should have been enough.\n\nAnother factor to consider is that most modern consumer HDTVs are set up to modify an image in various ways out of the box. They may boost image contrast and saturation, artificially sharpen edges, and even perform frame creation to make motion appear smoother. This stuff drives video pros and purists crazy, because it causes images to be displayed very differently from the creators' intent, but some people may prefer the resulting images. None of this 'enhancement' usually occurs when playing Internet video on a laptop, which means you generally get a more accurate representation of what the content is supposed to look like, but it might not 'pop' as much.\n\nAs odd as this might seem, yet another factor is audio. I work in video production, and there's a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) saying in the industry that \"Sound is 80% of everything you see\". High quality audio can significantly influence your perception of content quality. If you're comparing an HDTV hooked up to a full 5.1 surround sound system to a laptop playing audio through its internal speakers, audio quality is probably influencing your judgement more than you realize. Many better laptops can be hooked up to a surround sound system, and some Internet video services deliver streams with surround mixes, but most people aren't taking advantage of this.\n\ntl;dr: You can get very high quality video playback on a modern laptop, but there are a bunch of prerequisites."
] |
What does it mean, and what challenges does one face when one has a CYP2D6 deficiency/defect? | [
"CYP2D6 is a member of a large class of proteins called cytochrome p450s (AKA CYPs, pronounced \"sips\") that are very important in the metabolism of drugs. In some cases, CYPs modify drugs so that they are inactive and don't work anymore while in others they modify drugs so that they do work. Not all CYPs act on every drug, however. \n\nBecause everyone's genes are slightly different, some people have CYPs that are more or less active than others. In some cases, certain CYPs may be absent. This is why pharmacists and doctors often have to adjust people's doses of medications when they first start taking them. Unless we do genetic tests to know how active a person's CYPs are, its best to start a drug at a lower dose and then work up to one that is effective.\n\nHere's an example of its importance: imagine a blood thinner that is metabolized by a CYP to its active form. Person A has a highly active CYP while person B has a less active CYP. If they are both given a high dose of this blood thinner, person B's blood may be adequately anticoagulated. However, this same dose in Person A, with a highly active CYP, may cause life-threatening hemorrhage as so much of the drug is metabolized to its active form by the highly active CYP.\n\nA lot of research is being done in this area to identify which CYPs act on which drugs and how they do so."
] |
Brianne Altice was just sentenced to "two to thirty" years in prison for sexually abusing students in Utah. How is such a wide range of sentencing possible? | [
"She plead guilty to [Forcible Sexual Assault](_URL_0_), which carries a sentence of 1 to 15 years per violation. \"Judge Kay gave Altice three 1 to 15 year sentences, two to be served consecutively and one concurrently for a total of 2 to 30 years.\" [Source](_URL_1_). Since she's serving one of the charges concurrently, the time will run while she's serving the other charges. In other words, she's really only going to serve time for two of the instances for a total of 2 to 30 years.\n\nShe has to serve at least 2 years and she won't serve more than 30. After 2 years a parole board will periodically review her case and determine when, if at all, she should be released on parole.\n\nEdit: Wrote on federal law earlier. However, this is Utah law being applied in a federal court."
] |
Why do we celebrate with our fists clenched? | [
"It's a show of power. Clenched fists, loud voices, arms held above your head, maybe even stomping the ground with your feet.\n\nCelebratory shows of power have been with humanity for an extremely long time. Blind people will celebrate in the same way, despite having never seen another person."
] |
Why are the disposable batteries cannot be recharged? And what makes the difference between disposable and rechargeable batteries? | [
"Yo ho ho! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: Why can't you recharge a disposable battery? ](_URL_4_)\n1. [ELI5: Why can't you recharge regular batteries? ](_URL_2_)\n1. [ELI5: How do rechargeable batteries work? ](_URL_6_)\n1. [ELI5: The difference between Normal, and Rechargeable batteries. ](_URL_1_)\n1. [ELI5: How rechargeable batteries work ](_URL_5_)\n1. [ELI5: What is different about a rechargeable battery that allows it to be recharged, as apposed to a regular battery that cannot be. ](_URL_3_)\n1. [ELI5: how come car batteries can be recharged but your average flashlight battery can not? ](_URL_0_)"
] |
How did it come to be that beer cans and bottles in Europe are typically 500ml, and in the US/Canada they're 355ml and 341ml, respectively? | [
"America is dumb and hasn't switched to the correct measurement system like they should have 50 years ago. Source, am American",
"The US uses the imperial system and not the metric system. Beer cans and bottles are usually 12 or 11.5 fluid ounces which are 355 or 341 ml.\n\nIn Europe there are two standard can sizes - 500ml and 330ml.",
"To answer the first part of your question: beer was originally sold in pints in the UK, but now must be sold in metric units by law. One pint is 568 ml (to the nearest millilitre), and so 500 is a suitable round number to use for the bottle and can size. Rounding down rather than up (to 600 ml) saves on raw materials for the container, allows retailers to charge the same price for a smaller quantity, and may reduce the amount people drink if people think in terms of drinking a number of cans or bottles.",
"Only on the continent. UK cans of lager like fosters are 440ml and bottles of grolsch, budweiser etc are 330. But a british real ale or a German wheat beer etc is 500ml.",
"We also have 16oz bottles which I would imagine are akin to your 500ml. Typically, a pint (16oz) is your standard draught size as well."
] |
How do computers generate colours without reflection? | [
"> How do computers generate colours without reflection?\n\nThe standard computer screen these days is the LCD, or Liquid Crystal Diode. These screens use tiny crystals suspended in a somewhat fluid matrix which allows the crystals to be oriented using an electric field. In one orientation they allow light to pass through them while in another orientation they block light. You can observe this behavior with the classic digital watch or calculator on a sort of greyish green background. Those are simply liquid crystal cells which are made opaque to display numbers over a matte background.\n\nA modern LCD screen uses a white backlight which shines through a very fine grid of individual liquid crystal cells. Three cells are grouped together into a \"pixel\" with each cell being tinted the colors red, green, and blue. By varying how much the liquid crystals blocks light from each of the colored cells the combined color of the pixel unit can be adjusted. Combining many of the pixel units together allows an image to be formed.\n\nAn older display technology was the CRT or cathode ray tubes. Instead of a white back light the red, green, and blue components of a pixel were activated by shining an electron beam into them which would cause them to fluoresce. Scanning this beam back and forth across the screen would build the image from the same kind of pixel groups.\n\nA newer display technology is OLED or organic light emitting diodes. These displays have the red, green, and blue components of the pixel groups composed of individually activated LEDs, a semiconductor light source using electroluminescence. In principle though they form an image in a similar way as the other displays."
] |
Why do Magic the Gathering cards have different prices and why do they change so often? | [
"I don't play Magic so I could be completely wrong, but from what I understand there are new sets of cards/rules released every 3 months or so. With each release the strength and value of all the existing cards change. \n\nAlso, particular deck builds sometimes rise and fall in popularity. So if a certain deck becomes popular one month then unpopular, that will change the value for all the cards in the deck and the cards you play against it."
] |
Why can I search the whole internet in 0.58 sec but it takes over a minute to search a folder on my hard drive? | [
"Google doesn't search the whole internet for you when you enter a query. It searches a massive high-availability database stored on Google servers. The database is created by webcrawling, an automated process that goes out and *actually* searches the web, but takes a lot longer than a regular Google search.\n\nOn the other hand, when you search folders on your computer it usually has to *actually* search the files on your computer. The process can be sped up a bit if the files are cached, but it's still not the type of high-availability super database that Google uses.",
"Search engines like Google and Bing are constantly searching and _indexing_ websites and web content. When you throw some search words into them, they're not searching the entire internet, they're looking up those words in their index, then merging result sets into a list. This doesn't take very long (also, they have thousands of high powered servers to do this for you very quickly).\n\nYour computer on the other hand is just a single (probably lower powered) computer. But it still has an indexing function. If your folder searches are slow, it could be because your computer's indexing system isn't indexing that particular folder location.\n\nFor example, in Windows 7, in the Start Menu > Run window, type \"indexing\", then select \"Indexing Options\" that appears. That will show you all the folder locations that the Windows indexing service is covering. Add locations to this list, give it time to finish indexing and your searches should go faster.",
"Because Google has already done the searching and indexed the entire internet for you. If you have indexing enabled searching your folders will also be instantaneous.",
"Searching the internet uses a search index, your computer likely does not. As an example, lets look for the word 'banana' in the following sentences (the sentences are a metaphore for the files on your computer or the pages on the internt, btw):\n\nSentence 1: Apple apple orange.\n\nSentence 2: Pear apple mango.\n\nSentence 3: Mango pinapple banana.\n\nIf you have no index, you have to read through all three sentences. In this case that's 9 words, too much work if you ask me. So lets build a search index that tells us where to find any given word:\n\napple: sentence 1, sentence 2\n\norange: sentence 1\n\npear: sentence 2\n\nmango: sentence 2, sentence 3\n\npineapple: sentence 3\n\nbanana: sentence 3\n\nNow, we only need to search through 6 words before we know every sentence that contains the word 'banana'. Much better, huh? The bigger the search content, and the more words come up more than once, the more this search index would help us out.\n\nThis is a simplification, but the point is finding more compressed and efficient ways to store the searched information. If your interested, I would recommend reading more about search, and maybe playing around with programming.",
"The \"whole internet\" is really highly optimized indexed table where each and every terms are indexed with corresponding result page. The fast servers searches your query on those data tables and show them to you. However, in your hard drive, the data are not indexed. If indexed, you can certainly find your files faster. You can find some free tools like \"launchy\" to index your files and use it to search it immediately.\n\nYou can also see this interactive [\"How search works\"](_URL_0_) by Google.\n\nEdit: link for \"How google search works\"",
"Search engines index all the website they can see. Similar to how a book's index works, it's really easy to flip through the index and see what pages (book-pages or webpages) mention your keywords.\n\nYour harddrive likely isn't indexed. You can set it to index, but it's not set to do that by default.",
"Google's database is in memory, accross a farm of servers, using algorithms designed to do this, it's built to return your queries fast, using optimized techniques. Most of the speed comes from using parrallel processing and data that is already in memory.\n\nSearching files on a single drive is a different matter, especially in non-indexed locations. In this case, the system has to read most of the metadata from the drive itself, so its limited to how fast the drive is. Its a single process, reading from a single drive, it can't go any faster than your single drive's read speed.",
"It's the difference between looking up a book in a giant card catalog (google) vs going to the library and looking through each book title one by one (your computer). \n\nYou can speed up the \"your computer\"-based search by making the same giant card catalog that google uses, but it would take up a huge amount of space and be kind of useless unless searching for files on your computer is all you ever do.",
"The infrastructure that provides your quick online search results costs literally billions of dollars. Your hard drive is like $100.\n\nAlso, the software that crawls websites and provides you indexes to search is custom designed for that exact purpose. The software that is searching your hard drive is part of a multi-purpose operating system (i.e. Windows) built to do lots of other things, meaning it's not going to be excellent at anything in particular.",
"Indexes. You're not searching the Internet, you're searching an index of pages that a search engine has saved. You can index folders on your computer, too, if you want to be able to search them faster."
] |
When MMA fighters do choke holds people pass out but strangulation is silent way to kill someone. Where is the threshold between making someone pass out and killing someone by physically cutting of their air supply. | [
"Most martial arts chokes work by restricting blood flow, not air. The result is the same though, the victim passes out because the brain isn't getting oxygen. The brain can survive up to ten minutes without oxygen, but after 3-4 severe damage is likely. Luckily for sport purposes unconsciousness usually occurs in 15 seconds or so. Which means you can choke a person out without causing real harm.",
"MMA chokes do not cut off the air supply. That would actually take a very long time for someone to pass out. When applying a proper choke you want pain and discomfort and you are also attacking the artery in the neck, not the airway in the throat. So when doing a choke the person is thinking \"I dont like this I don't like this\" not \"I can't breath I can't breath\"",
"They don't choke the actual airway. The way the rear naked choke is performed the fighter only lessens the amount of blood going to the brain causing people to pass out in practice if done correct it's considered 100% and is only lethal when done improperly."
] |
Why doesn't ground beef need to be cooked well done anymore? | [
"The process of industrially grinding meat introduces bacteria, hence the need to cook it. The middle of steak hasn't been exposed to bacteria, so you don't need to cook it. Restaurants that serve burgers medium grind the meat themselves in sanitary conditions, so there is no need to cook it the entire way through.",
"The idea that a steak was okay while ground beef must be cooked well done was based on an external contamination would not penetrate the meat. With a steak, cooking the outsides would kill the contaminant while the inside was protected. With ground beef, the act of breaking the meat down would spread surface contamination throughout the product.\n\nCurrent food handling requirements have reduced the likelihood of surface contamination, so these establishments are willing to take the reduced risk of food poisoning to meet their customer's request for burgers that are not well-done. In addition, they often try placing disclaimers in the menus stating that uncooked meat and eggs may cause food poisoning in an effort to shift the responsibility for any illness to the consumer.\n\n**TL:DR**: Risk is a little better, burger places more willing to take risk for happy patrons",
"Nothing has changed with beef to make it actually safer. The reason you should cook ground beef all the way through is because most ground beef (unless you are buying a butchered cow) could be upwards of 100 cows meat in any given hamburger. So the issue is more about cross contamination of sick animals. One sick cow could potentially infect much more meat that just its own. Cooking ground beef thoroughly is still the best way to prevent food borne illness (from beef).",
"Depends on the quality of the establishment. Lots of your fancier restaurants are taking steaks and grinding the meat themselves. What you're worried about is contamination -- often e.coli, listeria, or salmonella. Although one worries some about these bacteria (and food poisoning) on cuts of meat, it's not as high as, say, salmonella is in chicken.\n\nSo, if the chef takes good precautions and is grinding their own burgers, you could have it less than well cooked, just as you could have a steak, \"rare\". \n\nIn short, unless you trust the restaurant, you don't want to eat there at all; but quadrouply so for less than well cooked food.",
"The \"ground beef must be incredibly well done\" thing came about as the result of [a particularly nasty food poisoning outbreak involving ground beef](_URL_0_).\n\nIt's been 20 years, so we've backed off a bit."
] |
How would raising the minimum wage to $10.10 affect workers who already make $10-13 an hour? | [
"When my girlfriend had been working at pizza hut for approximately 4 years. she had earned a $2 raise putting her at $10/h (this was due to her being promoted to a manager position. Then the minimum wage went up from $8/h to $10/h. Suddenly she was making the same amount as the brand new employees. Pizza hut refused to give her a comparative raise for 6 months. she quit after that along with everybody else who worked higher than entry level.\n\n worked at pizza hut and minimum wage went up",
"I was working for a dollar over minimum wage when they changed it to a dollar over my hourly pay. It was cool that I got a raise, but now I was working for minimum wage & that kinda sucked. It took my semi skilled job & put me in the same pay group of unskilled workers. I looked at my job different from that day on.",
"I can't answer your question, but I can provide a little information about the answers you'll get. There is no way to answer this question. Economics is complicated and there's no data to suggest that you can predict future economic behavior from basic principles (supply and demand, etc) and starting conditions. Anyone claiming that they \"know\" what is going to happen if the minimum wage is changed is lying. No one knows, and while there have been some studies showing weak relationships between minimum wage changes and some local issues, the results are often contradictory. \n\ni.e. sometimes raising the minimum wage locally causes a decrease in the number of jobs and sometimes it causes an increase. \n\ntldr; Nobody knows. And anybody claiming to know, is probably trying to sell you something.",
"It depends on who you ask, wages for the middle class have stagnated over the last 40 years pushing more and more low skill workers into poverty. Many economists believe that hiking the minimum wage would act as a defacto wage correction raising the wages of people at the bottom would have a ripple effect raising the wages of people above minimum wage as well.\n\n If a manage at a retail store in a mall is making $25,000/yr salaried but works 50hr a week he is making aprox 9.61/hr well above minimum wage. Now pay all the employees he manages 10.10/hr and they work 40/wk he is still making about $6,000/yr more than they are but is also working 120 hours/yr more than they are. Employers will find that less and less people will be willing to work for 9.61/ hour when they could be working for $10.10/hr meaning the salary for a manager would have to increase 26260/yr to stay on par with their subordinates. \n\nThe higher up the wage scale you go the less of an effect the change in the minimum wage has, but you have successfully increased the income of a large number of people and these people at this wage level are very likely to spend the extra money they now have on things like food and housing meaning more money is now going out into the economy. These people making more money are also now less likely to rely on government assistance to make ends meet. \n\nTL:DR Companies employing people at $10-13 per hour will have to adjust their wages to stay competitive with the wages now expected by people of a certain skill level.",
"There is a huge argument here. For the sake of ELI5 I will mention only one reason: \n\nThe vast majority of people living under the poverty line either:\n\na) don't work at all (over half) \nb) don't work full time (most of the remaining half) \nc) Already earn more than the new minimum wage would guarantee them (nearly everybody else)\n\nThe majority of those earning minimum wage are: \na) Not poor \nb) Teenagers/Students\n\nRaising the minimum wage by $2 or $3 does not decrease the poverty rate. Best case scenario: A poor person earning minimum wage, working full time, year round (very small percentage of those living in poverty) would see their yearly income increase by $3k. That isn't going to bump anybody people over the poverty line. Remember, there are people supporting only themselves, earning $12/hour that are still poor.\n\nUnless you are thinking of bumping the minimum wage to $15 (which would have disastrous consequences in and of itself), don't expect a higher minimum wage to be an effective weapon against poverty. There are legitimate arguments for raising the minimum wage, but fighting poverty is not one of them.\n\nEdit: Punctuation, Words",
"where i live, state prisons and mental health facility employees make $15/hr or less starting, literally. if you can begin to guess what kind of stress these people are under, going to mcdonald's to work for $15/hr would be a vacation. Sorry, I'm not answering the question asked, but I've thought about this quite a bit, as both of those areas are where i used to work, and i still have many friends that do work in those professions.",
"Although I support the idea of a minimum wage I do not like using it to cure social ills as it is ill suited for the task.\n\nAny broadbased increase in wages will have an unavoidable inflationary result that will quickly catch up to the new wage. Meaning that, for the most part, all you did is drag down everyone who was above the minimum wage.",
"I had received a raise and was making well over what many of my co-workers were making. They increased minimum wage and it basically set everyone to the same wages that I was making. I didn't get any raise or compensation to pay me a comparable wage to what I was previously.\n\nTo me, it felt like I was getting paid the same as dipshit #1 and dipshit #2 that didn't know the difference between their ass and a hole in the ground. Those two didn't magically start working harder or not doing stupid shit but now they were making more money to fund their drug habits. It's not like the money was even going to a good use for them.",
"We pay our nanny $3 more than minimum. If minimum went up, I'd up her pay, although we may have to cut her hours back a little so we could still afford it."
] |
How come you can tell someone's height without any point of reference? | [
"Because we use the height of their head from chin to top as a means to then calculate roughly how many of their heads will stack up to their height. Depending on how many we count determines roughly how tall they are to us in the picture."
] |
why aren't the arrow keys on the left of the keyboard? | [
"Because the current keyboard layout was developed before the mouse, let alone before modern first-person shooters. Lots of people use computers for things other than games as well.\n\nTo add, even if the direction keys *were* on the other side, most gamers would still use WSAD or something similar because of the number of extra keys in close proximity.",
"Because more people are right handed so they put them there. Then games using the mouse also made it so wsad also works, so the right hand can be on the mouse"
] |
Why don't cities plant fruitbearing trees on publicly owned streets instead of purely ornamental trees we typically see? | [
"Because the uneaten fruit would fall off and rot. Anything not eaten or removed would bring rodents and pests. Most fruit bearing trees also require a pretty hefty amount of tending to, as well.\nAlso, to be honest, I really wouldn't want to eat a fruit that's grown off of a public tree like that, I imagine it'd need a LOT of washing",
"- homeless man climbs tree to grab apple\n- homeless man falls out of tree\n- homeless man sues city for millions\n\nhomeless problem solved",
"Couple of reasons.\n\n1. If you've been to a commercial fruit orchard, you'll have noticed the trees are often not that attractive. They're pruned to keep them small - to produce good fruit you don't want the tree expending effort in growing too large. You want that energy going into the fruit (and also so that you can reach the fruit, it's no good if it's 10 metres up! You want small, productive trees). As a result, they don't provide good shade or look overly attractive.\n\n2. For the same reason, a good fruit tree requires quite a lot of tending and training, which requires the city to spend more on landscape and gardening services.\n\n3. Depending where you are, you may not *want* to eat the fruit. If it's in a park, yeah okay. If it's on a busy roadside, the tree will be sucking in the air, which will include relatively high concentrations of exhaust fumes. Obviously CO2 is photosynthesised out, but the air will contain all sorts of other nasties such as Sulphur Dioxide and various Nitrogen Oxides which the tree has no method of dealing with. Those toxins will actually then *concentrate* in the fruit.\n\nMoreover, if not washed, the fruit will most likely be coated in particulate emissions (i.e. soot).\n\nSo yeah, you'd \"solve\" your homeless problem by slowly subjecting them to heavy metal poisoning...\n\nPoint 3 obviously depends very much on the placement of your trees, air quality of the city, proximity to exhaust sources, etc. Might be a problem, might not be.",
"Fruit trees generally require a lot more care than ornamental varieties, can attract pests like rats and raccoons, and drop fruit all over the place which can cause damage or injury.",
"In Fuzhou, Southern China, the streets are lined with small mango seeds. Anyone falling on hard times can simply grab a ladder, grab a basket and sell them off the street, and the leftovers get eaten by animals and such. Pretty good system IMO",
"Here's another question: why don't more cities plant trees with tap roots instead of ones where the roots grow in all directions and inevitably tear up the sidewalk?",
"Plant a fruit tree in your own yard and tell us how it goes for you. I had one. Had. It turned into a gross mess.\n\nThe po for my house had an apple tree. It never grew well in my care and stank when everything dropped.",
"In the south of Spain, in cities such as Marbella, the streets are lined and plazas are full with orange trees.",
"Here's why. Whenever you set up something to \"help bums\" they simply hangout, scare people and drive down commerce. It's pretty much that simple",
"Because the larger the tree, the greater the environmental benefit, generally. And street trees need to be large to maximize their greatest benefit, shade over the street. Fruit trees are usually small, for trees.\nThe other answers are good, too.",
"People are going to tell you it's primarily to reduce the work involved in landscaping maintenance, and they are not wrong. My guess though is that if we look abroad, and far enough back in our own nations history, we will find that this is normal almost everywhere, and everywhen else. Cities in the US tend to marginalize and criminalize homelessness, and essentially anything that would make it easier to be homeless in a given area is systematically removed. First step? Easy access to food. Replace anything fruit bearing with ornamental trees. Then make it illegal for anyone to feed homeless people on public property. Then criminalize anything they might do in a given place. Example: I believe my state or Oahu county therein, just made laying on park benches illegal. \n\nTl;Dr: Free food enables visible homelessness. America does not want people to see exactly how shitty life is for a large population of its citizens.",
"In Mexico this is fairly common, and the fruit is owned by the \"community\" so it is a source of food for the homeless and poor. I don't get all the comments here claiming that fruit trees are hard to deal with. I've grown peach, lime, orange, pomegranate, tangerine, and had an apple tree. If your goal isn't to make some sort of business out of it or feed your family exclusively, they pretty much grow on their own. Fruit trees are some of the easiest sources of food you can grow yourself.",
"I am not sure homeless people would pick fruits off a limited type of trees and at specific times of the year instead of showing up at a shelter. Also some fruit bearing trees require care such as pesticides or fertilizer to grow. Also the fruit is edible for a short period of time only and then rots and make a mess on sidewalks.",
"Fruit trees generally take a lot of maintenance to be productive, look acceptable and not be a large liability for pedestrian/car traffic. They can also be very finicky about growing conditions and tend to have lots of disease/insect issues.\n\nSource- I'm an arborist.",
"A few cities around the world are trying to reintroduce fruit trees as urban orchards. Check _URL_0_ and other similar projects.",
"My city (London) has fruit bearing trees in places, there was one outside my house.\n\nTrust me it's a nightmare, fruit drops on your car, if you don't clean it your paint job is ruined.\n\nThere's rotting fruit all over the pavement (sidewalk) and you tread it all over your carpet when you come in.\n\nKids climb all over your walls and wreck them trying to reach the fruit.\n\nIt's just a terrible, terrible idea.",
"There is a tropical fruit called durian. It is a fruit covered with thorns, and the smell is sweet and and the fruit tastes sweet, thick and creamy. The tree is generally a tall tree with few branches.\n\nI would love to see these trees that in cities and at side walks.",
"When I lived in Valencia, Spain it was done with the orange trees. You do not want to eat fruit that was grown on the streets, they are absolutely disgusting, and make you want to vomit. U am not kidding, there is a reason they warn people to not eat the fruit!",
"There are a few cherry trees near my Aunt's house, and not only does some of the fruit rot and drop, staining the surrounding pavement (not to mention attracting vermin); most fruit is eaten by birds, who then leave cherry staining poop all over the surrounding area.",
"The trees outside my house are cherry trees - and its a fucking pain. They rot on the pavement, get stuck underfoot and you've got to be careful to not step on them before going indoors as you can't get that shit off the carpet.",
"Where I live in Israel a lot of the trees growing on public grounds are Orange trees and you can pick them and eat them right off the tree in the spring.",
"It would be messy, attract vermin... And sooner or later somebody will choke on a pit or get an allergic reaction and Sue the pants off of everyone."
] |
Why do the largest US cities have the poorest public school programs? | [
"Cities in the US have the deepest, most concentrated poverty in the country. Poverty is the simple answer to your question, as there is a stronger relationship between poverty rates and educational success than there is between school funding and school quality.\n\nEverything from pre-natal nutrition to the frequency to which children are read are worse in poor areas. Poor parents have less ability to be heavily involved in their kids' schools, which is also correlated to school and student success. So urban schools are sailing against a huge tide of under-educated kids who enter the system already well behind their suburban or wealthier peers.\n\nMoreover, once in the system, there is a lot of evidence that the poorer a child's home, the more learning they lose each summer. This effect is known as [Summer Learning Loss](_URL_0_).\n\nUltimately, all the factors that hinder poor students accumulate to devastating effect. Urban schools have been unable to stem these effects.\n\nSo yes, many urban districts have high per-pupil spending (relative to suburban and rural districts) but the effects of poverty in hindering educational achievement overwhelm the modestly higher funding rates.",
"So a lot of this is misunderstanding because of the term \"Inner City\". It sounds like it's referring to the non-suburban part, but it's usually referring to very poor minority neighborhoods. \n\nAs for school quality, much of that is misconception. A city like NYC or Baltimore may have some of the worst public schools, but it also has many of the BEST public schools. Typically in a major city you will have a lot of middle-to-decent schools, a few exceptional schools, and a small amount of DREADFUL schools that feel unsalvageable. The NYC public school system is massive, serving a student population that's slightly less than that of the entire nation of Greece. There is a huge range in school quality throughout the city. \n\nAs to the quality of the bad schools, that is due to a whole constellation of factors - taxation patterns, white flight, restrictive covenants, poor HUD management, redlining, poor timing for lead-induced crime wave, etc. Too much shit for me to explain in one comment. Basically the U.S.A. spent several decades turning its back on urban life, and that fucked some stuff up real bad and left a lot of communities really underserved. \n\nAlso, large immigrant populations. We have a lot of immigrants here, and they cluster in major cities. It's not uncommon for a few city schools to have a student population that basically just got there and it still learning English. That makes it hard to get things done, and having across-the-board national and state standards means that those students who are *learning a totally new language* are being measured against kids who've been here their whole lives. \n\nWe also lack trade schools in the public school system, which means that a lot of kids are forced to perform beyond their passions and aptitudes without being given solid alternatives. \n\nBecause some city schools are really bad, people treat them as representative of the overall quality of the school system, or they are evaluating a skewed average that doesn't take into account the incredible effort the school must take (for instance, to teach an adolescent population English). \n\nI've seen a lot of outstanding public schools in all sorts of neighborhoods here in NYC.",
"Children who grow up in an intact home do well in school regardless of income or race. \n\nPoverty has nothing to do with educational outcomes, attested to the fact that billions of taxes have been given to urban communities and the scores continue to decrease every year. Also, many poor Asians who come to this country excel at school, even in buildings that are crumbling (which is rare anymore).\n\nThe central issue is broken families. Every urban city is populated by a majority black population. In the 1960s, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for African Americans was 30 percent. Today, it's 72 percent.\n\nIn a study by The Brookings Institution, a liberal organization, they determined there are three factors that provide educational and economic success for children that also breaks the cycle of poverty:\n\n > [Children] enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.\n\n > Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class.\n\n > _URL_1_\n\nWhat schools are trying to accomplish without having intact famillies is to replace the family so they can break this cycle. No amount of money can solve this until people take responsibility for their own childrens' welfare.\n\nIt should also be noted that Asians have intact families far greater than whites, which also explains why Asians make more than whites on average. \n\nTherefore, this is not about race, it's about behavior.",
"There have been a few pockets of uncivil comments in this thread that have been removed. Please follow the rules and keep it civil and be respectful or the thread will be locked.",
"There's something called the \"urban crises condition\" that means something similar to \"inner-city issues vs. suburban struggles\".\nThose who can afford to can move to the suburbs for a better quality of life, and the majority of people left in the inner city are low income families. This leaves more issues like poverty, violence, etc, and the children in these schools are exposed to and react to those issues. \n\nAlso, most state funding for public schools (you can look at Virginia as an example) is allocated based on an algorithm that takes things like average daily membership (the amount of students enrolled), and average daily attendance into account. \nInner city schools always get the short end of the stick in this case. They are usually required to spend more money per pupil than suburban schools, all while generally receiving less of the necessary funding they need to compete with suburban schools.\n\n**edit: grammar**",
"There are several factors involved here.\n\nFirst off, the worst schools actually *aren't* in inner-city areas - they're in poor rural areas. They don't get much attention because rural areas are out of sight, out of mind - there aren't many people in any given rural area, so they don't get much attention. Schools on many Native American reservations, and in small villages in backcountry Alaska, are often very poor and have difficulty attracting teachers - especially high-quality teachers - as few people want to live out in those regions.\n\nStudents from inner-city schools do tend to have worse outcomes than many schools serving poor rural whites, but there is little evidence that this is a result of poorer school quality. One often neglected factor - which is why teachers resent the idea of being paid according to how well their students do on standardized tests - is student quality.\n\nIf a teacher gets a bunch of students who don't really care about learning, and whose parents don't help them, and another teacher gets a bunch of students who do care about learning, and whose parents are very involved in their education, which group do you think will do better?\n\nInner city schools have disproportionately weaker students, with uninvolved parents, which results in worse outcomes. This is because their student bodies have a very different racial composition than most schools.\n\nThere is something known as the [achievement gap](_URL_7_) in the United States. While there are many differences between groups, the one which gets the most attention is the achievement gap between blacks and whites. This shows up in basically all academic tests and tests of intellectual ability. The difference in average IQ (the best measure of g, the general intelligence factor) between blacks and whites, for instance, [is about one standard deviation](_URL_8_) - 15-18 points, depending on the test. The difference in SAT scores between blacks and whites in 2005 was [204 points](_URL_8_).\n\nWhile some people blame the schools, there is actually evidence against this; wealthy black students (whose families make $100,000 or more per year), who generally don't go to poor inner city schools, have an average SAT score 10 points lower than white students whose families make $10,000 or less per year - [and score 139 points below whites whose families are at the same income level](_URL_8_). Moreover, studies of black students who went to predominantly black schools and black students who went to predominantly white schools have failed to show large differences in scores on tests like the SATs after accounting for factors like socioeconomic status.\n\nThis suggests that some other factor is at play.\n\nBlack students suffer from a number of disadvantages unrelated to school - they tend to be poorer, are much more likely to be raised by single parents, are much more likely for their parents to have criminal records, are much more likely to have parents who never went to college, are much less likely to have parents who volunteer to help out at school, are much less likely to have parents who help them out with their schoolwork, are much less likely to be able to read going into kindergarten, and dozens of other factors, all of which are negatively associated with success in school.\n\nSome scientists have suggested that the difference may in part be due to genetics. The heritability of IQ is very high - [0.75 or more](_URL_7_) - but this is a highly controversial hypothesis because [group differences may be caused by environmental factors even as individual variation is dominated by genetic ones](_URL_7_). Unfortunately, the genetics of human intelligence are poorly understood, and it is hard to disentangle some environmental factors - such as the environment inside the womb - with genetic ones.\n\n-----\n\nAll that being said, schools in poor communities tend to be more poorly funded than schools in wealthy ones. This is because schools are often funded locally via local property taxes or other local taxes. This actually creates a double penalty in poorer areas - not only are poorer areas poorer, thereby generating less tax revenue, but poorer communities tend to value education less highly than wealthy ones, having less community involvement and less investment in schools. As such, not only are these communities poorer, but they may be more reluctant to fund public education.\n\nHowever, this is not always the case. The Washington DC school district, for instance, [spent $29,409 per student in FY 2009-10](_URL_8_). This is more than *twice* the national average of $12,401 per student in public schools.\n\nWashington DC continued to have extremely poor student outcomes. It is also, not coincidentally, one of the blackest major cities in the US - [almost 50% of the population is black](_URL_8_.).\n\nNote also that many of the best schools in the US are found in big cities - Stuyvesant High School in New York, N.Y. is a selective public school which is one of the best in the US. This, however, gets back into student quality - Stuyvesant chooses which students go there, and picks the best, resulting in them appearing to be a very amazing school when in reality they may not actually truly be one of the best schools, but simply have the best students, as they can pick many of the best students in New York City to go there.",
"Having been through it:\n\n1. CORRUPTION. Thumbs me down, but this is overwhelmingly African American corruption. People in positions of responsibility towards children that care only about enriching themselves and their families and so on. This means lousy facilities & materials, and also teachers that just feel shafted. I'm talking about barely educated staff and administrators *janitors* and *bus drivers* making more money than highly-educated, hard-working teachers.\n\n2. BAD FAMILIES. The parents raise their children poorly, they come to school bad, the teachers try to help out, and it works, but you're starting at a lower level than families where the parents are educated, feeding kids well, teaching the kids to read, etc.\n\n3. BAD ENVIRONMENT. Crime and pollution in the cities makes for kids that don't pay as much attention. Like the lead in the Flint water.\n\n4. BUSSING. If there's a good school in a city, the school district will find a way to put the worst students there, so it can be made more \"average\". Average in that city is of course just plain awful.\n\n5. RACISM OF ALL KINDS. Black & Latino kids beat up White & Asian kids. Black administrators screw White teachers. White taxpayers screw the mostly Black & Latino schools.\n\n6. ANTI-SCHOOL CULTURE. Doing well in school is looked down upon in the African American community. The kids are \"acting white\"\n\n7. GENETICS, MAYBE. The book is still out on this but it looks like African-Americans may just not be as good at school, everything else being equal.",
"The teachers get paid the highest in the large metro areas so that isn't the reason. \n\nIf what you mean by the poorest public school programs are those with high drop out rates, high teen pregnancy rates, low test scores, low college admission rates, some of that is genetics. Just like some people are better at playing basketball then others, some people are better at thinking and learning than others.\n\nStupid people are more likely to have stupid kids, genetics definitely plays a role in intelligence there is no doubt about it. And studies have shown that lower IQ of the mother correlates with higher birth rates. So not only do stupid people have a higher chance of having a stupid kid, they have more of them. They have fewer resources to devote to the kids they have to begin with because of their poverty and then they go and have more kids. Then their kids have kids. It's a vicious cycle of stupid people not being able to take care of themselves having more kids then they can take care of and then their children doing the same thing. The idea that people are poor through no fault of their own is bull shit. \n\nSome of it is cultural too - if you are raised in a ghetto where doing well in school is looked down on, getting pregnant at 15yo and going on state aid is not considered a bad thing and where no one goes to college or is college educated, well you don't place a priority on school. And you learned that not only from your peers, but from your grandmother or mother who are the ones likely raising you because your mom's baby daddy is in jail or on drugs and doesn't provide any support to the woman raising you.",
"Based on what observation do you even assert this is true? In Georgia I would say it is not. Every part of Atlanta you've ever heard Ludacris rap about is better at attracting qualified teachers than rural parts of the state. In part because Bumfuck, GA cannot afford anyone with a college education and that type of poverty doesn't necessarily translate to a student loan forgiveness school. Only the wealthy white suburbs produce really good public schools, but the pecking order definitely has rural small towns at the bottom, not inner cities.",
"My Grandpa said it best, The Greeks have been around for thousands of years, they created philosophy, calculus, wonders of the world. Africans, been around for longer.....look what they have.",
"Other people have talked about concentrations of poverty, population density and unequal distribution of resources, which are almost certainly factors. \nBut there are likely other factors at work, too. \n- Size: The more students you have to manage, the greater the pressure to be as efficient as possible. Efficiency and efficacy are not the same in education. For example, a lecture is the more efficient way to deliver information from one teacher to many students, perhaps hundreds at a time. but it is also the least effective way to deliver information. Much more effective, but also cost prohibitive, would be an curriculum tailored specifically for one individual student. \n- Politics: Education is run, at the top, by politicians. The larger the city, the more likely you are to have very ambitious politicians in charge. The politicians have agendas that go far beyond actually educating kids. They are often looking for campaign donations and votes to get them to their next elected office. Effectively educating kids is a lower priority. \n- Costs. Everything is more expensive in New York City than in Omaha. Salaries, school lunches, etc.",
"Because subsidiarity is the only way to get anything done. A town of 5000 people with 1000 kids is going to be deeply interested and proud of their local public school. Community members will volunteer. Teachers will work overtime. They will make it work. \n\nA city of 5000000 people with 1000000 kids is going to suffer from a form of the bystander effect. Why isn't the city government providing good schools? The best parents and kids will concentrate into a few magnet or charter or private schools. What will be left is just a lot of people faced with an enormous problem that none of them can solve. They will get angry, but about the wrong things: why can't my child get into the good school?",
"They have a lot of high value property, but population density often means that a specific district within the city will have vastly more students per dollar than districts in the suburbs will. They will also tend to have mores students from poor families which means that they will not have as much fundraising and other supplemental money from them to expand programs beyond what the primary budgets allow.",
"Well, let's start at the great migration. See, all of the former slaves were free to move around and many decided to move to big cities to find work in the manufacturing industries. Many of these manufacturing industries were located in the downtown areas of big cities. So, black people moved in to work and formed their own communities (due to racial segregation). Eventually, manufacturing jobs went away - blame whatever you like, unions, the gov., China, Capitalism, Greed - the jobs were gone; America was changing into a service based economy. As a result, the bustling black communities in the inner cities were virtually bankrupted. Additionally, all the whites who lived in the city were moving out, creating suburbs (\"white flight\"), and taking their wealth out of the city. As a response to the crushing poverty, the government created federal housing (\"section 8\") and other welfare programs, to try and help these areas. Now, inner cities are experiencing \"gentrification;\" whites are moving back in to the inner city and revitalizing it. \n\nHow this relates to schools is that most schools receive funding from taxes from the neighborhoods/areas where the school is located. So, we have the progression into poverty in the inner city, which means no tax revenue, which means no school resources = bad schools in inner cities. The suburbs, which may be their own townships, have a nice tax base to fund the schools there.",
"The answer is simple.\n\nLook at the voter demographics.\n\nThese areas are all run by Democratic leaders.\n\nThey promise all sorts of free and discounted programs for the people living in these area and then once elected, force the conservative citizens to move out rather than have to pay for programs they don't want to support.\n\nThis then reduces the number of people actually paying into these programs.",
"IMO it's mostly a cultural problem. Take the way whites blacks and asians value an intact family unit and education. Now I'm not saying any one culture is better than the other just that they have different priorities when it comes to these two things. One of the long term effects is poor results in inner city schools.",
"> I would assume the larger the city, the greater the tax revenue.\n\nSo that's the thing. You've hit the nail on the head. Sort of. Large cities aren't actually 1 city. \n\nBecause once you get into large cities there frequently isn't just *one* city making up the major metropolitan area. In the city I grew up in, there were 9 cities in 4 different counties. But that whole area is what made up the \"city\". Okay, you might be saying, how does this affect schools in any way?\n\nSchools get their funding in a few ways, some federal, a good chunk is state, but city and county taxes are the primary funding for public schools. In a small to medium sized city this isn't an issue as it's all probably within the same county and city. However, like stated above, large cities tend to be multiple cities kind of blended together. You'd never know you just entered another city while driving through town, but it makes a difference for tax purposes. \n\nSo here's the kicker. Cities can have a lot of different laws to make themselves more attractive to certain kinds of people. For example, in my hometown, there were no noise restriction laws. You could be as loud as you want whenever you want. \n\nThree streets over, there's a new city, with a city ordinance saying excessive noise past 10PM and before 5AM is a fine-able offence. I have been given a ticket for excessive use of my car horn. So that certainly discourages me from being loud. So if I like being loud at night, I might opt not to live there, to avoid tickets. Laws like that tend to mildly segregate populations, on paper it's pretty simple, you want to live here, you gotta follow the rules everyone voted on. In reality this tends to discourage whole demographics from being in the area. Obviously noise laws are only one aspect of it. There can be a whole slew of things discouraging certain groups from living in an area. There's a toll road through a richer neighborhood near my old place. Obviously that sort of thing discourages poor people. \n\nSo cities can discourage certain groups or encourage certain groups to live in that city. Nicer cities attract wealthier people, wealthier people pay more in taxes. Those taxes then get used for a wide variety of things (city maintenance, parks, events, new roads/buildings, police, fire department, etc.) but especially pertinent here, schools. When the city and county have a higher budget, everything they fund has a higher budget. When the schools have a higher budget, they hire better teachers, they build nicer schools, and buy better equipment. Which are all factors improving a students learning. \n\nThere may be something to be said for the respect kids have for the things around them. This may have something to do with, when everything is awesome around you, you like it, and treat it well. As opposed to in poorer cities, everything around you is crap, so you treat it like crap. This one isn't my strong suit, it's more of a sociological thing than financial one, so I'll avoid much further speculation, but in poorer cities, public property is damaged more frequently. \n\nSo I've explained where good schools come from, and now you've probably started to piece together why this causes bad schools. When there's a better place to live, people who can afford it move there. When people can afford it, it's more money for the city, and the city gets better. However since the person with money left the other area, the other area now has less tax revenue, and now has a smaller budget causing everything else to suffer, including schools. \n\nNinja edit: The reason this issue is especially prominent in large cities is because it's not like a family has to pick up their whole life just to move to a nicer city. They may only move a few blocks. Dad's commute might be a few minutes longer, but that's about the worst of it. They still have access to everything they had before, and now *more*. You can't do that when it's all 1 city. So that's kinda the double edged sword of large cities, they're great for a lot of things, but they're also great at keeping people clearly on certain sides of lines on a map.",
"On the contrary, I grew up in a small midwestern farm town in south eastern Minnesota. We had little to no poverty, there were small classes, and we were able to have nice things and renovate the older parts of the school. \n\nIt seems that when there are fewer students, there are fewer expenses on the student body overall. As a result, the money can go to having new things and like I said earlier update our computer lab, our lobby, provide better student assistance, and even build a brand new gymnasium. \n\nIt also depends on who is in charge of the finances. Most families in that town are well-to-do conservative families, who occasionally like to buy nice new things.\n\nTL;DR : Fewer kids, less expenses, nicer things.\n\nP.S. We also had an amazing fundraiser department. That's where the gym came from.",
"The inability to have an honest discussion about why the largest cities have the poorest school programs. I am neither democrat or republican, but EVERYONE should be able to weigh-in on these types of issues. Too often people in charge refuse to listen to anyone outside of their political comfort-zone and that is no way to resolve things. When things are the bad, we should expect the road to recovery to be painful at times",
"A lot of school districts get their money from taxes in the area. But while more people in a city = more tax revenue, it also means more children, which means more schools. Poverty is deeply settled in cities, and children from poorer homes tend to do poorly in school because they're busy worrying about and/or dealing with lower levels on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.",
"Remember when Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, threw away $100 million to try and improve mostly poor, black Newark public schools? \n\n[Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark public schools failed miserably — here's where it went wrong](_URL_9_)\n\nThe solution is NOT to throw more money at the problem.",
"Also, the system may be more different than you think. That LA district doesn't constitute everything in LA County. The wealthy cities in LA county are usually pretty smart. They have their own districts.",
"This is one of the most compelling podcasts I've ever heard, and hits this issue right in the gut. \n\n_URL_10_\n\n_URL_11_",
"What do you mean \"poorest\"? \n\nThose school systems certainly don't have the least money. That's not the major problem.",
"One big issue with public schools in the US is that it is funded largely by property tax.\n\nIn some cities that have a big, diverse tax base, that's not a problem. \n\nHowever for a lot of older cities that are actually geographically very small - like Boston, which is a pretty small city at the center of a reasonably large metro area - the affluent areas are in outer, neighboring cities.\n\nAdd in the complication from property tax-exempt land, like colleges, hospitals and religious institutions (which should not, IMHO, be tax exempt) and you end up with some cities in real tough situations.\n\nBoston **would** have it especially hard because it has so much tax-exempt land - colleges and hospitals make up something ridiculous like 40% of the land area in Boston itself. But luckily, Massachusetts funds public schools at the state level.\n\nDetroit has it particularly hard because there are virtually no affluent areas left inside Detroit itself, and the property within the city generates very little property tax for the size of the city. Add in the spread-out-ness from blight and you end up paying for more schools than you need, or having to transport kids a long way from home to consolidated schools.\n\nEDIT: for ignorance about MA public school funding",
"Want an answer from someone that grew up Southside Chicago? Our system is complete shit. The money collected \"for the kids\" gets wasted on pork projects not even related to education.\n\nThe ones that can afford it send their kids to private school (in our case Catholic) instead of public school. \n\nThe ones that can't? They make sacrifices for 18 years of their child's life to send them to private school.\n\nI don't know about the other cities mentioned, but I'd assume it's similar.\n\nTLDR: It sucked being the poor kid at a rich kid private school. In the end, I appreciate every single sacrifice my parents made to be able to afford this for me. During the process? It sucked. Hardcore sucked.",
"No one is really doing an ELI5. Let's keep it simple.\n\n1: The money for a school doesn't come from the big pot of city tax money - it comes from the local school district. It's based on property taxes. Poor places have cheap houses and less money for schools.^[1](_URL_12_)\n\n2: Public schools in big cities are actually **not** worse than average.^[2](_URL_13_) It's just that there's a lot of people in a tight place, so it looks much worse than a similarly bad school in the middle of nowhere. \n\nThe whole country has bad schools and it's generally because they're underfunded. There are notable exceptions, but that's the general trend.\n\n\n^[1] _URL_12_\n\n^[2] _URL_13_",
"most of these cities have good schools, it just depends on the area in which the school is. \n\nIn lower income areas it tends to be less cared after, more violence, more crime, higher illiteracy rates, less people working. Teachers get scared( some rightfully so) and dont want to work in these areas so there are less teachers to teach students. \n\nas with putting money into schools, one can only do so much but if people in these areas keep trashing schools, creating a violent atmosphere, then obviously they wont keep putting new equipment, new investments into that school if its just going to be trashed or stuff stolen",
"I don't know the US system all that well but I would think scale is something to do with it.\n\nIn a rural area you get maybe 1 school that takes in everyone from the local area, so you get a range of students both good and bad.\n\nIn cities however you got more schools for different districts. If you got one school in a rougher area and another in a wealthier area which one is going to proform better?\n\nGenerally the news will focus on the failing more than the successful and mediocre.",
"A lot of republican governments are starting to implement charter school vouchers as well. This takes even more money out of the public school system and allows charter schools to get all the benefits of a public school without having to serve the impoverished. There is truly a divide between the rich and poor here in America, even down to our school systems and it is truly depressing that someone has to ask why one of the world's greatest country's largest citys' schools are failing.",
"Where I live, school funding is based on property tax receipts, suburbs have high values and high tax collection rates, poor areas are the opposite. The difference between per pupil spending: my district back in the late 90s spent around 8,800 per pupil per year. The city schools were IIRC around 5,300 per pupil per year.\n\nThis system is creating a near permanent underclass based on where you grow up.",
"more people equals more ghetto's, more ghetto's equals shittier school. shittier school (bad grades) equals less chance the government will give money. this is why some teachers let you pass the class with a C no matter if you do the work or not because, it could help the school get a bit more money.",
"Caps on property tax. House prices keep increasing costs of paying teachers and materials increase but the city can collect a small fixed amount on property tax will leave districts with lack of funds every time.",
"inner city schools are run more like day care centers/prisons than actual school plus the teachers and administrators are usually shitty and they go on strike every other year.",
"I'm not sure if this is completely true, I've been to some rural areas and their schools did not look any better.",
"More government involvement - poorer school programs. Simple.\n\nWant to fuck something up? Just give it to the government."
] |
Can someone explain XOR to me? It means exclusive OR normally in coding. | [
"To satisfy AND, you have to have both of the criteria. To satisfy OR you need AT LEAST one of the criteria, but for XOR you need to satisfy EXACTLY one of the criteria and can't have both.\n\nA simple example:\n\nJoe is male and 25, Bob is male and 30, Anne is female and 25.\n\nIf we search for people who are \"male AND 25\" we will only get Joe. If we search for \"male OR 25\" then we will get all three people. If we search \"male XOR 25\" we will get Bob and Anne, but we won't get Joe because he satisfies both of the criteria.",
"Check these tables: True & false are the inputs for Boolean A or B, \"T\" means a true output, \"F\" means a false output.\n\n Boolean-A\n ╔═══════╦══════╦═══════╗ : True AND True - > True\n ║ AND ║ True ║ False ║ : True AND False - > False\n ╠═══════╬══════╬═══════╣ : False AND True - > False\n ║ True ║ T │ F ║ : False AND False - > False\n Boolean-B ╠═══════╬──────┼───────╢\n ║ False ║ F │ F ║\n ╚═══════╩══════╧═══════╝\n\n Boolean-A\n ╔═══════╦══════╦═══════╗ : True OR True - > True\n ║ OR ║ True ║ False ║ : True OR False - > True\n ╠═══════╬══════╬═══════╣ : False OR True - > True\n ║ True ║ T │ T ║ : False OR False - > False\n Boolean-B ╠═══════╬──────┼───────╢\n ║ False ║ T │ F ║\n ╚═══════╩══════╧═══════╝\n\n Boolean-A\n ╔═══════╦══════╦═══════╗ : True XOR True - > False\n ║ XOR ║ True ║ False ║ : True XOR False - > True\n ╠═══════╬══════╬═══════╣ : False XOR True - > True\n ║ True ║ F │ T ║ : False XOR False - > False\n Boolean-B ╠═══════╬──────┼───────╢\n ║ False ║ T │ F ║\n ╚═══════╩══════╧═══════╝\n\n- AND means that both A and B have to be true.\n- OR means that either A or B (or both) can be true.\n- XOR means that A or B must be true, but *not* both.\n\nA good way to think about it is to focus on the word \"exclusive\". There can be *exclusively* one true input for XOR to return true.\n\n...and now I've typed \"true\" enough that it looks really weird to me.",
"XOR is more like the \"or\" in English. _Tea or coffee?_ is an either/or question, the correct response is not _both_!",
"In regular English, when we say \"It's true that A or B\", we sometimes mean \"either A or B is true, or both are.\" Other times we mean \"either A or B is true, but not both.\" Usually, it's pretty clear which one makes sense from the context. But with computers, we need to be more exact. OR has the first meaning - \"at least one\" - and XOR has the second meaning - \"one and only one.\"",
"Input bits are the same = 0.\n\nInput bits are different = 1.",
"\"A XOR B\" basically means \"Only one of A or B\"\n\nFor example:\n\n No OR No = No , No XOR No = No\n No OR Yes = Yes, No XOR Yes = Yes\n Yes OR Yes = Yes, Yes XOR Yes = No\n\nIn binary it's also useful because if you XOR the same number twice you end up with the original number again, this has many uses like graphics and encryption to name just a few.\n\n 00001111111000\n XOR 10010101011110\n = 10011010100110\n\t\n 10011010100110\n XOR 10010101011110\n = 00001111111000",
"The opposite of XOR is called Coincidence.\n\nXOR: They gotta be different\n\nCoincidence: They gotta agree",
"In a sentence:\n\n\"One or the other, but not both\""
] |
How are generations, Baby Boom, Lost, Gen X decided? | [
"It is just pop culture. Gen X came from a Douglas Coupland book that provided a good description of people's attitude at the time. Since then less creative people have tried to use Gen Y, Gen Z, etc. Pepsi tried Generation Next. I have heard the internet generation, saw a camera commercial trying to make it the image generation. So far Millennials seems to be the most popular option. \n\nEdit: spelling of author's name.",
"Some sociologists have made lifetime careers out of trying to define and predict american behavior based on their generational cohort. I'm thinking of [Strauss and Howe](_URL_0_) in particular, but there are others. Their theory is interesting to read, but the legitimacy of the science involved is rather questionable. According to Strauss/Howe, every 20-22 years you get a new generation of Americans, and those generations display repeating patterns of behavior which reflect the events of the times.\n[This paragraph](_URL_0_#Defining_a_generation) in particular summarizes how they define a generation.",
"Baby boomers were born in the few years after ww2. When you look at birth rates and other stats to do with population change you can see curves or sudden spikes, these are then given names.",
"Usually by generational increments of around 20 years. Baby boomers mark the big increase in population after WW2 until around 1964. Gen X comprises the next generation to become adults ending around 1982 and everyone after is considered a Millennial. It is more about sociology, sales and marketing than anything else.",
"They're generally coined sayings, often by someone famous, Gertrude Stein came up with the 'Lost Generation' describing the famous writers who settled in Paris after WW1 such as Fitz Gerald and Hemmingway who were heavy drinkers and falling into existential beliefs being popularised at the time by philosophers such as Satre.",
"The simplest explanation I've had:\n\nA generation is a 20 year period, plus or minus a few years.\n\n1920-1940 - The G.I. Generation or The Greatest Generation \n1940-1960 - Baby Boomers \n1960-1980 - Generation X \n1980-2000 - Millennials \n2000-2020 - Generation Z? No widely used name \n\nWhere do the names come from? Usually some sort of influential book. These names change over time too. Millennials most notable used to be called Generation Y when I was growing up in the 90s.\n\nThe numbers aren't hard lines either and people who were born on the dividing lines often identify with different generations. I am a firm Millennial (born in 1983) and many people younger than me would be Gen-X. It has more to do with what you value at that point.\n\nAbove all, these are just general terms for grouping extremely large swaths of people.",
"More so they are define by a statistical burst of the population or by a major event or something else there is no set guideline for it and it's more a general classification",
"I'll tell you how. By the people who study demographics data making a decision about how to market/appeal to certain age groups. Those people then put out a study or news story which then gets picked up by the media and the name just sticks. Case in point: in the early '90s I was on the phone with one of our analysts in DC and we were discussing ways to chop up some data into pieces that would be easy for our clients to make sense out of. We were trying to come up with a term for upwardly mobile suburban female voters in their 30's with children. Luckily she came up a better sounding name than I could. All I could come up with was \"minivan mom\". Her name of \"soccer mom\" sounds a lot better.\n \nI kid you not. \"Soccer Mom\" was coined in a 10 minute phone call between two relative underlings at a political polling firm.",
"I think also that older generations pick up on these terms to disparage younger generations. They start out as demographic or marketing terms and then take on a negative connotation after awhile. Source: old guy here. Get off my lawn you Millennials."
] |
How does plasma get under a blister? | [
"The fluid under the blister isn't plasma, but a fluid called serum. It leaks in from neighboring tissues as a reaction to injured skin. \n\n\nBlood blisters form when subdermal tissues and blood vessels are damaged without piercing the skin."
] |
What makes gravity 'go'? | [
"We don't know yet.\n\nScience hasn't worked out the mechanism by which an increase in mass affects other objects. Yet. We know lots about how gravity behaves, obviously, but not enough about how it actually works.\n\n---\n\nedit: this thread has turned into a farce, congrats for shit-posting all over the place /u/RobusEtCeleritas",
"Its not fully understood.\n\nWe can describe the action of gravity and write exact equations that govern the behavior - allowing us to predict it with precision. Spacetime curvature is an excellent model, and we have documented pretty well (aside from very-high-energy states).\n\nEach of the four fundamental forces that make up the 'Standard Model' has an 'exchange particle'. We have discovered the particles that govern 3 of the four forces. We haven't yet proven the found the one for Gravity (We call this elusive concept the 'Graviton'.) What is an exchange particle? It is a virtual particle which carries the energy from one particle to another. For example, for EM force to be transmitted, the quantum theory demonstrates that a photon will carry the energy to enact that EM force to another particle, or 'exchanges' the force between the non-virtual particles. We can observe this very directly via electron excitation states.\n\nForce | Exchange Particle(s)\n---|---\nStrong nuclear | Gluon\nWeak nuclear | W^+, W^− and Z\nElectromagnetism | Photon\nGravity | [Graviton?]\n\nThere is (without going into tremendous detail) speculation that the graviton is a massless spin-2 boson. It has to be massless because the gravitational force appears to have no range limits and the uncertainty principle, which governs exchange particles, necessitates zero mass as range and mass are inversely preportional. As because gravitons would have a very low cross-sectional interaction with mass, we will have tremendous difficultly detecting them."
] |
Where did the southern stereotype of a "hick" or "redneck" come from/start | [
"I read somewhere (I believe it was a TIL) that the term 'Redneck' came from striking coal miners in Appalachian Mountains because they wore red bandanas around their necks as a sign of protest."
] |
If the President of the United States wants to barbecue while in office, where does he do it? | [
"Most likely the third floor promenade, outside the Sun Room\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)",
"There are a wide variety of recreational facilities on the White House grounds. And, if they didm;t have a BBQ, he could easily have one set up.",
"He goes to a super sercret basement level underneat the whitehouse, this is also where they keep the still living unicorns and mermaids, the president likes his rare meats rare.\n\nBut without joking, how about the backyard?"
] |
Why does drinking certain liquids change the colour of urine, but others have no affect? | [
"Some chemicals are processed by your body and others pass right through unchanged. If the coloring in the drink does not get processed by your body, it will just be filtered out by your kidneys and will pass in your urine. If it does get processed by your body, regardless of the organ that processes it, then some of it will be used by your body, and what's left will pass in your urine or feces, but since it's been changed chemically it will not be the same color as it was.",
"It depends on the type of coloring they used. Some are processed by the liver, some by the kidneys. The ones that get through the kidneys are what give the color to the urine."
] |
Why do we decorate Christmas trees? | [
"Decorating a pine tree with shiny ornaments isnt a Christian thing. It's a Pagan cultural thing to celebrate the winter solstice by decorating the home with evergreen clippings. When the Christians took over, they told the converting Pagans to keep on the traditions but just now it represents Christ."
] |
Why does viewing porn tend to make people horny, but watching someone eat doesn't make people really hungry? | [
"Clearly you've never watched *Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives* late at night.",
"Speak for yourself. Cooking shows are basically food porn and they make me hungry.",
"Now what happens if you're watching porn with food? I sorely need a pizzagasm in my life.",
"Watching people eat most certainly makes me hungry."
] |
Why do we continue drinking alcohol, when it continually causes problems for everyone? | [
"Prohibition caused even more problems so they had to give the booze back. Meanwhile, special interests have been pressuring the government to control alternative intoxicants to protect their various interests for about a century which has led to so many other prohibitions. A lot of these other substances have smaller fan bases, thus making it difficult to reverse existing bans. Drug prohibition has led to much greater problems than that of alcohol and will likely be reformed soon.",
"Alcohol isn't ignored. In fact we made it illegal for more than a decade. In the thirteen years of prohibition the crime rate rose to a point where law enforcement couldn't get a handle on it. The vast majority of people who drink do so responsibly. Most people have a drink or two and rarely cross the line into drunkenness. Others, the minority, drink specifically to get drunk and it's these you see causing problems.",
"It doesn't continually cause problems for everyone. Most people enjoy it responsibly. Now, you could argue that in a sense there is damage to the public good because it drains resources to deal with the odd bit of death and property damage, but in that same sense alcohol helps in general much more because it is such a huge business and it generates lots of money.",
"It's mankind's greatest discovery.\n\nYou take the good, you take the bad\nYou take em both and there you have\nThe facts of life, the facts of life.",
"Part of the success of the campaigns against cigarette smoke came about from 'secondary smoking' whereby somebody inhaling somebody else's exhaled cigarette smoke could feasibly contract lung cancer without ever putting a cigarette to their lips. This allowed for the stigmatizing of smoking, but the secondary effects of alcohol are less easily defined. \n\nYou can't get a diseased liver from sitting next to somebody who drinks too much. Drink-related domestic violence, street fighting, crime and death or injury from drink drivers are all immediate ways to incur injury from another drinker's behaviour, but none of that involves the scary C word and so it's a lot harder to promote the stigma associated with cigarettes.\n\nAlcohol is what Bill Hicks called 'the taxable drug'. This is really why alcohol remains socially acceptable. It brings in massive revenue for the government and so far hasn't been hit with the same social stigma as cigarettes. Perhaps in a more enlightened period ahead it will suffer the same fate as cigarettes, but I doubt it. Then again, who would have thought 50 years ago that cigarettes would not only be uncool but actually illegal to use in certain public places and frowned upon as a habit?",
"There are a few reasons, but the best ones are:\n\n-It is social ingrained: alcohol has been around for thousands of years, and was often consumed in place of water, where the water was not necessarily safe to drink (alcohol kills all sorts of nasties). It's a VERY long relationship to sever.\n\n-Alcohol can be created by anyone with access to sugar, water, and yeast--even bread yeast. Because it's so simple to make, it's nearly impossible to eradicate. Distilling takes a bit more work, but isn't much more difficult--particularly methods such as ice concentration.\n\nIf you can't get rid of something, the only option you have is to regulate it, and there's only so much public appetite for regulations on behaviour; it's either got to have \"always been this way,\" or it's a long hard slog.",
"Because alcohol as been a staple of existence since we can remember. It makes us feel good, it makes us feel something, and goddamnit, it makes us feel good. Bad aspects aside, when it's used responsibly it does a more wholesome job of altering our present state for people to widely accept its use as a social lubricant and coping mechanism than other recreational drugs in a wide forum due to how it's firmly established in our existence. Personally, I do not wholly agree, but at the same time, there is a reason I enjoy myself a beer when I finish up my day."
] |
When you cut something in half, why can't you simply put it back together? What once held it together that no longer can? | [
"The ELI5 method is that by separating the thing a microscopic barrier forms between the two, allowing them to \"know\" they are separate objects. For example, if you cut a piece of metal, the exposed surfaces oxidize extremely rapidly. This oxide layer prevents the two parts from reintegrating as that layer separates them. \n\nThere is an interesting phenomemon called [Cold Welding](_URL_0_) where two parts can weld together without being heated. This occurs in space with extremely clean parts and is basically exactly as you say. As Feynman put it\n\n > The reason for this unexpected behavior is that when the atoms in contact are all of the same kind, there is no way for the atoms to “know” that they are in different pieces of copper. When there are other atoms, in the oxides and greases and more complicated thin surface layers of contaminants in between, the atoms “know” when they are not on the same part.\n\nAs well, one of the reasons for flux in soldering/brazing/welding operations is to clean off contaminants and oxide layers, allowing the metals to melted together and joined. With no flux you may not be able to penetrate the oxide layer and you will end up with remaining distinct interface and a failed joint. \n\nEdits: \n\n* Brazing may or may not involve flux depending on the materials, the other two (as far as I know) do use flux all the time. Also, often times in welding the flux is for shielding of the weld, but I have encountered scenarios where it is also cleaning the parts to be bonded. \n* It should be emphasized that the conditions to get cold welding are reasonably extreme (vacuum, near perfectly mating parts) and it will realistically only happen in metals. Theoretically if you could separate the bonds of any material without otherwise disturbing the atomic structure, you could rejoin anything. Theoretically this could work with various organic things as well, assuming you could sever the bonds perfectly without damaging anything. However with our current tech, this is impossible. Metals are simple (basically a repeating lattice of atoms) so as you cut it, you don't have to worry about damaging any complex non-repeating structure like what is present in organic things (meat, fruit, wood, etc.). \n* Realistically, even for most simple materials cold welding isn't going to happen. Metals are special as they are more open to joining (proper enthalpy to spontaneously join with itself, credit /u/pyr666). \n* Seizing by Galling (as opposed to seizing due to rust) is a technically separate but similar phenomenon. This occurs over time as two parts rub against each other, they scrape small bits of material up and can end up \"cold welding\" (technically friction welded). The difference is that this requires cyclic stresses, cold welding is near instantaneous and requires only a relatively small external clamping force.",
"For metals, it's a fine layer of oxygen and nitrogen that separate them. If you cut the metals in half in a vacuum however, they will stick right back together.",
"This is a great question. \n\nI'm not a chemist, but as far as I know your intuition is right. It's atoms binding together (and a few other things). But different substances stick together differently.\n\nFirst of all, there are lots of things that do bind back together even after you cut them. Like liquids. You can pass a knife right through water, or join two amounts of water together again. Look at how water beads on a car, and you see that the liquid atoms are indeed weakly sticking together. Glue also \"binds\" things together. Glue molecules are just particularly good at getting close up to a surface and binding all over that surface, just like water. The difference is, glue also has enough internal cohesion to stick something else to the other side.\n\nMetals have something unusual going on. The atoms in a metal object stick together because they are sharing electrons. Think of a square dance where everyone's changing partners - it's hard for them to move away from each other. This is [metallic bonding](_URL_1_). So as /u/dem_brownies mentioned, as soon as a metal atom gets close enough to another one -- bam! Bonded. However, layers of oxide on the outside of a metal object usually prevent this.\n\nNow, moving on to your everyday things that you might cut with a knife, like say a piece of plastic. Plastic molecules are like long threads with weak magnets attached, all tangled up with each other. It should be clear that once you cut or tear them apart, they are not going to rejoin with the same kind of strength. If you apply heat and melt the plastic, those long threads can intermingle again and reform bonds.",
"Also, I'm on mobile or I'd link it, but check out optical contacting. Basically they take two glass surfaces that are \"perfect\" and press them together to form whats actually an incredibly strong bond without glue.",
"At first I laughed and thought 'What a stupid question...'\n\nAnd then half a second later I was like 'woaahhh...why don't they?'",
"objects are objects because they are chemically bonded together or stuck together like velcro. When you cut the object, the force of the cut breaks apart the bonds. To reform the bonds you need energy input, usually in the form of heat.\n\nPlastics are like velcro. cutting it, breaks bonds/ separtes the lego pieces. need heat to reconnect(however all plastics cannot be reformed( see wikipedia pages of thermoplastic vs thermoset polymers) \n\nmetals, oxidize wit oxygen so the material cannot bond, but in a vaccum it would bond because there is no need for an energy input. This is because all surfaces have an energy associated with it. minimizing surface area minimizes energy which things in nature just do.\n\nceramics, need to be reheated to refuse, as the bonds need energy to reform\n\nthis is a basic overview of polymers, metals, ceramic bonding (which differ) and why they can or cannot reform after breaking",
"Another thing to consider is that even a very sharp knife is actually quite rough if you look at it under a powerful microscope. So you don't make perfectly smooth cuts, you damage the thing you are cutting.\n\nAlso, materials like paper or wood are very complicated at a small scale. Even if things could be magically joined back together, once they've been cut they no longer line up when you put them back together. The tiny fibers in paper, or the cells and vessels in wood, are squashed and moved around by cutting.",
"Warning, what follows is ELI15:\n\nAll materials are made up of atoms (obviously) and these atoms form structures (often called lattices or crystal lattices). Now all of these atoms attract and repel each other (at the same time) and have a natural distance at which they like to be from each other. These forces are largely what determine the lattice shape (but that's a different story). So when you cut it in half, all of the sudden a large amount of the forces that keep the atoms in their positions are gone, and so the lattice restructures itself so that all the atoms are at the right distances again. Now, if you try to reintroduce the old atoms (and their forces) they are repelled. \n\nThere are a slew of other microscopic things that happen when you cut something, but this is the jist of it.\n\nDisclaimer: I have only an introductory materials science class under my belt.",
"There's the entropy explanation, which is that smashing something just requires a large force in practically any direction, while putting it back together would require all the pieces to be lined up perfectly and for somehow all of the chemical bonds which were broken to be reformed in precisely the same way.\n\nObviously one of these is far more likely to occur than the other, and that's why things break and fall apart rather than grow and self-repair. This is the concept of entropy: disorder always increases, because there are fewer ordered states than disordered states. There are other more specific explanations, but this covers a lot of similar questions e.g why doesn't mixing carbon and hydrogen make oil?\n\nPS: The reason living things seem to defy entropy is that our local reduction of entropy actually massively increases it elsewhere, by waste heat and the entropy generated by the sun.",
"I don't really get this sub, the point is to explain something like you are five, but that isn't what people actually want. In fact, I recently have a post removed because it wasn't long enough.\n\nactual ELI5 answer is imagine pulling apart something with a zipper. You can visually understand how a zipper is joined and that putting it back together isn't as simple as smashing the two objects into each other. It doesn't cover types of bonds and shit like that, but i am supposed to be explaining this to a five year old.",
"You may not think you're smart but you asked a very interesting question that I would have never thought to ask.",
"As I would say to my five year old, What did you cut in half?",
"Hmm, let me see if I can try to explain this. Most of the other posts that talked about this phenomena have it on a good basic level, but I want to delve farther. Molecules that exist in something like an apple or a piece of steal, bind together because that is what makes the atoms the \"happiest\". So, when you break away the bonds by splitting a molecule apart, the molecule now is in an \"unhappy\" state and wants to be happy again. Since the other piece of the molecule is no longer there to keep it happy, the atom will look for any other atoms that will make it \"happy\" again. Since our atmosphere has a decent amount of Oxygen in it, the Oxygen will bind to the apple or to the metal (this is where we get rust or the nasty brown in the apple when it is sitting out to long). So, what was split will try to find whatever molecule in the air that it can and will bind to it. This is the main effect. There is another effect in some molecules(some things that are cut) that if you break apart its bond, it can re-bond to itself in a new way and will essentially make itself happy again. These things plus dust prevent this from happening. Dust does not actually bond to the atoms, it just sits on the bonds. Think of bonds bound together by velcro, while the dust is just sitting on the part of the velcro that doesn't bind.(One last thing, dust can do this because gravity at this weight scale has a negligable effect, but that is for another time)",
"The most simple answer is intramolecular bonds. \n\nINTERmolecular bonds are the bonds that hold a molecule together, as in, the bonds that put oxygen and two hydrogens together to make water.\n\nINTRAmolecular bonds are bonds that hold millions of water molecules together to make a glass of water (however it is a liquid so obviously they're not held together as strongly as a solid.\n\nSo by cutting something you must be destroying these bonds. It can't just be put back together because they may require special or specific environments (heat/cold/pressure/etc) to form together.",
"This doesnt really answer your question but a fun way to think about elements especially metal (since i am an engineer) is like a big rubber band chain. It can be squished, twisted, stretched and bent (within a certain range) and return back to its original shape. Once you extend past those \"limits\" which is called the metal's elastic range, it becomes permanently deformed. Exactly like when you stretch a rubber band too far.",
"Theoretically, if you cut a metal block in half thru a perfect plane area, and stick it back together in a vacuum (so no gas molecules adhere to the atoms in the steel alloy) you CAN DO THAT. The covalent bonds between the atoms will line up and re-adhere together. See Johanssen blocks.\n\n_URL_2_",
"It reminds me of a parable my tai chi instructor told me:\n\nLong ago in ancient China, a rich nobleman's son wanted to learn Shaolin kung fu. With great pomp and ceremony, he left his home and went to the temple. He met with the head monk, who agreed to let him study kung fu at the temple. The rich man shaved his head and donned the robes and was led to a room containing a well and a barrel of water. The monk told him to slap the surface of the water with his palm until no water remained in the barrel. The rich man didn't understand, but did as he was told. He slapped the water with his palm and a little water splashed onto the floor. He repeated the slapping for what seemed like hours until no water remained. He found the monk and told him he had finished. The monk instructed him to fill the barrel again and repeat the task. This scene repeated for days. Eventually, the rich son stopped going to the monk and just refilled the barrel without being told. He grew angry. He suspected he was the butt of a cruel joke, and that the monks would never teach him kung fu but he knew that if he returned to his family having only slapped water he would be a laughingstock. Eventually, the seasons changed and the rich son returned home for the holiday feast. His family was so proud of him for studying kung fu, even though he was secretly ashamed that he had not received even one day's instruction. \"What kung fu did you learn? What did they teach you?\" his family asked, eagerly. \"They didn't teach me anything,\" he mumbled. \"Oh, you are so modest, tell us what they taught you!\" they urged. The man grew enraged. \"They didn't teach me anything!\" he shouted, as he slammed his palm on the table, breaking it in half.",
"If a solid object is holding together and not disintegrating, it's because there is some kind of chemical bond holding it together. For ice it's the electric force between opposite the charged oxygen and hydrogen in the water molecules (which happens because the oxygen pulls the electrons so they don't spend as much time with the hydrogen). When you cut an ice cube in half, you're spending energy to break those bonds. Now, I'm not a physical chemist (just a math guy) so I can't very well describe how this works but after you cut the ice cube you have some positive stuff on one side and some negative stuff on the other side that had just been bonded and \"want\" to be bonded again. The \"want\" is really that it needs to return to a low energy state just like a ball in the air \"wants\" to fall down \n\nHere's the part I'm not clear on. I don't know if that \"want\" is resolved by more bonding within a sliced ice cube or with stuff from the outside air, or if being unbonded causes the electrons all over the cube to shift. Whatever that step is, when it's done the molecules along the cut no longer need to bond to anything else (they are in a minimum energy state like a ball at the bottom of an incline) , so they don't react when you bring the pieces back together. \n\nI'd really love for a chemist to help me out with the missing step. \n\nEdit: I just want to add that you asked an amazing question. When you stop taking the natural world for granted is when you find the best scientific questions. This is definitely a question a smart man asks.",
"Basically, it depends on materials. Say, ice cream or clay can be cut half and put back together pretty easily. But wood or metal aren't, which requires say wood glue or welding to put them back together.\n\nIn most case cutting does physical separation of alignments of atoms in materials. Like say when we shuffle cards, if you lay one card on top of each other but only covers 50% of surface, after you did the whole deck you can feel that it's hard to push them back together so they are on top of each other 100% of surface. (google \"card shuffle\"), but if you bend and break the contact between card surface, they spring into position one by one.\n\nMost materials are like cards in mid shuffle state, so they tightly overlay each other in atom level, but once you cut them, they lose the alignment like the half shuffled cards. Essentially you pull the half shuffled cards apart and trying to put them back together without doing the first shuffling move, it's going to be very hard to align all the atoms properly, plus some atoms gets displaced/scrapped during cutting, you will never really recreate the original alignment by simply put them back at the same position with naked eyes.",
"So, I think the big thing that most of these answers seem to be missing is, the answer is a bit different for different materials. \n\nMany solid materials, especially pure elemental metals, will actually fuse if their perfectly clean, smooth surfaces are put together. In practice, their surfaces are generally rough enough that any atomic-level contact between them is very minor, so any molecular bonding that does happen is minor enough that you don't notice. Oxidation and surface contaminants (dust and oils and such) are also a large factor.\n\nOther types of materials, are more complicated and I don't know as much about how they form the bonds that hold them together.\n\nPaper, say, is actually a bunch of wood fibers complexly interlocked. Paper fibers themselves are very chemically complex and cannot simply fuse to other paper molecules. The kind of fiber interlocking that makes paper stick to itself can't really happen in a dry environment. The fibers are rigid and won't tangle with new fibers unless something makes them more pliable, like water.",
"A piece of paper is just like an extremely tangled ball of thousands of threads, that has been squished flat. Cutting it is like cutting all those threads. Putting two pieces of threads next to each other wont fuse them into one, unless you rectangle them, like recycled paper.",
"Most things (plastics, metals, even wood) are formed via chemical processes into their finished form. Cutting them is a physical process, and would require the same conditions as those present originally to re-form (heat, time, chemical processes, what have you).",
"You can if its a magnet or a fliud. It's all about forces."
] |
What happens to that eyelash that you couldn't get out of your eye? | [
"Your eye is very good at removing foreign objects over time. Every time you blink you push fluid across your eye from both sides. Any bits of dust or solid objects get caught in the motion and eventually work their way to the point where your lids meet. At this point it either falls out or gets stuck to the end of one of the lids and gets wiped off. It might take some time for this process to happen, but it works pretty well.\n\nMy wife always tries to pluck things out of her eye that is bothering her; doing the 'hold your eye open with on hand and try to get the object off by actually touching your eyeball'. That looks just as painful as having something in your eye, and her eye is always irritated and watery afterwards. I just stare at the ground and blink a bunch until it's gone, usually takes a couple seconds and no eyeball touching."
] |
Why do downloads often stop at 99% before finishing? | [
"Three possible reasons:\n\n**1. File integrity verification:** Your computer performs an operation on the data you downloaded and compares the result to a checksum. If answer and checksum do not match, the data is corrupt. This is how your computer tells if your file's data is a completely correct copy. \n\n**2. Uncompressing:** Some optimised downloaders or protocols (usually modern ones) have built-in compression. Compression reduces file size and helps with download duration. However, to extract the raw file from a compressed one, it needs to be decompressed first. The 1% is decompressing: you may notice the 1% takes longer for bigger files. \n\n**3. Virus scan:** Modern browsers also have in-built virus scanning. The process is similar to file integrity verification, but your computer actively looks and matches for malicious code checksums.",
"Imagine that your favorite cousin sent message to you\n\nHere's the catch: the entire message doesn't come entirely at once. They come in a string of letters, and there are a lot of them, and there are 2-3 days between each letter arriving\n\nSo when you finally have the final letter, you start assembling the entire letters, THEN you can read the message again in its entirety, to make sure you don't misremember\n\nGetting the letters is what the 99% shows, assembling and reading them is what 1% does",
"The other answers here have been good for certain circumstances, but the integrity checksum and uncompressing are usually stream operations, so they can happen as the file is downloading.\n\nVirus checking and moving the temporary file to it's finished location are block operations, so they would take time at the end of the download. But those only happen in specific circumstances - many people don't have virus protection and the temporary file doesn't need to be moved across physical drives / partitions, and yet there is still a delay at 99%.\n\nBut there is an answer:\n\n**File cache flush.** When the file handle is closed by the browser, it asks the OS to ensure that the file is physically on the drive. This causes the pipeline from the fast memory-based file cache to complete it's emptying out to the slower hard drive. This mostly happens continuously, but because the hard drive is slower, it takes some time to catch up.\n\nYou can also see an opposite effect: for medium-sized files, the first few percent is much faster as the memory cache fills up, then it slows down when the memory cache gets full or is flushed and has to wait for the hardware.\n\nThe size of the cache varies depending on your memory usage, hard drive speed and type, operating system and lots of other factors. The hard drive flush speed also varies depending on what other programs are using the drive, so it's hard or impossible to roll this in to the download time estimate."
] |
I am a college student, unemployed, uninsured and living at home. How will Obamacare affect me? | [
"It will. Everyone will need an insurance. Don't worry, we alrzady have this in Europe. It works like a charm."
] |
A modern GPU has Billions of Transistors, how do they not break at the slightest shake? | [
"For the same reason you can shake a book, or drop it off a 10 story building, and none of the words come loose from the page. The transistors in a CPU (or any solid state device) are printed directly on the substrate.",
"They're solid state - that means literally they are solids. There aren't lots of tiny separate bits, it's all produced on a single crystal of silicon.\n\nThe individual features are tiny, which also means they're very light weight so there's almost no mass to cause problems when you thump it.\n\nThis robustness is *one* of the original drives behind solid state electronics - being able to make something which would survive being fired out of a gun (radar fuses) or into missiles.",
"I think you may have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a transistor is. \n\nTransistors have no moving parts, are really really tiny and made of very tough material. In many cases, they are smaller than the cells in your body (which don't have a habit of just breaking, fortunately) \n\nAll a transistor does is either let current through, or resist it (represented by the binary units 1 and 0) Since all math can be done in binary (base 2) transistors can do any calculation that exists (given enough time) [also not totally true, you can only do calculations who's units don't exceed the number of transistors, but even 16 transistors can have 65,536 unique values, so it's sorta a moot point when dealing with millions]\n\nHow do they do it? You start with a wafer made of mostly silicone and you lase etch paths into it then wash it in a solution that bonds with the silicone to chemically \"print\" the transistors. They don't break because like anything it doesn't just break (it's like asking why the minerals in rock don't break when the rock moves. It doesn't really make sense for them to break, yknow?)",
"I like to tell people that when I entered the industry, the discussion in popular culture was that the features on a microchip were \"as small as a human hair\" Now we can effectively take that same human hair, slice it, and print many thousands of transistors on the end of it. \n\n(No you cannot print transistors on human hair, it's not silicon. Just using the analogy to compare sizes.)",
"[Here](_URL_0_) is a video by the guys who make most of AMD's chips about how processors are made.",
"Integrated circuitry is printed directly onto the substrate material. In the case of processors it's a single, flawless piece of silicon. You should do some research into how the chips are made, because that will show you quite clearly how the individual transistors are almost impossible to brake without scratching or wiping the surface of the die. You could throw a processor across the room or drop it on the floor and aside from breaking the pins loose you most likely won't damage the die at all.\n\n\nThe designs of integrated circuits are basically drawn up on a computer (originally obviously they were designed by hand plotting) through some sort of CAD program, and everything is carefully done in very thin layers. These layers are then projected through lenses onto the surface of the silicon which is coated with some type of photo-resist so that the image becomes the correct tiny size, and exposes some areas of the photo-resist to be rinsed off. Now you're left with a pattern off the first layer of the metals you need to start building connections and areas of the actual transistors on the surface. This process is repeated, so you end up coating the current layer of metal with an insulator, exposing it to the pattern of the next layer, coating it with metal, etc etc etc. It's a very involved process but it's a trillion dollar industry with millions of people perfecting the process so it's reasonable to see how in 40 years we've gotten to this point.\n\n\nYoutube has some great videos showing how IC's are developed, and it's a little more involved than I described but that's the basic idea. So you see there are no moving parts or exposed flimsy wires or pieces, everything is just layers a few atoms thick, insulated from one another, and printed on the surface of this piece of silicon. The entire depth of all the layers on top of each other is something like a a nanometer or even less. So it's almost like just a single plane.",
"Because the inter molecular forces holding things together is a *lot* stronger than you think it is, even when we're talking nano-scale.",
"> How does something that consists only of a couple of hundreds of molecules, something that's only 16 nm large, not get completely destroyed at the slightest movement?\n\nYou could say the same thing about your DNA. Individual base pairs are around that size, and they don't break when you jump around. The DNA is protected by the cytoplasm in the cell, and the transistors on a chip are protected by the dielectric material they're embedded in. It's basically one solid block.\n\n > how do they pull it off 7,2 Billion times on a single chip? \n\nYou cast the shadow of 7.2 billion transistors on the chip as part of the manufacturing process. It's all done at once.\n\n > How many of those are usually broken?\n\nWith GPUs, some of the processing units are broken at the factory. I'm not sure about the GTX 1070, but older GPUs used to have more processing units than they needed. The bad ones were disabled using lasers as part of the manufacturing process.",
"Simple version, the GPU isn't a bunch of individual transistors stuck together. It's a slab of silicon, the material that transistors are made out of, that's carved into shape using lasers and acid and whatnot. So it's all 1 piece, and therefore it doesn't matter if you wobble it around a bit",
"I worked in the diffusion section of Micron for almost a year. Diffusion is where the solid state circuits get made. The process itself is not unlike painting a car. Some stuff (car paint or toxic gas like Dichlorosilane) gets sprayed onto a surface (car door or silicon wafer) and then cooked at high temperatures. \nYou know how cake mix is gooey before it's cooked? What you're asking is the equivalent of \"Why can't I pour my finished cake out of the pan?\" Well, because it's been cooked and has changed. One process is called \"atomic layer deposition\". Go look it up. \nProcess Engineers example the final product, wafer by wafer, and send the higher quality products to be CPUs/GPUs/RAM while the poor quality product is sent off to become 16GB flash memory sticks.",
"No one is actually explaining *why* they don't fall off, they're just saying \"they're printed on, so obviously they don't fall off\".\n\nThe reason is that very tiny things (usually) have a very small amount of mass. When something is accelerated, this acceleration is generated by a force that is proportional to the mass of the object (f = ma). If m is very small, f is very small. If the forces keeping the object in place are larger than this, the object won't move.\n\nDue to the extremely small size of transistors and how they're constructed (here the printing analogy is useful), the force keeping them in place is much, much larger than the force resulting from commonly experienced acceleration (dropping a chip and having it hit the floor, for example).",
"They are \"solid state\" - one whole piece. So they are as solid as any other solid thing. They aren't particularly fragile like vacuum tubes used to be.\n\nThey've been assembled with enormous complexity but a trick using camera-like lens projection technology to assemble whole layers all at once across a wafer that will contain hundreds to thousands of chips. This technology was invented in 1959 and has been used ever since. Many layers and steps are added until you get a full, functioning chip.\n\nOf course, when building all the transistors, some are broken at the start. And some are weak and will cause premature failures. These are tested for, identified and those chips that have failures are discarded and never make it into products.\n\nI've been involved in the design, manufacturing and testing of chips (or integrated circuits as we call them) for 35 years.",
"Because it's a rigid body, not a bag of components that can collide with one another when shaken.",
"> how do they pull it off 7,2 Billion times on a single chip? How many of those are usually broken? \n\nLithographic techniques are used [to just 'print' all of those transistors onto the silicon using a mold via a layered process.](_URL_1_) The circuitry features multiple layers these days to maximize density. \n\nThis is where Yield comes in. They manufacture many chips on one giant silicon wafer, which is then cut up into chips. In the case of the 1080 chips, those that are partially defective become 1070's. But overall the yields are very poor, because the die size is so big and the manufacturing process is so small (14nm) and as yet unperfected. On a single wafer they get maybe 3-5% yield for these flagship gpu's, maybe 2% can be fully utilized for 1080 and 3% are partially fucked and get turned into 1070's with some of the chip area disabled. \n\nMeaning ~95% are too messed up to ever function as flagship chips and get thrown in the trash.\n\nSo to produce 500 of these chips, at least 9,500 have to go in the trash. Which is why they are hundreds of dollars each.\n\nLater on when chip foundries are fully retooled and pumping these out in greater quantities, they will utilize more and more defective dies, to make a 1060, 1050, 1040, 1030 etc by simply removing the defective areas or printing the reduced die areas onto their own wafers to increase overall yield. Even if the die is 80% fucked, you can still get a hypothetical 1030 out of it. GPU's feature simpler, highly parallel architectures, with plenty of room for redundancy, so unlike CPU's, it is much easier to cut up shitty dies and recycle them, re-branding into cheaper gpu's. You can't really do that with a CPU, outside of snipping away cores. But most flagship cpus don't have more than 8 or 6 very complex cores. Most of the die area of a GPU is essentially comprised of hundreds or thousands of 'shader' cores arranged in segments that can carry out some simple math operations. Thus more flexible when cutting up. \n\nWhich is why there are so many more GPU's than CPU's. GPU flagship can be parceled up more easily into less capable variants. CPU, not so much. Maybe you slice it and dice it down to 2 cores, and/or remove some of the embedded on-board working memory. So your Haswell i7 becomes an i3, etc.",
"Why don't we use GPU's as CPU's or vice versa?",
"> how do they pull it off 7,2 Billion times on a single chip? How many of those are usually broken?\n\nMany have answered part (a). (Answer: fancy photography where they make them all at once.)\n\nSince nobody else has, I'll give a quick answer to (b).\n\nAnswer: very few are broken. In general, if one is broken, they have to throw the whole thing out.\n\n**However**, there are a few exceptions to that rule. For example, if it's a 4-core and something is broken in one of the cores, they can disable that one and sell it as, say, a 2-core instead.\n\nAnd more commonly, all the RAM on the chip will usually have spare rows and columns. When they test the chip before shipping, if a few RAM bits are bad, they can \"flip some switches\" or \"blow some fuses\" that will swap in a good (spare) row permanently in place of the bad one. Note: you can't do this at home. It's a one-time deal at the factory to fix a manufacturing defect. It's supposed to be \"good forever\" once it goes out the door. (Actually, wires and transistors will break eventually, but it's supposed to be after hundreds of years of use.)",
"The transistors in microchips are made of different solid materials meshed against each other without empty spaces. There is no empty space (of air or any gas) into which the wires can bend or vibrate -- they are solidly packed together. (Hence the term \"Solid-state electronics\").\n\nThink of when you buy some fragile object and you find it packed in a styrofoam shape matched to the shape of the object. Obviously, the styrofoam helps prevent the object from moving while it is being shipped. Now imagine the styrofoam was actually melted to mate exactly onto the object -- then it couldn't move at all or even vibrate unless the whole thing was vibrating all at once. The materials, in the case of silicon chips, are conductors, insulators, or semiconductors (not styrofoam).\n\nSilicon wafers are also extremely thin (so they don't maintain a vibration even if some differential movement were applied to it) and are packaged in a plastic housing that helps absorb shock.\n\nIn short, I have never heard of a chip damaged due to physical breakage of an internal component as a result of physical forces applied to it. (Short of puncturing, or intentionally bending it.)",
"I know transistors being non-functional is a thing with processors. That's how they get the whole product range. The low end versions of a processor are the same chip as the high end ones, but with the parts that don't work disabled. So like an i5 is an i7 where the hyperthreading doesn't work, an i3 is an i7 with some cores that don't work, ect. That's part of the reason that the the top end chip is always waaay more expensive than the midrange ones: most of the chips they make don't function completely, so only a few percent of them can be the best model.",
"They are very very small and etched (scratched with chemicals and a lazer) into the very sturdy silicon wafer that is the processor. So its like they are part of the body of the object. The silicon is also surrounded by a protective housing, so like the atoms in a piece of glass don't move relative to one another when you shake the glass, the transistors don't break when you shake the whole graphics card. \n\nTechnically, each transistor is so light and so well attached compared to it's size and the size of the materials it is made of that you'd have to vibrate it SUPER SUPER SUPER ULTRA fast to be able to shake it loose from it's mounting. But relative to us that isn't really a good description. \n\nBasically what they do to make them, is the take a piece of material, coat it in a chemical that causes it to reacts with the base material and then shine a VERY accurate light pattern onto it so that a pattern is burnt into the material, and because the whole thing is pretty much microscopic shaking the whole chip around doesn't change the forces on each little transistor much compared to the others. \n\nThis isn't really ELI 5 material, but hey man, I can't make up for idiots anymore. I did for 2 years, but my head STILL hurts from getting those morons out of their collective retardation, and they didn't do anything to help me pay for any of it.",
"Physics student here (just completed finals a few weeks ago).\n\nA transistor has 3 components and its job is to amplify the \"base\" current to a larger value (in cpus, arbitrary values are generally 5/3volts, 10/3volts or 15/3volts). However, generally speaking, no two transistors are identical and when designing high precision circuits, you need to account for this. A parameter know as \"hfe\" determines how much the current is amplified. If a few bonds in the transistor are broken, the resistance will increase and the hfe will decrease - however when the transistor in made out of hundreds or thousands of bonds in parallel, this difference wont really make any difference (think, 100 to 99.9) and subsequent amplifications will insure the current goes back to assigned values. \n\nNow think how strong that 20 cent coin is - you can try pretty hard but you wont be able to bend it with your hands - that's because the bonds holding it together are pretty strong. Try as hard as you can, its unlikely you are managing to break those bonds. This will be the same for the processor - its made from a *single crystal of pure SiO2* (I kid you not, this is f***ing impressive s**t), if you can crush a quartz crystal with you hands, then you are probably strong enough to break a processor. Either way, both a quartz crystal and a silicon processor are very stable and are not about to break from a little shaking about.",
"Wow, this is amazing, so many quality responses. Wish I could reply to all of you!",
"they are etched into a tiny piece of silicon wafer, hence they can't broken off. BUT they can be melted away in a second, hence why such processors need great cooling to run well and not melt down. Especially if overclocked. Long story short, they have no moving parts, same as the difference between a regular HD and an SSD. We are talking about 7.2 billion transistors put in a thumb tip size piece of silicon. The transistors are not placed on the wafer, they are in essence a large picture shrunk down many thousands of times and etched into the silicon. Silicon has semi conductive properties, so it pretty much can be given the power to say yes and no a million of times a second. Hence machine language, binary, on and off, 1 and 0.\nAnddddddddd that's how all your computer work :)",
"The transistors are comprised of silicon silicon bonds or silicon phosphorous bonds and so forth. These tight chemical bonds require a lot of energy to break. They are made of perfect crystal structures. Fragile things have crystal structure imperfections that are microscopic but propogate with even small amounts of energy. A chemical bond is usually hundreds of times harder to break than the bonds around an imperfection on say a ceramic tea glass",
"Its not a light switch, but more like a brick. There are layers inside the brick that allow the switching to occur when powered. Rather than a physical piece of metal moving like a light switch, it's atoms moving when power is applied. And those are small. \n\nIt could shatter if you hit it with a hammer though, don't do that.",
"It's a great question. Read about the Square Cube Law. It basically says that things are stronger relative to their size, the smaller they are. It's why an ant has skinny legs relative to its body and an elephant has thick legs relative to its body. \n\n_URL_2_",
"_URL_3_\n\nWatch this, it explains how transistors are constructed these days. A little outdated, but the information is otherwise accurate.",
"Your body is made of way more cells than that, and they don't all break at the slightest shake."
] |
How YouTube Partnership works | [
"It still works the same way (you upload a video, turn on ads, receive money), but it's open to pretty much anybody now."
] |
Why does fire always point up? | [
"Hot air rises because it is less dense than cold air (Like how a helium balloon rises). The air in a flame is hotter than the surrounding air, so tries to rise. The flame rises with it until it cools enough to no longer glow. Then, it is just hot air rising some more!"
] |
Why doesn't solid material, when it breaks simply connect back together? What kept it together that is gone now? | [
"As soon as you break molecules apart they immediately want to stick to something, and they'll take anything that fits. For example diamonds are actually covered with a layer of hydrogen atoms, as soon as you break diamond apart the parts will immediately cover themselves with hydrogen from the air (when you touch diamond you're actually touching hydrogen not carbon). With metals it's generally oxygen that sticks to the surface (called oxides).\n\nThis means that if you break something apart and try to fit it back together the molecules have already stuck to other things so don't want to stick back together, like how when scotch tape gets covered in fluff it doesn't stick any more.\n\nAs other posters have mentioned if you break things apart in a perfect vacuum because there are no other molecules around you can actually push the parts back together and they'll stick.",
"I believe nobody has stated this: When you break some something, you are breaking bonds between atoms--something on the order of a sextillion bonds. In order to put them back together, you would need to line up every bond exactly as it was before, which is basically impossible.",
"I am going to leave this here: _URL_0_\n\nThis question was asked sometime ago, but I can't find it, and I don't remember the explanation; I only remember about this.\n\nI'm now going to let someone more knowledgeable than me explain it to you."
] |
Microsoft OneNote | [
"OneNote is my best friend working in IT. \n\nBasically think of it like a binder. You open it up, and you have tabs that you can organize stuff by. Each tab you can put different info/documents/attachments. For instance, as a network/systems engineer I manage hundreds of devices each with multiple IP addresses, phone numbers, contacts, support info, serial numbers. It's impossible to keep all of it straight and updated by traditional paper methods. I even keep customer info, passwords, VPN info, etc within a password protected section that uses 3DES with a 192-bit key length.\nLike I said, just think of it as a binder like this: _URL_0_\n\nThe best part is that you can share your notebook between multiple users and when they update it, it updates on all of your notebooks giving everyone a perfectly updated copy every time. This is especially useful when I'm away from the office working on a remote site and I wouldn't have all that information easily accessible. \n\nTL;DR: OneNote is an IT guy's best friend.",
"It shows up as a printer because you can print into it. When you print, it shows up just as a real piece of paper would, just in OneNote's form instead, similar to printing to a pdf. This can be useful if your professor or clients or whoever depending on where you are in life give you documents that you would like to annotate. Yes you can annotate and highlight in Word and Excel and such but with OneNote you can write in margins and on pictures and such, which is achievable in Word, but more formatting hell than anything"
] |
How can the entire world be in debt? | [
"Most *governments* are in debt to their *people*. For example, the United States is primarily in debt to American bondholders, from individuals to for-profit corporations and retirement funds. Only a portion of government debt in each country is held by other countries.",
"Talk personal debt then can scale up. Joe is a saver. Deposits $300,000 cash over his life. Doesn't withdrawal. I want a $300,000 house. I agree to a 20 year mortgage at let's say a percentage that makes me pay $50,000 in interest. I give the bank $25,000 down, use Joes to cover the rest, and on paper there is $650,000 in the economy from Joes $300,000. The bank keeps my $25,000 down as a reserve they can give to Joe should he decide to withdraw some meaning he theoretically has all the money he could need. \n\nNow technically the bank has debt to Joe and I have debt to the bank. $325,000 for me (minus down payment) and $300,200 for Joe (interest). But the pros of me owning a house and Joe having his money backed by the feds outweigh the risk. \n\nScaled up, the government borrows 10 billion from itself in social security to build roads. Those roads increase tax revenue and they hopefully pay it back before its due",
"Some dude prints a few pieces of paper, calls it money, the world agrees its money, that dude lends it to the world with the promise the world will give it back some day.\n\nBut the dude needs to buy a plane (he loves planes), so he says, while the world has his pieces of paper he wants a piece back every now and then to buy his plane, but he tells them that they still have to give him all the pieces back later.\n\nThey agree to this, but they can't give him pieces back and still give him all the pieces back at the end, cause, well, he only gave them so many to begin with, how can they give him back more than he gave them.\n\nThe only option is to ask him for more pieces of paper, so they can keep giving them to him, but still, no matter what, they know one day they have to give him the amount of paper they borrowed, which is impossible since they keep borrowing more to keep up the repayments.\n\nThus the world is not only in debt, it's in debt forever, and everyone is just fine with it.",
"I like the following explanation:\nA has 1 money. A loans 1 money to B. B loans this 1 money to C and C loans the 1 money back to A. In this group of 3 there is 1 money and 3 debt.\n\nAnother thing to keep in mind is that money is the sort of universal representation of work. 1 work equals 1 money. So a loan could also be described as work that still has to be done.",
"At the fundamental level, because all money is debt. Every single dollar, pound and euro is a liability to some-one and an asset to some-one else.\n\nFor you, the cash in your bank account is an asset and your mortgage is a liabilty.\n\nFor your bank, the cash in your account is a liability and your mortgage is an asset."
] |
How are sinkholes repaired? | [
"First they try to block off the route by which material was being eroded away (such as a hole at the bottom), and if possible, block the entry of water flow into the area. Then they literally just fill the hole with stuff, and cover it up.\n\n[Details here.](_URL_0_)"
] |
What exactly happens to an cut apple when we leave it on open? | [
"Oxygen gas starts to attack the exposed surface, cutting up proteins and fibers. This turns the exposed surface brown and soft over time.\n\nAlthough we need oxygen to live, it is a fairly corrosive chemical that will chemically attack (oxidize) a wide array of vulnerable materials."
] |
How do car keys wirelessly lock/unlock only your car? | [
"They transmit a digital code which only your car responds to.\n\nThey're actually rather more clever than that, because you could record this code and play it back to open a car that isn't yours - codegrabbing - so they change the code each time but in a sequence which the keyfob and the car know but which isn't obvious to others.\n\nThe sensitivity is because the transmitter is shouting quite loud but only on a very narrow frequency. It doesn't do it very often or for very long, so the battery lasts a long time."
] |
What exactly is a neutrino? | [
"It's a kind of fundamental particle. Neutrinos are very small, even compared to most other fundamental particles. They have no electrical charge, so they don't *do* much—they kind of just speed through the universe (and your body). Every so often one of them will manage to get close enough to the nucleus of an atom that they can interact a bit, and that gives off some light we can detect.",
"Neutrinos (and anti-neutrinos) are nature's pennies.\n\nWhenever you have a subatomic reaction, energy has to be conserved. For some reactions, like a neutron decaying into a proton, energies don't quite add up, so neutrinos are emitted to make up the difference."
] |
Why is it funny when people fall over? | [
"There is no universally accepted explanation of the role of humour and how it works. One possibility, however, is that humour is one of the possible reactions to mental stress caused by contradictions.\n\nWhen something is troubling, confusing, or strange, it causes some tension. This may lead to fear, anger or other emotions, but when it turns out that there is no danger and nothing to worry about, we laugh as a way of expressing relief.\n\nHumour makes use of that by creating a situation where there is some contradiction, tension or weirdness (a setup) and then resolving it in a way that one does not see coming (a punchline, a payoff). This is why humour is usually based on either something absurd, or on someone's misery that we can distance ourselves from. Both create a situation where there is something that might worry us, but we are shown that there is no reason to *personally* worry.\n\nPeople falling over can be either. It is a situation where someone is hurt, but if the situation is otherwise harmless (the fall is exaggerated or non-threatening), it is funny. Our brain knows there is no danger, so it reacts by causing us to laugh - to show that we are relaxed to other people, that there is no reason to be afraid or concerned for the person who fell. Notice that we don't usually laugh when someone falls over and dies or gets badly hurt (unless the person is presented in a way that makes us not care about them at all, for example being a villain or otherwise someone we perceive as inferior).\n\nThe other reason, contradiction and absurd, is usually by contrasting the fall with something that doesn't \"fit\" - for example, a very serious and important-acting person falls down, so our mental idea of the person being serious and dignified is contrasted with us seeing them in a very undignified situation. Or in another situation - a person may fall unexpectedly, so the fall in circumstances we didn't expect causes a situation that also feels contradictory. Or in yet another scenario, the fall looks so silly and out-of-place that it creates a similar feeling of being absurd."
] |
How did cavemen eat fresh meat and fruit, had things such as fire available, knew how to fight, and had even some plant remedies, yet their lifespan was only of about 35 years? | [
"That's the average lifespan, not the actual lifespan of any given person. Back then there was a very high amount of infant mortality - the very young died a lot. This brings down the average considerably.\n\nBut for anyone back then who lived past say, 10 years old, there's a really good chance they'd make it to 50, 60 or even 70.",
"> yet their lifespan was only of about 35 years?\n\nThis is why statistics can be deceiving. If there are 100 people, 55 of them die under the age of 5, and the other 45 live to the age of 70, then the average lifespan is about 35, even though everyone who survived young childhood lived a long life.",
"Infant mortality is the largest factor in reduced average lifespans. Modern medicine has had an astronomical effect on reducing infant mortality to near zero in developed countries. In addition to all the natural threats they face that they had no easy defense for such as wild animals and various diseases.",
"When you say they ate \"fresh meat and fruit\" and had \"plant remedies\", you imagine they had it like us, just mosey down to the nearest orchard / farm / food storage pile, and eat as much as they wanted to, even in winter?\n\nThey had fire, but it's unknown what methods they had for preserving food, if any. Source-of-meat animals may migrate, fruits and vegetables only happen for a few months, maybe, in late summer / fall, and plant remedies ... ever try to find wild mint in a wilderness area?\n\nWinter is very hard without refrigeration, canning, pickling, etc.",
"In colder climates they may have stored food in holes in the ground before it froze, then retrieved it when the ground thawed. Or in cold caves. Unless the food was beyond rotten and putrid, early humans probably weren't as squeamish as we are. The choice is being squeamish or being dead from starvation. There was a docu-drama on tv a long time ago about a tribe of humans doing this."
] |
What is wireless spectrum and why can't we make more of it? | [
"When we talk about light, we usually think of the thing that comes from the sun and light bulbs and colors.\n\nWe can think of this light as a wave. Each color is a different wavelength of this wave. Blue is a certain wavelength. Green is a different one. With red being the largest (lowest energy) and violet being the smallest (highest energy). \n\nBut in actuality, things like radio, microwaves, x-rays, and wireless ALL use this same exact type of wave. Just at different frequencies. \n\nSo there are only a select range of these frequencies that we can use for electronics. Certain frequencies are too common, so there would be a lot of interference. Some frequencies are dangerous (x-ray and gamma), some frequencies would require too much power (example, a lightbulbs requires power).\n\nOf the spectrum that we can use for electronics, a certain wavelength has been dedicated to wireless technologies. The FCC decides this. We can't just \"make more of it\" because there are only a certain number of frequencies. Sure we can dedicate 2110Mhz to something and then 2110.1 to something else, and then 2110.01 to something else, etc to 2110.00000000001, but this would cause interference. This is why radio stations are only odd numbers (no even radio stations) because if we had both, there might be some overlap.",
"\"Wireless spectrum\" refers to the parts of the [electromagnetic spectrum](_URL_3_) that can be used to transmit data wirelessly. The whole spectrum can't be used because some bands can't travel through obstacles (like visible), some bands will kill you (x xray, gamma). In fact there's only a few gaps which are suitable for wireless transmission at meaningful distances without requiring a lot of power. We can't make more of it because it already infinite and continuous. \n\nSo why are we fighting over it? How much data you can push through any digital transmission is limited by how wide a band of frequencies (bandwidth) you're using. The theoretical upper limit of this is called the [channel capacity](_URL_0_). This means that even though that's an infinite number of frequencies between 0 and 1 Hz, there is a finite and limited amount of data you can communicate with that bandwidth.\n\nEven though we can't make more spectrum, we can definitely improve how we use it with various [modulation](_URL_1_) techniques and [encodings](_URL_4_). \n\nTo give you two recent developments, a wifi modem was built that is capable of transmitting and receiving at the same time on the same frequency by placing antennas such that the transmitted signal destructively interferes where the receiver antenna is. This effectively doubles the channel capacity without increasing the spectrum used.\n\nThe other is the idea of modulating the signal [polarization](_URL_2_) to increase the data that can be sent in the same bandwidth by anywhere between 2 and 64x. I'm not going to cite sources for either of these because its been a while since I read them and I'm lazy."
] |
Why can't people just run away from a wildfire? | [
"\"Wildfires have a rapid forward rate of spread (FROS) when burning through dense, uninterrupted fuels. They can move as fast as 10.8 kilometres per hour (6.7 mph) in forests and 22 kilometres per hour (14 mph) in grasslands.\"\n\nThats too fast to maintain for any reasonable amount of time. The fire can simply catch up with you. Also it changes directions very quicly and could end up encircling you. Running the other direction might simply happen too late.\n\nYour basically underestimating how confusing a wildfire can be and how fast it moves. They are massive fires covering large areas of land, its not as easy as outrunning an oversized campfire."
] |
Why does my breath smell so bad in the mornings? | [
"You're dehydrated, and mouth bacteria thrive in dryness. When you go to sleep, your salivary glands stop moistening your mouth, and these drier conditions allow bacteria to multiply, and in turn, start crapping everywhere.\n\nThis is also why Mouthwash will make your breath smell nice at first, but make it smell like ass later: (nearly) all common types of mouthwash uses Alcohol to bind the its chemicals together, which will rapidly dry out your mouth on contact. Sure, it kills the germs, but it also sets the stage for them to make a whopping comeback.",
"Tiny beasts are in your mouth, **FEASTING** on whatever is in your wet face hole. Then they poo and fart in your mouth.",
"> Say you have a puppy who loves to shit all over your house. During the day, you're able to clean up after the puppy so the shit doesn't fester in any one place too long and emit its odor. At night, you're less attentive to the puppy so he's able to freely produce more fresh piles which will accumulate and sit longer. The result is one stinky house when you wake up.\n\n > Puppy = bacteria\nHouse = your mouth\n\n_URL_0_"
] |
Why are males naturally attractive without make-up? | [
"Because we are conditioned to believe that girls need make up to be attractive, not to mention that women have used make up for a long time creating a \"norm\"",
"They aren't. Most men would look better with a bit of makeup. It's just not our cultural norm.",
"In. Lot of ways men and women are attractive for different reasons, on a basic animal level so to speak. Men's attractivness often relies on their strength, or their available resources (think of fit, or or with lots of money). On the other hand, women are attractive based on ability to bear and raise young. If a woman appears healthy they seem more suitable for child raising. Things like healthy skin (which shows overall body health), and youth makes, at least from an anamalistic level, more attractive. Thus makeup becomes more important for women. To attempt to portray both of these.",
"The same could be asked about their nails. You'll rarely see a guy getting a mani/pedi, but they always have the best feet.",
"I love a woman who is naturally beautiful, without makeup. Somebody who doesn't need makeup and knows it. That's a keeper."
] |
So if Einsteins theory of GR toppled Newton's theory of gravity and its effect on matter, making it seem almost incorrect, why is it still being taught at school as basic fundamental physics? | [
"Newton's theory was a very very good approximation. And it still is. It's not like the laws of physics have changed since then.\n\nGeneral Relativity is probably wrong too. But it's an even better approximation than Newton's theory is. It's also more complicated, so if you don't need it then using it is a waste of time.",
"Newton's laws are mostly correct. When solving problems on the scales that humans exist on, they're accurate. Relativistic effects don't come into play until you're dealing with things many orders of magnitude outside of human experience - learning about them at first would only complicate everything without giving any practical benefits.",
"Say you are driving a car at certain speed, say 65kmph. You hit a break and: according to your pure guess you will stop after 20 meters. According to Newton's law, you will stop after 27.5 meter. According to GR, you will stop at 27.500007 meter. \n\nNow. Do you really want to apply complicated equations for the accuracy of several orders? Moreover in real world application: your speed is not exactly 65kmph. Say your speed measurement accuracy is +/- 1kmph. The friction coefficient given humidity, state of your tire, etc is also not known accurately. In such case, the accuracy gain from using GR is not significant - several orders lower than accuracy of your measurements\n\n(I make up those values, just wanted to point out that it may not matter)\n\nedit: the significance of GR is when objects are moving with more than 5-10% of speed of light",
"Newton's laws are an excellent approximations at the scales and speeds you are likely to encounter. If you're dealing with something very small, or very fast, or with strong gravitational fields, then you will need more sophisticated theories."
] |
How do I solve the birthday paradox? | [
"The mathematics and the problem are both defined in the wiki article, but i'll try show in a way no degree is needed.\nthe problem is defined as: \"The birthday problem asks whether any of the people in a given group has a birthday matching any of the others\" -Wiki\nSo basically, How big is the chance of two person or more having a same birthday in a group of a certain amount of people. And even easier to calculate the chance there are NO overlapping birthdays.\n\n\nIf we have a group of 1 people, the chance of them not having the same birthday is given by 365/365.\nthe first number 365 is given by the number of free spots on the calendar, not occupied by some one in the group. We divide this by the total number of days. This means there is 365/365=1 =100% chance there is no overlapping birthdays\n\nIf we have a group of 2 people, the chance of them not having the same birthday is given by 365/365* 364/365= 0.9973= 99.73% chance of no overlapping birthdays.\nThe first term 365/365 is for the first person. The term 364*365 for the second person (364 because person number one already occupies one place on the calendar with his birthday, leaving 364 empty spots on the calendar.\n\nIf we expand this for more people, the chance calculation gets extended to (1) P(A') = 365/365 × 364/365 × 363/365 × 362/365 × .... etc as we can see in the wiki article.\nIf we do this for a group of for example 57 people we find that this calculation yields 0.0083 or 0.83% that there is NO birthday at the same time, thus saying there is 100%-0.83%=99.17% chance there is at least one overlapping birthday.",
"It helps to the about the number of *pairings* of people in the room, not just the number of people in the room.\n\nSo, you're in a room with 22 other people. There's a 1/365 chance (ignore leap days) that you share a birthday with each person, which works out to just under a 6% chance that you share a birthday with anyone in the room. But that's just for you! The person standing next to you also could share a birthday with someone else, and removing you (since your relationship has already been counted), that's 21 possible match-ups. The next person has 20 more, the next has 19 more, and so on, so that there are actually 253 possible pairings of the 23 people in the room. That works out to about a 50% chance of two people in the room sharing a birthday."
] |
Why do people (Soldiers, Police, Government Agents) always seem to duck when approaching a helicopter? | [
"Because the rotor disc (plane the main rotors travel in) of a helicopter isn't fixed. How a helicopter maneuvers in the fore and aft, left and right directions is by tilting that disc (plane of rotating blades) in the direction you want to travel.\n\nMost helicopter rotors have a wide range of motion. With the helicopter on the ground, and the collective neutral (blades tilted so they aren't providing lift) you can articulate the disc down to head chopping height pretty easily.\n\nThis is why you never approach a 'turning' helicopter without the pilot signalling, so they have positive control of the cyclic in a neutral (level) position. Actually, depending on the terrain, you may have to tilt the disc away from loading and unloading passengers so they can safely get in and out.\n\nA good gust can tilt the disc in random directions if you aren't actively on the cyclic, which you always should be if your bird is turning.\n\nSource: Was AH-1W/UH-1N mechanic in the Marines for 5 years, worked on turning helicopters a lot. I also have my private helicopter license in the US.\n\nEDIT: I'll post a vid if I can find it. 2- Can't find it. it was a video of a Huey on the ground with blades turning, and the pilot moved the disc throughout it's full range of motion forward, back, left, and right. The tips get pretty low. 3- As compensation for my failure here's a cool ass video. If you're into helos anyway. [Cobra and Huey flight deck ops](_URL_0_)",
"Have you ever approached a helicopter with the blades still turning? The blade might be between 50-100cm above your head, but it's just a natural tendency to want to duck just in case. I call it The Highlander Reflex - you instinctively want to stop your head coming away from your body.",
"The edge of the blades can be several feet lower than the center point attached to the helicopter. One unlucky gust of wind or pilot error and ouch.",
"Probably, but the fear of decapitation is overpowering.",
"Don't assume there is enough clearance between your head and the main rotor. The helicopter may have landed on sloping ground. The uphill side will have much lower ground clearance than the downhill side. Always approach from the downhill side.",
"Every time I've boarded a helicopter (side entry) I sort of lean forward. For me it was not so much the fear of decapitation (the rotors really are high up there), it's just a natural reflex because of the rotor wash. You're running into some pretty rough wind, particularly in military applications where the pilot doesn't let the RPM go down.",
"I have seen what happens when someone is hit with a rotor blade. Awful mess. Even when rotating, the blades can tilt with movement of the cyclic stick.The cyclic stick gives directional control. When it moves, the entire plane of the rotor blades can move quite a bit. Frankly it is quite intimidating below something like that knowing what can happen."
] |
Why do raptors put up with harassment from small territorial birds? | [
"Because it's hard to win a fight 1 vs. many. Especially in the air.\n\nAll the smaller birds need to do is not be near the beak or talons to avoid getting killed. Meanwhile, the raptor needs to avoid all of the smaller birds: birds which are coming in from possibly every direction. They aren't going to be able to kill it, but if they can sufficiently injure it, the fight isn't worth the meal."
] |
Bubbles in my water | [
"First you need to know that the glass has tiny bits of dirt / dust on the inside. \n\nSecondly that atmospheric gasses such as nitrogen and oxygen can dissolve in water.\n\nA glass of cold water can 'hold' more gas than a warm glass. When the water comes out of the tap it is cold so when you leave it in a warm room the gasses that have been dissolved in the water form back into gas around the dust / dirt (Called nucleation sites) on the glass."
] |
The Google stock drop. Why it happened, what it means, and what are the consequences. | [
"Google failed to meet expectations for how much money they were going to earn this quarter. \n\nNow the stock has dropped. This could mean two things:\n\n1. If this trend continues and they make even less money next quarter, you'd have a problem. Especially if you bought stock\n\n2. This is a buying opportunity, and when they post better results next quarter, you can make some money."
] |
Why turbulence on an airplane, even the bigger bumps, aren't something to worry about while flying on an airplane | [
"So long as you're going to a sufficient speed, the wings will create a pressure differential buoying you up. The only danger is if:\n\n1. the turbulence is so strong that it compromises the integrity of the craft (almost impossible to happen without a weather forecast predicting such weather)\n\n2. the air pressure drops for such a height that the plan keeps falling for 1000s of feet and is unable to regain enough horizontal velocity to create lift (this is what's rumored to happen in the Bermuda Triangle: undersea pockets of gas rising, which upon surfacing have a much lower density which cannot support the plane)\n\n3. you fly into such a strong headwind that the plane isn't flying fast enough and stalls (also not going to \"just happen\" unless you're flying into a hurricane."
] |
What causes someone to lose consciousness when thinking about or seeing blood? | [
"Vasovagal syncope. Your body, well technically your brain, over reacts to a trigger like a needle or blood. It causes your blood pressure to drop and that's what causes you to loose consciousness. \n\nEdit: read this _URL_0_"
] |
Why have people freaked out so much that Valve+Bethesda wanted to take 75% of mod revenue, but not that Valve takes 30% from an indie game that someone entirely made themselves? | [
"Honestly, part of it is mass hysteria (we all love to conform in someway) and part of it is this is the first time a lot of otherwise ignorant people have stopped and thought about the fairness of how Steam (and any online publishing company - looking at you, Google) goes abouts its business. Is 30% worth the publicity given by having it on a platform everyone uses? That is the real question.",
"Because Valve taking 30% of an indie game still leaves 70% for the creator. For a mod, Valve takes 30%...and then Bethesda takes another 45%, leaving the modder with that last 25%.\n\nSell an indie game for $10, the creator gets $7. Sell a mod for $10, the creator gets $2.50."
] |
What changed in the U.S. between 1820 and 1860 that led to an inability to compromise and the civil war? | [
"The northern states started to develop a somewhat modern industrial sociery, so being paid for their work was all that a lot of people had. They thus became unwilling to *compromise* over slavery; the concept of owning people and not paying them for their work was just horribly offensive.\n\nThe southern states could never give up slavery, because slaves were the basis of their entire economy. So when they started to be scared that the northern states would end slavery, they rebelled.",
"South Carolina had been complaining about tariffs for decades and the issue was resolved by Andrew Jackson. When political power shifted, tariffs rose again. South Carolina didnt like these tariffs because it hurts their economy. At the same time, states were being admitted to the union. The southern states obviously wanted these new territories to be pro-slave, while the northern states wanted to have slavery banned in these states. \n\n Up until now, the 54th (?) parallel had been used as the dividing line between free & amp; slave states. It was only an act so it's effects were sort of diminished over the decades and it was basically obsolete. Congress was split almost 50-50 so admitting a state would shift the balance of power and that just couldn't happen fairly. Eventually it was decided to let the territories vote. This ended horribly as voting was quite unfair and violent acts were becoming increasingly frequent. \n\n The civil war was imminent. They could only delay it's coming. Eventually, South Carolina left the union bringing a few states with them. They became the Confederate States of America and recruited a few more states to join them. (Typing this on my phone so don't want to look up exact numbers or misinform you). Lincoln didn't want to seem like the bad guy who started the war—as he did have re-election in 4 years—so they provoked the south into attacking them. Fort Sumner was attacked by the South and no human causalities were sustained. This kick-started the war. \n\n**TL;DR: Civil War was in the making for about 50 years, was just being delayed theough comprimises. Eventually they got tired of comprimising. South Carolina did what the rest of the south was thinking and seceded, bringing some of them with it.**",
"As the North became more industrialized, slavery become less useful as a business model. Slavery is difficult to enforce in urban areas, and a skilled worker motivated by a salary was more productive than an unwilling slave. Anti-slavery sentiment grew and many states abolished slavery.\n\nIn addition, the North had a larger population and more states, which allowed them to set federal gov't policies in a way that favored them. For example, high tariffs made it difficult for the South to export cotton, as the ships could only turn a profit on one leg of the trans-Atlantic journey.\n\nThe South saw a further of increased Northern dominance and an eventual abolition of slavery that would be an economic ruin."
] |
Why is Planned Parenthood allowed to endorse candidates for political office? | [
"The political activities aren't handled by PP itself, but by an affiliated 501(c)4 organization that is permitted to participate in political advocacy.\n\nThe organization doing the political work isn't the organization getting the tax funding.",
"Considering one party is hell bent on shutting then down/taking away funding it's pretty obvious they wouldn't support that. Plus receiving some government funding doesn't revoke the rights to support a candidate.",
"Planned Parenthood is filed as a 501(c)(4) organization by the IRS. \n\nThe only requirements that an organization needs to fulfill to qualify is that they (1) must be a nonprofit; (2) they must promote social welfare; and (3) they could not have previously been an organization filed as a 501(c)(3).\n\nUnder the [IRS rules](_URL_0_), such organizations may engage in political activities as long as these are not the primary activities of the organization, as judged by the IRS. However, any expenditure for such activities may still be taxed. They may also be required to disclose to donor the percentage of their revenue that is spent on political activities.\n\nThat's it. As long as they continue to fulfill these requirements, they are allowed to endorse candidates, donate to their campaigns, etc. The law doesn't say that any of this changes if you receive federal funds."
] |
ELI 5: why does my iPhone get slower each time a new iPhone or software update comes out? | [
"Because each new update uses more and more power that your phone does not have. They do this A: to advance technology and compete with other companies and B: to make you feel like your phone is slow so you go buy another"
] |
. Why are batteries put into devices facing opposite directions? Why aren't they facing the same direction? | [
"It's easier to make a series circuit when the opposite poles are right next to each other. Less circuitry required."
] |
What's inside public commercial electric vehicle DC fast charger (50kW < ) that makes it cost $30k or more? | [
"A rectifier and DC power supply rated for 50+KW. That's a rather high power piece of kit, you can't make it with Radio Shack diodes.\n\nThat device consumes twice the power needed to trip the mains breaker on your house."
] |
How did the first person to interact with a new language go about learning / interpreting that language? | [
"To put it simply I imagine it happened through immersion like [this scene from The 13th Warrior](_URL_0_) or the way it's portrayed in any other movie: pick up object and say what it is slowly, then the person whose language you're struggling to learn says their word for it, then mimic what they said, repeat until fluent.",
"Humans are capable of communicating without a common language. It is mainly done using motions and emotional cues.\n\nIt's actually great fun to do. I've had very fruitful exchanges f.ex in China when I spoke no Mandarin and they didn't speak English.",
"It's a gradual process. Like others have said, initially gestures, pantomime and trial and error all play a role. If there's trade or co-habitation between two groups with different languages, then [pidgin](_URL_2_) and [creole](_URL_2_) languages will eventually develop. Like u/has_a_nap mentioned, children play a large role in developing communication between groups as they are more easily able to acquire multiple languages.",
"Keep in mind children also play a big role in situations like these. A child from a young age can begin to be immersed in both cultures and languages and allow for better communication."
] |
How cutting/slicing works atomically? | [
"...If you split an atom, you'd get a fission bomb. (What blew up Hiroshima).\n\nInterestingly enough though, Atom comes from the Greek meaning 'impossible to cut'...because of people thinking about this question in exactly the same manner.\n\nEasy answer: There are two kinds of cutting, sharp and serrated cuts. Sharp are pure pressure and split the object into two masses; while serrated (with a steak knife or a saw) cuts by removing a lot of matter and creating a gap.\n\n...that's the best I can do.",
"No, it doesn't cut atoms, or you'd release/consume a tremendous amount of energy trying to cut something. It doesn't even cut molecules for the most part, just moves them apart from one another.",
"Basically, the knife is punching the food in half. If you took, for example, a brick, and you karate chop it with enough force, you will break the inter-molecular bonds that hold the solid together. You snap it in half.\n\nThat's essentially what's happening with a knife. No matter how sharp the knife is, you have the entire mass of the blade behind it. However, the thinner the edge, the more force is being exerted per area of blade. So, if you have a 2 pound knife, and if you sharpen the blade so that it is twice as thin, it now exerts 2 pounds over half the area, making for more concentrated force. As the force/area increases, the solid is broken in two even more easily."
] |
why no pork in fast food? | [
"Just show up for breakfast.\n\nIn the US, pork absolutely dominates the breakfast meat market. Just go to your favorite fast food restaurant, and see how many pork options there are at breakfast. You'll find few, if any, chicken or beef options.",
"There's plenty of fast food pork being sold, you just don't think of it in those terms. You just walk into a DQ and order chicken fingers (pulverized chicken), a burger (pulverized beef), or a hot dog (pulverized pork).",
"Sausage or ham biscuits everywhere for breakfast. Barbecue sandwiches at Hardees and Burger King. McRib at McDonalds. All kinds of pork at Subway. Hot Dog shacks. Bacon bacon bacon everywhere. Chinese take out is loaded with pork. Can you say pizza toppings? Pork chop sandwiches at Carl's Jr and Hardees."
] |
how do bottle return centers make money when wherever you go, you only get 5 cents for them? | [
"They don't. Customers pay the 5 cent (or 10 cent, if you live in Michigan) deposit when they buy the bottled/canned beverage in the first place. When they return the bottles, they're getting their deposit back.\n\nAlso, it's the law."
] |
Why do gummy candies become stale? | [
"The same reason anything else becomes stale. \n\nIt starts to break down chemically. \n\nAll the little bonds holding something together will start to break down.\n\nTypically, there is something breaking down those bonds. It's sometimes bacteria, and sometimes sunlight. \n\nIn the case of gummies, what happens is bacteria start to eat the sugar in the gummies, and produce their own waste. As they eat the sugar, they are also breaking down the bonds around them, either through eating them, or putting out waste that chemically breaks those bonds. \n\nWhat you get, in effect, is a gummy that tastes stale because the sugar has been eaten, and the waste products which are present taste different. \n\nPS: waste products aren't always bad. Alcohol is technically a waste product, but one that everyone enjoys."
] |
Why do a movie theater employees enter a movie a few minutes after it begins with a clip board, stands to the side for a few minutes, then leaves again? | [
"It may actually be the projectionist, I used to work in projection and (when we had time) we would often nip into the screen to check the audio as the feature starts.\n\nEdit: I forgot, we had loads of time.",
"Perhaps just to take note of how many seats are filled in proportion to ticket sales."
] |
What are these "magic numbers" that people are talking about for post-season baseball? | [
"The team in each division with the best record is guaranteed a spot in the playoffs, so if a team can guarantee that they'll finish with the best record before the season's over, they've already clinched their spot. Magic numbers tell us how far away they are from hitting that point where they mathematically can't be eliminated.\n\nToday's a good example, because I'm going to see the Dodgers hopefully clinch the division tonight. Right now they have 97 wins, and the next best team in their division (the Diamondbacks) have 88. Both teams have 9 games left to go in their season. So if the Diamondbacks won every single game, they'd hit 97 wins. But, if the Dodgers win even 1 game and get to 98, then the Diamondbacks can't catch up no matter what.\n\nSo the \"Magic Number\" is 1. If the Dodgers win 1 game OR the Diamondbacks lose 1 game, then the division is settled. The magic number is the total number of wins by the leading team + losses by the trailing team that would clinch the division. If we look at the NL Central for another example, the magic number today is 6. So any combination of wins by the (leading) Cubs and losses by the (trailing) Brewers would seal the division for the Cubs - any less than that and the teams will either tie or the Brewers will overtake them and win their division.",
"If a team has a \"magic number\" for winning their division, it means that the when the sum of wins by them and losses by the team in second place for the division exceeds this \"magic number\" it will be mathematically impossible for the second place team to pass them within the number of games remaining in the season. \n\nOnce you're 5 games ahead with 4 games to play you've \"clinched\", because no combination of outcomes among the remaining games will lead to someone beating you."
] |
What is the difference between 2.4ghz and 5ghz on a dual-band wifi router? | [
"I used to be a service technician, and I´m a radio amateur as my hobby and radio signals are sort of my area so I will try to explain the more obvious details rather than going into the extreme technical details of how each packet gets sent, hope you´re okay with that?!\n\nRadio signals work that way that the lower the frequency the longer the signal will travel, but then there will be less bandwidth to play around with since the lower frequencies have less space for a lot of signals to be sent on. \n\n2.4 GHz is a pretty common frequency and have been the DeFacto standard for wireless gadgets and devices for the longest time now, even the most common weather stations use it for their remote sensors to send off small pulses with data that gets read by your indoor weather station or monitor, this also takes up bandwidth on the 2.4 GHz band, some use lower frequencies like 433 and 434 MHz as well. All depends on your country and their air-traffic (Frequency) laws and emissions permissions.\n\n2.4 GHz is now so crowded that the 5 GHz band is a good option.\n\nMany dual-band WiFi Routers use dual-band to achieve higher speeds for your surfing pleasures, I have one and it combines both of them to achieve speeds over 700+ MB/s.\n\nThe more traffic on the 2.4 GHz band, the more packet losses you will have and your device have to re-request packets and re-transmit these packets and you´ll notice that your internet gets slower because of this \"war\" with the other devices using the same channels.\n\nThere´s a tradeoff by using the less common 5 GHz band, and that is distance. The higher the frequency used, the smaller the distance the radio waves will travel, if you want to go into detail, wikipedia or the nearest Ham-Radio club will help you with the math behind this.\n\nThe difference is simply just the frequency. It uses the same technology to receive and transfer packets wirelessly as the other.",
"At a basic level use 2.4 for when you're far away from the router (sacrifice speed for distance) and use 5 for when you're close (sacrifice distance for speed). \n\nMultiple devices can connect on each band without interference. The only time I've seen bad interference is at a trade show when hundred of access points all try to run simultaniously essentially stomping on each other's signals such that no one could connect to anything. It was funny.",
"5GHz is faster. 2.4GHz has better range and deals better with stuff getting in the way. Also, the 2.4GHz band is very congested around cities and things, whereas the 5GHz band is mostly empty, so you'll basically never have problems with your neighbours. Also, there are far more usable 5GHz channels than 2.4GHz channels (if your 2.4GHz channel isn't set to 1, 6, or 11, change it to one of those, otherwise you're screwing your wifi, and the wifi of everybody else in the area)."
] |
"Save water, Save life?." How my saving little bit of water going to help, people in drought stricken area? | [
"It isn't. If you live in an area with abundant water, you can use as much as you like.\n\nBut you might not realize that you do live in an area without abundant water. Scientists and government officials monitor the 'water table', or how far you have to dig down to find water underground. In a lot of places, the water table has been slowly lowering for decades, and in these places there is a potential for future problems.\n\nIf your community has been the subject of a state-sponsored campaign to reduce water use, you're probably in one of those areas where there's water now, but current use is slowly depleting the supply. By reducing your water use, you're going to help people in the drought-stricken area of your hometown in the future."
] |
Why are the majority late night shows left leaning? | [
"Because that's how humor works. Political satire is about poking fun at the people at the top, about questioning the status quo.\n\nAnd that is inherently a left-wing thing to do.\n\nHumor is, and has always been, a way to question authority and ridicule the rich and powerful. And those are the *last* things you want to do if you're right wing.\n\nRight-wing ideology is about reinforcing the status quo, about how the people at the top deserve everything they've got, and the people at the bottom deserve their misery, and that is simply not good joke material.\n\nLeft-wing ideology is about saying that the people at the top don't deserve to be there. It is subversive. And you can easily build jokes on that premise, because jokes are about subversions, about screwing with people's expectations and questioning assumptions.\n\nOn the other hand, it is very easy to make right-leaning TV shows relying on anger and outrage. Right-wing ideology is at its core about comfort and stability. \"I like how the world is now, and so I despise anyone who would upset the status quo\". And so, all those pesky people who go around saying the world isn't great the way it is, you can talk for *hours* about how they're a danger to society and how someone should just run them down in a SUV and how they're lazy and jealous and looking for handouts. It's not funny, but it's *great* for channeling anger and outrage.",
"I don't know for sure, but I am guessing that it is because, like most entertainment, late night shows are based in large coastal cities which tend to be left leaning. Another thing is that it is easier to make a joke by mocking or being negative towards something. For that reason it is easier to make comedy against the party in power.",
"Making national broadcasting stations take a lot of people (cast, crew, tech, etc) and so national TV stations tend to be in big population centers like New York and LA in America.\n\nCities, by and large, are much more liberal-leaning, and so in the entertainment industry liberals are represented more often.",
"Most likely because they're filmed in blue states from citizens of those states. California and New York are both mostly Democratic so the probability of late shows filmed in those areas also leaning towards Democratic politics is is high.",
"The perception of left/right is in the eye of the beholder for the most part. In the Clinton years, the same comedians pilloried Democrats, and I don't remember complaints about general media bias. Most politicians almost expect it, and few complain because they want a mention no matter what. \n\nBefore you accept the left/right division, look around. Talk radio is almost exclusively right wing, the Sinclair group (a very, very conservative group) is about the largest holder of TV stations in the US. You've no doubt heard of Fox (conservative, not conservative leaning), another large chain. All are firmly in the conservative column, but you frequently hear of \"liberal bias\" in the media. Strange, since most media outlets are conservative owned.\n\nIt seems like there is an extreme amount of hand wringing over this perceived bias these days. Some might lean left, but if you watched late night for years, you would see that every president gets made fun of. Some have a thick skin and let it run off, others, like the current president, have an extremely thin skin which feeds the sharks. Clinton and Bush ignored them for the most part. \n\nJimmy Carter didn't complain, and he was mercilessly roasted as a country bumpkin with a drunk for a brother and a mother who famously wondered if she shouldn't have remained a virgin.",
"Id try a two pronged approach. Firstly, look up the owners of show's network. Look into their political philosophy, philanthropic leanings, and known public political sentiments. Look into executive producers and search for the same. You could even pull writers and individual personalities from the show into it if need be. You may be able to generalize an institutional bias toward a specific political ideology. Not the full story though.\n\nSecondly, look into demographics for late night shows vs. prime time t.v. You will probably notice a big shift in age and possibly gender. You can find statistics that will support the overall political leanings of the target demographics of late night shows. Producers are going to curtail their content to their audience to some degree. People love to have their ideas supported, and seek out entertainment that doesn't conflict their beliefs but reinforces them. \n\nLastly look into the political leanings of the demographics of people who get tired by big networks. These are well educated, witty individuals. The higher the education level generally speaking, the greater the likelihood to lean left politically. \n\nHope that helps, or at least gets you started. What do you think?"
] |
Do we have enough food to feed everyone in the world? | [
"There are a lot of different reasons. \n\nOne is we can't get there in time. By the time the food arrives to its destination, it would have already expired. \n\nOne is that some areas of the world just can't grow crops too well or are not growing enough to feed everyone. \n\nThere is also the issue of money. It costs money to buy crops and the equipment needed to turn it to food. If you don't have enough money, then you can't grow what your country needs."
] |
Why is Russia being considered a major threat to the west today? | [
"Russia remains very large and very powerful (and with nukes) and a leadership that, as examplified by the incidents in Ukraine, is willing to use its military to expand and won't submit to international pressure. It's a very dangerous combination to western nations.",
"Because the old heads are getting senile and their early memories of the USSR are becoming the strongest. To them it feels like the USSR is re-emerging, with Stalin on board."
] |
Why do some people feel carsickness? How does it occur? | [
"Motion Sickness: \nInner Ear: Guys, we're moving! \nEyes: No, we're not. \nSkin: I'm not feeling any air motion. \nInner Ear: Yes, we are. \nEyes: You're a moron; we're not moving. \nInner Ear: What are you, blind? We're totally moving. \nEyes: WTF dude, we're clearly not moving. \nInner Ear: YES, WE ARE. \nEyes: FUCK YOU. NO WE'RE NOT! \nInner Ear: Fite me. \nEyes: Come at me, bro. \nStomach: Guys... please stop...",
"afaik car sickness is caused by the brain receiving mismatched information about your movement. Pretty much everything tells it you're moving, but your eyes tell it you're not. \nThat's why usually people get car sick more often while reading, this means you're not watching the road or at least the outside movement which creates that mismatch of information."
] |
Why dont cameras with circular lenses take circular photos? | [
"Because the sensor is rectangular, the fact that the lens is due to manufacturing costs, the sensor inside is what determines the aspect ratio of the image, usually 4:3 or 3:2.",
"Very simply because it's not the lens that's actually taking the picture. \n\nOn old film cameras it was the rectangular strip of [35mm](_URL_0_) (or whatever size) film. On digital cameras, it's a rectangular [~~CCD~~](_URL_2_) [CMOS](_URL_1_) (thanks ScreamingBirdOfTruth)",
"Because the film (or optical sensor) is rectangular.\n\nIf the lens from your camera can come off, take it off and hold it over a piece of white paper and facing a light source. You'll see an image of the light source on your paper, and it will be a circular image.\n\nIf the paper was film, and you made a photograph, you'd have a circular photo (once you trimmed the paper).\n\nMaking circular film or circular sensors would be difficult and expensive, and nobody wants circular pictures anyway.\n\nSo instead, they make rectangular film or rectangular sensors, and make them small enough to fit entirely inside the circular image the lens creates. A lot of light spills over the edges of the film, meaning part of the image gets lost forever. That's life.\n\nYou can actually see this in action if you have a full-frame Nikon camera: Take the DX lens from a DX camera, and mount it on the full-frame camera, and you will see the circular picture in the middle of your rectangular frame.",
"Old-timey cameras did exact that. The lens (or pin-hole) would project a circular image onto the film.\n\nBut modern film cameras and digital cameras have square film and square light receptacles. The circular lens projects a circular image, the square film crops/cuts off the edges to make a square.\n\nBecause it's cheaper to make square blocks of film and square digital receptors.",
"The sensor in the back of the camera is rectangular. So that's the shape of the image.\r\rIn theory if you used a circular sensor you could fully utilise the lens and get a circular image, but there's very little demand for things like that",
"On film cameras, the film is rectangular.\n\nIn electronic cameras, the light sensor is rectangular."
] |
how to use brush my teeth without getting the toothpaste+saliva dripping all over the place. | [
"I was going to say \"use less toothpaste\" because that worked for me (I went from \"spitting a lot\" to \"not spitting until I'm done\") but I see you're already doing it, so I don't know. You might be salivating a lot.\n\nFor anyone else who might have the same problem: every toothpaste ad will make you think you need [this much](_URL_1_), but that'll foam very fast and you'll have to spit half of it. [This](_URL_0_) is more than enough.",
"If you wet your tooth brush beforehand, you only need a small pea sized amount. Then just keep your mouth closed, amd spit when your mouth is too full. Like anything that foams, you dont need a shitton of lather for it to be effective.",
"Keep your mouth closed as best you can. Lean over the sink so nothing ends up on the floor or on your clothes.",
"Close your mouth/try and seal your mouth around the end. Lean over the sink so it doesnt drip down your front."
] |
How is it cheaper to lobby a foreign government, permit and build 1400 miles of pipeline and assume risk and liability of it than for Canada to refine their own crude? | [
"Because Canada has little to no refining capacity as it is. Also, the tar sands where they extract their oil is in Northern Alberta which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere. For Canada to develop their capacity they would need to build their own pipeline to a coast and then build their own refineries. So why would Canada want to spend billions of dollars to develop their own infrastructure when they can get their neighbors to pay for a pipeline to the most advanced refineries in the world? All the while Canada rakes in money hand-over-fist (pre-Saudi oil dump.)",
"Refineries are not cheap to build and it may be in a location where the operating and distribution costs outweigh piping to somewhere where processing and distribution are cheaper/easier.\n\nI wouldn't be surprised if the refinery would cost as much or more than the pipeline."
] |
How did the FBI find the silk roads owner when it's anonymous? | [
"Many reasons.\n\n1. When Silk Road first came round, in order to drum up business, he posted to a few forums that did a similar thing and started advertising the site in it's early days. \n\n2. In these posts, he then further asked for assistance from someone who \"knew\" Bitcoin. He needed a good way for funds to transfer in and out of Silk Road leaving not trace of the sender and recipient.\n\n3. He put his full email address in this post, so people could contact him for more information. That was the first time that the FBI could relate someone \"high up\" in Silk Road to an email. From an email, the FBI have a great lead to go on. Even if he wasn't the owner of it, he was \"high up\" in the organisation.\n\n2. At this point, they have his email, so started researching who he was. They found his LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, and also got records on his Gmail account. Through all this they were able to get some IP addresses used to login to the accounts.\n\n3. From these IP addresses, it was apparent it was being done from a VPN server, thus it would be just sent the FBI on a goose chase.\n\n4. The FBI subpoenaed the VPN provider he was using.\n\n5. They were then able to get the IP address used to login to the VPN server, it was an internet cafe which was just a few yards away from a known address of a friend of his. This IP address was also used to login to his Gmail account a time or two. \n\n6. His ordered fake ID's to sent to his actual address. They were intercepted. The Homeland Security guys then got into their car and went to this address to question the guy. It was our dear friend Ross.\n\n7. It became apparent the fake ID's were being used to purchase more servers for Silk Road. Since they were fake ID's, when he purchased them, there would be no trace back to him.\n\n8. He posted to [StackOverflow](_URL_1_). This site is used for many programmers and web developers for solutions and advice on programming problems. He posted asking for help on how to connect to a hidden TOR website using cURL. It's not too relevant on what technologies he used for this, it's more the fact that he posted there.\n\n9. In this post, his original post referenced a TOR website URL that links directly to Silk Road.\n\n10. In this post, his original post was posted by a user called Ross Ulbricht. He changed this straight after posting and noticing his mistake, but the problem is by that point the damage had been done. He changed his named to \"frosty\".\n\n11. The [deleted answers](_URL_0_) in his post explicitly reference people refusing to help him because they tested where the link goes and found it went to Silk Road and didn't want to help someone working with them.\n\n12. Even though he changed his name to frosty, the FBI found many many references to frosty all over his servers and physical emails. \n\n13. The code in that StackOverflow post is within Silk Road's source. \n\n14. Although not out of the realms of possibility, the FBI put 2 and 2 together and realised \"frosty\" = \"Ross Ulbricht\".\n\n15. With the above, it was clear to see that whether or not he was the owner, he was clearly the *administrator* of Silk Road.\n\nTLDR: He fucked up. He made an electronic paper trial back to him.",
"The [forbes article](_URL_2_) mentions a number of clues:\n\n > The complaint also mentions security mistakes, including an IP address for a VPN server used by Ulbricht listed in the code on the Silk Road, mentions of time in the Dread Pirate Roberts’ posts on the site that identified his time zone, and postings on the Bitcoin Talk forum under the handle “altoid,” which was tied to Ulbricht’s Gmail address."
] |
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