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How do I raise my credit score when I don't have anything but negative to start from?(USA) | [
"First, you probably don't have that horrible of a credit score. The majority of your credit score is determined by the percentage of credit used. So, if you had a credit card with $10,000 and you had a $5,000 balance, you would be at 50%. Since you have no lines of credit the credit bureau is going to have to work on other bits of information.\n\nThe debt sent to collections isn't going to help you. But, if you've paid it off it shouldn't hurt you too much either. Most late bills don't get reported to the credit agencies unless they're 30-60 days lates. So I wouldn't worry about that either.\n\nRegarding checking your score lowering it. That only applies if someone else checks it. If you are checking your own score then it shouldn't impact it. Even if other people are checking it, it only matters if you have a lot of people checking it in a short period of time because that could look like you're shopping around for credit and trying to take on new debt.\n\nYou are allowed to check your credit history for free once every year from each of the three big credit agencies. The website where you can do that is here: _URL_0_ You won't get a credit score with your tax information.\n\nYour credit report is different from your credit score. Your credit report is a listing of all the transactions and accounts that make up your credit history. If there is something factually incorrect on your credit report you can get it changed, but it's not an easy process.\n\nYour credit score is the output of a formula the credit bureaus use that takes all of the details of your credit history and condenses it down to one number. The most common score used is FICO from the Fair-Issacs Company. You can read details on how it's calculated here: _URL_1_\n\nYour credit score is not free because the exact formula is considered a trade secret. You can pay to get your credit score fairly cheaply though. Since you are checking your own score, it won't impact it.\n\nIf you are really worried that you need to improve your credit rating, look into a secured credit card. Basically, you give a bank an amount of money (say $500) and they give you a credit card with that much limit. These are given to even the worst credit risks because the debt is secured with the collateral you first gave them. If you stop making payments, they'll simply take your $500.\n\nUse this secured credit card wisely. Pay it off every month and you'll be on your way to building a good credit history."
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If the Unverse is constantly expanding, what is it expanding into? | [
"When scientist say \"the universe\" they are actually quite sloppy since they should clearly say either \"the observable universe\" or \"the entire universe\". Those two are two different things which all to often are simply called the universe without distinction. Lets look at both cases.\n\nThe observable universe is actually just an illusion (a very big illusion). You can easily imagine the observable universe as a big three dimensional bubble where we are in the center. And it is simply all the light than possibly can reach us since the beginning of time. It also have a definite volume which is a sphere with radius = (13.8 billion lightyears + the expansion of space) ~= 46-47 billion light years. This bubble is simply expanding at the speed of light in to the bigger \"entire\" universe.\n\nAnd then we have the entire universe (or just the universe). This one we dont know so much about. The observable universe is of course a part of the much much bigger \"the entire universe\", but beyond the observable universe we really don't know whats out there. Many believe that the entire universe is infinite in space, and our theories allows the entire universe to be infinite, but we really don't know. What we do know about the entire universe however is that it had a beginning 13.8 billion years ago, and that is was a lot denser back then. We also know that space itself must always either be expanding or be shrinking and right know it is expanding. So if the universe is infinite then it can of course not be expanding in to anything. Since infinite far away it must still be the universe (not matter how far you go). But something infinite can still be expanding. If you imagine a grid with no end in sight. If you stretch out each square in this grid in every direction, the distance between every object in the grid have increased but the whole grid have remained the same size (infinite). \n\nAn other theory is that of the multiverse. Now there are many different interpretations of different kinds of multiverse (and there are no evidence for any of them so its just speculation), but one of them can easily be explained by the two concepts i explained above. In this case the infinite \"entire\" universe is the multiverse. In this infinite multiverse there can be many other universes of any kind of size and age (note that the multiverse is allowed to be of any age, whereas we know that our universe have a definite age). Our own universe (not just our observable universe but our entire universe) could be one of these universes in this infinite multiverse. In this case our entire universe could be of finite size and could simply be expanding in to this multiverse just as our observable universe is expanding in to our \"entire\" universe. \n\ntl;dr: observable universe < our entire univsere < a multiverse. The smaller thing expands in to the larger thing. The largest thing is probably infinite but can still be expanding, maybe. \n\ntl;dr: We don't know.",
"Dr Karl had a nobel laureate in physics (Brian Schmidt) on his show a few months ago, and he pointed out that what you need to bear in mind is that you aren't talking about space expanding, but rather spacetime. In a sense, you could look at it as \"expanding into\" the future, he said.",
"Imagine the universe is on a plane, the plane itself is expanding not planets and galaxies racing away from each other. \n\nAnother way to think about it is drawing loads of dots on an uninflated balloon, then blowing it up and seeing all the dots become more and more spread out and expanding.",
"The question has no meaning, because 'expansion' isn't expansion in the sense that you're thinking. The human brain has a hard time wrapping itself around the meaning of 'expansion' in this context. It's simply not a very intuitive concept.\n\nYour question is similar to the question, 'What's north of the north pole'?",
"The expansion of the universe creates more and more space between matter, diluting matter and energy in space more and more as eons of time pass by. As the stars, planets, and celestial bodies gradually lose their temperature or energy to space, even these will begin to breakup. All molecules and atoms will decay too into mere radiation. There'll come a time where the universe is nothing but barren emptiness, all thanks to expanding space."
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Why metal makes the *tinktink* noise when cooling down. | [
"Using the example of roll-formed roof sheets (eg, colourbond corrugated iron), in the heat of the day the sheets expand. They contract when it cools down. The expansion and contraction from the change in temperature causes a friction/static buildup and at a certain point it will release which is what causes the noise. Kind of like sometimes when you get zapped with static from a car or clothing you can hear the little click."
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What is a saturated market? | [
"Meaning that that specific market has reached maximum capacity, or is approaching it... i.e. there is no more room to expand in that market."
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How are spies from foreign countries tried in courts in the United States? | [
"Most likely they get charged with espionage in accordance with the Espionage Act of 1917. \n\nThe crime is against the US as a whole so the defendants will be tried in Federal Court. Any lawyer they can afford can defend them and if they can not afford an attorney, an attorney will be provided.\n\nWhy would the US listen to foreign countries regarding US domestic law?"
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Why are they telling us Californians to stay alert until Tuesday. Does the EQ threat end after that or...? | [
"In California there is always an earthquake threat. There is always a chance of an earthquake anywhere. But the chance is much greater in California. I was only in California for eight weeks and felt a building shaker. Californians care so much about earthquakes they have built a robust detection system for measuring earthquakes. That system is reporting a swarm of small quakes. This may be the prelude to the big one.\n\nCalifornia will not have the largest earthquakes ever. The strain cannot build up that much. There will be smaller ones instead, and the damage will not spread as far.\n\nIn my region earthquakes happen less often. But the damage when one occurs will be over a much larger area.",
"There is always some chance of earthquakes in California, but there have been micro-quakes recently that increase the odds of a major earthquake. If enough time passes from the micro-quakes without a major earthquake then things are seen as having settled down and your risk goes back to the standard for California."
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will they ever go after the actual person(s) who wrote and built the code for Volkswagen to cheat the emissions testing? | [
"When a company does something wrong, you sue the company, not the CEO, or the manager, or the engineer. This is what's called corporate personhood. So no, they won't go after the person who wrote the code.",
"While you're at it, give me the name of the guys who designed the touch pad on the piece of shit Lenovo laptop my work gave me."
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Does night mode have a practical function, or is it purely cosmetic? | [
"It is easier on your eyes.\n\nBright light is especially bad at night since it can trick your body into disrupting your circadian (day-night) rhythm, leading to insomnia or other sleep issues.",
"Most people have a hard time looking at bright screens when the room is dark. So night mode makes the screen darker so you do not strain your eyes."
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Why does the Thompson SMG have a higher muzzle velocity than M1911? | [
"barrel length. once a round exits the barrel it's no longer being pushed by the pressure of the explosion of powder. If you increase the time (read: length) that the bullet is pushed the more velocity is imparted onto it by that force.",
"The Thompson has a longer barrel which gives the exhaust gasses from the cartridge a greater period of time to push on the bullet and accelerate it. [When a pistol is fired there is still a lot of energy in the gas behind the bullet](_URL_0_) but there isn't enough barrel to let it keep pushing as much as it can.",
"Likely barrel length. A longer barrel allow for a longer “push” which results a higher velocity."
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Why do diabetes 2 patients sometimes need amputations?? | [
"They are generally also at high risk to develop peripheral artery disease, where plaque deposition in the arteries of the limbs starts restricting blood flow.\n\nEventually flow is too restricted to properly support the tissue, and it can die or become severely infected.",
"When you have too much sugar in your blood (*hyperglycemia*), it makes the blood more viscous, thick and gooey like honey. It also causes inflammation in the blood vessels, which causes plaques to build up on the walls of the blood vessels, meaning the blood has to flow through a narrower tube than normal.\n\nThe combination of gooier, stickier blood with narrower blood vessels means it gets much harder to pump blood around the body, especially to places far from the heart (feet/toes). If it gets too bad, blood in those areas may get clogged up and basically stop flowing at all. This kills those areas of the body. So you end up with a dead foot that has to be amputated.",
"**Diabetes has five big side effects:** \n* Sugar hurting blood vessels (vaculopathy) \n* Sugar hurting your body's filters (nephropathy) \n* Sugars killing nerves (neuropathy) \n* Sugar hurting the eyes (retinopathy) \n* Sugar making blood pressure go up hurting the heart (hypertension) \n\nWhen they need a foot taken off it's because they keep injuring their feet because they can't feel them and the foot is not getting the blood to heal because the blood vessels are weak. Toxins build up because the filters aren't working. \n\n**Sugar hurts your body three ways:** \n1) When sugar is hanging around it can react, and what is left over damages protein, the stuff that makes up all the soft tissue, like the plastic in playdough, and suddenly it gets sticky. \n(*Formation of advanced glycation end products, can cross link smooth muscle and trap LDL, bad cholesterol; it can increase coagulation; it can trap albumin protein in capillaries in nephropathy*)\n\n2) When there is too much sugar in a cell it turns on a signal, a green light, telling other cells to lay down thick blanket for more cells to grow on (*basement membrane*) and more vessels to grow (*angiogenesis in retinopathy, both through Protein Kinase C activation*) \n\n3) When there is too much sugar some cells can't say no (**nerves, lens, kidney, blood vessels**) they just keep taking it in and they get hurt. It's like filling a shed with strawberries, but there are so many that you have to process the strawberries into jam, but if you run out of jam jars, the jam gets on everything and you can't even use the shed anymore. \n(*Disturbances in polyol pathways; an increase in intracellular glucose is metabolized by the enzyme aldose reductase to sorbitol, a polyol, and eventually to fructose, in a reaction that uses NADPH (the reduced form of nicotinamide dinucleotide phosphate) as a cofactor. NADPH is also required by the enzyme glutathione reductase in a reaction that regenerates reduced glutathione (GSH). GSH is one of the important antioxidant mechanisms in the cell, and any reduction in GSH increases cellular susceptibility to oxidative stress.*)",
"Amputations are done if there is a major issue /complication caused by diabetes. Diabetes can lead to PAD (peripheral Artery disease). What happens is: the vessels narrow up and restrict blood flow to the lower extremities. The lack of blood flow destroys nerves (sense of pain is absent) and will also slow down wound healing. \n\nIt is important for Diabetics to be checking their feet everyday for any abonormalities / nicks caused by clipping of toenails/and or wounds. If cuts, wounds or scrapes are neglected, feet will get infected and amputation maybe required to save the limb (worse case scenario) . Regular Podiatrists visits (foot doctor) will need to be scheduled if at all possible as prevention.",
"I'm just a medical student, so take this with a grain of salt. \n\nDiabetes is often accompanied by peripheral artery disease, which is due to the increased blood sugar (hyperglycemia) causing vasoconstriction. Since the process of wound healing and immunity is largely associated with inflammation and blood flow (chemotaxis), this loss of blood flow will prevent proper wound healing and protection from infection. Without proper blood flow, various injuries (ulcers, trauma etc.) have a high risk of becoming infected, eventually leading to amputation if untreated.\n\nThis loss of blood flow can also lead to a peripheral neuropathy, which leads to a loss of sensation in the leg and foot. This loss of sensation will lead to an increased risk of all kinds of foot problems, such as ulcers, trauma, and even bone infections (osteomyelitis) from overlying infections and various skeletal problems (Charcot foot). Osteomyelitis, in particular, can often lead to amputations.",
"Diabetes may cause blood vessels to thin and nerve damage, so the limbs won’t get blood supply, and won’t feel the damage. They amputate a dead limb essentially.",
"Scenario- they get a small cut on their toe. They are less likely to feel it due to nerve damage. The body is not able to heal it as quicly due to smaller vessels such as capillaries being damaged due to high blood sugar. Impaired healing leads to an overwhelming infection in the blood stream where the choice becomes a) die or b) amputate."
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If you were to only drink 3,500 calories, and not eat any calories, will you still experience gain in weight? What's the different between calories you consume eating versus drinking (like soda, a starbuck caramel frapuchino, etc) | [
"calories are calories. but some calories come with vitamins and minerals and fiber whatnot etc that your body needs. \n\nif you eat 3500 calories vs drink 3500 calories and get the same vitamins and minerals and fiber whatnot etc it's exactly the same.",
"By the time you absorb the nutrients in your meal, it has been transformed into liquid by the acids in your stomach and other stuff, so it's the same thing. I could argue that drinking a frappucino is worse than eating a big mac, because the sugars are readily available for absorbtion and it would mean a harder strain on your body to balance your sugar levels.",
"Energy in must be burned or stored. Calories are energy, 3500 calories from any food source must either be burned or stored.",
"Pretend you need heat and light. You have two sources of fuel with the same amount of heat and light. Once source is a candle, the other gasoline. They both give off the same amount of energy, but one is manageable while the other gives off its energy too fast . Sugary drinks= gasoline, food with fiber( fibers the wax) = candle. When that much energy( sugar) is dumped into our liver, boom its too much, too quick, and we just store it as fat instead of using the energy evenly throughout the day. So calories are calories, but not really, the way we take them is key",
"There is no difference. A calorie is a calorie.\n\nImagine your calorie intake as your bank balance.\n\nIf you have a surplus, it adds to your original balance (weight gain).\n\nIf you have a deficit, it subtracts from your original balance (weight loss).\n\nThe bottom line is this with weight loss and weight gain. You consume more calories than you burn in a day, you gain weight. You use more calories than you consume in a day, you lose weight.\n\nAlso, you're never aiming for weight loss, you're aiming for fat loss.\n\nEdit: a word.",
"A calorie you consume eaten vs drank is no difference. \n\nEating 5 big apples and drinking 1 apple juice have the same effect on the energy your body gets. You'll receive the same amount of power from each, but you might feel different depending on the choice you make due to how the energy is metabolized. \n\nSo, energetically the same. But some might come with fiber and vitamins and branched sugars, and some might come with just simple sugars.",
"A calorie is just a measurement of the energy required to hear a litre of water by one degree Centigrade at one atmospheric pressure. Where it comes from or what form its in is irrelevant. You will gain weight if it's above your tdee.",
"You burn more calories digesting solid food so you'll net out more calories if you drink them."
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Why are my visual memories sometimes in third person? | [
"It's pretty common. After some time, episodic memories become semantic memories. That is, memories you can visualize become facts you can recall. So sometimes when we try to recall those memories visually, it's in third person because you are wanting to see yourself. You may be able to find that with a little effort you can recall a memory in first or third person.",
"I assume you have seen yourself in a movie and in pictures or videos people have taken of you. So it makes sense that you can accurately visualize yourself in 3rd person and then substitute that image into a memory and fill in some of the gaps"
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What is it exactly that makes noise when you hear sizzles while standing under a high voltage electric line? | [
"These are [corona discharges](_URL_1_). The electric field becomes sharp enough immediately surrounding the wires that any randomly-generated free electrons in the air will crash into other molecules and produce more free electrons and ions.\n\nAn AC corona alternates between positive (electrons inward) and negative (electrons outward) modes. This process produces sound at the same fundamental frequency as the line.\n\nIf a grounded object approached the line it would develop a corona of its own. Coronae are conductive and if they touch an arc will be formed.\n\nAC arcs absorb energy in pulses when the voltage difference is highest. So they *also* produce sound at line frequency.\n\nThese sounds have rougher waveforms than sine waves, so they sound different, more of a \"zzzp\" than a thrum.\n\n_URL_0_"
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How are acids made? | [
"Some are made by dissolving solids in water. Many natural substances create acids when dissolved.\n\nSome are made by bacteria. If you let juice ferment, it will turn to alcohol, then vinegar (an acid)."
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What data does Windows 10 actually send to Microsoft? Is it really anything bad? | [
"It actually sends every keystroke you type.\n\nNow Microsoft says this is to help improve it's spelling corrections, but with a warrant the FBI could use it for other things. It's not stored for a long time, by default, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be ordered to keep records for longer.\n\nCortana sends every sound made within earshot of your computer microphone to Microsoft. That's where it is processed and analyzed. It's a hot mic in whatever room your computer is in listening to everything said. Not for a bad reason, according to Microsoft.",
"The fact is we don't know, cause whatever it's sending is encrypted so we can't look and see. You can prevent getting the telemetry updates on 7 or 8 but it's baked into 10",
"Part of the problem is that it's not really possible to know for *certain*. We really only have Microsoft's word on what they're collecting and what they do with it, but Microsoft has recently demonstrated that they are 100% willing to lie to users (just look at how they've been describing some of the Windows 7 updates).\n\nFor some, like myself, even if Microsoft was *actually* being completely honest, we no longer trust them. At that point, it doesn't really matter *what* is being logged; logging anything *at all* is unacceptable.\n\nHeck, even *if* someone presented hard proof as to what Microsoft was collecting, the constant rolling updates mean you have no way of knowing for *how long* that proof is still correct.\n\nThe one thing Microsoft absolutely *needed* more than anything to get me on board with Windows 10 was *trust*. Their recent actions have pretty comprehensively burned every last shred of it.\n\nThe comparison to browsers and iTunes is, to me, totally invalid. The operating system is held to a *significantly* higher standard than regular applications. First of all, I can switch from Chrome to Firefox to Vivaldi without too much trouble, but switching out the operating system is a comparatively *colossal* task, if it's even practically possible.\n\nSecondly, the OS \"sees\" a lot more of my interactions with the system. My media player sees what music and videos I play; the OS sees that plus the websites I visit, the games I play, what I search for, my banking receipts, every password I type, all my connected devices, my local network, etc. True, there's nothing to stop, say, Firefox from capturing this information, but Mozilla'd be hard pressed to explain *why* it's doing this. Microsoft, on the other hand, are effectively claiming carte blanche \"in order to improve the customer experience\", since the OS *needs* to interact with all these things.\n\nTo put it another way: they can use that reasoning to semi-justifiably monitor *everything I do*. Even *if* they're doing it for benign reasons, that is *not* a level of surveillance I am, or ever *will be*, comfortable with.\n\nAs for the telemetry patches for Windows 7, this is part of the reason I have automatic updates turned off now and manually vet every update, only installing those I feel are *absolutely* critical. Even then, it's essentially bailing a sinking ship; I can't *know* for certain that any given security update isn't tied to some monitoring or advertising update (like that IE patch a while back). It's why I'm actively searching for an acceptable Linux distribution to switch to when sticking to 7 becomes untenable."
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If games can render near photo-realistic graphics in real-time, why does 3D animation software (e.g Blender) take hours or even days to render simple animations? | [
"Games use a lot of tricks to fake the photorealism at less cost than doing it for real (compressing textures, popins, etc.). The most important one is the lighting. You may notice that shadows don't always look right in games. You know how when you hold something colored under a light, it starts to glow that color? Games don't do this because they don't simulate the light for real, they change the textures to make shadows and light.\n\nReal animation software takes no shortcuts and renders things with full textures and full detail. This software often calculates the path of each ray of light bouncing around the area until it runs out of steam. This calculation is what takes all the time because there are millions and millions of light rays to trace. \n\nFun sidenote: a few weeks back, Nvidia managed to make real-time Ray tracing possible using some new technology they're developing, but so far it still take colossal amounts of power to run.",
"The ELI5 answer is that games don't actually produce photo realistic images in real time. If you look closely, you can see imperfections that break the realism. These mainly revolve around how lighting works. In order to fix that imperfections, it takes a lot more time.",
"Games produce their impressive graphics with some cheats that won't work in all cases and cannot really be improved by just throwing more render time at the engine. For example the game might have a relatively simple model with textures and lighting maps produced ahead of time to make the desired effect. A program such as Blender on the other hand would be producing everything from scratch and actually rendering the geometry of a more complex model (from which the lighting and bump maps were produced) and the interaction of light with the model and texture. While this process is much more time consuming it can also produce a better image with more allowed time for calculations.",
"There is a new version coming soon with a renderer called Eevee that does render very high quality in real time, though even with this, the full Cycles render will still look better.\n\nThe truth is, there is a noticable difference in visual quality between even the best realtime render vs pre-rendered cgi.\nFor a more specific example - A fancy renderer will simulate individual rays of light on the scene your rendering(ray tracing), but a realtime renderer will approximate it.\n\nIt's also worth pointing out that games 'bake' lighting maps before hand, which can take a lot of time if it's a big complex scene. You get different savings depending on wether you want baked or realtime.\nBaked - more ram and space on HD\nRealtime - more gpu/cpu time\n\nYou also can't move an object that has been baked into a lightmap, or it will leave it's shadow behind!",
"The most impacting element is that generally games use shading where as rendering with blender uses ray-tracing (virtually shining hundreds of thousands of virtual photons (if not millions/billions) to illuminate an environment.",
"Games use tricks to render wonderful looking graphics in real time.\n\nLots of games do complicated math in advance that can take hours or even days to compute. The results of this are saved and kept around to be used for final calculations later. All the time that would’ve been spent doing those calculations is saved, because it takes no time at all to look up the answer to something.\n\nThink of it like baking a cake from cake mix vs baking a cake from scratch. Let’s say you have a ton of cake mix already. You don’t have to go through the effort of measuring out the sugar, flour, baking soda, mixing it all up, etc. All you do is add some eggs, maybe some oil or water, and then pour it into a pan. Most of the hard work is done for you, but you can only make that one cake. The mix can’t easily be used to make other cakes.\n\nSomething like Blender is making a cake from scratch. It doesn’t have these clever tricks and shortcuts. In fact, programs like Blender are often used to pre-compute the math (cake mix) that games use to speed up their rendering!\n\nA great example is often lighting. If you have a scene where the light is going to be mostly consistent, maybe an inn in Skyrim for example, you can pre-compute simulated light bouncing around from the candles, fireplace, off of shiny objects that are immobile, etc. This lets you save the color and intensity of light at any point in the scene, and simply look it up when you’re trying to add light to an object. This is a huge savings in time, and the results look great because you did a bunch of math that you could never pull off real time to generate very high quality light.",
"Two reasons. \n\nFirst, to render in real time, games have a much, much higher upfront cost in artist time - it just takes a lot more work to prepare a scene to perform well. In addition, a things like lightmaps and light probes need to be pre-calculated, which can also take hours or days.\n\nSecond, games use a lot of trickery that has no basis in reality but looks ok thanks to very talented artists. But offline renderers (such as Cycles in Blender) generate the image by throwing around billions of rays of light, a lot like our actual universe does it. This makes the image look much more realistic and you can render almost any kind of scene this way without artefacts or bespoke code for this or that particular effect, as long as you throw enough processing power at it.\n\nOffline rendering is popular because computer time is many times cheaper than artist time.",
"Games are rendered using OpenGL or Direct X.\n\nCinema 4D, Blender and similar apps use Raytracers and those Ratracers have all kinds of additions and hybrid rendering methods like Radiosity, Sub Scattering, and numerous others that actually calculate the paths of the rays and photons. This takes a much much longer time to calculate but produces much more realistic results in light and shadow and even the way skin looks.\n\nedit: spell",
"Realism is mostly about lighting. To render a 3D scene, there are two ways:\n\n1. Try to render every object that is visible to the camera and calculate how it gets affected by an existing light. I'll take an example of a light that shoots all light rays in the same direction. If you can need to render a cube, you can draw perpendiculars on each side of the cube. Then you calculate angle between each perpendicular with the direction of light. If it's 0, it means they both are facing the same direction, which means, it's facing away from light. So you darken it. If it's 120°, you lighten it. If it's 180°, you make it the brightest. This technique is called Shading. Interesting point to note here is that it takes into account only two things: light and cube. There could be another red wall near the cube which will cast a red tint on the cube in real life. Now that can't happen with this simplistic algorithm. This can easily be computed by a graphics card on a computer in 16 milliseconds (1000th of a second) i.e. 60 times per second (60fps). Games use this.\n2. The other way could be where you try to be realistic. You shoot a ray from the light and trace every object it hits and bounces on. But this is not clear, how many light rays do you shoot? 10, 20 or million? Instead, people shoot rays from each pixel of the screen. We just need to get color for each pixel of the screen. For each ray, keep bouncing until you reach a light. Now set the color of the pixel based on the objects you have bounced upon and the type of the light. This technique is called Ray Tracing. This is obviously expensive. This will take minutes to compute. If you are now looking somewhere else, you need to recompute the entire thing again. Blender etc. use this.\n\nIf games did only 1, they would have shitty graphics. What you can do is ray tracing for all the objects that don't move. Buildings, mountains, trees etc. don't move in Games. If light doesn't change, they don't change and hence will look the same. You store how they look in the texture of itself, and you combine with shading, you get results as if it were baked.",
"All of the other answers about shortcuts and rendering tricks are true but also worth mentioning is that videogame consoles are hard-wired to do a lot of the specific processing a game would need to look really good—and be playable— moreso than your desktop if you haven't tricked it out in some significant way.",
"ELI5 version is that you can parallel this to calculating Pi, where games essentially do the equivalent of calculating 22/7 and gets close enough, but 3D software actually uses a much more complicated and more accurate formula, and as such needs a lot more computation power.",
"Because as good as game graphics are, they're no where near photo-realistic yet. Proper raytracing is needed to simulate lighting correctly and that's very expensive.",
"Light, hair and fabrics like very loose clothes. \n\nThere is no videogame in which hair looks and behaves almost perfectly natural like some animated movies. The Incredibles is a good example, I forget the character's name but the teenage girl with long black hair. Getting that hair to animate correctly is a nightmare and videogames can't even afford to bother much with that level of detail since no personal computer could render it in real time.\n\nSame for long fabrics like long skirts and capes. \n\nLight is a whole different story with material not reacting realistically to light hitting them, shadows not looking correctly or sometimes even being animated correctly, etc.\n\nSometimes mirrors are an issue too.",
"Games cannot render near photo-realistic graphics in real-time. Not even close. Most of their graphics are pre rendered. 3d animation software takes days because it do all of the work by itself, it's not already completed.",
"They are not really rendering all that in real time. A lot of the lighting is pre rendered with a method called baking.",
"A lot of the work to make things look real in games is baked in. Meaning they take time to pre render and compile data to make it available in game. This and many other tricks are done to make it more realtime.",
"The cool answer is that Starting with 2.8 and the release of their new evee real time engine, blender will have the same kinds of real time renders as a video game.\n_URL_0_\n\n\nThe correct answer is that rendering time depends on the render method and the desired quality. Ray tracing takes longer but is more accurate, because it actually shoots rays of light and calculates the results based on how the light bounces in the scene. You shoot more light rays, you get more realistic results, takes more time.\n\nVideo games use tricks to optimise. For example, you can bake your lighting in a scene and only recalculate character shadows and lights. If you have reflections, you can use a reflection sampler that calculates the reflections once and applies it kind of like a skybox to all the reflective objects in your scene. You can approximate a lot of things, like shadows and such. Vfx are usually faked using particles. etc ...",
"Alot of the newest graphical features you see coming out just now in games have been around in computer graphics since the early nineties. In fact a lot of graphical features are still too calcultation intensive for games to be playable at still.",
"Its about the fidelity and technique. Games take lots of shortcuts you don’t notice especially when things are moving. One of these shortcuts is using very parallel rendering techniques that work well on graphics cards.\n\nPhotorealistic rendering uses different approach that doesn’t many shortcuts and uses a processing method that isn’t as processor friendly.\n\nWe’ve gotten so good at our shortcuts and so fast with the hardware that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference.",
"OP. If you're into animation may I suggest using Unreal engine instead. It's going to be top quality and render significantly faster than Blender or similar software. Theres already someone out there using it for children's cartoons. It's free to use with some exceptions for commercial use. There's an expansive amount of guides out there for Unreal engine and I think video looks amazing on games using that engine(tricks or no tricks).",
"You can actually see how it’s done using just Blender - set up a scene, unwrap everything, create new textures and materials, and bake the scene. Switch your materials to emission materials that use the newly generated textures, change the view to material, and you’ll be able to view the “lit” scene in real-time - move around, manipulate it, etc.",
"Blender is working on a realtime rendering engine called Eevee, is pretty good so far but crashes every 5 or so frames and is super wonky. I don't suggest even attempting to use it right now, but it looks like it'll have a bright future.",
"Most of the lighting you see in games has been ‘baked’. You’re walking through the rendered scene. \n\nSome of the stuff I build can take a while to compile - this is the process of baking non-dynamic light into a map or scene.",
"Worth noting that a lot of the time spent waiting for a photo-realistic render, is offloaded on the back end in video games, via hours of work via modeling, sculpting, texture creation, rigging and animation that is optimized meticulously by artists.",
"I'm way too late, but it's basically because games use a ton of neat tricks to lower rendering time to fractions of a second, and you will never get as realistic of a picture and as detailed of a scene in a game as you will using a 3D rendering program.\n\nFor example, one common trick that used to be used greatly in older game engines (think Source, Unreal, etc.) was BSP (Binary-Space Partitioning). I only have a rudimentary understanding, but in essence it divides each game level into a binary tree (look up a graphic if you don't know) of objects to load, and it uses this assembled tree to tell if the player can view a certain object. If they can't? Then they don't bother rendering the object onto the screen.\n\nOf course, similar techniques are used in 3d animation programs, but only to reduce render time so it doesn't take months.\n\nThere are thousands upon thousands of little tricks like that to optimize render time. One example is anti-aliasing: in a conventional 3d program, it's going to get as minute detail as possible, and in doing so it will look pretty smooth. In games, this isn't necessary, and often it will render on a per-pixel basis with the color of each pixel being decided by the first object it collides.\n\nOf course, light doesn't work this way. In real life, the very edges of an object have a little bit of bleed through, so the black edge of a laptop will be greyish instead if there is a white light behind it.\n\nThis isn't simulated as well in games, because the render time would skyrocket at that minute detail. This creates \"aliasing\", which is just where you can easily tell that a line isn't continuous, and is simply a collection of pixels, occurring at the edges of a rendered object.\n\nThis is an obvious issue to photorealism, and so games simply blend colors together on the post-process (after the objects have been projected to a 2d picture) pass to get around this, among other techniques to reduce aliasing (hence the name, anti-aliasing)\n\nTL;DR games are both lazy and efficient and use weird tricks, while 3d renders don't need to, and are really exact in detail.",
"Games while looking \"near photo-realistic\" are still a far cry from actually looking real. In the context of the game yes it looks awesome because everything is in that universe with that same level of fidelity, but as soon as a pre-rendered cinematic pops up suddenly you are thrown by the difference in fidelity. \n\nGames do a lot of thing really well, lighting, shaders, faking a lot of stuff with shaders, baked in lighting, pre-rendered fx on sprites, etc but when it comes to actual fidelity games sacrifice a lot in the name of FPS. This is why you get flickering shadows, aliasing, faceting on models, un-realistic physics, and don't even get me started on how bad the animation looks on games...especially facial animation. \n\nFeature film and other high end productions literally every single thing you see on screen is pixel fucked to kingdom come. Yes you will still get crappy looking cg in highend productions but usually that's a result of cheap budgets, lack of time, and or bad direction. \n\nIn features the bar is set super high, every spark, strand of hair, water droplet, fragment of exploding building, eyelash, muscle flex etc is reviewed on a full sized movie screen with the director over and over again until they are satisfied. It doesn't matter if it's on screen for less than a second or 3 minutes they will look at it until they think it looks perfect. They know we have the ability to do it so they will scrutinize every pixel. So when you are trying to get fidelity like that, you can't take any shortcuts visually, if you can get a shortcut in software that doesn't look like a shortcut on screen then we're all for it, but usually those are few and far between.\n\nSource: Pro CG artist working on blockbusters for over 10 yrs.",
"Game development and animation majors here,\n\nI'll echo what most have already said. Animation in general uses a different pipeline, engines, and higher quality bitmaps to produce a more real image. I.e Arnold, Mental Ray, Renderman and others try to recreate lighting & shading, fog, etc as realistic as possible, or rather to more specific settings you've given it. \n\nWhereas game engines cheat in some ways. You see animation can pour over the details because there is no limit to time. I remember a Pixar dev saying that a single frame of Sully from Monsters Inc took 48 hours to render. \nGame engines can't do that, it needs to be instant. So we cheat. Things like fur? It's not fun at all, we use polygons with transparency often. Leaves? Same thing. Water? No we don't have fluid simulations for Ultra good deals, we use polygons and depending on what we're doing, particle effects. Super detailed ships & guns? Those are a series of bitmaps. Color, metallic, opacity, normal, etc etc. Now, often Animation uses these same bitmaps, but we're not afraid to use 4k bitmaps in animation if it's needed. Whereas for some basic VR applications & simulations, the entirety of the texture work maybe on one 16k map. \n\nIt's improving quickly though! Some of the GDC talks for Unreal we're amazing, the things some of the industry leaders are starting to do are truly amazing. Though I would count on real time Ray tracing in games for a long while, it's expensive, even if the game managed to do it, most computers probably wouldn't handle it. One of our biggest challenges as developers is to put the details where they'll be seen or focused on, and sacrifice elsewhere where it won't be noticed.",
"No cheating involved, games and CGI renders use two very different ways of forming a picture, or \"render\" a picture. Games use many (often very many) tiny little puzzle pieces each with a fraction of the picture that makes up the colors of the object as a whole, called a \"texture mapped polygon\" and every object visible from the camera is made up from these small pieces. The game then mathematically squishes all of the objects directly in front of the camera onto a glass window just in front of the camera.\n\nA CGI style render works differently; instead of objects made up of puzzle pieces, they are made up of mathematical equations. For every tiny dot within the image, and even one frame of a UHD Blueray movies has a grid of 3,840 dots across by 2,160 dots down or over 8 million dots or \"pixels\", for each one of those pixels the CGI style render shoots out a mathematical arrow which attempts to figure out if this arrow pierces any of the objects mathematical formulas. If it does then it calculates what color it should make the pixel at the camera. Some objects you can see through, or color what you see, or maybe it reflects the arrow to another object or a light.\n\nThis means that while game style rendering is getting closer to being photo-realistic, games only need to do a fraction of the amount of work involved in a ray tracing style render. There's a need for both styles though, and I don't Invision that will change. Even when 8K games come out, there with be 8K CGI in movies that took hours per frame to render and will look so good you won't think it's CGI.",
"Game engines are often built from the ground up aiming to take advantage of all the hardware. Because of this they don't actually aim for the most accurate physics, textures, lighting, animation but they do aim for the most complete and hopefully fast versions of these elements.\nAdded to that you're often playing a VERY curated experience to help hide what some game engines are bad at..\n\nWhere as rendering engines that are used with Blender/Maya/3d Max etc have been built often over decades and thus can't really depend on access to deeper hardware that games use because it's just simply going to cause more development time (and these things are expensive!). It's much easier to aim for a faster processer more memory and a faster hd. They also have to render without any unexpected results every time.\n\nThat said there has been some recent engine developments that actually use more hardware (graphics cards) to help in the rendering and they actually use some game techniques to achieve faster speeds. But you really can't compare a curated experience where a team has spent months, maybe years of experience to achieve 60fps and a 3d engine which is built with a much more open undetermined goal.",
"One of the biggest factors that makes still rendering take so long is lighting and resolution. Most games use textures with baked on effects and simple lighting to get as close to they can to photorealism. Rendering stills and animations use very complex layers of lighting and effects like ray tracing and sub surface scattering to get much more accurate results. There’s some promise in the new Star Wars real time raytracing demo that came out recently, but the processor load to achieve this is huge, and with resolutions increasing dramatically recently the RAM requirements are high as well. \n\nELI5 answer: the simple animations use models with infinitely larger resolution, way bigger textures, and super accurate effects that can’t be done in real time",
"Another reason is traditionally you would render on the CPU, as differences in video cards would mean differences in image. If you’re using a render farm frames would end up being different. You wouldn’t notice it with a side by side image, but in motion you would see flickering and colours changing. \n\nThere’s a bunch of GPU renderers now though. \n\nWith video games you can see some pretty bad stuff happening if you know what to look for. The distance shadows appear is one of the biggest (along with jagged edges). A lot of things get hidden by textures. White walls are actually pretty hard to do because it would show just how bad the shadow maps were.",
"All 3D graphics are a mathematical approximation of real world physics. From Minecraft to the best that ILM has to offer, shortcuts are taken. In games shortcuts like level of detail transitions and raster rendering make things run much faster. These usually aren’t used in movies. Also games usually only do what they can do well. Things like refractions can’t be done realistically in video games which is why when you see a assets made of glass, they don’t look right. Also as others have mentioned, games use a raster rendering while most movies use Ray tracing which is much much slower but is able to do stuff like refractions, indirect lighting, subsurface scattering, and more.",
"I'm assuming you've already seen somebody else's explanation already but, the main way games reduce the load on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit or graphics card) is by baking. Baking is basically rendering the scene that will be in a game in blender or some other realistic rendering program and then saving the shadows and other stuff directly to the textures. This means that the game engine no longer needs to tell the GPU to calculate complex things like where the shadows need to be. Baking is used to pre-render many other things than just shadows (like reflections) but shadows are the easiest to explain. \n\nI hope this was helpful ;)",
"Gamedev here: We put incredible time, effort and technology into faking very limited scenarios to look realistic (while essentially being painted cardboard cutouts) . Classic raytracers (commonly used in animations) are much simpler but more versatile than the limited scenarios we can produce for games. They essentially bruteforce realism by actually calculating light per photon (more or less), but it takes much, much longer. But there is an increasing effort to get realtime rendering into the hands of Animation studios, because it is great for artists not to wait for hours to see an approximation of the final look. Much less expensive too.",
"A game uses a prebuilt computer. 3D animation software has to build the computer before using it.\n\nGames use software and graphics that have already been processed and calculated. 3D animation programs have to calculate how to show what the graphics/animation looks like from scratch. If you render something once in the program once ot will go slow, do it again withoit changes and it will tend to go faster since part/most of the information is already saved in the ram of the computer",
"I think everyone is missing the question. Games use prerecorded animation for cutscenes, and prerendered gfx for scenes and animations. A few possible renders are made and are combined and stored in the games files. Since the environment is the same, the lighting and angles and all can all be pre rendered up to a point, like doing all the heavy passes, and the game only has to render character positions and what not.",
"It's a good example of the 20:80 rule. It takes about 20% of resource/time to get 80% of the output. Squeaking out the last 20% takes up 80% of the time and effort. So getting almost realistic can be easy, but going past that just takes lots of time and effort.",
"Can I hijack this well answered post to ask a secondary question?\n\nWhat are some of the best photorealistic games out there? I have some excess 1080 TIs SLI-ed which I use for mining and am curious what's the best gaming use for them when not mining, graphics wise?",
"In blender they’re developing a new render engine (eevee) that renders realistic graphics in real-time. It’s pretty awesome so blender doesn’t have to take days to render simple animations.",
"Also, games use low poly models. A wheel isn't perfectly round .. get close enough and you see the polygons. \nAnimation uses far higher density models",
"It was this very question that led me into a 15 year career in the game industry and a published book on GPU performance.",
"Such software goes to extreme lengths to produce accurate lighting, usually far beyond what is necessary."
] |
- Wireless Internet and why it is often slower. | [
"As wireless already implies, there is no wire to transport your signal. So without a wire, the signal has to travel through the air. The wire had the advantage, that it is only your propagation path and it guides the signal to its destination without anything in between. This is like having a highway just for you directly from your doorstep to your destination. In comparison, wireless is like you living in the middle of the town without knowing where your destination is and you have to travel during rush hour. As your wireless signal is just radio waves, they get easily disturbed.\n\nTo alter our example a bit, imagine you want to send a message and you are sitting on your roof and only have carrier pigeons, lots of them. But unlike real pigeons, your pigeons are stupid, because they only travel in one direction, the one you gave them at start. Now because you don't exactly know where your friend, to whom you want to send the message, is situated, you always send pigeons in all directions at the same time with the same message. Now some strange things could happen. One of your pigeons flies against a wall and drops to the ground (*absorption*). Another one does the same, but instead of dropping to the ground, it just turns around and flies in another direction (*reflection*). You have bad luck and a strong wind changes the direction of some of the pigeons to a slightly other direction (*refraction*). In one direction, your pigeon stops, lays some eggs and all the new born pigeons fly off in different directions (*diffraction*), some even back in your direction (*diffuse reflection*). It gets worse: Some of the pigeons that have turned at a wall now collide with other pigeons you have sent and you realize now, not only you are sending messages with pigeons, your neighbor does also and his pigeons also collide with yours (*collisions*). Some of your pigeons are just to weak and loose your message during the flight (*packet loss*). Other pigeons just scramble the message between their feet and no one can read them afterwards. You get angry and must resend all the pigeons until you get back a message from your friend, which should tell you your message has arrived, but his pigeons are not more intelligent than yours and he faces the same problems. Eventually you agree with your neighbor upon not sending pigeons at the same time to avoid some collisions (*time slotting*), but now you have to wait for him. Other neighbors are joining this agreement and you have to wait even longer. As you have several friends, you notice sending messages to the closer friends is more reliable, because less bad things happen to your pigeons, but nevertheless, sending messages this way is exhausting and slow. This is the reason, you build a little tunnel (*cable*), which goes directly to your friends house (*router or the like*), and you'll never have to send pigeons again. End of the story. (*Disclaimer: This might not be an exact representation of real wireless networks and I don't guarantee completeness*)"
] |
Why do multi-vitamins contain more than 100% of certain nutrients? | [
"Something people haven't patronized yet on here is bioavailability & bioaccessibility; even if it says 100%, you don't really get a 1:1 ratio of access/usage from it, same as when you eat food. Also, the daily recommended requirements are often really low, more like a \"this is good enough so you don't outright have an issue\", not \"this is optimal\".",
"Usually those values are percentages of the daily requirements for the \"average\" adult. \n\nIt's very debatable if people actually need more vitamins than the normal daily requirement.",
"I take a vitamin D2 pill with 50,000% of the daily value (prescription), which is a slow absorption pill meant to be taken once a week. In this case it makes it more convenient to take one pill a week than to take one daily. Most of it is not used by the body, but the high % allows the body to still use it days later.",
"100% of the \"minimum daily requirements\". In some cases, it there is data to suggest that there might be beneficial effects from having more than the bare minimum. And in most cases, there isn't much hazard to having more than the minimum. If your body doesn't use it, you'll just excrete it.",
"Because you need some extra when your body pisses away 100% of the multivitamin that you take.\n\nNo, [seriously](_URL_0_)."
] |
Why car manufacturers sometimes have different names for the same car model in different markets? | [
"Sometimes it's a marketing reason, and sometimes it's copyright or trademark law. For example, back in the 1960s, Ford wanted to export the Mustang to Germany. However, a German company, Krupp, was already using the name \"Mustang\" on a line of delivery trucks. Because Krupp already had the rights to use the name \"Mustang\" on a vehicle in Germany, Ford had to [re-badge its car as the \"T5\" when sold in Germany](_URL_0_).",
"Names have different meanings dependent on the location. \n\nCase in point, about 20 years ago Chevrolet reintroduced the Nova as a compact car. They had to be renamed in Mexico because \"no va\" means \"no go\" in Spanish."
] |
Why do some people not remember anything when they get drunk? | [
"To expand on tstorm1986's comment, I believe ethanol specifically inhibits the short-term-to-long-term memory transfer process, thus making those people unable to remember even the smallest action more than 5 minutes afterwards, or as soon as they start thinking of something else.\n\nELI5 version: A tiny amount of the liquid in alcoholic drinks heads up to your brain and tells your brain to stop making memories indefinitely. Eventually, your body gets rid of all the drink, through one end or the other, and the brain starts making memories again, but it is too late to make memories of everything you did the night before.\n\nAlso, the simplest solution to your \"Wake up feeling horrible\" problem is to just drink plenty of water before you go to sleep drunk.\n\nEDIT: Changed \"inhibits the short-term memory process\" to \"inhibits the short-term-to-long-term memory transfer process\", as per [ritosuave's](_URL_0_) comments/research. Go ahead and give him a few upvotes.",
"Ethanol inhibits the receptors necessary to create memories."
] |
Why is it considered grammatically incorrect to use 'ain't'? | [
"I ain't saying that you're wrong, but I ain't saying you're right either.\n\nIt's not grammatically incorrect to use ain't, it's just informal. In any formal writing, \"am not\" is much preferred.\n\nFunnily enough the word \"amn't\" which actually makes my spell check say it isn't a word is also defined, and is also therefore grammatically correct, but is again informal.\n\nTl;Dr it's informal, not incorrect",
"Bigotry toward the poor, specifically Cockneys. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt is actually fully grammatically correct to use as a word and has been for centuries. It is just associated with \"common folk\" of poor social standing and so was something frowned upon by teachers and professors who catered primarily to the upper classes. By the time education was opened up to all citizens it was established as bad grammar."
] |
Viscosity | [
"You can think of \"viscosity\" as how *thick* a liquid is. If you fill up a cup with water, and then pour it out, it flows out of the cup very, very quickly.\n\nTry the same thing with honey, or maple syrup. It takes a much longer time to flow, doesn't it? This is \"viscosity.\" Honey and syrup are more **viscous** than water.\n\nWhy is it this way? It has to do with what the fluid is made out of. Every fluid is made up of tiny, tiny, pieces that are so small that you can't see them. These are called molecules. These teeny bits that make up water do stick together - a little bit\\*. The tiny bits that make up syrup, however, are *really* sticky! They stick together so much, that when you try to pour syrup out of a cup, it takes a long time for gravity - the force that makes the syrup fall - to overcome how darn stuck together the bits (molecules) that make up the syrup are!\n\n\n\\* Water is more viscous than other things; its \"stickiness\" is largely the result of things called \"hydrogen bonds.\" These are still not as sticky as honey or syrup particles\n\n**EDIT**: As S7R4nG3 points out, the size of the molecules that make up the substance matters too. Maple syrup, with its complex array of sugars (polysaccharides) has difficulty \"sliding past\" itself compared to water, which is made of just two Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen atom.",
"Viscosity measures how easy a liquid flows. If you tip a glass of water over, the water flows right our; this is because water has relatively low viscosity. On the other hand, you have molasses. Molasses has very high viscosity, which is why it takes to long to pour out.\n\nAnother way to think of viscosity is \"fluid friction\"; higher viscosity means that there is more friction, and that it takes longer for anything to happen."
] |
What is the actual structure of the Chinese government? How is it organized? | [
"The crucial difference between western democracies and China is that in China the Constitution explicitly gives the Communist Party certain very important powers. In particular there is no difference between the leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the President of China. They are separate positions but always embodied in the same person -- it is not possible to have a President who is not the head of the CP. An analogy might be the relationship between the US President and the Supreme Commander of the US Armed Forces -- although they're (on paper) two different jobs, they are always held by the same person.\n\n\nHowever at a more conceptual level the country is governed in a similar way to most others. There are separate branches of government for the executive, legislative, and judicial processes -- along with an almost-as-powerful section of the military in government -- although again the Communist Party has a strong control over all these areas.\n\nAdditionally in terms of local government, depending on the region local areas may be allowed to have elections for their officials, or they may have their officials appointed directly by central government. Even in areas where elections are permitted, all candidates must first be approved by the Communist Party and sometimes by central government as well -- this is one of the key areas of protest in Hong Kong at the moment, where the protesters want to have a free choice of candidates to vote for, but Beijing is only allowing a choice between a couple of hand-picked candidates.",
"Its structure is similar to how Western countries are organized, you have the legislative branch, executive branch, judicial branch and military. Except the people in charge of these branches aren't democratically elected, but rather elected by party members in the National Congress of the Communist Party of China held once every five years. The guys elected to the top positions of these branches form the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China, which more or less controls the entire country. In recent years they de facto limit the length that someone can hold these top positions to make sure that no dictators can take root in the country."
] |
how could depression affect us physically? | [
"It often makes your sleep and appetite wonky, which makes you feel physically bad in other ways-- if you've been asleep all day and haven't really eaten, you'll probably feel like shit.",
"Okay. Depression in the medical sense is often associated with brain chemical imbalances. Your brain controls your body. If your brain isn't working at 100%, you will feel it physically."
] |
If Colds are passed on by an infected creature, how did the first creature get it? | [
"We're not really sure how viruses started. A virus is basically a chunk of DNA (or RNA) on it's own that can break into living cells and take over those cells to make it produce more viruses. Nobody's sure if viruses evolved as an offshoot of cellular life or if they're just a random corruption of broken-down cells.",
"Thats a chicken/egg problem. The answer, as always is: \"its not that simple\", and evolution plays a significant role in it. Eg. we still don't really understand how viruses came to be (i.e. if they developed out of organisms that had their own metabolism or in some other way). See also [viral evolution](_URL_0_) for a more in-depth analysis.",
"There have always been parasitic creatures, one of them evolved to be less fatal with a quick mutation rate and that is what the common cold is."
] |
Why don't televisions and other screen resolutions use "rounded" aspect ratios, e.g. 2000 by 1000 instead of 1920 by 1080? | [
"Read up about [aspect ratios](_URL_1_). Turns out that the first widespread standard ratio was 4:3, based upon the size of the physical film commonly in use. That particular ratio means that if you want both dimensions to be integers rather than including fractions thereof, there are only a few plausible ratios that work, i.e., numbers which are multiples of both 4 and 3. 400:300 would work, but that's a pretty small screen. The next \"round\" ratio is 800:600--which is actually the SVGA standard. After that you get to 1600:1200, the UXGA standard. There's a list [here](_URL_0_), and as you can see, there are only a few ratios on there with \"round\" numbers. \n\nThis means that if you're trying to maintain a standard pixel density, you probably need to use \"not-round\" numbers for a lot of aspect ratios and screen sizes. I mean, you *can* stick to \"round\" ratios, but the result would not be satisfactory on many screen sizes. Hence the use of intermediate conforming ratios, even if the numbers seem a bit arbitrary.",
"I hope I am not too late to help answer this one. I see there are already some great answers here. However, I saw this comment you made:\n\n > \"In addition, what technical reasons created 4:3 and 2.35:1 in the first place? That's really the heart of my question.\"\n\nIf you have the time I suggest you check out this movie: \n_URL_2_ \nIt is about 20 minutes long, but it discusses the evolution of modern aspect ratios. Essentially I started with film, and progressed with modern cinema needs.\n\ntldw: \n\n* We started with an aspect ratio of “4:3” using 35mm film. Each image was 4 perforations tall by as wide as the film would allow. 0.95”W : 0.735”H (4:3 or **1.33**).\n\n* When Audio was added to the 35mm film, it made the printable area for the images smaller narrowing the image. To compensate for this, the top and bottom of the image was masked (black bars) to bring the ratio closer to 4:3 known as the “Academy Ratio” (**1.37**).\n\n* To compete with home TV, wide screen was developed for theaters. The new “Cinerama” used 3 projectors side by side using 3 35mm films at 6 perforations tall each resulting in an aspect ratio of 2.59. Essentially each perforation is .184” tall, and 35mm film is .95” wide making the overall image 2.85”W : 1.10”H (**2.59**).\n\n* People loved wide screen, but it was expensive. As a result movies began to be filmed in Academy Ratio (1.37) but with top and bottom cropped off. To make the end result much wider. The final aspect ratio was **1.66**. (kind of an arbitrary number). Unfortunately to project this cropped imaged on the newer larger screens, the image was essentially stretched enlarging film grain which was not ideal.\n\n* The next innovation was to film a movie using an anamorphic lens. This squeezed the image horizontally allowing you to fit a much wider image on the same narrow 35mm film. The film was then projected using a similar technique to stretch the image back out on the screen. The resultant image had an aspect ratio of **2.35**. (The films were shot using a 2:1 anamophic lens essentially making the film 2x wider than the original 4:3. The reason it was 2.35 and not 2.66 is because room is needed on the film for the audio track(s)).\n\n* This didn’t solve the problem of film grain though. As a result Paramount developed “VistaVision”. They filmed the movie vertically across the 35mm film 8 perforations wide, with the height being the width of the 35mm film. The end result was an aspect ratio of **1.85**.\n\n* Insert other bazar 35mm aspect ratios here.\n\n* “Todd AO”, a new film type, was released next which replaced the traditional 35mm film with 70mm film. Essentially doubling the width of what was losslessly filmable on 35mm. The resultant aspect ratio was **2.20**.\n\n* With the development of new lenses and processes new formats appeared on 70mm such as the MGM65 with an extremely wide aspect ratio of **2.76** using an anamorphic lens.\n\n* Using the same technique as MGM65 but with a standard spherical lens Super Panavision 70 was released with an aspect ratio of **2.20**. (Essentially Todd AO with different processing.)\n\n* When HDTV was being developed, 16:9 (**1.78**) was the decided standard. This is because it is the geometric mean of the two standards of the day, 1.33 for TV and 2.35 for Theater. Basically take the height of 1.33 and the width of 2.35 and you get 1.78 . It is hard to explain without a visual. This is why on an HD screen SD images are pillarboxed with bars on the side, and theatrical release movies are letterboxed with bars on the top and bottom. It is a compromise so both standards share similar real estate space on the screen.\n\ntldr; \nBlame 35mm"
] |
Why are we using a loud, obnoxious *BEEP* to censor curse words? | [
"I was thinking the beeps are used for a humorous effect. If we can't have curse words out in the open in case there's children watching, we can at least have a laugh at the obnoxious beeping.",
"I'm curious also, although I have heard the loud BEEP a lot less the past few years. Nowadays it seems to be mostly a small moment of silence to censor the curse words.",
"If we go back in time to when audio was recorded on tapes, the way to censor something is to record over it. If you just record silence over it, you'd still hear the censored content, albeit likely quieter. If you put a nice solid tone over it, it'll for sure eliminate the ability to hear what's underneath.",
"Besides what /u/KingRubbish said, silence is mentally disturbing. A beep tells us that there is nothing wrong with our hearing."
] |
Why is my voice so much deeper in the morning? | [
"When you sleep, your vocal cords get looser, (vocal cords are muscles) so the vibrations are more bass-like. It takes a couple of seconds to tighten them up though",
"I heard alcohol also loosens the vocal chords if you have been drinking"
] |
What is the history behind Earth Day? | [
"There was a giant oil spill near Santa Barbara in 1969 which - as you might imagine - was an even more gigantic catalyst for environmental protection. That movement picked up pace pretty quickly, aided by the “Summer of Love”, after a fashion. \n\nIt wasn’t too long before John McConnell, a noted peace activist, was proposing an international holiday to honor the environment. He made the proposal to the U.N (specifically UNESCO) in 1970 - suggesting it be observed on the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere."
] |
Why do electric cars have such a low top speed for their horsepower? | [
"Perhaps they are more concerned with efficient power consumption than going faster than a Lambo?",
"Electric motors deliver their maximum amount of Torque at low speeds, and their maximum amount of power at middle speeds. Gas engines deliver maximum torque at middle speeds and maximum power at high speeds. This means electric car can have great take-off acceleration, but gas engines can do better at taking a moving car and making it go even faster. \n\nBeyond that, part of it is the design goals of the car. No one really cares about the fuel economy of a Lamborghini, but people do care about the range of their electric cars. You could make an electric car that would go faster, but since maximum power is at middle speeds you would have to design your motor so that it would never make it to it's sweet spot in normal driving (where you're probably unlikely to exceed 80mph) it's going to have negative effects in terms of motor performance.",
"The car is electronically limited to 130 out of the box, 155 is an upgrade (but they don't mention if it's a electronic limit or a physical limit).\n\nKeep in mind, electric cars only have one gear. They all have low speeds for their power, generally speaking, because of this.\n\nThey can get by with one gear because full torque is available from 0 RPM up to the max speed (10,000rpm+ for many of these motors). Having gears is hard, just because of the pure torque these things can make at any speed. A normal gas motor would stall under 1,000, deliver max torque around 3,000, and have to shift at 6,000 (or so, guesstimate for a V-8). Many of these modern cars have 6-8 gears in order to enable the acceleration and 200mph top speeds.\n\nAn engine can only spin so fast, without extra gears, the top speed suffers in order to keep efficiency and acceleration where it needs to be."
] |
If just a couple "specks" of fentanyl is enough to kill a person, and one can overdose merely by touching it, how is it that people are able to ingest it without dying? | [
"As always, the dose makes the poison, and your mileage may vary. Fentanyl patches are meant for patients receiving large chronic doses, as in cancer pain, where tolerance is already high. If a child, weighing a third of what the intended patient does and never having received opioids, sticks the patch on, there's risk. But plenty of people would take that same dose without dying. Lethal doses are usually given as the amount required to kill 50% of people, because it's just not predictable for any individual.\n\nIn a controlled medical setting, giving a one tenth of a milligram of fentanyl isn't much different than giving ten milligrams of morphine. For that matter, we use botulinum toxin (Botox) for all kinds of medical purposes, and it's one of the deadliest substances by weight in the world! As long as you can be sure the dose is accurately tiny, it's mostly an arbitrary number. On the flip side, taking 500 milligrams of Tylenol is very safe by any measure. Yet precisely because people aren't afraid of Tylenol, and because it's so widespread, it's a leading cause of liver damage. \n\nThe other thing is that opioids usually kill by shutting off your drive to breathe. In an intensive care unit, where most patients are on ventilators, they don't get that option. High doses of fentanyl are used safely every day in the ICU for pain control and sedation.",
"Prescription drugs are obviously produced in a form factor such that people won't immediately die from being around them. The fentanyl lollipops that are prescribed do, indeed, have only tiny amounts of the drug in them. But they're repeatable and reliable because they're manufactured by real drug companies who can be sued if someone accidentally overdoses because a lollipop is three times the marked strength.\n\nThat's really what makes illicit use of drugs, especially opiates, so dangerous: the actual amount of active ingredient you get per \"dose\" varies widely from source to source and even from batch to batch. If people were able to buy pharmaceutical oxycodone from CVS, they would overdose much less frequently, because they would know exactly how much to take given their tolerance.",
"Fentanyl is a great painkiller, but the lethal dose (LD_50) is around 3.1mg/kg while the dose used to relieve pain (ED_50) is around 0.01 mg/kg so it is extremely easy to overdose. \n\n\nEdit: seems like that ld50 only applies for Rats and is way to high. Around 3mg can already lead to respiratory failure and death",
"You do not die from touching a Fentanyl patch. You don't even die if you wear one as a completely opioid naive person.\n\n\nThose reports are either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated.",
"Another problem with doses is most street doses are cut and mixed in an uncontrolled manner. Imagine some tweaker with a wire whisk and a glass bowl. Obviously while you're mixing in whatever your cutting agent is (lactose, baby powder, baking powder, whatever), you'll mix it in... but there will be \"hot spots.\" So even if you have the same weight or volume of street drugs, one may actually contain more of a drug, and be more potent than the same dose from the same batch.\n\nThings mixed in a lab are more controlled, and less prone to this."
] |
Do birds re-use nests that were previously used by other birds? | [
"Doves/pidgins use other birds nests for sure. I watched a robin build a beautiful nest on my property, she spent ages on this nest, laid her eggs and then one day a pidgin comes along, kicks the robins eggs to the ground and lays her own. Then she sat there, like a proud mama, defending her eggs against the angry robin.\n\nThat all said, I don't really blame the pidgin that much - have you seen the nests they build? Two sticks on a branch = good enough nest to lay an egg in for a pidgin."
] |
Why do dogs grab their toys when really excited? | [
"They associate smells with objects too, which can draw them to things like owner's shoes. Showing off toys is less of a natural dog instinct, and more something we condition into them by praising them when they do cute stuff like pick up toys to play with",
"I'm pretty sure you're on the right track. They get excited and see a new opportunity to have their ball tossed across the room.",
"If it's a lab, it could be that they're retrievers, and that's what they do. My husband and I have a 4 year old lab and he has to greet husband at the door every single time with a toy. It's been bred into him. However, often times it can be that they're just excited and want to play, especially being 2 years old."
] |
Why do most animals have tails but humans do not? | [
"We did have a tail at some point in our evolution. But now we only have tails during part of the time we are embryos but it reduces to the tailbone or 'coccyx' before we are born. The functions that tails serve can all be accomplished by us through other means such as hands for manipulating objects, language for communication and the visual system and ear canal for balance.",
"> but why do humans not have them?\n\nTails serve a purpose for a lot of animals - mainly balance and control, but also safety (look at how lizards can actually drop the tip of their tail to get away)\n\nWhen humans started standing upright we didn't need it for balance and it actually became a hazard (you are easier to catch if you have something hanging behind you) Over time we just stopped having tails. We still have a tailbone and most of the genes required to grow a tail. \n\n > Does a cat have full control or is it mostly just instinctual movement?\n\nIt's mainly instinctual but they can control it if they want. It's usually associated with mood more than anything else but when they need to they can control it. Next time your cat is \"hunting\" watch his/her tail and how low and still they keep it.",
"I'm pretty sure it's instinctual but they know they're doing it. like you know you're blinking and you can control it, but you don't always (consciously) do it.\n\ni always figured they know what their tail is doing.",
"Due to our upright posture and our habits of walking on the ground we do not need to balance ourselves as cats and monkeys walking on uneven tree branches."
] |
The location methods used by explorers like Columbus to record their findings and navigate home | [
"[Columbus was the first sailor who kept a detailed log of his voyages. We therefore know how Columbus navigated, and that he was a dead reckoning navigator. On the first voyage westbound, Columbus sticks to his (magnetic) westward course for weeks at a time. Only three times does Columbus depart from this course: once because of contrary winds, and twice to chase false signs of land southwest.](_URL_0_)\n\nColumbus made very good time on some days of his voyage, as good as sailing vessels achieve.",
"They had a couple of ways to navigate. They had a very good understanding of the sun and it's position in the sky so this helped in the day.. at night they actually navigated using the stars. Different cultures invented different tools to use to help, the sextant being the most well known, but an older tool called the cross staff predated that. On cloudy nights navigation was hard, or impossible. Otherwise navigation at night was possibly easier than in the day because of the stars, tools, and charts.\n\nIn even earlier times they mostly didn't go far from shore and the shore was what they used to navigate with"
] |
The Lacanian idea of the Other and the 'objet a' | [
"I'd crosspost to /r/philosophy. Zizek has written exhaustive words on Lacan. As I understand Other, it is how we frame ourselves, language, relationships, etc... against the world we perceive. \"Objet a\" deals with objectifying desire, glory, drive, libido...all are unattainable but we compelled by them. He never wanted to name \"Objet a.\" He chose this algebraic equation to represent it: $ < > a. Great question. It is making me want to pick up my Zizek reader."
] |
what do doctors/forensic specialists mean when they say a bullet "bounces around"? | [
"Because the body isn't a piece of homogenous mass. You've got bones inside you, and bones are pretty damn solid, especially compared to soft lead bullets. And as the bullet travels through you, all that mass begins to slow it down, making it more susceptible to ricochetting off something.",
"Your body isn't a solid piece of mass. If anything, it more closely resembles a bag of water.\n\nIt is when bullets strike bones that they can bounce around - especially after the bullet has lost some kinetic energy from the entrance and travel through the body.",
"Because a bullet has a lot of energy. And your body has a lot of stuff in the way. When that bullet with a lot of energy meets a lot of other energy in its way that energy now has to travel in a path somewhere."
] |
Why are operating systems written in C? | [
"Your OS needs to care about all the low-level details like interfacing with your hardware or managing memory. Languages running in VMs (Java, C#) or interpreters (Python) do not offer such functionality and adding them does not make any sense from a language point of view (because you actually do not _want_ them).",
"C is very low level. Higher level languages like Python and Java run on top of a VM that abstracts away the underlying hardware. That's good if you want to write a program that doesn't care what platform it's running on. That's bad if you want to write an operating system, which by its nature must interact with the underlying hardware.\n\nFor example, on systems using memory mapped I/O, all your peripherals are mapped to a memory address, and you interface with them by writing data to that area of memory. Doing that requires raw pointers, which higher level languages often don't have.",
"> I have never seen python or Java outside of the context of a C based operating system, so does it mean that python and Java can't work without C?\n\nSeeing as how both the Python interpreter and the Java virtual machine were written in C, in a sense that's the case.",
"Two reasons probably:\n\nThe operating systems were originally written in C and changing code may be more trouble than it's worth.\n\nC is a lower level language meaning that the instructions are more closely related to the machine's code. As such, compiling into machine code is more efficient and less bloated. You ~~definitely~~ probably don't want an OS written [entirely] in Java.\n\nEdit: My statement about Java was probably too strongly worded.",
"To answer your follow-on questions - yes, it means that Java and Python can't work without C (or, at the very least, assembly language). C++ and Objective-C are used for application-level development because they're inefficient compared to straight C. You don't mind the inefficiency so much when it only impacts your application. But when you're writing base-level code that is accessed by *everything*, you don't want all sorts of unnecessary stack maintenance just so you can make your source code look prettier.\n\nTo some extent, writing low level code is more about coding style than anything else. People who write high level application code use tools to make their life easier. People who write low level code use tools to make the *machine's* life easier.",
"Lots of half-answers here. There are two main reasons: purpose and low-level.\n\nPurpose just means that C was designed to write an operating system; very few other languages have been, since they're designed to run *on top of* an operating system. This requires a bit of history that I'll talk about below.\n\nLow-level means that C doesn't abstract away *anything*. If you want three characters worth of memory, you don't ask a memory manager or VM like you do in most other languages: you run malloc() for 3 bytes of storage. You need this kind of low level access and lack of abstraction to make an operating system.\n\nNow back to the history, because its what ties both of those together.\n\nBefore C, there wasn't a general-purpose system programming language. If you wanted to write an OS, you wrote assembly for the target architecture, which gets prohibitively more difficult when there are dozens of competing and incompatible architectures. There was just that kind of environment in the late 60's-70's.\n\nEnter UNIX. It was originally written in assembly on a PDP. Then, K & R began creating a language specifically to implement the system at a more abstracted level. Thus was born C. So in effect, C was designed specifically to write the kinds of low-level facilities than an OS provides. This also comes with the huge benefit of portability. With high(er)-level code, all you need to do to get the system running on a particular architecture, is have a compiler for that architecture. You don't need to rewrite huge swaths of the OS code for the new system. And that means that the OS could become popular, which leads to...\n\nWith the spread of UNIX came traction, which is another huge factor. By the time Microsoft were writing Windows in the late 80's, there just wasn't a choice: if you wanted to implement an OS, you used the best language for that: C. And that is still true to this day.\n\nTo put it in even simpler terms: most other modern languages, especially the ones you mentioned, are themselves written in C and compiled and/or executed by a C program. C is the level between the machine itself, and those high level languages.\n\nTL;DR you write OSes in C because C is designed to write OSes; almost no other programming languages are, because C is.",
"C is an old language and there hasn't been a new major operating system written in the last 25 years. Windows is from 1985. OS X is based on NextSTEP from 1989. Linux is from 1991, but designed to be a recreating of Unix which is from 1969.\n\nAll these operating systems predate Java, Python and most other modern languages. Microsoft wrote a new research operating system call Singularity that was mostly written in C# but it was discontinued in 2010.\n\nI believe Sun made machines that ran Java directly in the 1990s but they never caught on.\n\nC++ and Objective-C add features to C to make it easier to use. You could do everything they do in C, but it would be harder.",
"Python and Java high level languages. This means they are easy to use but slow. Assembler is low level. This means it's almost impossible for some to use, but very fast as it uses hardware instructions directly. C is somewhere in between so perfect for writing an OS which has to be fast but it's also quite complex.",
"**Real ELI5** : *You know all the power tools in Daddy's basement? You can make awesome stuff with them!! But, you can't use them because they are dangerous. Only people who know how to be safe with them can use them, but those people can do cooler, more intricate stuff with them than you can with your plastic tools. Sometimes certain projects require the precision that these tools use, but access to that precision makes them dangerous.*\n\nC is one of the OG Object Oriented Languages (OOLs). Most other OOLs pretty much use C to run. C lets you control a lot of stuff that other lanaguages don't because they're meant to be easier to use and don't want to allow people to screw stuff up. For example, don't go trying to say where to put an object in memory for Java. It doesn't want you to because that stuff is hard and can screw up a machine. Java and most other high level OOLs will also do \"garbage collecting\" (the removal of stuff from memory) automatically.\n\nEdit: clarity"
] |
Why is running on a treadmill so much easier and less tiring than running outside? | [
"As far as I understand, the belt turnover of the treadmill contributes greatly to helping you run. The belt is guiding you towards running and as a result, most \"serious\" runners don't equate their time on a treadmill to be the same as what they would do when running outside.\n\nAside from the ground not being a moving belt to guide your steps, on a treadmill your feet/legs/body is also landing on a softer, more flexible surface rather than crashing into the immovable ground with every step.\n\nTl;dr: You just have to keep from going backwards on a treadmill, but outside, you have to keep moving forward and pushing against the earth.",
"I would say a combination of \n\n- The soft ground of the threadmill \n\n- The bad calibration of the system which make it more generous than it is actually (so if you run 4min/km but feel like you run 4:15/km may-be you run indeed 4:15/km) \n\n- There is no obstacle on the way nobody to avoid, no pedestrian passing by no street crossing. On a 10k run in town you easily loose 5 min because of all these\n\n- The fact that distance speed is displayed make it psychologically easier. \n\nThat said, on a threadmill I run 5k in less than 20min. Last official race I made with a similar distance I ran 6k in less than 24 min so it's seems that it's not that easier to run on a threadmill",
"- There is no air resistance (no \"wind\") as you are not really moving\n- The treadmill is very flat (and even if you lift the front a little, it still is more regular than most area where you would run outside)\n- And what's probably the main reason, you are not making the effort of pushing yourself forward. As soon as your front feet touches the belt, it will slide backward without any effort from your part\n\n(- Also, you may be distracted by music/video more easily as you don't have to pay attention to where you are putting your feet or to traffic)",
"Very simple, when you're running on a treadmill, you have no wind resistance. It's like running with a permanent tailwind."
] |
Why would a company like Mars modify one flavor of a candy like Skittles and then refuse to go back to the old flavor in the face of monumental backlash? | [
"\"Monumental backlash\" often is nothing more than a vocal minority complaining loudly and often about something they don't like. Those people are also likely to continue buying the product in spite of their vocal distaste.\n\nMars knows that these people will fade away soon, and they probably haven't seen any appreciable drop in sales numbers, so they're not going to change their minds.",
"I guess I'll rephrase your question for you, \"Why would a company make a sudden change to their product, and then decide not to change it back when people are upset?\" The answer to which is two parts.\n\nFirst of all, companies have been known to revert a product back to \"normal\"after a poorly thought out change. Take New Coke for example. They changed it because of sales numbers, not because of reviews. They may be related, but aren't the same. \n\nInn the case of the Skittles problem you did mention in your original question, they did not revert the change, simply because despite the negative reviews, their bottom line was not negatively affected.",
"People complaining on social media and an actual decline in sales can be two very different things.",
"What I don't understand is why they still put 'original' on the bags when it's clearly not...",
"I love Lemon Jolly Ranchers. I know some don't, but many people love that flavor.\n\nIn my unscientific poll, in Vegas, inside the Hersheys store, they have giant towers of flavors.\n\nI asked, which is the top seller. Hands down it's lemon said the clerk. \n\nThey brought Lemon back. Now the big bags are gone.\n\nThe people at Hersheys don't care which is the favorite flavor.\n\nYes, I know that scarcity of the lemon plays a role in it outselling watermelon. You can get watermelon anywhere, so why pay the ridiculous Hersheys store rate.\n\nWhoever replaced lemon with that foul blue raspberry is a moron.",
"Today I learned that one of my favorite flavors is gone. I can't really complain though because I haven't eaten any in... I'm not even sure. A couple years at least.",
"The new Orchard Skittles has a green lime flavour, its the exact same one. If your feeling nostalgic just buy a bag of Orchard and take all the lime skittles out and replace them with the green apple...problem solved lol.",
"Reasons they may have initiated the change: \n* Cost savings. \n* Hopes of broadening market and/or increasing sales. \n* Availability of ingredient. \n\nAll possibilities can be boiled down to one overarching reason; wanting to make more profit.",
"They change things up to keep the product fresh and new to the consumer or maybe they just move them around to make more combinations, case in point the Lime skittle is now available in the Orchard skittle variety.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Man I miss my lime skittles... or, more accurately, I hate the green apple ones. I can't just eat a random bunch of skittles anymore because even one stray green apple will ruin the whole flavor profile, whereas lime blended right in with the rest.",
"Wait, when did they change the formula. I haven't had skittles in... in... I don't know how long.",
"Advertising. Getting people to talk about it. What?!? They're going to change Skittles? Outrage! Think I'll go buy some Skittles! For instance, I only found out about this whole thing because of this thread, and that didn't cost them a penny of advertising $$. As they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity...",
"I hate all things green apple. I was sad when they ditched lime as its my favorite. \n \nYou can still get lime in the Dark packs, and the other flavors are good as well to eat, but don't make the optimal Skittles vodka batch.\n \nSo I've stopped making skittles vodka. Bummer, that.",
"I work at the facility thay makes skittles, Starburst and snickers. We went to green apple and the lime flavor went to the skittles in china. Also China has a different flavor of orange.",
"Isn't the bigger question, why do they continue to call it \"original?\" If it changed, isn't it the very definition of non-original?",
"OP. Stop thinking companies care about what you want. They care about what you buy and what makes them money."
] |
Does Earth appear as a bright planet? | [
"A few million light years away? That is an insane distance. Our entire galaxy is only ~100,000 light years in diameter. Even one lightyear away would be too far, not only is our planet not that bright, it is minuscule in comparison to the sun so anyone trying to look for us would just see our big, bright sun. This is a struggle we have in our search for planets outside of our solar system, no telescope is powerful enough to see them, however we are able to detect them by other methods.",
"[Here is a picture and a speech](_URL_0_). The answer is no - the earth is not particularly luminous. No more than the other planets in our solar system. You lose sight of us before you leave the solar system. Long before then, we're nothing but a pale blue dot."
] |
Why betting the same amount on two boxers to win will not always give a payout due to differing odds. | [
"Any real-world bookie is going to adjust the odds and payouts so that they get a cut for themselves (the vig). They're not working for charity.",
"Even if not using a bookie that takes a vig (cut of the money), you're still taking a risk. Let's say you bet $1 a piece on two boxers facing each other. One has 1:1 odds and the other has 4:5 odds. So you bet $2 on the fight. \n\nThere are two outcomes:\n\n* The 1:1 fighter wins and you make $2 from the fight. Well, since you sent $2 on both bets, you've broken even.\n* The 4:5 fighter wins and you make $1.80 from the fight. Again, you spent $2 on both bets, so you've lost $0.20.\n\nUnless the odds of one boxer winning are really huge, it isn't economically feasible to bet on both boxers and expect a guaranteed payout. Even if you do have 50:1 odds on a boxer, his opponent is going to have lower than 1:1 odds. If that boxer wins, you lose money by betting on both of them.",
"The casino needs their cut. It's easier to understand on a point spread bet where both sides are set to -110. If you bet 100 dollars on both, you are guaranteed to lose 9 dollars. The casino is taking the 100 dollars from your losing bet, pulling out 9 to pay themselves, and giving the remaining 91 to you to pay your winning bet. The same thing is happening on a moneyline bet, but it's less obvious with different odds at play. Also with the moneyline bet you aren't guaranteed to lose money if you bet an equal amount of money on both sides if the underdog wins.",
"Like any gambling operation, the total of the payouts is always inferior to the total of the bets. That's the way the host makes their money. \n\nIn this case, the bookies would adjust the odds as they take bets in order to make sure that no matter the outcome they don't lose money.",
"Because the house sets the odds to try and get equal money to come in on both sides not so the winnings are equal on both sides"
] |
Why does PBS get the rights to BBC content where other networks do not? | [
"Downton Abbey is not a BBC production; it is created by ITV, a commercial television company. So whatever is the reason that PBS gets British shows, it's unlikely to be a specific agreement between them and the BBC.",
"British entertainment, while popular, is still considered a niche interest amongst the larger population. Larger networks like FOX/TBS/NBC would prefer to make American adaptions (The Office, Skins, Top Gear) of British shows in order to more appeal to an American audience. \n\nThis has left networks like PBS with a nice little niche to get involved in. They can get newly popular British programming and get the ratings from it while American networks focus on their own adaptations."
] |
How do coaxial cables transmit so much data with only one pin? | [
"Coax can carry more bandwidth (as in frequency spectrum). RG-6 coax can carry somewhere 1-3Ghz while Cat 6 Ethernet (8 wires) can only carry about 500 Mhz. The reason is the shielding is so good and the impedance of the RG-6 coax cable is guaranteed over a long distance. \n\nHD TV channels only need 6Mhz so a single RG 6 can carry roughly 166 channels simultaneously without switching.",
"each bit takes up a really small amount of time. So a lot gets through really fast.",
"The overwhelming majority of data communication is done serially (with only one data line). As long as you can send data fast enough, it's often advantageous to use a single line as then you don't have to worry about multiple data line bringing in data at different times and having to resynchronize them.\n\nPretty much every cable you use that transmits data will be done serially.\n\nSome examples of cables/devices/architectures that use one line: USB, Ethernet, PCI-E, FireWire, Lightning, etc.\n\nExamples of cables/devices/architectures that use multiple lines: ATA, PCI, uh......honestly, I don't think any modern devices use parallel"
] |
Why TV's/Monitors are rectangle and not square. | [
"We have two eyes, next to each other. So our area of vision is wider than it is tall. Screens reflect that fact.",
"Because of aspect ratios. It used to be that the monitors were square(ish) because the normal, common aspect ratio was 4:3. Now, with the widescreen format being most common (16:9) most TV's and monitors are built to meet this format."
] |
What is convection? | [
"The transfer of heat by the circulation of air or gas.\n\nExample: hot air rises. As it does so it cools, which then causes it fall back down. If there's a heat source at the bottom (a fire, a warm ocean), it'll start warming up again and so the process starts again.",
"It's a heat transfer between a solid and a liquid or gas, or between a liquid and gas.\n\nThere are two types of convection. Natural and forced.\n\nLet's say you have a vertical hot water pipe in a room filled with calm cool water. In the pipe, hot water runs at a certain speed. So, when you look at the wall of the pipe, on one side you have hot running water, and on the other side you have calm cool water. Naturally, heat goes from hot water to the pipe wall and from the pipe wall to the cool calm water. Because the hot water in the pipe has some velocity and is moving, it is \"forced\", by a pump or something, therefore heat transfer to the inner surface of the pipe wall is by forced convection, while the water outside of the pipe is calm, and nothing is \"forcing\" it to go anywhere, it receives heat from the pipe wall by natural convection.\n\nimage: _URL_0_\n\nHere you can see what convection actually is. Convection is those arcs between temperatures T1 and T2 and between T3 and T4. That is the law of convection. T2 is always lower than T1 and T4 is always lower than T3. Due - to - convection. And that is why when you put your hand on a wall in your room, it's colder than the air 5 cm from that wall.\n\nAlso, heat transfer is always more efficient with forced convection than with natural.\n\nEDIT: And it's also why your soup cools faster when you blow at it (forced convection) than when you just leave it to cool (natural convection)."
] |
The difference between Gray and Grey | [
"Same difference between color and colour. Continent-based spelling differences.",
"In British English, \"grey\" is the preferred spelling. I believe \"gray\" is US English. Not certain about Canada or Australia."
] |
Why do accents seem to disappear when singing? i.e. why do Aussies, Brits and Kiwis all seem to have american accents when they're singing? | [
"This old ELI5 had some real answers in it: _URL_0_\n\nWhat I understand is that accents are largely derived from how long you hold certain sounds when speaking, but when singing regional differences go away because we all try to hold the same sounds the same length to sing \"correctly.\"",
"Lots of singers start off by emulating the styles of the singers they admired and listened to. Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones developed their music style from American blues, hence why Mick sounds [very American when singing](_URL_2_).\n\nBut other groups who don't do this are prolific too. Think of [The Proclaimers](_URL_2_), who sound as Scottish as they are.",
"It depends on the singer, to be honest. Some will imitate an American accent, perhaps because their genre is dominated by the American market, perhaps because American music was their childhood or their influence. But there are plenty of artists who don't.\n\nA couple of examples:\n\nVirginia Astley ([A Father](_URL_9_)) - British accent\n\nBastille ([Durban Skies](_URL_9_)) - ~~South African accent~~ EDIT: I'm told (by many replies) that there isn't a South African accent for Bastille. Nonetheless, they are British. The confusion here stems from me knowing that Dan Smith is of South African heritage, and identifying a different accent (which apparently is a British accent not local to me). Disregard this line.\n\nKodaline ([Love Like This](_URL_9_)) - slight Irish accent\n\nAmy MacDonald ([Poison Prince](_URL_11_)) - Scottish accent\n\nAll Mankind ([Can You Hear Me?](_URL_10_)) - Australian accent\n\nScouting For Girls ([She's So Lovely](_URL_11_)) - English accent\n\nSqueeze ([Up The Junction](_URL_11_)) - English accent\n\nLily Allen ([Smile](_URL_10_)) - English accent\n\nSam Johnson ([Loveville](_URL_10_)) - English accent\n\nGenerally, the top of the pop charts will be people imitating an American accent, as American artists dominate the mainstream pop market. And generally, the very top of the pop charts in Britain or Australia will be what makes it into the higher ends of the pop charts in the USA and is therefore what is on the radio most.\n\nIt's probably perception, as well. What you hear most is an American accent, so your assumption is that a song will be sung with an American accent and weak accents won't stand out to you. As an Englishman myself, I find I hear a lot of English accents, as smaller English acts, which have English accents far more often than the big chart-toppers, are more popular and more marketed here. Just as I don't know many American artists beyond the biggest names, you (probably) don't know as many British artists beyond the biggest names as American artists.",
"It happens with Spanish music as well. Mexicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans sound the same. There are some exceptions like Spaniards and Argentinians that have different grammar or pronunciation of some letters so those are easy to spot on. However if it was not for those few words you wouldn't know. I guess is because of the act of singing by itself? It changes the pronunciations of the words to a neutral one. I honestly have no idea why it happens",
"Shamelessly stealing /u/Hasmir's comment from [this thread](_URL_14_):\n\n > There are a couple of reasons people switch to an American accent when singing.\n\n > First, they don't. Singing drastically morphs your enunciation and intonation, to a degree where it can often give the illusion of sounding like \"no accent\" (i.e., your native accent/whatever accent you're *expecting* in a vacuum). This isn't always true -- Kate Nash's accent [comes through loud and clear](_URL_17_), but note that she has a very \"conversational\" intonation in general. Compare Adele, who tends to sing [big, sweeping pieces](_URL_21_) that change the sounds of words much more (indeed, I only just now learned that she's British when I looked up this song).\n\n > Second, often it comes with the genre. When a genre gains popularity, it tends to pick up the inflections of the place where it got big. Just try and sing a country song without a Southern twang, for instance. Or think of punk music, which started in the US, the UK, and Australia, so a lot of American punk bands have a pseudo-British accent when singing (like Green Day).\n\n > EDIT: Also, listen to some symphonic metal bands. They're generally from all over Europe, and their respective native accents are universally prominent. You'd never mistake any of them for Americans, or for each other.\n\n > - [Rhapsody of Fire (Italian)](_URL_16_)\n- [Dark Moor (Spanish)](_URL_20_)\n- [Heavenly (French)](_URL_19_)\n- [Blind Guardian (German)](_URL_18_)\n- [Sonata Arctica (Finnish)](_URL_12_)\n- [Hammerfall (Swedish)](_URL_15_)\n- [Falconer (Swedish)](_URL_13_)",
"Just wondering, where are you from? Because I'm a kiwi and although singing does seem to mask the accent I can still hear the difference between quite a few songs. Like these for example, [New Zealander](_URL_24_) [Australian](_URL_23_) [English](_URL_22_)",
"Yeah, yeah, but what about Iggy Azalea? What the fuck is going on there?",
"Singing is essentially extenuating the vowels in words. \n\nThe American accent requires a similar pronunciation of vowels. If you think about how an American says hello, compared to a brit the 'o' is much more prominent. \n\nSo it's not that singers sound American, it's that the American accent is closer to singing.",
"There are lots of Aussies who seem to sing in American accents. I'm an Aussie and I hate it. I think they just think that's how you sing.\n\nSo when you hear someone sing in an Aussie accent it is \n\na) very noticeable\n\nb) wonderful.\n\nFor example\n\n_URL_26_\n\n_URL_25_",
"ELI5 version goes like this:\n\nIt's more that Americans *lose* some of their accent when singing (properly). You can't hold a pitch on a consonant—despite their prevalence in the alphabet, consonants are mostly percussive. Most of our accents come from vowel sounds, and singing sacrifices the efficiency of getting to the next consonant for the sake of maintaining rhythm and getting the \"cleanest\" sound.\n\nAn interesting contrast to that is country music, because of how the \"r\" consonant interacts with vowels. The \"US Country/Western\" accent puts a hard focus on vowels that close with the \"r\" consonant (e.g. Power, air, tire—in US Country/Western, these would be pronounced something like: \"Parr, arr, tarr\"). That's why in \"US Country\" songs, it appears that they don't \"lose\" their accent. You'll also note that a great deal of their lines end on \"r\" diphthongs and triphthongs (\"Ring of Fire,\" anyone?).\n\nWestern accents, in general, evolve from laziness of the mouth muscles; it's the oral instrument seeking to get from one sound to another with the least effort possible. Different people are lazy in different ways, and different languages allow people to take shortcuts in this way or that. Again, singing undoes these shortcuts because you have to hold sounds for their appropriate length, resulting in a more uniform/accentless sound.\n\nOnly in cases where consonant/vowel sounds have not existed in a language for a long time (the \"L\" sound in far Eastern cultures, for example) will you still find cases where substitutes are made even after all equivalent sounds have been lengthened.",
"The Kinks purposely retained their accents in their singing and didn't adopt the ['singing accent'](_URL_27_). \nI've read about this before - years ago - but damned if I can locate the original and more thorough explanation! I'll keep searching..",
"This is buried under a ton of comments by now, but I actually studied this for my English degree. \n\nIn actual fact, the accent you tend to hear is neither American nor English. It has elements of both. The vowels tend to be more American (but exaggerated), while the rhotic r (as in \"car\") is rarely pronounced, much like British English. \n\nYou end up with a distinctive singing accent which is sort of a democratically agreed accent that has evolved over time.\n\nIn fact there are studies that show how the Beatles' singing accents gradually got more American as time went by. So they may be largely responsible for it.",
"Its because in singing, particularly choral music, you learn how the vowels and consonants are supposed to sound. The result isn't American, however, as an american accent is much wider and generally lazier on pronunciation. \n \nSupposedly the Canadian accent(non-maritime) is closest to a pure English, we say roof and about properly, for example.\n \nDifferent styles each do different things and allow a different amount of laziness on the vowels and consonants and beats.",
"Mikey Bustos did a video where he explored this. He found that because of they way tones sounded when sung it is actually closer to a British accent than a North American one. We are just so used to hearing it that we assume it is a North American accent. _URL_28_",
"As a trained singer, I have found that classical singing technique tends to sound more British. Pop music tends to sound more American for the same reason that classical singers love to sing Italian, the vowels are brighter so the sound rings more without as much effort.",
"Calls Australians, Britons and New Zealanders as Aussies, Brits and Kiwis.\n\nDoesn't call Americans as Yanks.\n\nCome on, lad.",
"Shirley Manson and Annie Lennox don't sound Scottish when they sing, but The Proclaimers definitely do when *they* sing.",
"When learning how to sing properly (classically trained) you need to learn how to pronounce vowels in a certain way to preserve tuning. For example, an American a (as in Apple) is almost never used because when you use it your note goes flat. Instead, a more British sound is used, a sound more like the American short O. While I was learning how to sing in a Choir we used the International Phonetic Alphabet to transcribe our lyrics for pronunciation (_URL_29_) because when singing different styles (barber shop, gospel, or classical) different accents are used.",
"Its a modern mass media (radio and TV) phenomenon. Since jazz most music genres have come from America so people mimic these singers to sound authentic. When enough do it, then local accents sound strange in song. However think of genres like early punk rock or irish trad and you see exceptions. Depends on your preferences and tastes. I personally find it silly and pretentious when aussies sing in a hard American twang for example. Wankers.",
"Musicians tend to sound like their influences, across all instruments, it makes sense that singing would reflect that.\n\nFor fun, here's what an Australian accent singer sounds like: _URL_30_",
"Actually, we all technically sing in a truly neutral accent because all of the vowels and consonants are given different a different duration and placement than how we would speak them to make them easier to sing, it's not really \"American\" per say. The reason everyone sings in a single \"accent\" is because of the minimization of the things that create dialects: diphthongs or shadow vowels, shortening or lengthening sounds, placement of consonants when you speak. Because music makes everyone unify the way they use these sounds, everyone sounds like they're singing the same way. There is an alphabet that tries to explain this called the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA for short. It will show you the different sounds used in different languages and dialects, like how there are actually 8 different ways to make a sound for the letter \"r\". We all tend to unify these when we sing because it makes for an easily singable sound.",
"If you've actually been taught to sing, classically, the Latin vowels should sound the same regardless of accent. Also dipthongs shouldn't be used and what someone said earlier about note lengths being uniform. \nI've been ranting about the \"clo-ez ya eyeeeez\" song and the horrible vowel sounds for months. I'm happy someone asked.",
"I think ozzy is a great example of this, I still don't understand how he can go from being damn near unintelligible when he talks to singing and easy to understand, at least when he was younger (it's been ~7 years since I've seen him live).",
"I think there are a lot of reasons, but another is that 'correct singing' involves using appropriate vowel shapes so you don't end up with a gross sound. The result is less variation in how a word is sung.",
"they dont. plain as, you'll hear the accent of the person singing unless they actively try to hide it. pop singers probably try to hide it more since most modern pop music is from the US",
"Oh god everyone here is wrong. It's not about emulation it's about the way that English is pronounced in singing. It's standard. You hold notes mainly on vowels. Vowels are all pronounced the same way in singing regardless of what your accent is. People who have an accent while singing are making an acting choice. If you have correct technique, your accent should sound the same as someone else with proper technique. \nSource: singer and have been trained by a Grammy nominated vocal coach.",
"An accent has many components. Rhythm and melody are some of the most important ones. When you sing you effectively replace the melody and rhythm of the dialect with the rhythm and melody of the music, and so the accent will disappear or be diminished.",
"It's because most American accents are rhotic, and when people sing, they sing in a rhotic fashion. (Rhotic means they thoroughly pronounce the r sound, non-rhotic is what English/Australian accents sound like.)\n\n(Edited for clarity and dumb mistake for calling American accents non-rhotic)",
"Technically they're dialects, not accents. Accents are what people have when it isn't their first language. Dialects are when people with the same language speak a little differently because they come from different places.",
"On another note, in the Stephen Hawking movie they show him getting his first speaking computer to help him communicate. His wife comments \"It speaks American\". Broke me up. I never noticed that before.",
"With a few exceptions, Americans sound pretty English when they're singing, to me - unless they're some kind of country & western singer or putting on a strong accent.",
"Point 4 of this article provides theories. Quite easy to google this question. _URL_31_",
"Most accents are distortions of the vocal apparatus and surrounding tissue that are most common to a given environment. Coastal and cold tend to all be nose-airy because of constant cold-congestion. In places where people eat nearly constantly or chew on leaves, smoke (or in the labor case explained below hold nails in their mouth) these influences will ALSO have effects on their accent. Popeye always had the pipe in his mouth and that had a direct effect on his voice that didn't go away unless he carefully and deliberately spoke. ETC etc etc. Whist these influences/causes may not be the source of ALL the people in the area sounding the same, they are the origin.\n\nSo when you're singing and producing a larger amount of sound requiring a larger channel for the flow of air, you reduce your accents some or a lot to produce the tones. True operatic singing is one of the most powerful and really destroys most of a person's accent durring performance. Since English is one of the bigger markets for singing the singers tend to learn \"sung\" english when singing to produce a sellable product.\n\nA great example is lead singer of the Cranberries, a beautiful accent because she's singing in Irish accented english because she doesn't give a damn what you want. It produces a beautiful series of peaks and troughs to her singing. (lower e on english for ireland!)\n\nOne of the way you can tell your kids are fake crying is that they cry in an accent.\n\nGenerally speaking, singing is one of the most effective accent removing techniques because of its limiting of inflection in the tones.\n\nThe most interesting result is where singing reduces stuttering because it allows a concerted SINGLE purpose to the act of enunciation. The disseparate impulses that cause the interruptions are moved out of the way by the total effort most of the time just like using all your fingers to grip instead of a couple stops the un-needed fingers from wiggling around. \n\nThis being an example of suddenly becoming aware of your hands when talking to someone and why we go ahead and use our hands to talk. Hand motion whilst talking tends to have accents too based on the labor skills and habits of the person speaking. \n\nSo weather for sound and effort for motion. Two examples of the human condition.",
"1) a lot of \"accent\" is about the melody of phrases. I'm not a native English speaker and cannot give the best examples, but I notice how Southern US people talk fast and with sudden stops while English people speak slower and with well pronounced vowels. If both a hillbilly and a brit sing the same song, the fast-talking, the slow-talking, the stops and pronounced vowels are obliterated by the melody of the song itself.\n\n2) Still, you might perceive the brit and the hillbilly's accents as different as they sing. It's because in different regions, people use different [phonemes](_URL_32_) - different sounds - to mean the same thing. For example, every English language accent has a way to say the word \"car\". The word's made of three phonemes, but the hillbilly and the brit don't use the exact same phonemes to say it; still, they usually understand it's the same word.\n\nHowever, even your natural phonemes might disappear when singing a song because you could be mimicking the way another person sang it.",
"I think the trend now is to resist this. I Am Kloot are distinctly northern and the Proclaimers are clearly Scottish. I think distinguishing elements like rolling or not rolling your Rs, how you pronounce the vowels in words like \"you\" and \"can't\" can't be put down to how long you hold a note. \n\nSimilarly, country music singers don't just sound \"American.\" They sound clearly Southern. \n\nThere is a conscious decision to either mask an unusual accent or not. \n\nAnd sometimes people just don't notice the markers of a different accent in a song until they're pointed out to them. Possibly because they're paying more attention to the beat and the melody and even the words, that how they're really pronounced doesn't register as clearly as in normal speech. \n\nAlso, I'm afraid I might've pulled a lot of that out of my ass, so I'm happy to be corrected.",
"What you are hearing is that singing focuses more on resonance than accent. To get pitch and projection, a person holds their mouth in a different position than they normally use when speaking. \n\nWhen focusing on choral music, one is encouraged to open the back of the throat and widen the space in the mouth. As other people have said, vowels carry the musical tone. Vowels are encouraged to take up the space within the mouth and throat. This leads to a \"very similar\" accent between singers.\n\nIn fact, in France, I was encouraged to move nasal vowels into to full vowels. \"Faim\" (hunger) and \"pain\" (bread) were moved into \"ahhs\" instead of the nasal \"a\" sound. This provided better resonance (tone) and projection.",
"I'm guessing most of the people answering this question are American because I can tell you for certain that we are putting it on. Granted, most of us have been doing it so long that it's not a conscious decision, it's just that our singing voice has an American accent. The vast majority of the music we hear it's sung in that accent so we do the same. There are also singers who sung in their own accents, just fewer of them.",
"That is mostly the case with \"pop music\" which as a genre is heavily influenced by American culture. Also people trying to write music with global appeal tends to emulate American styles.\n\nIf you listen to slightly older music or regional \"folk music\" never intended for the global market the regional differences will be much more noticeable, lots of Irish folk tunes have a very distinctive accents, Reggie music is generally performed in a Jamaican sounding accent and so on.",
"It probably relates to how people sing. If you take singing classes they teach you specific ways to project your voice and make certain sounds.\n\nI've seen instructors from more than a few countries do this while traveling with study abroad kids in singing classes/choirs and so on.\n\nSeems to me its just music theory and so it all ends up sounding rather similar.",
"Singing and speaking are controlled by different parts of the brain. This has been observed in stroke survivors who lose the ability to speak, but can still sing and relearn to speak by singing. \n\nThe accent in your speaking voice is a part of the speech region of the brain, but does not exist in the part that controls singing",
"Pretty sure the Beatles and other 60's British bands were intentionally doing American accents to mimic the 50's rock and roll that they enjoyed. If you want to hear how British people sound when singing without the fake American accent, the most prominent band I can think of is Blur, although I'm sure you can find others.",
"As a former American choir singer I can tell you that while we are singing, we are generally singing in an English accent. This is done because that accent has more correct vowel sounds and prevent singers from going flat or sharp on notes. So in fact we are all mostly singing in the same accent.",
"Singing and speaking use different parts of the brain. Dr. Sacks has studied it and there's a TED talk on it somewhere. I knew an SLP who would tell her students to sing rather than speak. I tried it in the classroom and it really does help with stuttering and other speech problems.",
"This all has to do with vowel shapes. If everyone sang with the same vowel shape, we would all sound nearly identical. Here is a chart to reference:\n\n_URL_33_\n\nGenerally singer's should have tall (like \"aww\") shapes when they sing any vowel. That helps create and whole, round sound (like opera singing).",
"I was a singer songwriter when I was younger. I'm a Kiwi and sang with an American accent for two main reasons. 1. I love American rock music and sought to emulate it and 2. The American 'a' sound lends itself to rhymes much better than my own accent.",
"[Los Campesinos!](_URL_34_) from Wales are another band (pretty underrated) whose vocalist has an accent that really stands out. He's got a sense of humor that I identify with that side of the globe as well.",
"Whenever I sing Bowie tunes with my guitar, I try to sing with a slight British accent.......I found that hard at first.\n\nI did have a Brit tell me I sounded good doing it.",
"Hands Like Houses are an aussie band and have a weird mix of accents in their music. They alternate between very american and very australian a bunch within one song.",
"From my experience, when singing *along* with songs you just emulate the sounds even if it's not your first language so you automatically have the same accent.",
"I love how Adele has this very neutral accent but when she is done singing she says \"Fank you!\" and the cockney comes back out.",
"Most /r/britpop bands retained their accents when singing and a lot of post-Britpop bands like Keane, Elbow, and Doves also sing with a British accent.",
"i thought (from Billie's singing) Green Day was an English or UK band, till i found out they are from the USA.\n\nedit: spelling",
"Not all singers do this. [This is my aunt singing \"I'd Rather Go Blind\"](_URL_35_). You can clearly hear her Irish accent.",
"They seems to get worse if you listen to American country, their accents multiply by a factor of 10.",
"There are a lot of singers that still have very noticeable accents while singing. *cough ellie goulding cough*",
"After reading the comments, the reddit experts say this doesn't happen.\n\nIdiots. This entire subreddit is idiotic."
] |
Why do wet wipes clog up the sewage / plumbing system? | [
"Because toilet paper dissolves and wet wipes don't. Most things you flush down the toilet can break down into smaller and smaller bits except for wet wipes, female hygiene products, and similar products. If these get caught on something inside the pipe it can completely clog the pipe up and no clog remover is going to take it out, you will have to snake the drain."
] |
Why is it wrong to discriminate against people for their political beliefs but there is public outcry when someone is anti-gay marriage etc. | [
"This post is not asking for a layman-friendly explanation to something complicated or technical, so it doesn't belong here and it's been removed. Entirely subjective questions generally belong in /r/askreddit.\n\nAsking \"why is this wrong\" or \"why is this ok\" is inherently subjective and so it doesn't belong here."
] |
Why are Saudi Arabia and Iran are having a war in Yemen? | [
"Yemen has only been a single country for 25 years and fought a civil war in the 1980's. The central government is weak, the economy weak, an active al-Qaeda branch causes problems, and the various tribes follow different religions. The current unrest is a new civil war supported in part by outside parties. \n\nSaudi Arabia is interested in a stable neighbor and Saudi-allied government. Iran is interested in an unstable neighbor for Saudi Arabia and a new Iranian ally. The most dangerous branch of al-Qaeda is located in Yemen and is the primary reason for US involvement. \n\nProxy wars are preferable to real wars as they are less expensive, involve few of your own people dying, and harder to be blamed for. Proxy wars are strongly preferable to the weaker party who holds little hope of victory in conventional war. Iran has no chance of defeating Saudi Arabia in direct fighting. The Saudi military is superior and supported by the US, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Pakistan. \n\nSaudi is leading the current intervention and is supported by nine other countries including Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, Kuwait, UAE, Jordan, Bahrain, and Qatar. The US is providing intelligence support but I don't believe any money. Iran is supporting an insurgent group.",
"Same reason most wars were fought in the 20th century. It's about ensuring a sphere of influence.\n\nIf the Sunni side wins, it's another ally for the Saudis. If the Shia side wins, it's an ally for Iran.\n\nBoth countries have long been locked in a struggle to be the \"top dog\" in the region. Just look at the controversy over the naming of the Persian / Arabian Gulf."
] |
Why are tobacco companies allowed to continue selling products guaranteed to kill or do serious harm? | [
"Because it is worth a lot of money to the government!",
"Because it's not illegal for people to harm themselves.",
"They have great lobbyists. \n\nThey also spent a lot of money obfuscating the true damage that cigarettes do, by hiring scientists to study the subject of cigarette smoking and blow smoke (couldn't resist) into the faces of scientists who studied the subject more objectively. This (of course) was eventually overcome, but it's still neat historically.\n\nIt's billed as a freedom of choice thing."
] |
Tipped employees/tipped wages/etc/ | [
"Even with a tip credit, it is illegal for you to earn less than minimum wage.\n\nYour tips + wage must add up to minimum wage.\n\nIt's a way to pass part of the cost on to the consumer for employee wages. Not sure what the original reason for it was though."
] |
How do CEOs use their money if its all in stocks? | [
"It varies. \n\n1. A CEO only takes the \"$1 salary\" with lots of stock if they can afford to do so. So...in many cases, the money is indeed locked up, they just live off the rest of their money.\n\n2. You can sell some shares, assuming your stock is in a company that is reasonably liquid. This could be company buy-back, could be a private sale or could be on a public exchange.\n\n3. You get dividends. If the company pays dividends to shareholders, you get those. \n\n4. you place stock in escrow in exchange for a loan. If you're a pre-IPO mark zuckerberg banks will line up to give you liquidity in exchange for the relatively low risk that a shit-ton of shares will be convertible to cash at some point in the future.\n\n5. You get an investor who does a founder or shareholder buyout as part of the investment strategy (E.G. a PE firm or a late stage venture may buy from a general pool but may also be willing / interested in buying from existing shareholders.",
"Everything else said here is true, but I think the why will help it make sense.\n\nThe idea is you want to align the incentives of the CEO with the shareholders. When you give a CEO stock, and make him hold it for a period of time, then any increase in stock price is a direct increase in wealth for him personally. A decline in stock price is a decline in wealth for him, so he/she is personally invested maximizing the share price. It also helps reduce taxes paid.\n\nFor most people with wealth amounts of CEO's, most of their wealth is in assets (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc) anyway, so it's not an inconvenience to them the way it may be to other people. But to actually be able to spend the money, they do have to sell it at some point. The exception, of course, is if the stock pays dividends.",
"Most CEO types who receive a large portion of the income in the form of stock, or who were founders and hold large portions of stock, will typically have a selling program set up that sells X number of shares every month/quarter no matter what, which frees up cash for living/spending and also frees up money to diversify their investments. Even if the majority of their holdings are in their company they'd want to have some other investments in other companies, in bonds, in real estate, etc. to diversify their portfolio. By setting up a selling program that they aren't actively controlling, then they aren't open to accusations of insider trading or otherwise manipulating the stock for their benefit.",
"Part of their compensation is in stocks, not all. But if they want to spend that, they have to sell the stock.\n\nSince CEOs are insiders, what generally happens is that they schedule and announce their sale of stock. So they might say \"In three months, on this date, I will sell 20,000 shares of stock in the company\" and then they'll sell it for whatever the share price is on that date. This allows insiders to sell stock when they have information that could affect their decision."
] |
The definition of Liberalism | [
"Although amarkov is correct, I think a bit more can be said on this issue. Liberalism is broadly divided into two main schools: American Liberalism and Everywhere Else Liberalism (not it's actual name).\n\nIn the US, 'Liberal' is used as an opposite to conservative and essentially means anything on the left of the political spectrum in the US. To some it means government providing 'equality of opportunity', to some it means government interfering in private business and personal life/state's rights. It's definition has been changed from it's original one and now means something very different in the US to how it would be used anywhere else, but how that happened exactly, I'm not sure.\n\nOutside of the US, especially in Europe, the term is again used to contrast vs conservative, but in a somewhat different way. As parliaments and democratic systems began to grow in power compared to the monarchies of the countries in which they existed, they normally grew to contain two political 'parties', conservatives and liberals. Conservatives were generally old money aristocracy, and Liberals were normally new money businessmen who had made themselves through trade, the industrial revolution or something else. Liberals pushed first to be able to participate and then to expand their participation in the political process, and also to try to expand it to more people, regardless of their income. Conservatives represented the old guard, and favoured restrictions on the non-nobility - Liberals were opposed to these, and wanted a more Laissez-Faire style of governance.\n\nLiberalism in Europe, etc, means essentially being allowed to do what you want. It stands for the expansion of individual rights and freedom from undue restrictions. You can have social liberalism and economic liberalism - social liberalism normally encompasses things like the right to an abortion, the right to gay marriage, etc etc. Economic liberalism means low taxes and little government interference.",
"Lots of people use the term to mean lots of different things. There is no one true definition anymore."
] |
What determines if I bleed a little or a lot? | [
"The size/depth of the cut and where it is.\n\nYour blood flow and pressure.\n\nWether or not you have haemophilia."
] |
How does counting cards work? | [
"In blackjack, you are much more likely to beat the dealer using a deck that has more \"big\" cards (aces, face cards and 10's) and less \"small\" cards (2's, 3's, and 4's). One of the reasons for this is that the dealer *must* take another card when he has a hand of 16 or less, so the more high cards there are left in the deck, the better his chances of going over 21 and losing, while a lot of low cards means he has a good chance of getting a very strong hand, like a 19 or a 20. Another reason is that a lot of aces and 10's mean more blackjacks (two-card 21's) for players, which pay out more money than just winning the hand. Because of this, if you know there are a lot of high cards in the deck, you should bet more, and if you know there are a lot of low cards in the deck, you should bet less.\n\nThe easiest way to count cards is to just keep one number in your head. When a new deck is used, start at the number 0, and watch every card as it is played. Every time you see an ace, a face card or a 10 played, subtract one from your count. Every time you see a 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 played, add one. That way you keep a pretty good idea of what kind of cards are left in the deck. If your count is at -6, for example, you know that there are more small cards left in the deck than big cards, so you should make a small bet. If your count is +8, you know there are many more big cards left than small cards, so you should make a very large bet.",
"[Assuming the five year old is familiar with the basics of blackjack.]\n\nYou keep a running count like so: every time you see a 2-6, add one to the count. Every time you see a face card or ace, subtract one. Divide by the number of decks remaining to be dealt. The higher the count, the more you bet.\n\nIt works because small cards benefit the dealer, whereas big cards benefit the player. For example, if the remaining cards are rich in small cards, the dealer is less likely to bust his hand. So, the richer the deck is in big cards, the more you want to bet."
] |
If feminist truly believe in equality then do feminist believe that men should have paternity leave as well in the work place? | [
"Depends which feminist you ask. \"Femnism\" is not a unified, codeified set of beliefs, there are so many movements and groups and waves within feminism that there's no single answer to your question, and different feminist groups could argue for days over it..",
"I believe they do. \n\nMost enlightened countries do have paternity leave anyway (or parental leave which can be shared between both partners). Does your country not?",
"Depends on which group of feminists you're talking about. The so-called Third-Wave Feminists people tend to bash moved away from feminine inequality issues to the wider world of gender and sexuality inequality issues.\n\nMale paternity leave is a substantial issue and it's one feminist interests in Europe have been struggling with for awhile, but it's less out of concern for male bonding and more for workplace equality. Places with generous newborn leave still tend to have a cultural expectation that it's maternity leave. As a result, this makes women much more variable workers who might disappear for a few months. This means employers tend to only want women in roles where these disappearances can be easily dealt with so things like nursing and teaching remain female-dominated because they're less reliant on firm acclimatization. Feminists care because these traditionally female roles tend to be paid less. They push for men to get, and be expected to use, paternity leave to even the playing field.",
"Logically speaking, yes of course! If a baby has two parents (and a number of babies don't) then it shouldn't be just one parent doing all the parenting. Men should have bonding time too. Scandinavian countries, for example, give parental leave for both men and women. However, women do get more weightage in most scenarios because they're the ones who went through a difficult biological process and they're not just getting time to bond with their baby but also to heal their bodies. \n\nThis said, \"feminism\" is not a hivemind and includes men and women so it depends on who you ask. I personally have never met anyone who argued against parental leave for men on the basis of feminism but YMMV.",
"Obviously, Feminism isn't a monolithic entity, but a Google search for \"feminism and paternity leave\" does come up with a lot of different pro-feminist essays in favor of paternity leave. \n\nDo with that what you will.",
"As a yes/no question, this is removed as not ELI5 material. See [Rule 2.](_URL_0_)\n\nELI5 isn't for everything; this post may do better in a different subreddit."
] |
The Stock Market: How does it work and how do people make money off it? | [
"I'm going to start up a lemonade stand but I need 100$. So what I do is I say is that I'm going to sell stock in my store to make that money. It is worth 100 stock. Each is 1$ and each says that you invested into my start up costs and therefore you are part owner of my store. So you buy 10$, I put in 55$, the other 35 stocks are bought up by strangers. Since I own the majority I am owner of the company.\n\n\nCurrently I have 1 stand and make 100 bucks a day. I expand over 5 years and now I have 100 lemonade kiosks and each makes 1000 bucks a day. I have 100x more stores and each store makes 10x more. In a perfect world well the original 100 stock is now worth 10,000x more. So that original 1$ is now worth 10,000$. How do you get your money? If let's say you are happy with the amount you made, you say you're out of the business because you know lemonade is going out of style, so you sell your stock, you made a profit, and someone else can buy it up and choose to continue to investing in the store.\n\nBut let's say the new guy that bought 10 shares of the 100 stock pays the 10,000$, and his kisoks start going out of business, well the stock is no longer worth it because the kiosks are no longer making the money to back up the stocks and able to pay you back. So, new guy made a bad investment.\n\nOf course it's not that simple, especially because most are already established stock, but that's how shares work.",
"Company has stocks.(not all of them). You can buy those stocks(if anyone selling). Company also has value which determine how much are stocks worth. If you have a stock in company and value of company goes up, price of your stocks goes up. You can sell it fore more than you bought them, making profit. Opposite can happen, company value can go down so your stocks become cheaper, and if you sell them you loose money."
] |
What are the beliefs of the Church of Scientology, and why are they hated? | [
"It's a brainwash scheme that takes desperate people, isolates them socially, brainwashes them with some bad scifi, and then has them give up all their possessions, house, car, anything they own, as donations to the church.\n\nThey also take in celebrities, who get different kind of treatment. They get paid good dime for advertising their abusive brainwash scheme which attracts more desperate people to their church. These celebrities are essentially aiding in abuse.\n\nThe actual doctrine of the church is just bunch of scifi nonsense. The long story short, bunch of evil aliens sealed bunch of good aliens in a volcano, volcano exploded, and good aliens had their souls travel onto Earth, where they possessed primates, which turned into humans. The church then teaches how to connect with your alien self, called Thetan I think? It was initially a scifi book series by the church founder, but for whatever reason he essentially turned his fictive books into a church. Haven't read the scifi books myself, but the reviews I've seen would indicate they were below average, no particular highlights to them, good or bad.",
"Their beliefs and practices are not fully known, the system is a hierarchy built on secret knowledge. It is one of the reasons they are hated and seen as a cult instead of a legitimate religion. \n\nMost religions will come to you door and tell you everything they know about what they believe for free.\n\nAlso there have been many exposes on their coercive tactics for those that try to leave the organization. And people have even died suspiciously at their headquarters.",
"I hear so much about Scientology in the news and about celebrities having involvement etc. What is it?"
] |
Why do most of us forget our dreams? And some remember every minute of it? | [
"You remember your dreams vividly as soon as you wake up, but you begin forgetting immediately. Keep a journal next to your bed and the second you wake up, start writing down what you just dreamt about. Eventually you will remember your dreams in full detail and even begin to dream lucidly...which is pretty damn awesome.",
"It depends on when you had the dream. As you may know, you go through 90-minute sleep cycles when you sleep. These cycles are comprised of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-rapid eye movement (nREM) sleep. Most of the time' you're in nREM sleep, but you go into REM sleep for a little bit at the end of each sleep cycle. \n\nThough you can dream during both nREM and REM sleep, you usually remember your REM dreams better.",
"Maybe I am odd but I remember all my dreams (also keep a dream journal). I can also control my dreams and often having recurring dreams where as I may not being able to control what happens, I can decide what and what not to do in an attempt to change the dream."
] |
Why can't dogs and cats be tickled? | [
"They can. Many animals can be tickled. They just can't *laugh*, so perhaps you're not aware of it, but they can be tickled."
] |
How can adware companies run business operations that are based on such ideas as reinstalling malware? | [
"Legally, they can't. But when you're operating out of a small Eastern European country that won't extradite you and you make sure not to attract any attention in your own country, there really isn't anything anyone can do."
] |
Why are there only 12 notes in music? | [
"It is all about the chords.\n\nTwo notes played together sound pleasing when their waveforms line up nicely. Frequency ratios of 2:1 and 3:2 sound better than 13:9 or 23:17. 12, being divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, gives a lot of ways to hit these good ratios, in a way that 10 or 13 would not.\n\nAlso, there are some musical traditions that divide the octave differently, with 18 and 24 being a common alternatives.",
"[There are things called microtones that are not common in western music, but which have notes within the intervals of the 12 notes in western music.](_URL_0_)",
"You're asking a few different questions:\n\n > why there are only 12 tones in the canon of Western music\n\nThe most stable, and hence consonant, [frequency interval](_URL_4_) is 2:1 (octave), followed by 3:2 (fifth). The octave is so fundamental that we perceive it as being the same \"note\". A sequence of 13 fifths will [almost exactly match](_URL_4_) a sequence of 7 octaves, so discounting the slight mismatch in frequencies at the end of the sequence, there are 12 distinct frequencies derived from intervals of fifths. Since Western music favors consonant harmonies, these are the 12 most useful \"notes\" in any key.\n\nEach of those frequencies (with some adjustments) also becomes the basis for its own key center.\n\n\n > aren't there an infinite number of possible pitches, and moreover, an infinite number of major scales\n\nYes. And without musical instruments, a singer may start on any of those infinite pitches. But all physical instruments have physical limitations, some more, some less. The modern piano, being a totally fixed-pitch instrument, requires a [system of tuning](_URL_4_) where all the differences between pitch centers are averaged out, yielding 12 equally spaced notes in each octave.\n\n\n > How did we settle, for example, on a specific number of sonic hertz being a \"C\"\n\nThat [developed over time](_URL_4_), like many other examples of standardization. Even today there are a few slightly different standards.",
"The pitches are relative to A=440Hz, but they haven't always been this way. Back in the day, it didn't really matter what you were tuned to, so long as the whole orchestra was in agreement on it. Different countries and orchestras had their own standard tuning.\n\nHowever, in the last hundred years, we've been able to mass produce instruments, and create electronic instruments, so it seemed logical to have a standard. And it just turned out to be A = 440Hz. It is arbitrary (although 440 is pretty nice because it has many factors). In some countries, they prefer A=442, and some think that baroque music should be played closer to 415.\n\nThe reason there are only 12 tones is because of the Harmonic series. In ELI5 terms, the ratios of these 12 notes are approximately the most harmonious.\n\nAn octave is the most harmonious interval. In fact, an octave is so harmonious, it sounds to us like the same note. Why is this? Because an octave is double or half the frequency of the original note. There's a mathematical relation between these notes — for every vibration in the air of the first note, there are 2 vibrations in the air for the octave above it — [this diagram](_URL_5_) shows that the waves synchonise for every cycle of the red wave. The next most harmonious is the fifth interval, as in C to G. The 5th has a ratio to the original note of 3/2 — notice in [this diagram](_URL_7_) the waves synchronise every 2 cycles of the red wave. So there's a clear relation here as well. There are mathematical relations between all the 12 notes. The least related note is the tritone — as in C to F#. Looks how unrelated these [waveforms are](_URL_6_) — they don't line up at all. It is these mathematical relations which form the basis of our tuning system, and provide us with the notes we use."
] |
What is the difference between a "culture" and a "subculture" | [
"A subculture resides within a dominant culture. \n\nThe simplest example is probably the African-American subculture existing within the larger North American culture.\n\nSo you can see both are characterized by larger patterns: both eat at McDonald's, shop at Walmart, and watch the NFL on Sundays.\n\nBut then there are things that distinguish the African-American subculture, like the droopy jeans and hilarious content on twitter.",
"Just guessing here, but isn't a culture bound to geological locations and subculture not?\nExample: western culture, Japanese culture, are bound to the western world and Japan.\nRock n roll subculture can be found in every part of the world, but doesn't form a whole location wise"
] |
Why are sports contracts so outrageously high compared to avg worker wages? | [
"Professional sports make a lot of money. LOTS of money. The players feel that they should get a reasonable part of the money being made because they are the major reasons why people pay money for season tickets, buy jerseys and hats, or watch on TV. If your boss made millions of dollars off of your work, you'd want to be paid fairly for it. And the best athletes know that they can ask for that much money and get it.",
"It is economics. There's a ton of money in professional sports, and if you want your team to have the best change at winning, then you're going to fork over the money it takes to buy good players. If you don't, those players will go to other teams and help them win. Teams that win get attention and sell more tickets and merchandise.",
"> Is it just personal greed?\n\nThe team makes the money either way. So it becomes how much should you give to the players vs the owners. \n\nTheres no greed to it. Its a business like anything else. The sports teams are going to charge the most that people are willing to pay. People love sports and pay a ton. As such they make a crap ton of money. Players demand a fair share of it because well they are what make a sports team good.",
"Nobody has talked about wear and tear these athletes take on their bodies. Linemen in the NFL make a ton of money because they are basically sacrificing their knees for the rest of their life."
] |
is drug resistant bacteria evolution? | [
"Yes, it is. It's a perfect example of it. There's a bacterial population infecting someone, they take the antibiotics till they feel better, but not until they clear the infection. There's a few of the bacteria that aren't immune but slightly better at surviving. Once the person stops the antibiotics because they feel better, the infection come back but this time the population of bacteria is replicated from the few microbes that were stronger and so now the whole population is stronger. They infect someone else and we have to keep upping the anti on antibiotic strength but people keep repeating that process, making the stronger bacteria even better until we run out of something to use against them.",
"Yes, it's called selective pressure, by which case we selectively allow the growth of resistant bacteria by giving too much antibiotics. Bacteria under antibiotic pressure will replicate and that 1 in a million bacteria (some number I made up) will have a mutation which confers resistance to that antiboitic. If that antibiotic continues to be given, then that bacteria with the mutated gene (and hence can't be killed) will conitnue to survive and give off offsprings.",
"In a way, yes.\n\nIts not natural selection (the core process of evolution) but artificial selection. We (humans) are forcing them to evolve, and they are evolving."
] |
Why are there no heated snow shovels? I feel like this product is a no brainer. | [
"My experience with shoveling has taught me that wet snow sticks to the shovel, making it harder to move or throw the snow. A heated shovel would take normally cold, \"dry\" snow and turn it into heavy wet slush that sticks to the shovel.",
"Surely it's easier to shovel snow than water. Seems like the last thing you'd want to do is melt the snow before moving it."
] |
Why are cats terrified of cucumbers? | [
"Possibly the same reason as why many pet birds are afraid of arms/hands reaching towards them - because they vaguely resemble snakes which are a predator. And because it's unexpected."
] |
Why can we make synthetic oil but not synthetic gasoline? | [
"we can. it's just not cost effective energy wise or money wise.",
"Nazi Germany had [Brabag](_URL_0_) working on this. They had a fuel shortage but enough coal that they didn't care about the energy cost of the process. Generally it's more efficient to sell what you have and buy someone else's gasoline (distilled from crude oil)."
] |
Why don't we have the $3, 60-year LED lightbulb yet? Why aren't LED bulbs getting cheaper as promised? | [
"From what I understand, basic LED technology has been rather difficult to scale up to actual room-lighting. On a smaller, dimmer usages they're very efficient, but once you try to scale up to very bright outputs, you run into a few issues. As an LED bulb gets warmer, it will get dimmer, which is bad. Also, a bright LED generates a LOT of heat in a really small area, which can cause the systems to fail (they're using big heatsinks to try to solve this problem). In addition, the efficiency of the LED's decreases as things like current and output increase, making brighter LED's more prone to heat damage. Researchers have been making great advances in efficiency and output. As they push the technology PAST what is sufficient for practical use, the technology will start to become reliable and cost-effective to use on a mass scale.\n\ntldr; LED tech is great when it's small, but we run into a lot of problems when we try to make them big and bright. A lot of the cost goes into finding solutions to those problems.",
"I think mostly with the longevity and power savings combined, they only need to beat the incandescent by so much before the accountant/actuary tells them they can get more money for the product.\n\nSo, until we get a good old fashion price war."
] |
How come some pictures look better at than others, even though they have lower resolution? | [
"Lighting and visual 'noise' (or grain) are two major factors that affect the visual quality of an image in addition to the pixel resolution. Compression artifacts (when you save images in a lossy format like JPG) also affect the visual quality.\n\nAlthough lighting and noise do not affect the pixel resolution of the image, they do affect your ability to resolve detail in the image, and therefore effectively reduce the resolution in other ways.\n\n[This image](_URL_6_) and [this image](_URL_2_) provide visual examples of what visual noise looks like and how it affects the quality of an image.\n\n[This image](_URL_5_) and [this image](_URL_1_) and [this image](_URL_4_) provide examples of how different lighting and exposure conditions can affect the visual quality of an image and the ability to resolve detail.\n\nIn terms of compression artifacts left over from lossy compression image/video encodings, see [this example](_URL_3_) and [this example](_URL_0_).",
"Resolution doesn't measure beauty or artfulness or how important or powerful or meaningful or useful an image is. You can have a blank grey picture with a billion pixels or you can make Mario out of a few dozen. Without defining \"better\" more concisely there are any number of reasons why a lower resolution image might be \"better\" and I would argue there would be very little correlation if any between picture resoution and picture \"betterness\""
] |
What is or what are Dividends? More so relating to the financial world. | [
"It's a stock thing. \n\nSo: Stock. Right. So let's say I own a hot dog stands. It's a pretty killer hotdog stand and I'd like to expand but I don't have enough money to buy more carts. There's a couple different ways I could get this money, but I'm gonna go with issuing stock: I call a bunch of friends, offer them a chance to become part-owners of my hot dog business and create \"shares\" to divvy up the ownership -- say I create 20 shares valued at 10 buck each, I keep 10 for myself and each of my friends buys a share off me. So now the hotdog business has 11 shareholders with twenty ownership shares between them, and I have $100 bucks to buy a new hotdog cart. \n\nStill with me? Great. So, i use the money from the stock sale to expand my hot dog business, expansion's doing great, original joint's doing great, and a few months down the road I find myself with say, $2,000 in profit from my hotdog business. \n\nNow, I could put that money in the bank for a rainy day , or I could use it to buy even more hot dog carts. But let's say I don't want to do those things --- the locations i have at the moment are doing just fine but I don't think I'd be making any more by adding another one. If I don't want to hang onto the money or reinvest it in the business, then i can take it and divvy it up among the shareholders: $2,000 in profits split among 20 shares is $100 per share. I own ten shares and get $1,000; the rest of my friends own one share each and so they get $100 bucks. And that my friend is a dividend: When the profits made by a stock company are divided up among the shareholders. \n\nCertain kinds of companies are more likely to offer dividends than others. Coca-cola or AT & T are huge companies; with few worlds left to conquer --- they set some of their money aside for developing new products and so forth but at this point basically everyone in the world who wants Coke can buy Coke, so any profits Coke make it splits among its owners. A tech company on the other hand is less likely to offer a divdend because they're taking their profits and plowing them back into the business, hoping to expand quickly; people buy those stock in the hope that the company itself will be worth considerable more down the line and not to get a chunk of profits today."
] |
Why more games aren't made for OS X? | [
"Historically, Windows PCs and Macs had different audiences: business and techie types for Windows, novice users and creatives for Mac (I'm oversimplifying here, but you're five, so don't complain). \n\nIncidentally, this disparity is the basis for the [Mac vs PC series of ads](_URL_0_) from a few years ago.\n\nBut back to the point: until recently, video games have appealed more to techie types, who were much more likely to have PCs than Macs, so game developers (being techies themselves) would just develop for PCs and consoles. Put simply, the gamers didn't have Macs, and the Mac users didn't play games. Also, there weren't that many Macs around 15 years ago so there simply wasn't a business case for porting to Mac.\n\nObviously, things have changed somewhat with Macs and iOS becoming much more popular and more games being written for casual gamers, but the crossover hasn't happened (yet?) for hardcore gamers. \n\nThat's my take on it, anyway. Besides, can't you just run Windows on your Mac?",
"Windows and OS X are differently written. You could compare it with PlayStation and XBOX. Most games are developped for both consoles, but as you stated, just a few of games are playable on a Mac. The reason behind this is the marketshares and amount of users of OS and Windows. The PS3 and XBOX have (almost) the same marketshare and millions of users. For game developpers, it's profitable to develop for both consoles.\n\nHowever, the PC market isnt that \"equally\" divided. Approx. 85% of all pc's are running on Windows while only 7% are running on OS X. Therefore, its too expensive for game developers to create OS X games. There are simple too little OS X gamers.",
"If you look [here](_URL_1_) then it shows that windows is by far the majority of the market, this means that it is vastly more profitable to make software for windows than it is mac or linux so most of it is.\n\nAnother reason is that most games are made with directX, this is made by Microsoft and so it only runs on windows and can't easily be ported to mac or linux and if it was to be then it would have to be rewritten to use something other than directX so the games would basically have to be developed twice."
] |
what is the point in giving high ranking Nazi's like Eichmann or Himmler trials, when they are going to be found guilty no matter what? | [
"It's more about showing the world all their crimes, as well as giving formal closure to their victims and victims families. \n\nAlso, no matter how severe your crimes, the right to trial still applies",
"Especially with Nazi war criminals it was showing the difference between a *good* group of Nations and a*bad* group. The good group gives trials to even the worst of individuals, while the bad group will abduct, punish, or kill an individual without trial.\n\nA lot of it is PR for nations proud of their human rights policies. A lot of it is allowing closure. There's some public announcement of crimes as well as marking a delineation between war time and postwar time.",
"The Nuremberg trials straight after the war were somewhat about taking the moral high ground and parading the wrongdoers in front of the world. Some of the allies had had other plans. Before the war had ended Stalin had stated plans to execute German military officers *en-masse*, up to 100,000 killed without trial, a plan strongly opposed by Churchill. The Nuremberg trials focussed on the very top of the Nazi leadership.\n\nAnd many of those tried at the Nuremberg trials were found innocent on one or more charges, and some innocent on all including propagandist Hans Fritzsche.\n\nAs for the later trials, that go on to this day, it's to send out the message that no matter how long it's been, no matter where you are, you will be found and brought to justice.\n\nHimmler was never tried because he committed suicide.",
"If you start suspending the rules of law when you're 100% sure that someone is guilty, things start to get murky. There's possibilities for mistrials if rules aren't followed (means they'd have to go through expensive trials multiple times). Also, asking whether someone pleads guilty or not takes like 5 seconds. There's all the possibilities and implications and dangers of skipping important rules of law, all to save a couple seconds of time?",
"Himmler was never tried since he committed suicide shortly after capture.\n\nAnd if you look at the Nuremberg trials 3 of the 24 accused was completely acquitted on all counts and some where on some counts. \n\nAnd if you look at Nazi Germany, USSR and other dictatorships they have often had show trails. There is a reason for them as propaganda and a warning to other would-be dissidents. So even if guilt was certain there can be a reason for the trail."
] |
For disc copies of games, why must we pay full price for a new disc if the original becomes scratched or broken? Why can't we buy a replacement version that's cheaper? | [
"Most game companies do let you do that. Let you send in damaged disks for replacements in some warranty agreement."
] |
What is the point of inflation? | [
"Inflation and deflation reflect changes in the value of money. Like most everything in economics, these changes are governed by supply and demand. The supply that matters in this case is the money supply (which includes cash, checking accounts, and some other stuff), and the demand is (more or less) the size of the economy as a whole.\n\nSome real world examples:\n\n1. Germany needs a bunch of money to pay for various things after WWI, but is unwilling to raise taxes. Their government deals with this by printing a bunch of money. The supply of money goes up dramatically but the economy as a whole remains the same size, and as a result they suffered from a period of severe inflation.\n\n2. Zimbabwe kicked out all of their farmers. This causes their economy to shrink pretty dramatically while the money supply (initially) remains the same size. This also causes some pretty bad inflation.\n\n3. The US suffered a wave of bank failures at the start of the great depression. Because people's checking accounts and so on are included in the money supply this means that the money supply decreased dramatically while economy (at least initially) stayed the same size. This causes deflation\n\n4. Bitcoin is set up in such a way that the maximum number of \"coins\" in circulation is fixed while the total size of the bitcoin economy will (maybe?) rise over time. If people actually use bitcoin as money in the future, one would expect bitcoin to suffer from constant deflation as the size of the economy grows but the amount of money in circulation remains the same. \n\nAs far as the \"why\" of inflation, there are a couple of reasons why central banks like to set things up with a bias towards a mild amount of inflation every year:\n\n1. As /u/goraks mentioned, it acts as a \"tax\" on holding onto your money and gives people an incentive to either spend it or invest it, which is good for the economy.\n\n2. It acts as kind of a \"shadow pay cut\". In a recession it's useful to be able to cut the wages of the workforce but people don't like taking home less money. 4% inflation every year basically amounts to a 4% pay cut but since people don't perceive it that way it can be used as a sneaky way to cut worker's wages in bad economic times.\n\n3. For various technical reasons it's easier to get rid of inflation than to get rid of deflation, and so they bias things a little towards inflation so that the monetary policy tools will work better. \n\nAll of this stuff is super-simplified and ELI5d up, and I probably forgot some stuff too. If you have any more questions or want anything to be clarified I'll probably be around today.",
"Fundamentally, inflation gives everyone an incentive to spend and invest, because if they don't, their money will be worth less in the future. This spending and investment can benefit the economy.\n\n\nInflation reduces the real burden of debt, both public and private. If you have a fixed-rate mortgage on your house, your salary is likely to increase over time due to inflation, but your mortgage payment will stay the same. Over time, your mortgage payment will become a smaller percentage of your earnings, which means that you will have more money to spend.",
"There's not a point exactly, it's just an inevitable consequence of the way our financial system works.\n\nPeople and business often need to borrow money. That may be to buy a house, lease a car or expand their company. They need people to give them their money. Well, the person lending the money isn't going to just do it for free. They want a return on their investment. If they lend you $1,000 they are going to want $1,100 back or something like that.\n\nSo, at the end they have more money than they started with. When you add up all of this lending and interest you end up with a more money floating around 10 years down the road than you have today. This extra money causes inflation.\n\nA small, predictable amount of inflation isn't a bad thing. It lets people plan on what their money will be worth down the road and encourages people to invest and not hold on to their extra cash. The real problem comes in when inflation gets out of control and people can't possibly earn enough to keep up with inflation. That's something that government and central banks try desperately to avoid.",
"There are many factors that cause inflation, but there are two large causes.\n\n1) Demand can cause prices to rise. Imagine a small village that is far away. A new apple pie recipe has been discovered in the village and everyone in the village now wants to try it out. There is a limited supply of apples in the village, but demand has gone up. So the grocery store raises its prices on apples because it knows villagers will pay for it. Hence, inflation. This is called \"demand pull\" inflation.\n\n2) Cost push inflation: Imagine this same village. The nearby water well is starting to dry up, so the water company is charging more for water since it's becoming more scarce. Everyone needs water, and every business needs water to operate. So anything that's sold now costs more, because businesses have to pay more to get their water to make their goods. The rising cost of the raw material, water, is now pushing the prices of goods up in the village."
] |
With Colorado now allowed to legally sell pot on a state level, can the Feds still shut down the dispensaries? If so, what are the punishments for the seller and/or user that are in the store? | [
"The feds can shut down the dispensaries, but have indicated they will not, for now.\n\nThe punishments would be drug trafficking and drug possession.\n\nThere is an outside chance those charges could be overturned, if a federal court to a narrower (and IMO saner) view of the interstate commerce clause."
] |
Auction Hunters, are those guys really lucky? or are Americans just that forgetful? | [
"It's not really forgetfulness. Auction Hunters, at least at the beginning, bid on abandoned storage units. \n\nSay you lose your job and get one that pays worse. You can no longer afford your house, so you buy a smaller one. You declutter as much as you can, but you still have too much stuff that you can't stand to part with, so you rent a storage unit and fill it. A little while later, you lose your job again. You can't pay for the storage unit, you don't have any place to put the stuff. Eventually (based on the terms of the contract), the owner of the unit says \"you haven't paid in a year, I'm selling you stuff.\" And they do. I'm sure that 99% of what they find in those storage units is garbage that only the original owner would care about.\n\nAnother scenario: Grandma is forgetful. Grandma put a bunch of stuff into storage. She set up a bank account to automatically pay for the storage unit. Grandma died. Nobody knows about the bank account or the storage unit, because grandma was also a little paranoid. Eventually the money runs out, and the contents of the unit sold.\n\n-------------\n\nThose are just two scenarios. There's lots of reasons why someone would abandon a full storage unit. Largely it comes down to \"money\" or \"I haven't even looked at that stuff in years, I'm not going to pay to keep it any more and can't be arsed to move it myself\"",
"it's a scripted tv show.\n\nthe producer of the show puts stuff into storage units and the actors get to bid on them",
"I have met a guy a few years ago who went to storage auctions. His two car garage and most of his driveway was covered in sorting tables. He says that he barely makes any money on the stuff and most of it is junk. A few collectibles like comics and baseball cards are most of his income. A lot of the stuff he sells on eBay, Craigslist, and pawn shops.\n\nA lot of times he has \"mystery stuff\" he has no idea what it is or how to sell it. \n\nHe got into it after getting hooked on the TV shows, eventually roped his dad into helping him. In general he didn't seem too happy doing the auction stuff. - Maybe it was a recession job.",
"It's a fake show. Real life auction hunters will go decades between getting anything other than moldy old clothes and broken bicycles."
] |
Would I die if I drank the water found on Mars? | [
"Probably. Much of the dust on Mars' surface is composed of chemicals called [perchlorates](_URL_0_) which are highly toxic. If you were to drink water from Mars it would almost certainly have a lot of the stuff in there.",
"To be totally fair, there's a good chance you'd die if you drank from most water sources here on Earth, too. Ocean water is too salty to drink untreated.",
"Why are we trying to colonize Mars when the soil is toxic?",
"To my knowledge, we haven't actually found liquid water on Mars, only evidence that it exists. Absent of actually testing it, it would be impossible to know. Pure water from Mars would presumably be safe since it's just the same H2O we have here on Earth, but Martian water is doubtlessly impure in its natural state.\n\nAs it happens, the Martian regolith contains toxic perchlorate salts, so if those were dissolved in the water it would probably be unsafe.",
"Aside from the chemicals in Mars' dust/dirt. There have been suggestions that any running water on Mars will contain a high salinity volume. So you'd basically be drinking extreme sea water.",
"Yup. The water and the soil contain toxic levels of perchlorates. We've actually known this (at least, the soil part) for quite some time."
] |
What will happen when Windows XP becomes unsupported? Why will it suddenly become vulnerable? | [
"It won't spontaneously become vulnerable. It was already vulnerable, but every time a vulnerability is discovered, a patch is released to fix the vulnerability. Now the vulnerability will not be fixed.",
"An Explanation for 5-year olds: \nthink of a computer program like a game with rules. Everyone's playing by the rules and things are great, but then little Billy the trouble maker comes along and does something that makes the game unplayable. The rest of the people playing say \"Hey! You can't do that!\" and little billy replies \"It isn't in the rules!\" So the players tell the person who made the game and he puts out a new rule forbidding what little billy did. Well little Billy doesn't give up that easily and does something else that makes the game unfair for other people and again the players complain and a new rule is made. \n\nHowever, this game has become outdated so there's no one to complain to to make a new rule when little billy breaks something. So everyone is now playing a new game based on the old game but with even MORE things to do. So there's even more ways to bend or break the rules that little billy can cause trouble with.\n\nLittle billy can be a hacker, virus, bug or anything disrupting the operating system. The rulemakers (programmers) try their best to prevent this but the rule book is THICK and it's easy to miss these problems."
] |
Is there really any reason we still use the qwerty keyboard? | [
"The hassle to change to a new keyboard layout would be too great for them to justify any new keyboard layout. It works, well for that matter, so there just isn't enough incentive to switch.",
"It would be too difficult to switch. I've spent my entire life using QWERTY, and have become reasonably proficient with it, so have a huge number of other people.\n\nThere are some brave souls out there who've adopted other layouts - I hear Dvorak is vastly superior, but it does seem that only people who've got the luxury of getting to use just one or two computers that they have personal control over can realistically use it. As soon as you step out of your own little bubble and start using machines provided by an employer or in public, then you're back to using QWERTY - and businesses are unlikely to switch en masse, because they've already got hoards of employees who are used to QWERTY."
] |
Why do we feel so groggy when we first wake up, but after doing some exercise so much better and alert? | [
"Waking up in the morning is a dormant stage. After doing something such as push-ups, this sends more blood flow to the brain, as well as taking in more oxygen to spread throughout the body",
"Melatonin (your body produces it) signals your body that it's time to prepare for sleep, and it helps you feel drowsy. Two powerful brain chemical systems work together while you sleep (i do not know the names) to paralyse skeletal muscles during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (the state you are in when you dream). If you wake up during Rem these chemicals your body has released are still in your system and as a result, your body is still removing it which can cause you to be groggy and slow. (also been proven to be the cause of Sleep paralysis which is a temporary inability to move or speak that occurs when some people wake up during Rem).\n\nEdit : Added unknown names part",
"If you're also drinking water with a workout, hydration also has a significant impact on grogginess."
] |
Carried Interest | [
"A \"carried interest\" is a sort-of profit sharing compensation (traditionally) for managers of private equity (PE) firms and hedge funds. Before continuing, it helps to know what these two things are and what they do.\n\n* PE firms pull together a large fund of money from various investors in order to make a limited number of large capital investments. Traditionally, that means they buy businesses and run them for a number of years before they sell their interest (realizing a gain for the investors). By their nature, each PE fund is a years-long venture.\n\n* Hedge funds similarly pool money, but they invest it very differently, by actively trading on securities. So unlike the PE guys, the hedge fund guys are buying and selling assets all the time.\n\nIn either case, the manager(s) commits a substantial portion of his/her own capital to the fund. And for their services, the manager receives two things:\n\n* A management fee (a measley 1-2% of total capital committed), which is really just used to finance the expenses incurred in managing/investing the fund. It's not really meaningful compensation for the manager.\n\n* A \"carried interest,\" which is an interest in the return (profit) of the fund. This is as a percentage of the total return, which is taken after the investors' capital has been returned, and (often) after the investors' \"guaranteed\" rate of return has been paid.\n\nTraditionally, the carried interest is usually taxed as a capital gain (max income tax rate of 20% currently) as opposed to ordinary income (max marginal rate of 39.6% currently). Why? A number of reasons, including:\n\n* It's income from capital investment after all. I mean, at bottom that's what you're doing. The fact that the manager does it professionally doesn't change the fact that the transaction(s) involved are capital investments. Hell, the manager even kicked in his own cash, so it's a capital investment for him, too.\n\n* Ordinary income taxation doesn't really make sense, at least in the PE context. Here, you have this manager who's been tending to a single investment for five or more years, and then, suddenly, he gets a payday when the investment is sold and a gain is realized. Taxing that as ordinary income would hit him with a MASSIVE tax bill, which would have been much lower in the aggregate had a portion of the carried interest been taxed each year while he was managing the fund. But...\n\n* doing that would be impossible since the value of the carried interest isn't actually known until it is ultimately realized.\n\nI hope that clears things up. Let me know if I can be of more help."
] |
Why do zodiac signs and horoscopes exist? | [
"Historically, the stars were very important. Before we had GPS, or maps or clocks or calendars, or even *numbers*, they helped you navigate and told you what time of the year it was. \n\nBut at the same time, humans had no idea what stars were and why they behaved they way they did. All the knew is when a certain constellation was visible after sunset, it was time to plant. Or if they sailed to a certain star, they'd reach their fishing grounds, and if they sailed away, they would get back home. \n\nBeing intelligent and creative, it was natural for humans to try to come up with a reason behind the stars. Maybe that planting time constellation represented the fertility goddess. Or maybe that north star represented the god of the sea. Or maybe they weren't superstitious at all, and just made up little stories to help them remember. Either way, it eventually took on a life of its own and became a whole system of believe that had nothing to do with farming or sailing.",
"Ancient people were superstitious and clueless, so they made things up to comfort themselves. Modern people are superstitious and intentionally clueless, so they make things up so they don't have to think.",
"Human brains are adept to recognizing patterns and conforming with the implications. The brain needs a solution always and often consciously overlooks the obvious.\n\nCoined as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, our brains recognize the many attributes that are similar, while overlooking the many differences or wrong prophecies. When a horoscope says something of good fortune, our brains will be programmed to scope out the good fortune and forcibly make a connection between the horoscope and the scenario. From there, our brains conclude that it is not merely a coincidence, but there is meaning which consoles many people.\n\nIn short, we enjoy the comfort of \"knowing\" the answer because our brains constantly search for answers. Even when the answer is incomplete or incorrect, we tend to not over-think and accept the salience because it makes us feel good.\n\nWhy do they still exist? Marketing.\n\nCompanies will sell things that make people feel good (i.e. - drugs) because people like to feel good. When horoscopes are featured on a website article or as any other form, those websites get clicks, which means more advertisement exposure, which means more money, which means more profit, which means more horoscopes."
] |
Why does ice in a plastic bag end up making the skin wet? | [
"There's water in the air, it's called water vapor. Water vapor can't stay vapor after it cools down. It turns into water through a process called condensation."
] |
If evolution is driven by natural selection, will the future of human race be affected by modern medicine since more people that should have been phased out can now live and reproduce? | [
"Absolutly. The fact, that a lot of women today are not capable of giving natural birth is an outcome of this. \n\nIn earlier times, if a womens pelvis was too small to give birth, she and her child would (probably) have died. Today, she can get a C-section and she and her kid will live happily ever after.\n\nSome smart people, however, have suggested that modern medicine and technology *itself* is a new stage of evolution, because it allows us to adapt to so much more than just our \"natural\" human nature.",
"That's 90% accurate. In another time, if you were not at least somewhat intelligent, somewhat physically capable, etc. you would not be able to survive, and help your offspring survive. Today with modern medicine, welfare, warning labels and all sorts of idiot-proofing, people are surviving that probably wouldn't have survived. So yes, over time this will effect our evolution.",
"Humans (at least those in western society) are no longer subject to Natural selection like wild animals, but rather by guided selection, more like domesticated dogs.\n\nNatural selection would never have allowed the Pug to exist. However humans decided to breed for characteristics they found humorous. We guided the dogs evolution. Today we guide our own. \n\nSo yes. Remember, Evolution doesn't promote things getting better, it promotes traits that lead to breeding. \n\nI think you might enjoy the first 5 minutes of [Idiocracy](_URL_0_)",
"Well the fundamental question that should be asked is- does modern medicine make 'attractive' mates out of otherwise unsuitable or unfit people, because that's the essence of natural selection. I don't think it does. It's true that there's also a question of viability, but for every 'non-viable' person who is essentially saved by modern modern medicine (take the example given elsewhere in this thread of an unsuitable unborn child and its small-hipped mother who would both be saved thanks to a C-section) there's going to be a viable mother/child who is saved in the same manner. And assuming both of these examples make it to an unlikely adulthood, the fitter human will still be a more desirable mate and will have a better chance of procreating. \n\nJust look at how humans in general are living much longer, are much larger, are much taller, and these traits are being expressed throughout our species at a much greater rate than ever before. Presumably modern medicine has something to do with this.\n\nMaybe one could argue that longer lifespans make natural selection *even more apparent than before* So maybe modern medicine is even *speeding up* the process.\n\nI don't really think that natural selection is being suppressed the way the OP suggests, personally.",
"Natural selection still occurs. As an obvious example, many genetic diseases kill people before they can reproduce. Being smart enough to avoid fatal accidents also improves your chances of passing on your genes to the next generation. Even amongst adults who live through childbearing age, only 80-90% have children - that's a lot for natural selection to work on, albeit nothing compared to many wild animals."
] |
With water shortages increasing, why don't we use sewage water to water and fertilize our crops? Wouldn't the plants benefit? | [
"Our sewage treatment plant is state of the art and produces fertilizer/sludge that local farmers use on their land. One of the big issues with sewage treatment is the increased amount of drugs, mostly prescription, that come through the system. Some, I think are treatable, but not all of them."
] |
Why does the 1st pancake you cook on a pan always turn out bad? | [
"Because I'm terrible at making pancakes. For the record, the rest are no better."
] |
Why is it easy to spin something around your index finger one way and harder to spin it around the opposite way? | [
"It's just muscle memory. I can spin things both directions pretty easily. I just do it a lot."
] |
In music why are B# and E# notes skipped in a scale | [
"B sharp and E sharp aren't skipped. It's a lot easier to visualize on a piano. \"Sharp\" is up one key and flat is down one key. That is why say A sharp and B flat are the same note. One note up from B is C. C and B# are the same note, as are B and Cb, E# and F, and E and Fb. \nAs for your other question, it's a bit unclear but I think I get what you're asking. Everything sounds out of place/in place depending on what scale you are playing. All scales are based on intervals. A major scale is a whole step (two keys on a keyboard), whole, half (one key), whole whole whole half. If the scale you are playing is for instance in A major, C# and D fit into the scale while F# and G do not. Your ear automatically adjusts to what key you are playing in.",
"Because an E# sounds functionally the same as an F-natural.\n\nMajor scales go tone-tone-semitone, right? If you start on C-natural and start playing up the scale, D is a tone higher than your starting note. E is a tone higher than your D. F is a semitone higher than E, a smaller step.\n\nThere ARE scales that include an E#. When you write a scale, it must contain at least one of every note - one A, one B, one C, etc - so there are scales out there that would use E# to fill their E slot in that written scale.\n\nBut if you had two musicians and said to one of them “play me an E#” and then told the other one “play me F”?\n\nThey’d sound as though they were playing the same note. It would be written differently, but sound the same.",
"Because B# is C and E# is F. They are found in scales though, such as C#. I'm not sure why exactly there is no note between them, but looking at a keyboard, you can see that B/C and E/F are right next to each other. \n\nI'm not sure what you mean with the second part of your question"
] |
What's happening in the video of the guy directing a bug with a pen? | [
"We did this one in my high school science class. It's just something in the ink. It's color-dependent though. My teacher showed us the bug avoiding a blue pen but being unaffected by a red one of the same brand."
] |
the sensation of spicy. Do people who like spicy food have fewer or more taste buds that react to spice? | [
"A fraction of the population are [supertasters](_URL_0_) which means they are more sensitive to certain tastes.\n\nSupertasters sometimes [avoid spicy foods](_URL_1_) but taste is pretty malleable (acquired taste).\n\nI've also noticed that the people who enjoy very spicy foods somehow manage to break down the capsaicin molecule (responsible for the spiciness of chili) in their guts. Therefore, it's not spicy for them when it's coming out the other end (but it burns so much for me).",
"You got it all wrong.\n\nI used to be a wimp, eating anything remotely spicy caused me great pain. I would get angry whenever my siblings ate spicy cheetos because if I tried to eat even one then I would cry in pain for hours.\n\nAfter living desperately off college money eating nothing but beans and sriracha, suddenly I developed a strong tolerance to spicy foods. Today I'm able to eat habaneros with no problem.\n\nIt just shows you that tolerance to spicy food depends on if you're used to eating them or not. \n\nAs for the reason why people love spicy food, there's two very good reasons why they're amazing.\n\n1) Endorphin rush. Every time I eat an extremely spicy dish, I get this really amazing buzz like I just won a championship or just beat 10 people in a row.\n\n2) Peppers have their own aroma/taste that adds to the dish such as habaneros having a fruity flavor and others having a smokey flavor. For some it greatly enhances the fun of eating the dish but for others they find the pain too much so they just eat it plain."
] |
How does catwalk fashion turn into high-street fashion? | [
"High street retailers will look at what the capital-F fashion designers are doing--in addition to often employing a trend forecasting service to do it for them--and design their own takes on the trends they see. There's an economic advantage to going in the same direction as everyone else, because consumers will buy more if they see things that complement that season's purchases.\n\nObviously, there's a difference in price levels between the two market segments, so they'll often water-down the concept a bit (taking off some costly design details, moving to a lower priced fabric, etc.) as well as making changes to the design to fit their own label's aesthetic. At this stage they'll probably also consult their legal departments and make sure nothing is close enough to get them sued.\n\nFinally, due to the lightning fast turn-around time modern manufacturing and logistics high street retailers invest in, they can easily have their own garment on the salesfloor before the original designer.\n\nAlso, just some clarifications from reading this thread:\n\nSome clothing (including prêt-à-porter/ready to wear) shown on the runway is never meant to be sold. Sometimes the cost of producing the garments is too high, or the demand too low, and those particular garments are used more for marketing's sake to present a designer's mood for the season. An extended and/or reedited collection is presented to retailers in a showroom.\n\nHaute couture, on the other hand, you can think of as a marketing vehicle for the big Parisian brands. Though there are definitely customers, many of the houses do not profit from those collections of five-to-six figure dresses made custom for the client, but they make great photo-ops for the media.",
"Some cat walk fashion is not intended to become everyday fashion. There is a thing called haute couture which is really art that happens to be displayed on a person. The idea is to do way out there things almost ignoring that is is clothing.\n\nOn the other hand there is pret a porter (ready to wear)which is more like the stuff you eventually see in stores. Even here, it sometimes ends up being an inspiration for a concept rather than the actual clothing that people buy. For example certain colours, fabrics, use of zippers, length, layering, etc. can be ideas that make their way from the runway to walmart."
] |
How hard is it to create a software that zooms in on pictures without loosing to much information? | [
"Imagine you made a painting out of little colored plastic squares (a mosaic). To zoom in on the picture would be just getting closer to it. Would you see more detail? No, the individual squares would just be bigger and easier to distinguish from each other. There is no more information to gain by looking closer.",
"For single images the best we can do is a '[good guess](_URL_1_)' at information that is not in the original image. The results can be visually quite good, but you can't be sure they accurately represent details smaller than a pixel in the original image. Sometimes the guesses are wrong.\n\nIf you have multiple frames of slightly different images (like sequential photos, or a video) the you have more information to work with and you can resolve more detail.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Most images are bitmaps. Imagine a bitmap image as a grid of individual squares, lego blocks if you will. Every lego block has some information, most notably it's color.\n\nA 10 by 10 lego blocks bitmap image has a total of 100 lego blocks.\n\nNow let's say you want to zoom in so the picture is twice as big on your screen. The image is now 20 by 20 pixels. But hey, we still only have 100 pixels of actual information to work with.\n\nImagine if we took our 100 lego blocks of information but we started with a new plate that fits 20 by 20 lego blocks instead of 10 by 10. We can still fill the plate by skipping a space between each lego block.\n\nNow to complete the picture, we're going to guess what color the missing lego blocks ought to be based on the original lego blocks we did have.\n\nWe fill in the missing spaces and now we have a picture that is twice as big (zoomed in) compared to the original. But really, we guessed the color of half the lego's or pixels in the image. The more we zoom in, the more empty space we're going to have to fill in by guessing the right color for the missing pixels or lego's.\n\nThis guessing based on what information you have is called extrapolation and it's exactly what your computer does when you zoom in on an image.\n\n\nIncidentally we can get very good at guessing missing information. Take car licence plates for instance. We know that the only important things on a licence plate are letters and numbers. And as luck would have it, we only have 26 letters and 10 numbers that go on a licence plate. So even if we zoom in and get a blurry picture of a licence plate, we can still make a pretty good guess since those blurry shapes can only correspond to a total of 35 different shapes."
] |
Why does ice that has melted taste different than regular tap water? | [
"First, when water freezes, some of the gases are released, so the unfrozen water is not as aerated. Second, when water is frozen in many refrigerates, the oders in the fridge are taken into the water.\n\nSome folks put an open box of sodium bicarbonate (often Arm & Hammer baking soda) to absorb odors, but this may not be as common as when I was five. (grin)\n\nAre you crazy? I'm afraid I'm not qualified to judge that."
] |
Why do some sporting events start at odd times like 7:05 or like the Final Four games at 5:09, 7:54, etc rather than simply 7:00 or 5:00? | [
"It works better for TV. \n\nPractically all TV is run on schedules of starting at the top of the hour or the bottom. \n\nFor a sporting event, they want to have an introduction before the event starts. Sometimes they broadcast the singing of the anthems etc. they surely want to get some advertising in. \n\nThey wouldn’t have time if the game started right on the hour.",
"Some of this might be related to Turner Broadcasting (I know TNT has the NBA).\n\nBack when Ted Turner founded \"the Superstation\" in the 70s or 80s, he purposely had programs on his channel start at five minutes after (Either 7:05 or 7:35, for example), for many reasons. One was that if you were channel surfing, you may have missed the first few minutes of one program, but you could catch the start of a TBS show.\nAlso, it kinda kept you hooked, because if you started a show on TBS and didn't like it, you had already missed MORE of the show on another network.\n\nI don't know if TNT has kept this process up through the years, though.",
"Actually it's typical for ball games to start after the hour because network news on the radio was at the top."
] |
Can bacteria (and other microorganisms) be too fat or too thin? | [
"I'm sure a biologist can weigh in here and inform you on this subject much better than myself but the process of an organism becoming overweight, at least as defined in mammals, involves the deposit of excess adipose tissue, or fat. From some quick research, this capability also exists in many lower organisms, particularly worms.\n\nInsects have fat deposits as energy stores and the larvae of various species of insect become fat before developing into adults, with an organ called the fat body surrounding them both as a protective layer and an energy store. The fully mature adults are generally protected by a layer of chitin instead. Even if insects and other lower organisms are capable of building up excess fat deposits (I think they are but I don't know for sure), I imagine their consumption of food is generally instinctive and the urge to over-eat like humans and some other mammals doesn't arise.\n\nInterestingly, I found [this article](_URL_0_) where worms were exposed to a huge array of chemicals, some of which caused them to become fatter or thinner. Note that these chemicals are not consumed by the worms as food, but alter enyzmatic processes involved in their metabolism. Studies like this can be used to understand more about human metabolism too as the biochemical processes that occur in even these simple organisms are similar to those occurring in humans.\n\nAs for single-celled organisms like bacteria, they contain 'fats' in the form of lipid bilayers which make up the cell membrane and other cellular structures (our own cells also contain these) but if a bacterium were to build up excess amounts of these lipids it would probably just die.\n\nDisclaimer: I don't actually know anything about this topic but your question got me interested and I decided to do some quick research. I'd be interested to hear from others who are more qualified.",
"If by obesity you mean subcutaneous fat, then no. Microogranisms typically lack the required physiological structures to produce and store fat in that way. Other creatures, such as plants, may store excess energy as starches.\n\nThere's a lot of variety in terms of size and shape in the microbial world. Some cells are long and thin, others very round."
] |
why don't we have a picture of our face on credit card? | [
"I used to have a debit card back in the late 90s that had my picture on it. I don't know why they stopped doing it but they did do it at one time. It could be people didn't want their picture on the card or maybe the banks didn't want the extra expense.",
"Because all credit cards are premade with half the numbers as blanks. When you order a card, they run it through a scanner and the remaining numbers has to be pressed on along with your info on the black strip. To attach a photo would mean that each card be made individually and thus drastically increase the cost and decrease the efficiency in which they are delivered.",
"You have to consider who would it benefit to add pictures and how much would it benefit? For the card holder you are not responsible for fraudulant charges. So if someone got a hold of your card you just report it and a rep will go through the recent transactions with you. Anything you didn't charge isn't your problem the Credit Card company takes care of it. So there really is no advantage to the end user. For the Credit Card company it would reduce fraud but at thte same time it adds a lot of expense custum printing cards with each persons face on them. As well it adds hassle to the end user that may discourage them from using thier cards as much. So the bennefit of less fraud isn't worth the extra cost and potential declined usage. As well the average cashier at Target doesn't care enough to properly check pictures.",
"Some banks do add photo ID to their debit cards. Mine does (credit union), and it's come in handy periodically when I've been required to have a 2nd photo ID somewhere.",
"They do offer such cards. I've had one of [these](_URL_0_) for something like 10 years. I think I had to fill out a form and mail in a passport-style photo.",
"I still have one. But so much credit card fraud these days is done online that it wouldn't help.",
"I have a credit card with my picture on it. It's a Costco Amex card."
] |
Why does the US Government keep on raising the debt ceiling incrementally and passing stop gap funding bills? Why don't they just make the ceiling higher by a huge number so government shutdowns happen less often? | [
"Because politicians are douche bags. The idea is that if they regularly bring the debt ceiling up, they have a wedge issue to use to fund raise, to bicker over and the use as a bargaining chip for other legislation. They friggin' passed the budget that is causing the debt to increase and then fight over raising the debt ceiling?",
"You're talking about 2 different, but related things. A \"shut down\" occurs when Congress does not pass (or the President does not sign into law) appropriations bill(s) to keep the government funded. \n\n & nbsp;\n\nThe debt limit is the amount of debt the U.S. allows itself to incur. So if we reach the debt limit and do not raise it, the U.S. would be forced to pay its bills with whatever revenue it has on hand instead of borrowing more money.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nSo, the U.S. can pass a long term spending bill authorizing funding for the federal government for a long period of time. If we hit the debt ceiling, we would only pay for those obligations with cash on hand. \n\n & nbsp;\n\nOR, The U.S. can shutdown the government without even getting close to the debt limit.",
"...or they could just pass a law that says that the Department of Treasury can take out all loans necessary to effectuate Congress's budget.\n\nBut then the \"out-of-control spending\" legislators will have one less chip with which to bargain later on.",
"The debt ceiling is a charade. If you can raise it, it's not a ceiling, it's political theater."
] |
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