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How do they release HD movies that were out decades ago? | [
"Because the film originally used had higher resolution than the standard HD formats anyway. Quality 35mm film has a horizontal resolution of approximately [4096 pixels](_URL_1_), which is about twice the resolution (and four times the pixel count) of the [1080i/1080p](_URL_0_) HD format.",
"Imagine getting a VHS quality video, then expanding it to the size of a cinema screen. You realise that the quality would be grainy/pixellated due to the fact you have just stretched an image of a small resolution, to a large one.\n\nWhen tv's were produced in the 90's they were often at a resolution similar to that of a video, so the quality was produced to match what was needed. However since the advent of HD-TV's, they are at a much higher resolution, which could be matched to what you would have found in a cinema.\n\nHowever you couldn't put that image on a cinema screen and expect the same quality. Original copies of the movie were produced at a much higher resolution than early videos, which you are likely comparing your experience to.",
"Movies have been recorded with gear that makes amazing images since the 80's. However, transferring that to a medium available for viewing is where the problem lay; there wasn't an HD standard really until recently. And, it's not like they throw the raw footage away; they simply reassemble it in a hi def format.\n\nFor older movies, a programmer comes up with an algorithm (set of procedures) to which a computer touches up the picture. Image stills that don't work with the algorithm (for many reasons) are individually touched up."
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Where are the colors that a human can't see? Is my wall secretly another color? | [
"The electromagnetic spectrum of light is very, very long. We call colours the wavelengths that we can see with our eye. But there is a lot more in the electromagnetic spectrum than the range between 390 and 700 nm. The wavelength is a particular feature of the wave, imagine a sinusoidal wave (a nice smooth curve that starts at 0, goes up to 1, down to 0, continues to -1, returns to 0). The distance between the first and last 0 is called the wavelength. It can be a nanometer (Xrays), several hundreds of nanometers (visible light), it can be several meters (radio). And I'm talking real distance. As in the wave starts at the wall and ends 1 meter later (and then it repeats itself). Probably you've heard of frequency, frequency is the inverse of the wavelength. Long wavelength, low frequency; short wavelength, high frequency.\n\nThe first colour we see is red (700 nm), before that we call light infra-red. Then we see all the colours of the rainbow ending with violet (390 nm), beyond that we call light ultra-violet. A few species can see a bit in the ultra-violet range. It is believed that insects choose certain flowers because of their pattern in the UV, and not by the bright visible colours that we see.\n\nIn total, you would have (in increasing wavelength):\n\ngamma rays - X rays - UV - visible light - infrared - television and radio waves.\n\nEdit: your wall totally emits infrared radiation, because it is at a certain temperature. It will emit less than you, unless your wall is crazy hot. This principle is why nocturnal vision cameras work. It is electromagnetic radiation, yes, but it's not a \"colour\".",
"I am not color blind but I am not very color sensitive either. Women tend to see more colors or be able to recognize more subtle differences. So it is probable that your wall is painted from two different cans of paint that are \"different\" but not enough for you to notice. It would also be possible to intentionally mix the paint so that they are sufficiently different that my sister would notice but I would be oblivious and say they are the same.\n\nHere is a good article on the subject.\n_URL_0_",
"So first of all, there's no such thing as color.\n\nThe phenomenon you call color is really the excitation of different parts of your eyeball, as interpreted by your brain. Different wavelengths of light excite your retina in different ways, and your brain interprets that as different colors. But in the absence of an eye, just a world out there with only blind creatures walking around in it, there is no color. There is no color *out there in the world* really, because color only happens inside a brain. \n\nOur eyes and brains understand a specific wavelength range, and our eyes don't respond to light outside that range. Other animals' eyes and brains understand different ranges, some higher, some lower. \n\nWe don't even really know if non-human animals consider colors colors. There's evidence that in different human cultures, the different language we use to describe colors actually alters how we perceive them. So a dog, without language at all, we have no idea how it conceptualizes color, or even IF it does.\n\nAnd different physical materials have different patterns of light wavelengths that they reflect (which our eyes pick up, and our brain interprets as the color that each different material \"is\", although it's really NOT that color, that's an interpretation happening in your brain). And certainly they reflect wavelengths outside our range of perception, so an animal that could see that wavelength would perceive a color (assuming animals perceive/conceptualize color at all, which we don't know that they do) that we can't perceive, when they see that wavelength.",
"Hi! Neuroscientist here. See my other comment response in this thread for a detailed explanation. Short version, yes, your wall is secretly many other colors. You can DETECT many wavelengths of light, but not *tell them apart*. If you could, you'd be able to tell the chemical composition of things by sight."
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Neural Net "dreams" | [
"They are using a very large neural network model that was used to classify images into categories.\nIts probably a convolutional neural net which looks for small features in the image by \"scanning\" it.\nThese learned features are pretty much stored inside the neural network. which it sees them those neurons fire producing a high output for that category.\nThey did many different experiements and didnt publish how they did all those images. but in many they tell the network what output they want then force the network to work backwards to change the image into an image that would produce the highest output for the category they requested. So if they told it this image has to be an animal the network barfs out all the animal parts it knows onto the image. That way when the image is shown to the network again it produces a high output for animal.\nThe tons of little pictures of different sizes nested with in each other come from the way convlutional layers are stacked."
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Why are added sugars so much worse than natural sugars? | [
"> Wouldn't it be just as bad to eat an excess amount of natural sugars?\n\nYes. Eating an excess amount of anything can be bad for you. There is nothing inherently \"worse\" about eating something that has added sugar instead of natural sugar. So long as you are eating the right amount for your body, it will be good for you. Similar goes for fat or other nutrients.\n\nDon't ever let the word \"Natural\" fool you. \"Natural\" does not equal \"healthy\" and Artificial does not equal \"Unhealthy\".",
"Added sugar can *be* natural sugar. Too much sugar is bad. Added sugar means they added sugar, i.e. more sugar. More sugar potentially means a quicker path to 'too much' sugar, because many modern diets are pretty thick with sugar.",
"Natural sugar comes in things like fruit, which also has lots of fiber, which helps your body absorb it slowly, at a rate that it can properly manage. Refined sugars (which are chemically pretty similar to natural sugars - it's not like they're totally different things) usually get added to our foods in amounts completely out of proportion to the fiber content. They get absorbed very quickly, which causes your body to overreact and overproduce the hormones that control how we use those sugars.\n\nThat causes all sorts of problems throughout the body. It makes you feel hungry even as you're actively turning all the excess calories you just ate into fat, it fucks with the immune system, it even increases the risk of dementia in old age if you regularly put your body in this state.\n\nNote that it's not about the type of sugar, it's about the amount and the rate. Starchy food will cause the same problems if you don't eat them with enough fiber. Likewise, even healthy things like apples will cause this problem if you remove the fiber (leaving just the juice). The reason you hear about natural sugars being good is because people commonly confuse the specific type of sugar (natural's not really any better) with the way that it's consumed (artificially concentrated and added in high quantities is much, much worse).",
"Natural sugars are in proportion to each other and to fibre and other food components. Eating them triggers metabolization at the appropriate rate to keep your body chemistry in balance.\n\nMost added sugar in the US is high fructose corn syrup.\n\nSucrose is made up of simple sugars, most commonly glucose and fructose. Fructose is more fat-producing than glucose, and is only metabolized in the liver. Glucose triggers insulin production, which is used to aid in inserting glucose into cells.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSo depending on artificially added high-fructose sugars means that your liver is oversaturated with fructose without being provided the other materials required to properly metabolize it. As a result, not only does most of the fructose get converted directly to fat, but the liver is poisoned in the process, and your insulin production is completely messed up.\n\nNormally in sucrose metabolization, the break down into glucose and fructose happens fairly evenly, triggering an appropriate amount of insulin for cellular absorption. When you introduce extra fructose in the chain, this means that the balance is off, meaning the body is not producing the right levels of insulin compared to the levels of glucose and fructose being produced.",
"Technically speaking, it isn't any better or worse. Your body can't tell whether a sugar occurs naturally, or has been added to the food item.\n\nThe reason \"added sugars\" are under scrutiny now is that there is very compelling evidence that it's the excess sugar, not the excess fat, that is driving the obesity epidemic. \n\nDuring the 80's, when the FDA started pushing the low-fat food policy, manufacturers started adding sugars to food to replace the flavor lost when lowering the fat content. Coupled with the discovery of high fructose corn syrup - cheaper to produce than imported cane sugar - it started a trend of loading up manufactured foods with sugar and sugar products.\n\nThe problem isn't the *type* of sugar, it's the *amount consumed*. Sugar is in everything at the supermarket these days, and manufacturers use tricks like combining multiple sweeteners to hide the amount of sugar they are using.\n\nA good example: those fat-free greek yogurts that are all the rage these days - they have almost as much sugar as a candy bar. But people think they are healthy because they are high protein and low/no fat.",
"I'm guessing your question is really more about the term \"No added sugar\" on products.\n\nThis is mostly just advertising, the idea is to get to to think it's a healthier option, when usually it's got just as much sugar in it, just from a different source.",
"Sugar in any form is not healthy for you except in very small quantities. Way, way smaller quantities than us Americans eat in our daily diets. There really is no benefit at all to eating sugar in the modern diet. Sugar is also very addictive.\n\nThe latest science is discovering that it is sugar that is responsible for the obesity, diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer's epidemics in the USA and the world. Sugar is the cause of plaque build up in the arteries and brain and NOT fat as we have been taught for the last 50 years. Yes, the scientists and doctors have been teaching us the exact wrong way to eat for the last 50 years. How long do you think that will take to change?\n\nBig Agra is starting to fight the release of this information and is trying to muddy the science just like the cigarette industry did with smoking 50 years ago. The food industry is fighting this tooth and nail because almost all processed food has added sugar because sugar is addictive and keeps us coming back for more. It helps that sugar is empty calories without fiber so we will never feel full overdosing on sugar.\n\nOkay? (As he steps off the soapbox.)",
"The real difference is between eating fruit and eating the same amount of sugar without fiber. The fiber basically allows the sugar to slowly absorb unlike added sugar. If you absorb the sugar too quickly your body gives you a bigger rush of insulin making you store fat."
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Difference between 32bit and 64bit | [
"Think a 4 lane highway (x32) vs an 8 lane highway (x64). The cars are the information. The amount of lanes does not effect the speed of the cars.\n\nPicture 8 cars going down each highway.\n\n8 cars on a 4 lane highway, the car will have to go in two rows of 4. The second row will get there after the first row.\n\n8 cars on an 8 lane highway, all car can get there at the same time.\n\nNow picture 1000 cars on either highway. By the time the last car sent gets there on the 8 lane highway, the 4 lane highway would have only been able to deliver less cars.\n\nEdit: it's also kind of like a garden hose (32) vs a fire truck hose (64). Both can have the pressure increased, but the actual output at the same pressure, would be much higher on the fire hose. Increasing the water pressure is like getting a faster CPU. but the 32 or 64 bit motherboard can only transfer so much at one (thickness of hose).",
"Imagine that I sent you a letter in the mail.\n\nOur standard size paper is 8 1/2 - 11. What if I told you I could send you a letter, with DOUBLE THE SIZE of that sheet?\n\nI would be able to write way more on that \"double size\" paper. Every letter I sent to you would have double the words, and double the information.\n\nWhen a 32 bit piece of information gets sent, it gets sent like a piece of mail. When we introduce 64 bit, we essentially double the \"letter size\". This allows us to transmit more information with one packet (letter)."
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If I got a lot of extra sleep last night, and very little sleep tonight, will that balance out and leave me well rested on Saturday? | [
"Your body does best with a consistant amount of rest. The extra sleep will likely help get through the long night, but it is unlikely that you'll wake up feeling well rested.",
"No. Sleep is a bit like charging a battery. You can do it until you're fully rested, but sleeping longer won't let you \"overcharge\"."
] |
; hardbacks and paperbacks | [
"In general, hardcovers tend to be more expensive, as They cost more to produce. Hard cover books are more durable than paperbacks. The hard cover allows for fancier cover work in the form of engravery, reliefs, stiching, ect. as well as a jacket, that provides additional art. I think hard covers are more satisfying to hold, and look better in your library."
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If binary is a deterministic process how are computers able to so randomized operations/calculations? | [
"Usually they're *pseudo-*random number generators. They're actually deterministic, but they're random enough for most purposes. Typically the process is seeded with something like the current time so that the deterministic process starts from a different place each time and you don't get exactly the same results every time.\n\nTrue random number generators have to use an external source of randomness, like the decay of a radioactive sample or the timing of your keypresses and mouse movements.",
"For instance using sensors (i.e. analog input): Temperature, air humidity, mouse movements, microphone noise and so on."
] |
What exactly is REALLY going on in the American political scene right now? | [
"We have a controversial president. He didn't win the popular vote but because he won the right states to win, he beat his opponent. Some argue that he's crass, sexist, and racist and doesn't know what he's doing. Some argue that he's incredibly smart. Some argue that he won because of Russian hacking. Some argue that he has secret ties with Russia that dictate his actions. Some argue that the Russian story is made up by his opponents.",
"You're asking two questions:\n\n1) The United States political scene is Late-Stage-Capitalism/Corporatism as [warned by Dwight D. Eisenhower](_URL_1_) accelerated by the flood of money into politics with the dam break of Citizens United combined with a shift in the DNC to Clintonian 'third way' [neoLiberal](_URL_0_) focus coupled with the GOP's shift to [astroturfed](_URL_2_) Tea Party corporate protectionism/tax theft.\n\n2) The current Executive Administration has scandals based on complex relationships that are being [uncovered](_URL_3_) and a bellicose lack of interest in doing anything but denying and squelching questions. As the House and Senate are dominated by GOP loyalists, investigations are being further denied and rebuffed."
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Why our bodies are more sensitive to wind when we are wet. | [
"We sweat to release heat from our body. Sweat evaporating takes heat with it. When we are wet, the water is taking heat from our body, too. As it evaporates, it cools us down. Wind removes heat as well, as it is almost always colder than our body. Wind plus water just removes far more heat than either alone.\n\nIf you were to be in a cold bath and get out into hot wind, they would cancel out a bit, and as the water evaporated you would start to feel warmer. In a hot bath getting out into hot wind, you would immediately feel warmer."
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How are LCD/LED TV screens made, and so reliably? | [
"So there's actually 2 questions here, what the production process is, and how to get rid of dead pixels. The first one is pretty complicated, it'll take too long for me to describe it, but I'll describe the second one. This is highly simplified. (I used to work at a LCD fabrication plant...yes, taking bare glass in and putting LCD panels out. So there will be some personal anecdotes in this, not purely explanation. Sorry.)\n\nFirst, preventing particles from landing on the screens during production. Basically, the screens are made in clean rooms. A single particle around 3-5 microns wide has the potential to kill a pixel (make it permanently bright or permanently dark) if it happens to land on the wrong place on the screen during production. So these clean rooms are really really clean. I remember when I went on a tour of JPL and they were bragging about how their clean rooms where they assemble satellites were class 100,000, meaning it only allowed 100,000 particles that are 0.5 microns or larger per cubic foot of air. Well, the clean room I worked in was rated at class 10. (We had our doubts about if it was *actually* class 10, but that's what the design spec was.) Humans are the dirtiest objects and the biggest source of contaminants in an LCD fabrication plant, so we went into the clean room area only when necessary, and went in a full head-to-toe clean suit. The machines are highly automated, so we go in basically when there's problems or for preventive maintenance, etc., but otherwise try to stay out of the clean room as much as possible.\n\nSecond, there are inspection machines that specifically look for defects on the LCD panels during production, and also testing machines that directly test the wires that make up the LCD panel (also looking for defects and other problems). Using that information, the dead pixels on each panel is then repaired. Sometimes they are outright repaired to be regular functioning pixels. Sometimes, when that's not possible, the pixel is killed and rendered permanently dark. This is because the human eye typically will not notice a small dark dot on a lit screen, but will easily notice a bright dot on a dark screen.\n\nOnce repaired, the LCD panels are sorted into different grades, for example (these are not actual values) an A grade might mean that panel has no dead pixels at all, a B grade might mean that it has at most 3 dark dead pixels, a C grade might mean that it has at most 5 dark dead pixels and 1 bright dead pixel, etc. The panels are sold according to grades; for example, Acer say might buy 100000 panels with 80% A grade and 20% B grade. From the brand name's standpoint (Acer, Vizio, etc.), lower-grade panels are cheaper (increasing their profits), and they're gambling that the return rate on them will be low enough that their reputation won't suffer. (Many people won't even notice dark dead pixels if there's only a few.) The worst panels are thrown away in-factory so they never see the light of day.\n\nSo how can this be done? Well, at the beginning LCD panels *did* have a lot of dead pixels. It's that over time, manufacturers gradually figured out to make the clean rooms cleaner, and developed more effective ways at detecting defective pixels and repairing them. At this point, such methods are well-established in industry, thus leading to very low defect rates.\n\n\nTL;DR\n\n1. Clean room and air particle control: Make sure the production area is very, very clean, preventing particles from landing on the panel.\n\n2. Inspection and repair procedures: For each panel, find where defects are, and if possible, fix them before they leave the factory.",
"I can't say how they're made but i do know that they do throw out a lot of screens that don't hold up to quality standards. Plus a lot of the time a seemingly minor defect would just break the screen entirely so those don't even see the light of day\n\nA lot of times manufacturers recoup the losses on the panels that aren't high quality enough and sell them as lower grade panels or as cheaper units. Those $100 wal-mart TV's aren't exactly made from the cream of the crop, even if the cream of that crop still sucks.\n\nThere was a big craze a few years ago of people buying monitors that had literally the same screens as apple cinema displays ($1000 monitors) for ~$300 because the panels in them didn't fit apple quality control standards, were sold for cheap and got slapped into barebones monitors by no-name korean companies.\n\nAlso side note , LED is a fantastic misnomer because LED tvs and LCD tv's aren't the jump in technology they are made out to be. They sure as hell are an improvement, but not really in image quality. Before LCD backlighting was feasable screens used cold cathode lamp lighting. LED's make much less heat, take less power,and are generally more reliable than cold cathode lamps, but the LCD panel on top of them is really just the same thing and can still be shitty and produce a low quality image.\n\nThere are screens where each pixel is made of LED's, OLED screens, but i don't think there are many television sized panels like that. it's mostly been a thing relegated to cell phones because of the difficulty in mass producing TV sized screens. Don't confuse it for AMOLED because AMOLED uses a matrix of oled pixels on top of a traditional LED backlight but i think those have the same production problems as well\n\nthis is probably way more than you wanted to know about screens and I'M NOT EVEN DONE cause there's still different types of LCD screens *hovers mouse over WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?*"
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Why can't I use my Canadian passport in America when I have dual American-Canadian citizenship? | [
"Most countries don't recognize dual citizenship. They don't outright ban it, but they don't care what other countries think...first and foremost, you are their citizen.\n\nSo to the US, you are an American, how Canada feels about you is irrelevant. Americans must enter the US with a US passport. It is probably true they just assumed you were a Canadian, and since it is easy for Canadians to get into the US, they didn't hassle you.\n\nYou could revoke your US citizenship, but it probably isn't a great idea:\n\n* it is a lot of hassle\n* it could make it harder for you to enter the US\n* you would lose the automatic right to work in the US, which could eventually be a big deal to you",
"I don't know specific laws but I'd say for the sake of not dealing with political bullshit that you just get an American passport and carry them both with you when connecting flights are in USA. Sucks, but that's US Border Control for you :s",
"A Passport is a proof of citizenship . So you need to carry two if you have two citizenships: making some sort of hybrid one would require too much cooperation for nations to manage. Passport management is a fucking pain for every nation"
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Why does it take Android OEMs so long to get new versions of Android to their phones? | [
"One of the biggest parts of it is that every phone has a slightly different kernel (the core of the OS). Yes, it's all Android, but the specifics are tailored to that specific phone's hardware. If you took the version of Android running on your Galaxy S5 and tried to run it on my Nexus 4, for example, it wouldn't work. That's why every device on the [factory image download page](_URL_0_) has a separate link.\n\nThus, carriers have to make sure that the new version of Android is running well enough on their specific devices to warrant a release. Top that with the fact that release testing is hard. I was a software quality assurance intern for a company and I release tested apps, which was tedious enough. I couldn't imagine testing the entire operating system :("
] |
How does 'getting used' to spicy food actually work? | [
"When you repeated eat spicy food you're over stimulating the receptors that sense heat. The receptors deactivate themselves so they can better handle the heat. It's kind of like having an annoying younger brother who you eventually just decide to start ignoring instead of dealing with.",
"This is just a practical tip to use if put in a situation where you need to eat spicy food you aren't used to. I'm from Lousiana and grew up eating boiled crawfish seasoned with red pepper etc.. when someone would make an extra spicy batch, the trick was to eat until your mouth started burning then stop for a while & let your mouth \"sweat\" without drinking anything. Once the burning stops you are good to go. This goes along with the idea that you allow your receptors to become desensitized.",
"There is a chemical that transmits pain in your nerves called Substance P. It is synthesized in the nerve and helps you sense pain. [Capsaicin interferes with its synthesis](_URL_0_) and reduces the ability to feel hot, so when you eat hot food a lot, it depletes Substance P and doesn't hurt as much. Your nerves get tired of screaming, so they stop.\n\nYour brain will also release endorphins to counteract the pain, and this is similar to morphine. Some people get pretty spacey, but it clears up pretty fast. Nevertheless, there are claims that you can get addicted to hot food, partly because of this.\n\nIf you go a long time without eating hot food, your sensitivity will return.",
"I know this one! :]\n\nThe heat receptor explanation is good, but I think this is better: With repeated exposure, your body learns that the pain of spicy food is an indicator that pleasure is coming. For the small amount of pain caused by spicy food, the body releases a lot of endorphins (a natural opiate--pain killer). Thus you learn that the pain is a \"good\" signal, and so less painful.\n\nThis also happens with other tastes, like the bitterness of beer and caffeine. Ultimately, your body learns that the bitterness predicts the pleasureful effects of alcohol or caffeine. Thus, people learn to actually *like* the bitterness, out of anticipation of other effects.",
"This is an interesting question that I am not sure is understood completely.\nI will start with what I know about this subject and others can perhaps fill in more details.\n\nThe compound in peppers responsible for the heat sensation is capsaicin.\nSome nerve cells have a protein on their surface, TRPV1, that can bind capsaicin. Binding of capsaicin to the TRPV1 protein causes the nerve to signal to the central nervous system.\nThe nerves containing the TRPV1 protein are involved in pain and heat detection. Thus activation of the TRPV1 protein with capsaicin causes a heat impression.\n\nNow, if you keep on eating capsaicin, the ability of TRPV1 to signal heat decreases. There are short and longer term processes. The ability of TRPV1 to transmit the signal, or the amount of TRPV1 on the nerve cell surface, will decrease. This is a short term process, I am not sure how long this effect lasts.\n\nCapsaicin in high doses is also used to completely destroy nerves with the TRPV1 protein. I presume these nerves can grow back but I am not sure. Whether the dose in hot food is enough to destroy nerves in your mouth is something we actually debated recently in the lab. \n\nThe wiki page on TRPV1 has more info but not quite ELI5 format.\n_URL_1_",
"Not sure what more I can add:\n\n* The thing that makes food 'spicy', a chemical called capsaicin, works on the same cells (receptors) that are stimulated by heat. They are called TRPs or \"Transient receptor potential\" channels, because when the chemical touches them, it 'channels' heat into each cell*. That heat is the spiciness you feel on your tongue for instance.\n\n* This is a good thing, as heat is normally bad (think about being burned); so we are very sensitive to the chemical that is in spicy foods like chilli peppers. The heat causes the cell to release our own natural painkillers, in case we are getting burned. It also causes us to sweat (so we cool down), and to go red faced (the blood comes closer to the skin so the heat gets out of our bodies faster).\n\n* However, the more and more these channels are used, the cells think they don't need to be SO sensitive to letting the heat in, because clearly its just something they need to ignore. Its very much like moving to a hotter country; eventually you get used to the heat and don't notice it anymore. \n\n* The cells on your tongue pull these TRP channels inside themselves, much like pulling up a drawbridge, so all the heat cannot pass into the cell. So you've less channels for the heat to pass through. That is how we 'get used to it'.\n\n* Edit: people are going on about the psychology vs. physiology of intolerance. They aren't exclusive things; we all start out with different 'pain thresholds', but all the other things above are the exact same regardless. One of the big things is chilli is addictive & euphoric (see below).\n\n*heat isn't heat in this case, its actually electrical energy from the movement of charged sodium, calcium and potassium ions (and to a lesser degree, Chlorine ions) across a cell membrane through the TRP channel. The 'heat' is the chemicals released internally in the cell in response to the activation cascade (i.e. cytokinins etc.)\n\n*BONUS ROUND 1*: capsaicin is put into bird feed to deter squirrels, so it burns their mouths. Birds however don't have TRP channels in their mouths so they aren't affected.\n\n*BONUS ROUND 2*: the effect of eating chillis is addictive, and can make you feel euphoric (at least a little after the burn). The painkillers, called endorphins, are released in the Central Nervous System after being activated by pain ('nociceptor') cells in response to 'feeling the burn'. Endorphins work on 'opioid receptors' in the brain; the same ones stimulated by drugs like heroin.\n\n**Source**: Me, I'm a BSc Neurophysiology graduate who specialised in Chilli, and whose supervisor discovered the 'cold receptor'. :) I'm now a psychology lecturer though (cause I was interested in the addictive effects :P)",
"Literally almost everyone I've heard respond is incorrect. Capsaicin activates an ion channel called \"TRPV1\", which leads to an influx of calcium into neurons in skin tissue containing TRPV1 which provide \"nociception\", the perception of noxious stimuli such as heat and chemicals. This leads to activation, producing a sensation of heat that is also painful, but over-activation will result in a calcium-dependent programmed cell death response. The death of these \"nociceptor\" neurons reduces your sensitivity to capsaicin, allowing you to tolerate hot peppers better. Most cells do not express the TRPV1 ion channel, and do not respond to capsaicin. However, mast cells (a resident immune cell in tissues) will respond to substance p (a pain-inducing peptide secreted by these nociceptor neurons in response to TRPV1 activation) and secrete histamine (among other chemicals) which causes tissue inflammation.",
"I was raised in spicy foods. I've always loved them. I found through my personal experience that when your body gets used to spicy flavours, you start to taste the hidden flavours behind the overwhelming spice. For example. I put an ass load of Scotch bonnets in my curry. And to a normal mouth that equates to pain. For me, there's a great sweetness to Scotch bonnets that blends really well with the rest of the Curry. Also, culinary school grad here.",
"Is there a way to get your body used to the...other side...of eating spicy food?",
"Capsaicin is the main activator of the receptor TRPV1. Over time and exposure to capsaicin, the expression (the amount) of the receptor increases, meaning higher amounts of capsaicin are needed to get the same effect.",
"Not ELI5, but according to this, _URL_2_ , the answer is \"With chronic exposure to capsaicin, neurons are depleted of neurotransmitters, leading to reduction in sensation of pain and blockade of neurogenic inflammation. If capsaicin is removed, the neurons recover.\"\n\nSo, capsaicin causes pain, you stop feeling it after awhile as long as you keep eating spicy food. If you stop eating spicy food, the pain comes back.\n\nI once knew a neurologist who told me that the nerve cells were actually killed with too much exposure resulting in permanent immunity to spicy food. Dunno.",
"There is another fact that is being overlooked. Spicy foods, particularly naturally spiced foods,(not chemically spiced foods) typically have a high vitamin c content. For example one chilli pepper contains 109.1mg of vitamin c, where as a medium orange only has 50mg. That is double the content for a fraction of the mass. So the body releases endorphins when consuming spicy foods so you want to eat more to get more of those vitamins.",
"I always laugh when you white people can't handle spicy food. I know a guy that exhales spice fumes upon eating taco bell hot sauce",
"I noticed this when I started eating thai, mexican, and indian every week. Your spice tolerance goes up, but not your asshole tolerance.",
"Follow-up question - does your butthole get \"used\" to spicy food the same way?\n\nLike if you love spicy food on the way in, but your next day's shits feel like excreting lava, will you eventually \"ignore\" them the same way?\n\nN-not that I'm asking for me. For a friend.",
"Capsaicin depletes Substance P, a neurotransmitter, from pain receptors. Less substance P, less pain. Capsaicin is used for topical pain relief for this reason. It's even been placed inside knees after knee replacement surgery to decrease pain.",
"Easy! One day you're a little bitch, and then you're not.",
"Your tongue builds a tolerance level but your butthole never does.",
"My friend at work gave me a piece of a dried pepper that was the second hottest pepper ever. I ate it and immediately ran outside with tears snot and drool dripping from my face. Absolutely was the hottest thing I've ever eaten. I got in my car and drove to my parents house which is really close to my chugged cold milk which only sorta helped on contact but after I swallowed the full gulp it was back to intense burning. Now before I ate that is say I was not afraid of spicy, but things were still spicy. Like I'd get thia food at medium spicy level. Or I could only eat a few hot chili's before having to put away the jar. But ever since I had a piece of that dried pepper from hell nothing has been too spicy. At thia restaurants I was the spiciest food they got but it isn't that bad anymore. And I can sit and eat the same hot chili's that sent my fiance to the emergency room for acid reflux like they are cherries. Want a higher tolerance? Just go destroy your tongue! It'll be fun :)",
"I can't even taste spice! I have never gotten the burning sensation in my mouth before! Does anyone know why this happens? Its never bothered me but it has just been a strange phenomena in my life that I've never really questioned.",
"Lawrence of Arabia summed it up about extinguishing a match between his fingers:\n\nWilliam Potter: Ooh! It damn well 'urts!\n\nT.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.\n\nOfficer: What's the trick then?\n\nT.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.",
"Just keep eating it until it doesn't bother you anymore.",
"Some of it is psychological. I have a higher tolerance to spicy food than my friends do, because I have dry mouth and find spicy food stimulating and it gets my eating juices flowing. But I still think it hurts me just as much as it hurts them, but then again, pain is a harder thing to measure.\n\nOn that topic, though capsaicin sensitivity mostly only goes away if you eat it as a child. People who only start eating spicy foods as adults won't build up as much physical tolerance (based on self-rated pain) as people who ate it as children (usually in lollipops-the sugar makes the hot sensation dull).\n\nThat only explains capsaicin tolerance, though. It's hard to find information on other spices... But I do know that my relatives from Laos could not stand eating radishes. Maybe since they had the capsaicin tolerance since childhood, they never built a psychological tolerance to spiciness?\n\nIt does seem that piperine stimulates TRPV1 like capsaicin.\nI can't find out anything about allicin, but allyl isothiocyanate (radishes, wasabi, mustard, horseradish,) is picked up by TRPV1 and TRPA1.\n\nTRPA1 is inhibited by caffeine, so maybe the difference between my family here from the midwest and my family from Laos is that... we have a caffeine problem. It might have nothing to do with region at all, they might just have healthier coping mechanisms... (I can only find coffee consumption data for that area from 1990 onwards, which is 15-20 years off...)\n\nTRPA1 also picks up the spiciness from cinnamon and hydrogen peroxide(did I mention the coffee problem?).\n\nSo, deactivation of receptors from caffeine, childhood training, and whether or not you even like eating it.",
"In the mouth, pain signals are emitted by the brain when the chemical Capsasin is detected; this is the \"spicy\" taste (since we do not have taste buds for spicy). As you continue to eat more spicy foods in your life, you will build up a tolerance to this pain, and therefore the signals become weaker, making you not feel the heat as much. \n\nIn order to relieve yourself of the burn, do not reach for water. Capsacin in a non-polar molecule and will not dissolve in a polar molecule such as water, so this is a fruitless effort. Instead, reach for something else non-polar such as milk or a beer. This will quickly dissolve the chemical and the pain will go away",
"Capsaicin produces pain because it has a similar chemical composition as the axons of pain recepters, so when other pain receptors (nociceptors) come into contact with capsaicin, it \"unlocks\" the pain signal. The nociceptor neurons that send and receive pain signals can only become active so many times, so they become damaged, and after a long enough period of time your body does not replace them as quickly, so you have less of them, and ergo less pain.",
"From what I understand, spicy food strips away an enzyme or protein in your mouth over time, and after prolonged exposure, the body/mouth either stops producing it as long as you maintain eating spicy stuff, or it gets weaker. That's why after you eat something spicy after a long time of not eating spicy foods, it feels like it's 10 times as spicy, because that tolerance has faded due to increased levels of the enzyme/protein.",
"* To a degree, very spicy food is still very spicy to me, but I've grown an appreciation for it\n\n* It's sort of a game: how hot can I order my Thai without taking away from the enjoyment of how delicious it is\n\n* Hot doesn't pair well with breakfast cereal, but it does pair well with Indian, Thai, and Mexican food",
"I remember eating habanero hot sauces around age 10. So hot it made my ears burn. Now, almost 30 and going strong. I find now that when eating something extra spicy, my mouth will burn for the first 1-2 bites, then it's almost like a switch is flipped and it loses it's effect.",
"Once something becomes familiar and is no longer considered an unknown or a threat, you become desensitized to it. I think it's similar to the way you get used to certain smells. I'm sure you've noticed certain scents \"lose\" their intensity after you've smelled them for a while.",
"Part psychological. Def about finding things u like that are spicy and adapting to the wonderful taste If u really wanna go all the way in. But I love spice food",
"Follow up question, if I may that is... It's there any actual evidence of something akin to addiction to spicey food, or is it simply the placebo effect?",
"Jalapeños ad a lot of flavor to things too. I had some bomb ass nachos a few days ago and they were better with jalapeños.",
"Tell you what though, as your taste buds' resistance to spicy foods get better your 'roids get worse",
"You're simply building up a tolerance to the allergen. The allergic reaction to capsaicin is the spiciness.",
"If I eat spicy food every day, when will I gain immunity and stop having turboshits?",
"Grow up in Louisiana. You are acclimated from birth.",
"You clench your asshole and harden the fuck up."
] |
Why can't we dispose of nuclear waste by putting on a subduction tectonic plate to sink it into the earth's core? | [
"It would work. But the subduction plates move at the same rate that your toenails grow, or thereabouts. So it would take years and years and years for the waste to disappear. Years that highly radioactive/toxic material is sitting on the ocean floor, polluting the water and killing nearby organisms.\n\nNot to mention the difficulty in getting the waste there, which is not a tivial task. It would have to be placed carefully by professionals, as well as transported safely to the location by ship.\n\nIt's sort of like saying, \"why can't we fire radioactive waste into the sun?\" We can. There is no meaningful amount of crap we can shoot into the sun that would make it care. It's just getting it there is enormously expensive and if a rocket explodes in the atmosphere or on the launch pad (which they still do, from time to time), it'd be an enormous mess.",
"One thing to keep in mind is that water itself is actually a very good radioactive shield. I'm pretty sure I saw something somewhere where they showed it is actually safe to swim in the radioactive storage pools, the radiation only goes a few feet through water. The problem is that of contamination. If the barrel leak, and the actual material gets absorbed by plants, animals, etc. That spreads the contaminant around. Or if it gets into drinking water that you drink, you no longer have the benefit of the shielding.",
"Not everything on the subducting plate is subducted. It's quite common for the stuff on the upper portion of the subducting plate to get accreted to the overriding plate. So not only would you need to be operating in very deep water, you'd need to be drilling very deep boreholes into the seafloor to store the waste. This might in turn create problems dealing with hydrothermal fluids at whatever level you place the waste, and the effect they'll have on your containers. \n\n[This](_URL_0_) is a chunk of seafloor that was in the trench off California, when there used to be an active subduction zone there (it was replaced by the San Andreas Fault zone, which is not a subduction zone). It failed to be subducted and now forms a hill in San Francisco. Also note what happened to those rocks; those layers used to be perfectly horizontal. Imagine a waste canister being subjected to that. It gets [worse](_URL_1_). The complex in San Francisco includes not just the sediment cover but a good chunk of the lower reaches of the subducting plate as well.\n\nThis is why engineers look for places that are geologically stable to stash the waste. Geologically active areas are messy.\n\nOf course, how long it would take for this all to happen, and whether that's enough time to wait out the radioactivity of the waste, is unclear. \n\nPeople also worry about waste being erupted at the zone's volcanoes, but this is unlikely, as it's generally thought to be mostly the water, not the heavy elements, that leach out of the subducting slab. In any event even if it did erupt, it would take a long time, the waste would be diluted during the process, and not all of it would erupt."
] |
Why are foods associated with times of the day? | [
"Not scientific at all, just a possible observation.\n\nImagine it's 1910. You don't own a refrigerator. When you wake up in the morning, what seems fastest? \nGoing out to get eggs from the chicken coop, milking a cow, and eating some leftover bread (or even baking some fresh bread). \nSlaughtering a chicken, defeathering said chicken then roasting the chicken for several hours. \n\nIt's likely certain foods became morning foods just because of their ease of access in the morning. Since people didn't exactly have refrigerators, everything had to be eaten fresh. Wake up, get some eggs from the chickens for breakfast, pull a few potatoes out of the celler, grab the milk from the porch and that's your breakfast. Run down to the store and get some cheese, stop at the bakery for some bread, run to the butcher and grab a roast for dinner start cooking at one, five hours later serve dinner leave just a bit left over and make a quick sandwich to throw in a lunch pail for the next day."
] |
- Why do I see green patterns of flashing light when I press in my closed eyes? | [
"Basically you can stimulate photoreceptors in the eye with pressure, as opposed to light. The stimulation causes you to see something, in this case a green flashing light pattern."
] |
How does a Tesla vehicle "see" the car AHEAD OF the car in front of it? | [
"> Taking this one step further, a Tesla will also be able to bounce the radar signal under a vehicle in front - using the radar pulse signature and photon time of flight to distinguish the signal - and still brake even when trailing a car that is opaque to both vision and radar.\n\nsource: _URL_0_"
] |
Why the Xbox One included what was used in 4Chan's latest exploit | [
"This particular set of instructions is not a single feature of the Xbox One, but the linking of a couple of features together to prouce an undesired outcome.\n\nAccess to a developer console is rather common and whether they intended to leave this access in the shipped product is unclear to me. It can be useful to have lower-level access to the system to repair problems which might occur, so having a strange method of accessing it (to keep people from screwing things up) is not too uncommon.\n\nThe rest of it is simply asking you to add a command to reboot the system into the boot process making it impossible to fully start your system (and thus fix the error). Just like how having the ability to delete files from your computer is good and having access to your system files can help an expert fix your computer is good, using your file deletion on your system files is generally not a good idea."
] |
Why didn't the Nazis attack Switzerland? | [
"For a bunch of reasons: \n\n* It would have been difficult to drag their tanks in there because Switzerland is, mostly, surrounded by mountains. Mountain fighting alone is pretty deadly but one of the major advantages that Germany had early in the war was the speed of their tank attacks. \n* Swiss had a conscription process so every man was a trained soldier with their weapons at home. \n* The Swiss had set up every bridge and tunnel to be destroyed in case of attack. \n* It's not a fun air war in Switzerland. Crossing the alps requires lighter loads. \n* There isn't a lot of military benefit in owning Switzerland. The Swiss really couldn't go on the offensive and Germany had all of the surrounding land. \n* By the time that the Germans were operationally ready to attack Switzerland they were already fighting on both sides of Europe. They really didn't want a launching site in the middle.",
"Not Worth it. \nIt is surrounded by mountains on all sides, and heavily millitarized to enforce their neutrality. Any invasion would pass through many Valleys that would be effective killzones, letting Switzerland tie up large amounts of the very limited German manpower.\nIts doesn't have much of value either, not compared to the cost in Manpower, equipment and time to invade.\n\nAlso, neutral Switzerland as a good source of income for Germany, letting them pawn off valuables gotten as spoils of war, or who were seized from \"undesirables\" like jews or gypsies to fuel their war machine.",
"Not worth it. Switzerland wasn't in a position to get cocky anyway, and Germany had more pressing matters to attend to.\n\nSure, if they had beaten the Soviets, then the British would probably fall, and then, neutral countries like Switzerland and Sweden would probably be given an ultimatum of \"join us or be invaded\", and have little choice but to accept.\n\nLuckily, Stalin and Churchill held their lines.",
"short answer: Switzerland wouldn't be very easy to take relative to the gain of conquering it, relative to the base case of leaving it alone and focusing on other objectives.\n\nAs others have mentioned Switzerland is very mountainous and hence difficult to attack, especially with tanks, some aircraft and mobile troops which is where Germany had it's strength.\n\nSwitzerland would not provide strategic value if they captured/defeated it, because:\n\nIt was not a coastal country like norway (another small neutral country Germany did invade).\n\nIt did not have significant industrial assets to use or manpower for armies/labour, or decent land with ethnic germans to take over like Poland. \n\nIt did not pose an offensive threat, like France or the Soviet Union.\n\nThe only value to capturing switzerland would be in the wealth contained in it's banks and the access to the markets it provided... but that was already provided by a neutral switzerland open to trade.\n\nWhen you consider goals you need to consider the opportunity cost of what you could have achieved without that action: Germany needed to mobilise to fight in the largest conflict in history, the eastern front. It also needed to build the Atlantic wall and air defenses against the western allies, help out Italy in Africa, enforce order in Greece. After a couple of years they also needed to sent additional troops to defend against a possible invasion from the US/UK. These were all critical strategic requirements for which Germany was already spread too thin, so they weren't going to send a few hundred thousand troops to invade a mountainous country for no real strategic gain.",
"I would say there was no need for it. Since Nazis fought west and east there is no need to add another country to your list and Switzerland being neutral posed no threat. You can say that with their neutrality they were an ally."
] |
Why does it take so long to cancel when you're copying files? | [
"When you hit cancel, it's un-copying whatever that has been copied."
] |
How am I able to make it home safely after being blackout drunk? | [
"As your car gets older, you can expect certain things to stop working, but you don't know the order in which they'll stop working. If you car's brakes stop working, that's bad, you're not going anywhere. But if your headlights stop working, it's not going to prevent you from getting home.\n\nBeing blackout drunk means the mechanism to create memories stopped working, but most other things were still functional. You just couldn't create a memory of what you did. Maybe you're quite functional in that state. It's possible your memory shuts off after fewer drinks than others, and it takes more drinks to shut off your ability to walk or stay awake.",
"Being black out drunk is like someone erasing the middle of a movie. You go back and watch it again and it starts out fine, then there is this big blank spot and near the end, you don't know how it happened, but everyone is happy and the problems are all wrapped up. \n\nWhen you are drunk, you are still you. The things you know, the choices you make are still what drunk you would do, just no long term memories are stored about you doing it. It's like the end of the movie. Obviously things happened to get them to that point, you just don't know what it was."
] |
why are there so many reports of incidents involving incompetent police officers, what does it take to become one? | [
"we only hear about the bad ones. in reality there are FAR more good cops than bad"
] |
Why do eyes sometimes change color depending on the day/time of day? | [
"Eyes do not change color, outside of a slower change as a result of certain diseases. The differences you see are caused by varying light levels, angles, etc. The same way a shirt can seem blue in one light and green in another."
] |
Difference between United Kingdom, Britain and England | [
"So if you look at [this map](_URL_0_), you will see that England is pink, Scotland is blue, Wales is red, Northern Ireland is yellow, and the Republic of Ireland is green.\n\nThe United Kingdom is a country made up of England, Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Great Britain is the island that contains England, Wales, and Scotland. Ireland is its own country."
] |
why fingertips hurt for a few days after cutting nails a little too short | [
"The top of your nail is dead, so it doesn't hurt to cut it.\n\nIf you cut too short (to the quick) you cut the part of the nail that is alive (and grows the nail), this will result in pain and possibly bleeding."
] |
Why do we "run out" of laughter after a laughing fit? | [
"I don't understand why every person in this sub assumes that everyone experiences exactly what they do. I have no idea wtf you are even talking about here."
] |
How did they do those human transformations at the end of Michael Jackson's 'Black or White' music video? | [
"They used \"[Morphing](_URL_0_)\" software to take 2 images, plotted out the similar parts of each (nose, eyes, mouth, etc...) and blended them from one to the other."
] |
Why, when baking, do you have to add different ingredients at different times, using different techniques? | [
"Cooking is just science that makes you poop.",
"Well, for instance, butter is a solid at room temperature.\n\nIf you were stirring a bowl of room temperature batter and just dumped melted butter in it, it might form clumps as it re-solidifies, so you pour it slowly while stirring so it mixes evenly in.\n\nWith wet and dry ingredients, often there is a leavening action going on (rising, like bread, cakes, etc.). This can start to happen as soon as the wet and dry ingredients are mixed, so you mix them separately so you can combine them and start using them quickly, rather than having air bubbles form as you stir and get popped by your spoon, making the food not rise properly once it's baking."
] |
How radiation and radiation poisoning work? | [
"depends on the exact type of radiation. there are two types, particle and electromagnetic. bit cause problems by breaking apart molecules in our cells, but how they do this is a bit different.\n\nElectromagnetic radiation, which is photons/waves of energy, (visible light is a type of EM radiation, btw, as are x-rays, microwaves, and gamma rays - all the exact same thing, just different frequencies) imparts energy into molecules when it hits them. this makes the molecules move around, possibly making them break up. The higher the frequency the more likely that is to happen, since higher frequencies have more energy.\n\nparticle radiation, on the other hand, is sub atomic particles moving at high speeds. Think teeny tiny bullets. the bust molecules apart when they hit them. The bigger the perticle, and the faster it is moving, the worse this effect is. just like a real bullet.\n\nThe larger a molecule is, the more likely it is to get hit by particle radiation. about the biggest molecules in our cells is the DNA. Our cells rely on DNA to make all the proteins they need to function. blast a cell with some particle radiation, bust up it's dna, and it can'e make the stuff inside that it needs to function and it dies.",
"Radiation comes in many varieties, but there are three major ones: Alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma waves. All three come from atomic nuclei jettisoning particles and converting subatomic particles into different subatomic particles in order to achieve a more stable state. Alpha particles are big heavy particles, consisting of two protons and two neutrons. Beta particles are electrons. Gamma waves are pure energy. All three of them are dangerous because they can collide with your cells or DNA and damage them. Too much damage, and you die horribly within hours. Less damage, and you might get cancer from DNA damage. Alpha particle emitting radioactive materials are comparatively less dangerous. Because the particles are big and heavy it doesn't take very much to block them. Your skin is strong enough that they just bounce off. It's only dangerous if swallowed or if it enters your blood stream, because then it can do damage internally. Beta particles are smaller and contain more energy, so they are more dangerous. They can penetrate your skin and cause damage simply by being exposed to them. They can be blocked with a sheet of aluminum. Gamma waves are the most dangerous by far. They're the stuff that can only be stopped by lead because it's just energy. Barriers have very little effect on you. They can pass through your body with ease, destroying everything they encounter by damaging your cells with the elevated amount of energy."
] |
What is the Purpose of the Pad Part of a Water Lily? | [
"Since it's a plant, it needs to get energy from the sun to live (through photosynthesis). It's easier to do this on the surface than underwater, especially in murky waters like are often found in ponds and lakes.",
"The flower of a water lily is for mating, trading pollen with other lilies, and eventually forming a seed. The pad part is the leaf, just like the leaf of any other plant. It provides the surface area necessary for photosynthesis, and provides the energy that the rest of the plant will use to grow."
] |
Why have the majority of men in recent history preferred shorter hair then women? | [
"Hair that is very short cannot be grabbed in battle, so that's why the military uses short hair, traditionally. You might be surprised how much influence the military has on fashion. I believe the modern business suit is a reflection of officer uniforms."
] |
What causes the "dry spot" in your throat? | [
"If you feel like just one spot is dry, this is an illusion -- it's actually irritated, not dry. This can be caused by a persistent drip of mucus from your sinuses into your throat, or by a throat infection."
] |
Why do bugs seem to fly in circles around one when out hiking, particularly around the head? | [
"Generally, they are either attracted to the carbon dioxide you are exhaling or the body heat you are giving off. For flies, it's the CO2, mosquitoes seek body heat. And the head is usually the hottest part of your body, and it's usually exposed, especially in the type of weather that mosquitoes are an issue."
] |
Why do YouTube comments' dislike button exist? What does it do? | [
"It does literally nothing. In fact, if you dislike a comment then hit f5 and it won't even show that you hit the dislike button."
] |
Why do people post questions here that could easily be googled? | [
"Because googling it wouldn't get you an answer that is dumbed down and simplistic. It also wouldn't give you the opportunity to ask follow-up questions of the answerer if you still don't understand the concept.",
"To get people's opinions and respond back and forth with what is posted, as opposed to just reading results...it's more interactive",
"People don't post here for an answer; they post here because they're interested in the discussion it produces.",
"Also he didn't ask for what that ment, he asked for the difference and he simply wanted to know what the difference was; in order to know what the difference is you need to have knowledge or read up on each individual topic and then put the next to each other, a lot more work.\n\nAlthough, I admit some questions are just a 1 minute google job.",
"They long to be acknowledged by another human being"
] |
What is a "non-member observer state", and what does this mean for Palestinians? | [
"Its a half-way step to becoming a full-blown member of the UN. It is recognized as an official country (State), which means they get to send a representative to sit in and listen to the goings-on in the UN (Observer), but not cast any votes (Non-Member)."
] |
What does it actually mean to be Left wing or Right wing? | [
"It's a very rough guide to explain some of the differences between political parties -- but *very* rough. It works reasonably well when you're talking about mainstream politics, but when you get to the extremes it becomes less accurate (for example, Germany's National Socialist Party of the 1930s is usually considered \"far right\", but has lots of ideas taken from the left wing as well).\n\nRight-wing parties tend to believe that lots of government regulation is a burden and often unnecessary. A strong market economy with plenty of competition helps keep prices low and and quality high, because consumers can choose the best products for themselves. Capitalists, who own the means of production, provide goods, services and employment to the masses, so naturally the best companies thrive and the worst companies go to the wall. If the capitalists make lots of money, they will of course buy things, so their wealth naturally \"trickles down\".\n\nLeft-wing parties tend to believe that the market economy can't be trusted to police itself; government regulation is needed to ensure that fraudulant and unfair practices don't proliferate. In particular, working-class people need to be protected against exploitation by their employers. When capitalists make money, they tend to keep it to themselves or invest it in meaningless things like stocks and bonds, so instead of \"trickling down\", wealth tends to become concentrated in the hands of a few; so a robust system of taxation is needed to redistribute wealth to those who need it most.\n\nPeople on the right wing are likely to argue that people should help themselves, and that too much welfare encourages them to be lazy and leech off the state; people on the left wing are likely to argue that a capitalist system makes it impossible for those at the bottom to help themselves.",
"Generally speaking, world-wide, there is no consensus on this. But we have a couple of shortcuts. Any right- or left-wing party usually shares at least some of them:\n\n- Right-wing: Less regulation, more free market capitalism, less social welfare institutions, less social freedom (abortion, LGBT rights), anti immigration, nationalism, authoritorianism\n\n- Left-wing: More regulation, less free market capitalism, moe social welfare institutions, more social freedom, pro immigration, less nationalist, less authoritarian\n\nFor, say, Germany and the US, this pretty well makes up the spectrum. But countries in Eastern Europe typically have right-wing parties in favor of regulation and social welfare institutions while being very nationalist, very socially conservative and anti immigration. \n\nAt the same time, traditional leftist parties, such as the Parti Socialiste in France, are moving away from traditional leftist values and becoming more moderate."
] |
How do they take crystal clear pictures of jets going supersonic speeds? | [
"Two methods in combination: very fast shutter speeds, like 1/1000 of a second or less -- I've taken pictures of helicopters this way where it doesn't look like the rotors are moving. Also, follow along with the plane as it moves. Any background trees or whatever will probably end up blurry, but the plane will be sharp.\n\nYou'd use this approach for taking pictures of birds in flight as well.\n\nGood cameras also have auto-focus features that can adjust focus on objects that are moving toward or away from you."
] |
(Serious) The thought process that leads doctors to choose to become proctologists, gynecologists or urologists. | [
"I can think of three reason:\n\n1) Money - If these positions pay more money, doctors will follow.\n\n2) Demand - Perhaps a lot of doctors do not want want to be urologists and such. However, since fewer doctors take these jobs, these positions will more available. So the doctor has the choice to compete against 100 other doctors to be become a neurosurgeon, or can take the guaranteed gynecologist job.\n\n3) Personal motivation - Some doctor specialize in certain areas due to personal reasons. A doctor might choose to become a cardiologist because his father died of heart failure. I'm sure this type of motivation might exist for gynecologists as well.",
"All those fields pay very well, and most doctors in those specialties work solely based on appointments which is much less stressful than working in, say, an ICU.\n\nI know it seems like it would be a gross job, but there's no part of the medical profession that isn't gross. A \"regular doctor\" like an MD or PCP has to touch other people's junk and assholes on a daily basis too."
] |
Why are movies all 1.5~2 hours long? | [
"It's an average at which a compromise occurs between holding the audience's interest and attention and the feeling of getting value for money paid. Any longer and the brain starts thinking about doing other things; any shorter and the brain starts thinking it's been ripped off because it paid for a certain \"duration\" of entertainment. A half-hour flick isn't interesting enough to invest in a trip to the movie theater. \n\nKids movies are usually shorter than adult drama features because younger audiences have less of an attention span and have a much greater sense of the passing of time (which is why rainy afternoons lasted forever and killed us with boredom as toddlers but we barely remember them passing as adults). \n\nAll of this can be overridden if you are really into something that immerses you like a videogame, and it's more about averages than about individual watchers.",
"I remember Quentin Tarantino saying that Harvey Weinstein (co-owner of the production company called Weinstein Company) said that he prefers movies to be 1.5 to 2.5 hours and will stretch it to 3 hours if needed because research shows that 1.5 to 2.5 hours is the average time a person will spend on one task before they get bored or lose interest. That is why Kill Bill is two parts because together they are 4 hours long.",
"People don't generally spend more than two hours sitting paying attention to anything. That's why you'll see intermission breaks at plays and shows, and classes that are over two hours.",
"According to the documentary \"The Battle of Brazil\" Its harder for the movie theater to have enough viewings a day to be profitable when the movie is longer.",
"In no order of importance:\n\n1. Audience attention - The average movie-goer can sit still in his seat and pay attention to the movie for no more than 2-3 hours at the very most. Any longer than that and your narrative will lose its weight simply because people will start to think about the time. As a side note, this is why many arthouse films also ironically like to experiment with overly lengthy films, for whatever reason. Take [this](_URL_0_) for example.\n\n2. Budget - Principle photography (the actual shoot) of a 90 to 120 minute long film could take anywhere from 20 days to [400 days](_URL_1_). Point is, time is money, and few directors/producers are willing to spend time shooting a film longer than 2-3 hours, especially since (point 1) the audience isn't likely to appreciate extended lengths anyway.\n\n3. Narrative - this isn't necessarily true, since scriptwriting formula isn't concrete, but most film narratives can start an end within a couple of hours. Any longer, and the story is either too long, or too convoluted, or simply isn't economic with its delivery. Again, arthouse films like to be super long simply because they don't care about the narrative alone, and like to play with things like sound and cinematography, but that's why they're arthouse and not mainstream.",
"There are much longer movies out there, and unless they are exceptionally good, they are usually heavily criticized for being overlong.\n\nThe longer a movie gets, the harder it is to retain an audience's attention. Either you stretch the plot so thinly that it gets boring and nothing happens for extended periods (the main criticism of the recent *Hobbit* movies), or you make the plot so complicated with so many twists and associated subplots, that audiences get confused and literally \"lose the plot\".\n\nYou then have some practical problems to deal with. Audiences are human beings, and they have to eat and drink from time to time, and they have to use the bathroom as well. They get tired, especially if they have to concentrate very hard, and they have lives to lead. They want to leave the cinema in time to wine and dine their dates, or get home before the babysitter's parents start getting worried.\n\nIf a movie is too short, there isn't enough time to develop either the plot or the characters. You need time to establish who the characters are, what their current situation is, and then you have to create a situation to drop your characters into where they have to make some kind of decision, and at the end of it at least the main character has to emerge changed in some way. You can probably do all that in an hour, but it would feel rushed. Most importantly, the audience have to actually care about the characters, they have to like them or at least understand their motives. You can't just introduce audiences to Jane Doe and then, after five minutes, have her caught in a love triangle and having to choose between Harry Hunk and Barry Boring. Nobody would care. You also can't make audiences care about whether or not Sergeant Ruthless lives or die if they have no idea who he is or how good a cop he really is. Why does he have such a disregard for the rules -- is it because he is the only cop with any kind of integrity in the whole department, constantly frustrated by his corrupt superiors and bean-counting bureaucrats, or is he just a crazy guy who should never have been given a badge in the first place?\n\nAnd cinema audiences have bought tickets for the privilege of watching the movie in the first place, so they're going to feel cheated if the movie suddenly ends just as they were beginning to warm to the characters.",
"There are films that go on for things like ten hours or five days or whatever, too.\n\n_URL_2_"
] |
I don't have a lisp speech impediment but can mimic one if I try, why can't someone that has a lisp speech impediment do the same in regards to speaking without one? | [
"Sometimes, the lisp is the result of the shape of the mouth and teeth. In such a case, you may as well say \"I don't need a wheelchair, but I can still use one. Why can't disabled people just walk?\"\n\nOften, though, it's psychological, and can be trained away by a speech therapist. That's why lisps are more common in children than adults.",
"It takes time and effort, and typically money for a speech therapist, to re-learn how to speak. If parents or teachers don't take action to correct a speech impediment in a child, that child will grow up not recognizing that they have a problem, or may not know it can be corrected, or may simply have grown accustomed to it and feel no pressure to change. Children also learn more easily than adults, so if it's not corrected in childhood it takes a lot of motivation to work on it as an adult.",
"Similar to why you can mimic a limp easier than someone with an injured leg could mimic a normal walk. People have lisps or speech impediments because of some sort of physical or psychological abnormality, though perhaps one that can be corrected with effort depending on the cause.",
"Some people actually can, but it takes a lot of practice and a lot of effort. I was pretty surprised when I woman I went to college with and always spoke \"normally\" (though a little slowly) suddenly started lisping when talking to me outside of class. She had gotten comfortable enough around me that she dropped \"the act.\" (That's what she called it. It was exhausting, but she felt she had to put on \"the act\" when in class because the instructors were giving her lower grades when she lisped.) And, as others have pointed out, if there's something physically wrong with your mouth, you're not going to completely get rid of a lisp no matter how hard you try."
] |
how gas planets form differently than terrestrial planets | [
"Two major theories: \n\n1: They form much like rocky planets and infact have a rock or ice core. Basically they just form earlier when there's more gas in the disk around teh star. \n\n2: They form kinda like stars in that you get clumps of denser gas in places which can pull more gas toward itself and so on. They just form late enough that there isn't enough mass available for them to become stars or brown dwarfs."
] |
How does Walmart justify its employees costing taxpayers $6+ Billion in government assistance a year? How (why) do they get away with it? | [
"Why does Walmart in particular need to be held responsible for the government assistance its employees use? Is Walmart is inherently more evil because they pay people similar wages/benefits as other retail stores simply because they're larger? What about food service giants or other industries which predominantly keep people on part time hours for barely livable wages?\n\nEssentially, I'm not clear on exactly what you want answered because I do not understand the premise of your question. They get away with it because the entire industry gets away with it and the alternative is not economically feasible.",
"Walmart pays the lowest wage it can and people are willing to work for it.\n\nIt's simple supply and demand economics. The supply of low-skilled labor greatly exceeds the demand and the price plummets as a result.\n\nWhatever external impacts this might cause aren't relevant to the company or its investors, they're not in the business of overpaying for easily replaceable labor."
] |
How the fuck do I keep coriander/cilantro alive? | [
"Give it deep soil, water enough to just keep 1\"down damp. DO NOT overwater and give at least 5-8 hours of sun each day. Anything above 20° 60° is warm enough."
] |
Why do some fermented drinks need yeast, and some other drinks need yeast and bacteria (scoby)? | [
"Fermentation with yeast and without bacteria is alcoholic fermentation, with bacteria lacto fermentation. Kombucha (scoby) isn't intended to be an alcoholic drink, although it does contain some alcohol.\nBut if you want an alcoholic drink you would use yeast and not a scoby to ferment the sugar water. If you want a drink with probiotics you can use a Kombucha culture (scoby) or Kefir grains."
] |
How much did the recent deluge in SoCal help the drought? | [
"Helps a little short term, but yeah, it needs to be in the mountains and **a lot** more than what we just got. The ocean is pretty gross right now, for what it's worth. I wouldn't swim for a few days at least.",
"From my understanding snow pack is what we need. Rain like this dosnt really do much except cause mud slides, floods, and rapid growth. That growth will cause brush fires later on."
] |
Why aren't more laws created or changed by grandfathering them in years or even decades from now? | [
"Because a grandfathered in law can still be changed before it goes into effect. Sure, *now* it won't hit hard, but in 10 years when it's about to happen? People in Congress *then* are going to be de-elected if it actually goes into effect. So, they'll put it off, or scrap it.\n\nBesides that, setting a policy to happen in 30 years is frankly stupid. No one has any idea what the state of the world will be in 30 years, and whether that'd be a sensible policy at all at that point.",
"Because reformists are just as short-sighted as reactionaries. No one can take credit for changes that will happen in 2116 in the 2016 election. I like the way you think, though."
] |
Lewy Bodies and Parkinson’s Disease | [
"Basically, there's this region in the brain called *substantia nigra pars compacta*. This region is rich in dopaminergic neurons and is, roughly speaking, responsible for fine motor movement.\n\nParkinson's disease happens when dopaminergic neurons on this part of the brain begin to commit apoptosis (cell suicide, so to speak). Lewy bodies are protein aggregates that develop inside nerve cells and displace normal cell function, and can promote apoptosis. They're also related to other neurological disorders."
] |
How to count cards. | [
"Blackjack is the most common game where people count cards. It doesn't guarantee you will win, but it helps you know how much to bet on each hand. The idea is to bet more on hands where you have a high chance of winning, and less on hands where you have a low chance of winning.\n\nGenerally, in blackjack, people don't try to remember every card that's been played, especially since the dealer may have shuffled 2 or more decks together. Instead, they count how many cards valued at 10 (10, J, Q, K) they've seen, and how many other cards they've seen. If the difference is significant, it means the deck is way more (or less) likely to have a 10-value card come up during the next hand.\n\nBy betting and playing with this knowledge in mind, your statistical odds of winning money go up. You might lose several small bets while waiting for the deck to get \"hot\", then win it all back and more on a carefully timed big bet.",
"As has been pointed out, card counting is not illegal, but the casinos are allowed to ask you to leave if they notice you doing it. You will be allowed to keep any winnings up to that point since you have broken no laws. They certainly won't \"take you out back where the Boys will have a Chat,\" like you see in bad films.\n\nFirst of all, it should also be noted that before anyone even tries to learn card counting, they should learn 'basic strategy'. For every possible situation in blackjack there is an optimum play which will see the greatest return (or smallest loss) in the long run. By learning what play to make in any situation ('basic strategy') you can increase you're return to about -0.5% (that is, you increase it from a larger negative value.) If you successfully card count, you can further increase it to maybe +1.5%. \n\n~~On the whole, casinos love card counters because the majority of people who try are not as good at it as they think, and will end up throwing a lot of money away.~~ **EDIT**: Apparently I'm wrong on this point, and casinos are actually very vigilant. See ShinjukuAce's response. \n\nThe basic premise is that in black jack high cards are advantageous to the player, whereas low cards are advantageous to the house. If you know that a lot of low cards have already been played then there must be a lot of high cards left in the deck and the player has an advantage. Bet high when the player has the advantage and bet low when the house has the advantage. \n\nA card counter does not attempt to remember every card that has been dealt. Instead, they use a scoring system for every card dealt. I've never actually attempted to learn, so I don't know the details, but I know that:\n\n1. There are several types of scoring system. Some are more sophisticated (and harder to master) then others.\n\n2. The simpler ones will look something like +1 for a jack or higher, -1 for a 6 or lower, 0 for anything in between. \n\nKeep track of the count and bet high when it is good and low when it's bad.\n\n\nAs you can see, none of this is actually very difficult. In an unpressurised environment (e.g. playing at home or with fake money) I think most people could learn to successfully card count in a matter of weeks. The problem is doing it under a lot of pressure, without the casino cottoning on. Not to mention that the end result is that you earn a small return with high variance (e.g some times you will simply be unlucky and will still lose. If you get very unlucky you could lose for days, weeks or months. Imagine the stress of this if you depend on it for your livelihood), and it requires a large initial investment so that the swings of variance don't bankrupt you.\n\n**Edit** Changed the player's edge with basic strategy from -2% to -0.5%.",
"Card counting is not actually illegal. It is illegal to use some device to help you with it. There was a NJ Supreme Court case that found that casinos cannot bar someone from card counting. However, casinos make card counting fairly difficult by having multiple decks, more shuffling, etc. \n\nHow you card count sort of depends on the game you are playing. There are specific methods for blackjack that make it a lot easier than just memorizing all the cards that come up. These methods are not as helpful for something like poker. \n\nIn Blackjack, the general idea is that low cards are better for the dealer and high cards are better for the player. This is because you get better odds for blackjack but also because a dealer has to hit on 12-16, if there are more high cards the chance of busting is higher. The card counting methods allow you to keep track of the concentration of high or low cards. Basically, you can assign an arbitrary values to the different cards (such as +1 for 2-6, 0 for 7-9, -1 for everything else). All you need to do keep track of the cards is just remember a single number and add/subtract based on what is coming up. For example, if the cards 2, 5, 10, A, K, Q, J have showed up. You would subtract 3 from your total. Now, if you have a lower total number you can bet more and when the number is higher you bet less. This generally allows a slight edge over the house in the long run, but it is fairly marginal, ~1%. Basically, this isn't true \"card counting\" but is what a lot of blackjack players do for an advantage.\n\nOtherwise, if you want true card counting, you just need a really good memory. Some memory tricks might help, but not enough really to make it feasible at a casino."
] |
How do cold chills work and why do they make people involuntarily spaz out for a second? | [
"Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: What causes us to get those random cold chills? ](_URL_5_)\n1. [ELI5: What are \"chills\" and why do we experience them? ](_URL_3_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do people get an involuntary shiver, or chill, at seemingly random moments? ](_URL_2_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do people get the shivers when there's a sudden significant temperature change? ](_URL_1_)\n1. [ELI5:What is happening when someone gets the shivers? ](_URL_4_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do we get \"chills\" when something extremely moving or pleasing happens? ](_URL_0_)"
] |
Why do bees die when they lose their stingers? | [
"Most bees will never reproduce, so sacrificing their lives for the colony does not effect the evolution. When a stinger is left in its victim it causes greater pain and incentive to stay away from the colony, effecting the evolution.",
"They die because the stinger is barbed and sticks into the skin and doesn't come out, and because it connects to the entire contents of their abdomen. The only way for the bee to get off is to be torn apart.\n\nI was once stung by a bee. Its stinger was in my skin. I took hold of its upper body and pulled it off gently. The stinger remained stuck in, and the upper body tore away along with most of the outer casing of the abdomen. What remained was a poison gland and connected muscles, visibly pumping like a heart to inject more poison into me. I had to scrape that out.\n\nBees can die when stinging because they don't sting to hunt - only to defend the nest. The suicide-payload approach allows each bee to be metabolically cheaper but still dangerous. They rarely have to use the payload - the threat of it keeps animals that would threaten the nest away.",
"So here is what happens. Has your dad ever taken you fishing? Did you see the ends of the hooks that had barbs sticking off of them? A bee's stinger has tiny little barbs like that on them. When they sting you those barbs stick into your skin and the bee can't pull the stinger out. However the bee keeps trying and tears the stinger out of it's body. The stinger is still attached to the inside of it's body so it pulls some of it's insides out. That is what kills it. \n\nAs for wasps and hornets their stingers aren't barbed so they can pull the stinger out without issue.",
"They die when they sting humans because our skin contracts around the stinger. They are ripped apart when they try to fly away.\n\nThey don't intend to die when they sting. It is a particular problem with our skin that causes that to happen.",
"Their stinger is attached to their innards.\n\nHere's a picture of it.\n_URL_0_"
] |
How does my car radio pick up digital details (station, artist, song) on just FM reception? | [
"The FM signal actually contains different parts separated from eachother and one of those is the [RDS or Radio Data System](_URL_1_) (regular wikipedia) used to send program information.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is an illustration of different parts of a FM signal. The green to the left if the mono signal, after that comes the pilot tone that tells the reciever it is a stereo transmission and then the stereo signal information followed by the RDS data. And the radio does know what to do with these different parts."
] |
If we (the human race) somehow become immortal, aren't we basically dooming ourselves? | [
"If we were to become immortal, there wouldn't be a need to adapt. If the end game of evolution is to create something that is able to survive as long as possible, then immortality would be the endgame.",
"no.\n\nEvolution would still favor those more likely to reproduce and in greater number. Evolution doesn't care if you die or not, except that it favors you not dying until you're done reproducing. after your reproduction age, it doesn't care if you live or die.\n\nWhat exactly would we need to evolve for? we're immortal. We've beat the natural system.\n\nThe human race would keep expanding, it wouldn't just be the same people.",
"Tech evolution. Eventually the things we build would augment us and create evolution through better and better technology instead of slow natural evolution. \n\nA lower being with augmentation would quickly exceed what would take nature millenia to do",
"Only if the following are true:\n\n1) We can no longer reproduce. Offspring can carry genetic mutations that allow for evolution\n\n2) The entire population is immortal. A mixed population will still act normally.\n\n3) We cannot or will not improve ourselves with technology. Tech allows us to adapt to harsh environments far better than evolution ever could.",
"You are making a small albeit understandable mistake here: evolution doesn't require the previous generation to die. It just happens steadily when you are born and your children are born and theirs and theirs and theirs and so on. In fact it would be quite interesting to see the changes between the first generation of immortality and the 150th or something like that. We WOULD however be dooming ourselves because overpopulation would quickly skyrocket and we would have to advance space exploration at a maddening rate in order to keep up with the growing need of housing. Additionally this would also mean that a lot more people are destroying the environment and the expanding need of resources would mean that our planet becomes rapidly uninhabitable and then we have to ask how this immortality works and if it is a curse or not (I'm gonna say yes, as much as I HHAAAAATTTEEEE the prospect of dying, I kind of think that immortality is just as creepy if not more creepy)",
"Humans aren't what is evolving. What's evolving are mechanisms that create and encode information into the universe's \"media\": matter/energy. Or, as Dawkins puts it: memes. The process of life is the encoding of an increasingly complex matrix of matter and energy interacting \"successfully\". Successful matter/energy interactions permit the creation and encoding of more information. \n\nInformation creation and encoding will not cease when existing biological substrates become obsolete, and thus evolution will not cease. \n\nFurthermore, when conscious control of matter at the atomic level becomes commonplace and personal, individual consciousness may choose to continue the biological evolution your question references.\n\nAn appreciation of grace, beauty, and the sublime are already successfully encoded into The Information, and will likely to inhibit the creation of future information mechanisms that are nightmarish, \"flat\", or Borg-like. I hope.",
"We could live for ten seconds or forever, so long as we have children during that time we'll evolve. And if you don't evolve much (i.e. crocodiles and sharks, which have barely changed in millions of years) that doesn't mean you're doomed unless there's some kind of massive, sudden environmental change, invasive species or something similar.",
"Immortal how? Immortal implies nothing can go wrong, so why adapt? If not, then it's not immortal.\n\n\"Well, I'm bored, I'm gonna go blackhole surfing.\"",
"\"Death is the price we pay for progress.\" - The Doctor"
] |
why does hearing and balance happen in the same organ? | [
"Evolution often creates the simplest system that works the most efficiently. \n\nIn order to hear, your body has a complex series of physical reactions that happen in your ear transcribing sound waves. The last stage of this transcription, which converts the sound wave messages into neural signals, takes place in fluid-filled tubes deep in your inner ear.\n\nThe reason that this is usable to find balance is that fluids are, when at rest, always level with the plane of gravity. For example, when you have water in a cup, and tilt the cup, the water remains level with the ground. Your inner ear uses the same property of fluids to create a sense of balance. Construction levels use the same property. \n\nThis is why very loud sounds are disorienting to your sense of balance. When your inner ear is strongly disrupted, the fluids are moving in a way that doesn't actually reflect your body's position in relation to the ground."
] |
Why are domestic or shorthaul flights in the USA/Canada so much more expensive that comparable distance air travel in Europe? | [
"A main reason: more competition not only by other airlines but also trains, as Europe has a resonabley fine rail network including highspeed trains between mayor centers. Also you have to be carefull with airfare quotes as they often do not include various fees.",
"It actually has a lot to do with Airport taxes, and Nav Canada fees. Nav Canada charges landing fees, Terminal area fees, etc. The Toronto airport charges 7 dollars per seat for a landing fee, and then 17 dollars per 1000kg (above 19,00kg) landing fees. All these miscellaneous fees get passed on to customers. In the US, a lot of these fees are skipped in favour of attracting business. There has been motions passed to the government trying to lower these fees as the GTA loses 6 million passengers a year to US flying. As a pilot for a airline, it's frustrating for it to be cheaper some days to fly out of the US, than my own airline.",
"In your example you quote flight in Canada. In Canada its almost monopoly on flights(i believe there only 2 companies, Air Canada and West Jet), plus there are a lot of unions involved(airport, flight attendants) that demand certain rate of pay, which airline passes on to you. In US there are way more airlines, therefore more competition. Flight from Toronto to Seattle would cost you $600, but if you take 2 hour $30 bus ride to Buffalo you cant fly to Seattle for $400 ."
] |
How do animators match up the characters' mouths with the voice actors' words? | [
"They record the voices first, almost always. They time out the syllables by listening to the audio, and figuring out when each syllable hits what frame in the timeline. They then animate the mouth syllable at a time, and then fill in \"half-way\" drawings between the syllables, as necessary.\n\nIn computer animation, it can be done similar to traditional animation, but they'd be changing the CG model rather than drawing. Conversely, they could use other techniques, such as motion capture or even automated systems that understand the sounds being made and match up the lips.",
"What djmcomics said..\n\nHowever, when you see dubbed Anime, the animation is obviously already there so the voice actors have to match the \"lip flap.\" A lot of that is accomplished by the writers. You might notice that anime can sound kind of hokey, verbally. It's not because of translation. A lot of it is finding the right words to match the lip flap.\n\nIf you have Netflix streaming, John DiMaggio's (Bender from Futurama, Jake the Dog from Adventure Time) Documentary called \"I Know That Voice\" has recently been added, and you can see a lot of behind-the-scenes of animation voice acting and a bunch of great actors like Rob Paulsen, Mark Hamill, Jeff Bennett, Nolan North, Tara Strong, Billy West, etc."
] |
Why can't I tickle myself but can sexually stimulate myself? | [
"Ticklish-ness is thought to be a warning system against spiders and insects that could present a bigger risk that their actual size/touch would indicate. This is why a light, unexpected touch causes an overreaction from the nervous system - tingles everywhere.\n\nSex is different - it's not a reflex sensation, and is largely mental/hormonal in nature. Touch/friction is a huge component, but it's a conscious act rather than an involuntary warning system.",
"The response to tickling (struggling) is an evolutionary defense mechanism (most 'ticklish' areas of the body are the soft areas around vital parts). Since human sexual organs are well protected (between the legs), there was never need to develop a defensive response for stimulation to those areas. It could also be argued that any human that evolved a negative response to sexual contact would be very quickly out bred."
] |
- Why do we laugh? Is it learned, or is it something that we just do? | [
"I read recently that blind people smile instinctualy even though they have never seen others smile. Perhaps laughter is the same."
] |
Why are movies able to break record sales in box office when the price of tickets are different from other movies before? Why are movies not based on the actual number of tickets sold to have a fair comparison? | [
"Mostly because it doesn't sound as good.\n\nThe movie that has sold the most tickets ever was Gone With the Wind (1939), followed by Star Wars (1975); ET (1982) or The Sound of Music (1965) (my two sources disagree on the order); and Titanic (1997) or Ten Commandments (1956) (another disagreement). If you look at recent movies, Star Wars: the Force Awakens is only 11th; Avatar was 14th when it came out (15th now), and The Phantom Menace was 16th when it came out (18th now).\n\n\n\nSources:\n\n- _URL_1_ (sorts by tickets sold)\n- _URL_0_ (sorts by income adjusted for inflation).",
"If you could say your movie made the most money of all time, or it made the 25th most money of all time after adjusting for inflation and the market over time, which would you choose? \n\nWhy wouldn't a company choose the completely true fact which sounds better? \n\nAlso, there are more people living today than in the past, so a pure number of attendees wouldn't be fair either. \n\nAlso, movie tickets haven't raised in price equally with inflation and other market values."
] |
Why is it really necessary to blur out product names on some shows? | [
"There are quite a few different reasons why they'd block out the logo on a can of cola, for example, but there are 3 primary ones I can think of:\n\nA) They want to avoid conflict with companies whose advertisements run during the commercial break (ie Coke is a \"sponsor\" by running an ad during break, but a can be Pepsi is shown during the episode) B) They want to avoid legal action if the content of the show is potentially offensive and the company doesn't want their product associated with it. C) \"There are no free lunches\" - why show a character drinking a Coke during an episode for free when you can potentially get a brand to pay for product placement?",
"They wish to avoid:\n\n* conflict with current advertisers\n* conflict with potential future advertisers\n* current or future controversy associated with the product (think Chick-Fil-A)\n* upsetting an advertiser who doesn't want their product associated with that show\n* diluting the value of the advertising and product placement revenues\n\nWith the way syndication works, their show could still be earning money for them ten, twenty years from now...there is just no way to know what the future holds. If one of their characters is always drinking Mt. Dew, and five years form now they find Mt. Dew causes testicular cancer or secretly supported terrorism, that will undermine the marketability of their show."
] |
Why are there no national referendums in the United States like there are in other countries? | [
"The US constitution simply does not have any procedures in place or allowance for a national referendum, so there isn't one. There have been amendments proposed to do just this, usually with a specific case in mind, but they have never gotten anywhere.\n\nThis makes tremendous sense that the framers of the constitution specifically (intentionally or not) did not include a national referendum or any national votes into the constitution and laws. At the time, the US was still viewed as a collection of states who were sorta independent little countries, but agreed to have connections for the better of them all, but they were not really a unified country as today (this did not really happen until the Civil War). Having a national vote is a bit contrary to this, even the presidential election process was state based, not national.",
"There are a lot of good points here. Indeed, there are a lot of concrete reasons for this but the lack of national referendums is also based on founding fathers's ideology. Essentially, the founding fathers wanted the people to have power on decision makers, not the decisions themselves. They believed that this way guaranteed the best possible decisions because they didn't think that the average people were intelligent enough. They believed that the voters would vote the brightest minds to make the best possible decisions. That's a reason there's no procedures in place in the US constitution for a national referendum.",
"The US does not have a process for it in the Constitution. The reason for this is that we are a federation of semi sovereign states. We are more like the UK than we are like France. As such we are not a direct democracy and vote on things via our representatives as a State, not as individual citizens.",
"There are no federal elections in the United States, other than the Electoral College. Everything else is state level only --- we literally don't have the infrastructure for a national election, since every state has different voting processes and procedures, which would likely be deemed unacceptable under due process, since different voting methods have different errors in counting rates.",
"Speaking for the \"other countries\", in Croatia we have a law that enables referendum, but it is hardly ever held, partly due to number of signatures (10 % of registered voters) needed for the initiation of procedure. Only meaningful referendum that we had was about independence in 1991, after that referendums were pretty much a joke (one for the accession to the EU, other to ban some gay rights). There was even one about the labour legislation, but even though there was enough signatures it was never held.\n\nI think that only in Switzerland referendums have a real weight.",
"We are a representative republic, some of our states have landmass and populations equal to entire countries. Texas for example, if it was counted as a country, would have the 12th highest GDP in the world. We do have referendums on a state wide basis however. Unfortunately our federal government is entirely too intrusive to allow states referendums to actually change anything radically, and given another 100 years or so, the EU will represent this same type of force in Europe.",
"Also a reason for not having referendums in the constitution is that at the time it was written the process would have been too complicated on such a large scale. Nowadays with telecommunication in mind it would be very possible.",
"Sour-grapes answer: Because the people don't tell the government what we want, the government tells the people what they *should* be wanting.",
"Referendums are simply inconsistent with rest of the federal system, which is based off a representative democracy. Referendums, propositions and direct initiatives take place at the state and local level, however. Nevertheless, such practices still are crititicized as \"sloppy democracy\", a good example would be the direct initative in Schuette v. BAMN.",
"\"Why are there no European-Wide Referendums?\"\n\nThat's a much better comparative question. And in it lies the answer. We already have a representative government dictating single-solutions over a massive, diverse population. \n\nHaving 151 million people dictating what all 300 million do? Not a recipe for happiness."
] |
Why do some websites don't open without "www." when most websites don't need that? | [
"**Pre-emptive tl;dr: There's no reason that www needs to be part of a domain name, it just exists as convention. Usually they point to the same place as the primary domain, but sometimes not. Sometimes it doesn't exist at all.**\n\nWebsite addresses are basically just a fancy shortcut to an IP address, at first they were just a means for remembering an address more easily (ie it's a lot easier to remember _URL_0_ than 88.221.134.121 which is what it currently points to). Originally this was mainly for convenience's sake, but since many sites can be running off of one IP they're pretty much a necessity these days as these tell the server what data to load.\n\nAnyway, a website address is made of levels, from right to left. So the extension, such a .com/.uk/.be is the top level, with the namespaces controlled by certain companies (verisign manage .com, nominet .uk, for example). Basically whoever owns the level on the right has the right to control what's on the left.\n\nWhen you buy a domain name you are effectively leasing control of the namespace. So if you bought _URL_1_, you're basically signing a contract between yourself and verisign to grant you the right to manage the namespace for _URL_1_ and every level below it.\n\nNow, _URL_1_ needs to have a root record, that is the IP address that it is designed to point to. Strictly speaking you don't need more than that, but a lot of people choose to delegate to a subdomain of their root domain, which they're allowed to do as per their agreement with the governing body of the domain.\n\nwww is simply the most popular of them. There's no reason it needs to exist, and indeed isn't part of the domain name specification, it's just convention. The vast majority of the time this is set to point to the same place as the root domain, but not always.",
"www._URL_2_ and _URL_2_ technically are different domains. Most domain owners configure their domain in a way that www._URL_2_ equals _URL_2_ (CNAME record). \n\nBut some don't."
] |
Why can programmers write code easily but have difficulty reading it? | [
"It's very easy to write code that is unreadable. Some programmers test every 15-30 lines or whatever of code, so they work on their own momentary memory of what is supposed to happen. On top of that some don't have a good sense of organization or how much responsibility to give one method or function or class.\n\nSo you get 15k lines doing 70 jobs with variable names like \"s++; doOtherStuff(s);\"\n\nThe programmer reads his own code 2 months later and asks himself \"WTF is s???\"",
"Here's three explanations. They're all generally similar, but hopefully different enough that if you don't get one, the other two will fill in.\n\nExplanation 1:I have terrible handwriting. A lot of times when I'm in class in college. I'll write things down as I hear them or as I think of them. When I go back to study weeks or even days later. I'll read over my notes and have no idea what was going on, though when I wrote them everything made perfect sense.\n\nThe thing about coding is that you typically plan big ideas, like maybe a function is going to take two numbers and run something on the that converts them to a 30 paragraph essay. You know that what you're going to write, but you don't know exactly how to get there. \n\nExplanation 2: If your coding knowledge is good enough, you can sit and just write, step by step, until you get to where you want to go. You're always wrapped up in what you're writing, what you've just written, and what you're about to write, but once a line isn't important to your current line, you forget about it and worry about seven lines from now.\n\nBy the time you've written 50 more lines, you forget what happened in line 12.\n\nExplanation 3: Pick up a book you've never heard of and read a paragraph out of the middle. Now explain how that paragraph contributes to the plot of the story.\n\nIf I look at a random five lines of code, in a few seconds I can tell you exactly what those five lines do. But exactly what those five lines do is worthless to me. I need to know what those five lines mean. Why are they there? \n\nTypically if I'm reading code, I'm fixing something, which means I need to know a whole lot about that function, otherwise I might solve one problem, but create another that's even worse. \n\nImagine trying to fix a car engine, but all you've ever studied is how the fan belts spin. You're going to fail unless you start reading about everything else that goes on under the hood.",
"Mark Twain has a pretty good related quote on this:\n\n > I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. \n\nIt takes time, experience, and is harder to write concise, understandable code. Writing good code is hard."
] |
Why can't we move our toes independently like our fingers? | [
"Human here: You can, it's just harder. Your fingers are easier to move because they have 3 bones connecting them to your hand but your foot only has 1. If you try hard enough you can move only 1 toe at a time. At least I can.",
"You can, it's just that you never do so it's harder when your first try. There are people who have lost their arms who can do some amazing things with their toes to compensate."
] |
What is the financial benefit to EA for not selling games on Steam? | [
"Valve takes a ~30% cut of every game sold on Steam. That 30% is a whole lot of money when you're settling millions of every game you put out. It's so much money that the expense of creating and maintaining your own distribution platform STILL saves you money.",
"They honestly probably lose sales by not being on Steam, but if they were on Steam, they would have to pay a cut to Valve for every sale. In the end, it might be more cost-effective for them to distribute their own games even with fewer sales. \n\nI know plenty of people (myself included) that just don't buy EA games on PC because Origin is garbage and I refuse to use it. The same goes for Uplay.",
"EA competes with Valve. They have their own online distribution system called Origin. They have absolutely no desire to let Valve control their content and pay them a piece of every sale.",
"EA are big enough, and with big enough titles that they know wherever they release those games a lot of people are going to follow. You played Mass effect 1 and 2 on steam? Come to origin and play #3, or battlefield 4, or sim city.\n\nOn origin EA gets a cut of all the transactions, so even if they only get their own players coming to play games they aren't paying a cut to steam for facilitating the sale. If they get those players to commit to origin and buy other games then EA gets a cut of those as well. Third party developers are probably quite happy publishing to both stores as it makes no difference to them."
] |
Do you need to have some sort of condition for euthanasia/assisted suicide? | [
"Well, the laws vary considerably based on where you're planning on doing it.",
"[Here is a page](_URL_0_) on various legal requirements for euthanasia in different jurisdictions.",
"In what country? In my country there is no possible scenario you can be in for it to be legal."
] |
Why do human bodies build up tolerance to alcohol/drugs but not daily medications like antidepressants/cardiac/etc meds? | [
"I can't speak for the other meds, but you absolutely can build up a tolerance to antidepressants and painkillers and the like"
] |
We make leather from cows, sheep and pigs. Why not horses? | [
"We can. A horsewhipping is not just an expression. The other animals are food animals. While horses are eaten, they were a delicacy for stone age people, horses are not meat animals the way the others are. The other hides are products of food production. Most likely an old horse is an old friend and just buried."
] |
Why is it so much harder to read a phone when someone else is holding it, as opposed to when you are holding it yourself? | [
"We can't hold our body completely still. When you're holding the phone yourself, it moves together with your body - your movement is synchronized with the phone's movement. When someone else holds the phone, that's no longer the case - the phone swings together with the other person's body, not with your's.",
"Viewing angle - the screens are designed for optimal viewing from the front - the more you deviate from straight on, the more dim it appears and the colors start fading. It's really hard to align a phone with someone else's eyes perfectly.\n\nThis is more geared towards TVs but it's a decent explanation that's also relevant to phone display technology.\n\n_URL_0_"
] |
If 'white' and 'black' are politically correct terms for Caucasian and dark-skinned people, how come using 'yellow' and 'red' to describe Asians and Native Americans is considered offensive? | [
"Because black was used less as a derogatory, and more as a descriptor, maybe? For the record, in social activism circles, the politically correct term to use is \"people of color\", or POC. Not \"colored people\", but you put the person first with \"person of\".\n\nYellow and red as descriptors have also been used in more derogatory, objectifying ways than \"black\" and \"white\", if I'm right. Feel free to correct me."
] |
Is "quark" really a nonce word? | [
"It is a type of cheese, but the name likely comes from Late Middle High German. So it could have been a nonsense word *in English* at the time.",
"ELI5 Where the hell does \"nonce\" come from?",
"Quark, in Germany and other German-speaking places (as well as Netherlands and eastern Europe), is like a soft cheese made from curdling milk and straining it.\n\nWhen Joyce used it, he meant the sound a seagull makes, if memory serves. But it was certainly onomatopoeia at best, and nonsense at worst, designed to rhyme with \"Muster Mark\"."
] |
What happens to my iris when my pupil dilates? Where does it go? Does it compress? Is the pupil in front?? I must know!! | [
"The pupil is the hole; that's like asking if a donut hole is on the front or the back of the donut.\n\nThe iris is a muscular ring -- the \"donut\" -- which just gets \"squished\" into a thinner ring when the iris dilates, it's still there, it's just smaller, which causes the pupil to get bigger, because it's the hole in the middle.",
"The pupil is a hole in the iris. The pupil doesn't actually do anything, the iris just expands and contracts."
] |
How does your body know the difference between sleeping and napping? (i.e. when you nap, you wake about in a half hour or hour as opposed to a full sleep) | [
"Waking up from a short nap or a full night's sleep depends on your body's [sleep cycle](_URL_0_) which lasts about 5-6 hours. It takes about 45 min to enter deep sleep, and once you do, you are very likely to stay asleep for the full cycle. \n\nHowever, during the first 10-30 minutes, your body is still transitioning form awake to deep sleep which is why it's easier to wake back up."
] |
why do humans love spicy food | [
"The molecule that causes the sensation of spiciness is capsaicin, which binds to the nerves responsible for registering heat and more importantly pain. This causes these nerves to fire, making us feel these sensations. In response to pain, our bodies release endorphins, which help to nullify the pain and create a mildly pleasant feeling. It is likely that we are attracted to spicy foods for this reason, because it creates a mild euphoric sensation as a side effect of the pain. Of course, the pain response can override the numbing effect of the endorphins, so we have a certain threshold of tolerance, which can vary."
] |
Pawning | [
"My buddy owned a very successful pawn shop where he would turn about $500,000.00 a year in just loans. \n\nThe simple explanation: \n\n1. Hold an item for people in exchange for a very small loan.\n\n2. Charge a high percentage of loan interest/fees for this service.\n\n3. If they pay, you make money of the interest/fees and give them back their item at the end of the agreed upon time.\n\n4. If the can't pay you now own that item and sell it at a mark up.\n\nYou are strapped for cash, so you bring in your watch to pawn. It's worth $300.00 but they only offer you $100.00 for you loan. You take that because you intend on picking it back up. Only thing is, at the rate of interest they charge, by the time you make all the payments you pay back WAY more than $100.00. At my buddies shop, if you made the minimum payments on time, you would end up paying back 350% of the original loan value. So quick math\n\nLoan of $100 x 350%= total pay back of $350.00 \n\nThat's more then your watch was worth in the first place. The way they make it work, is the people who come into pawn shops are usually *desperate* for cash need it immediately, OR it's people who think they can pay back the loan faster than the agreed time frame. \n\nNow if you CAN'T pay back a loan, they shop keeps your stuff and will sell it at a mark up of usually 100%. So if you had a watch worth $300.00, they loan you $100.00, but you fail on payments, they can turn around and easily sell it for a minimum of $200.00.\n\nWhere it **REALLY** pays off is when someone is making payments, but eventually no longer can. Then the shop made money on you for payments + interest+fees, and also gets to keep your watch and sell it at a huge mark up. \n\nIf you have enough capital, some know how, and a decent location, a pawn show can be incredibly lucrative.\n\nA hilarious side note, my buddy once lent a guy $100 for his very expensive prosthetic leg and the guy then walked out with a 2nd cheaper prosthetic he owned. They guy couldn't pay for the first loan and came back to pawn a SECOND cheaper prosthetic for $50. This being his \"back up leg\", he ended up hobbling out on crutches. He never came back for either leg and now my friend displays them on his shelf with no intention to sell as a reminder to people that he will literally take the legs out from under you if you don't pay him!",
"Pawn shops do one of two basic things:\n\nFirst, traditional 'pawning' is using an item as collateral for a small loan. For instance, if I needed to come up with a quick couple hundred dollars, I can take my guitar to a pawn shop and they will hold the guitar for the duration of the loan. If I do not pay back the loan with interest, the shop will keep my guitar. In that sense, a pawn shop can operate like any other financing company, except they keep possession of the collateral up front, instead of accepting it after default. In this sense, the principle would be the amount of the loan, the interest would be either the interest rate, or a flat calculated amount of interest, a finance charge would be any other charge or loan fee associated with the pawn transaction itself (loan fees cover the salaries and other overhead of the company), redeeming would be paying the loan back.\n\nThe other thing some pawn shops do is straight up buy used items. This transaction is much more straightforward and functions exactly as you'd imagine it."
] |
Why are so many people "excited" about the Fifty Shades of Grey movie if everyone seems to be (rightfully) making fun of the book? | [
"There's two \"everyone\" out there.\n\nOne is the \"everyone\" that makes fun of Justin Bieber, Nickleback and Twilight.\n\nThe other is the \"everyone\" that throws money at that shit and makes it insanely popular.",
"The thing you have to understand about Fifty Shades of Grey is that it is, fundamentally, porn. It is very, very important to keep that in mind. The book has been hugely successful and wildly popular not because it's a masterpiece of literature, but because it is sexy and engaging. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, in my opinion; almost all men have watched porn at some point in their lives, no reason at all women shouldn't join in the fun. From what I've heard, it's fairly well written compared to most erotica. \n\nI think the movie's fundamental failing is being anything other than softcore porn. By parsing it down to an R rating, they had to cut out almost all the sex and bondage scenes, leaving you with the book's filler in between all the porn (which are *not* the parts that made it successful).\n\nWhen it was written, Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't intended to be a mainstream movie for general audiences; it was an erotica novel directed at women. Trying to make it into more than that is clearly a mistake, though quite possibly one they'll make money off of anyway.",
"In a country with 350 million people, if 10 million see the movie, it is a blockbuster....even if 50 million criticize it.\n\nKeep in mind, only about 1/3 of Americans actually watched the Super Bowl...and it is essentially a U.S. institution.",
"I'm excited because the flood of stories coming to the Internet in the next few weeks of people getting embarrassingly mangled as they try to emulate the behaviors displayed in said film will be more entertaining than the movie could ever be. Also I plan on ripping it and dubbing the start of every sex scene with \"Hi, I'm Christian Grey, Welcome to Jackass!\"",
"It's just like twilight; you either hate it or love it. There are plenty of people on both sides."
] |
How is it that Singapore, UK and the US found Nestle India's noodles safe to eat, but India found the opposite? | [
"There's a possibility Nestle manufactures the noodles differently for exporting to countries which are more stringent with their checking. \nHowever, there's also the possibility that it was a shakedown by the government, possibly due to some bribe that Nestle refused to pay. That's the sorry state of politics around here."
] |
What's the reason pirates are depicted wearing eyepatches? | [
"The fact that some pirates wore eye patches most likely had nothing to do with a missing eye, and everything to do with being able to see—specifically, above decks and below them.\n\nJim Sheedy, a doctor of vision science and director of the Vision Performance Institute at Oregon's Pacific University, told the Wall Street Journal that while the eyes adapt quickly when going from darkness to light, studies have shown that it can take up to 25 minutes for them to adapt when going from bright light to darkness, which \"requires the regeneration of photo pigments.\"\n\nPirates frequently had to move above and below decks, from daylight to near darkness, and Sheedy says the smart ones \"wore a patch over one eye to keep it dark-adapted outside.\" When the pirate went below decks, he could switch the patch to the outdoor eye and see in the darkness easily (potentially to fight while boarding and plundering another vessel).\nArrrr We Sure?\n\nThough there are no first-person sources from history that state this as fact, there's no question that keeping one eye dark-adapted works. MythBusters tested this hypothesis in their pirate special in 2007 and determined that it was plausible (only the lack of historical sources kept it from being confirmed). At least one military manual for pilots pointed out that \"Even though a bright light may shine in one eye, the other will retain its dark adaptation, if it is protected from the light. This is a useful bit of information, because a flyer can preserve dark adaptation in one eye by simply closing it.\" Even the FAA recommends that \"a pilot should close one eye when using a light to preserve some degree of night vision.\""
] |
Why are so many freekicks in professional football/soccer shot so badly? | [
"Perfection is what they are going for. They are aiming for the very edge of the net, the furthest distance from the goal keeper because anything aimed in the middle of the net is easily going to be blocked. Being just a little bit off will cause their shot to miss the net but missing a little bit the other way is no different, as the shot goes to the goal keeper and is blocked. Same result, no score. A perfect shot is just out of the reach and still inside the net.",
"The margin of error is small, and there are many factors that could impact the execution of the shot.\n\nThe player has to strike the ball in a certain way to score - the shot has to be powerful enough, aiming for a very small area that isn't covered by the keeper or defernders, and might possibly be trying to impart spin on the ball to curve it into the goal.\n\nActing against that, the ball is a sphere and the foot needs to strike it at a certain position, with a certain part of the shoe, and from a certain angle and force. A slight deviation could cause a huge miss due to the distance to goal (a 1 degree difference might mean 30-40 difference at the goal-line) and there's various factors in play like the movements of teammates and defenders, perceived pressure on the kicker, the temperature, the type of grass, whether it's raining, noise level in the stadium etc etc.",
"The space where the ball needs to go is actually very small. \n\nConsider that an average defender will easily block anything under 2m in height and you have a wall of them, easily 5m wide. The goal is only 2.44m high and 7.32m wide. If you go past them, your shot will either go wide or be a relatively simple task for the goal keeper. \n\nIf you try to go over the wall of defenders, you want the ball to either go right underneath the crossbar or bounce just in front of the line. The first requires a significant amount of power which hurts accuracy, the latter requires less power but you'll need pinpoint location or you'll look like a fool. Neither is easily achieved and essentially it means hitting a target not much bigger than your average dart board. From 20m out that'll be a difficult task even when throwing a tennis ball, let alone kicking a football.",
"It's because players have to find a mix between accuracy and power. When you see those truck shot videos, there's often no goalie or the goalie isn't trying. \n\nIn professional soccer goal keepers are so good that shots have to be both powerful and accurate. If not powerful enough, the goalie will get there in time. If not accurate enough the goalie will be in position. The reasons shots are so often high or wide is that it is incredibly hard to get shots on net with enough power to beat the goalie. Only the best players \"Gareth Bale for example) can hammer it with power and accuracy",
"Combination of pressure, lack of composure, trying to fake out the other team, etc. It's like asking why everyone in the NBA doesn't have a 100% free throw, even though it's probably the most practiced shot in most careers."
] |
Why can most people cross their eyes easily, but not point them in opposite directions outward? | [
"Because when you cross your eyes, you move your focus points closer together, and that has a function for seeing things close up.\nSeeing as far as possible will require your eyes to be pointed somewhat straight forward, not outward.\nThe reason we can't move our eyes in different directions like chameleons is that our big open eyes together can detect light from 180 degrees, with focus at 3-5 degrees of angle. Keeping them in sync gives us excellent depth perception, which has helped us hunting and can be found in most major predators.",
"Crossing your eyes is a physiologically normal thing that you train to do from birth. Whenever you look at something up close, your eyes come together slightly. The closer it is to your face, the closer your eyes get. Otherwise, when you looked at something up close, you'd get double vision. \n\nLooking outwards isn't an \"in-built\" mechanism in our brain so we can't do it.",
"Your eyes are built to focus on a single object and then your brain uses the different angles to determine depth. Going cross eyed is just you trying to focus on objects very close to your face."
] |
Why is a big screen that is far away more pleasant to watch than a smaller screen closer to your eyes (which covers the same space in your field of view)? | [
"Your eyes can tell how far away objects are, especially if they're only a few metres away. This messes up your feeling of immersion so TVs don't feel as realistic as a cinema screen. VR headsets use optics to avoid some of these issues."
] |
Ghost in the Shell - Free Will | [
"Well it is perceived on a delay of around 4 or .004 nano seconds for a brains command to be active. For ghost in the shell, she is constantly getting upgrades to help with a sense of phantom limb pain that she has randomly. Due to the fact that she was a fetus at the time of augmentation her brains wiring and impulses grew inline with the augments. But to keep it simple all actions are electric impulses from the brain in their simplest form. Some automated like circulation, some semi like breathing, and some manual like muscle contractions."
] |
single camera vs multi camera setups for filming TV and movies | [
"Multi-camera is often used in sitcoms. It's a cheaper way to shoot the show because you have multiple cameras filming things.\n\nSingle camera is just what it sounds like -- just one camera. If you have a scene where you see three different camera perspectives, that means they re-positioned the camera for each perspective and redid the scene.\n\nSingle camera results in a better product, because you can adjust the lighting and everything to make each shot look perfect. With multicamera, you have to have the entire set lit up so that it looks adequate for all cameras. So, with single camera you can get a lot more depth and detail in the shots.\n\nOf course, single camera takes longer to shoot, and time is money, so it's far more expensive.",
"Good answers from my fellow industry members too!\n\nIts all situational. Depends on what you are doing, where, when, time, budget... etc. \n\nIn addition to the other great comments more cameras mean multiple more people usually. And more blocking/complexity of the shot. And more $$$.\n\nThat said if you are doing a big stunt (first thing comes to mind is a huge explosion) than you want a lotta cameras so you can get all the angles on the action as you wont get to blow that thing up twice or put people into danger twice.\n\nThose are just some more thoughts.",
"A single camera setup means you can only see the action from one point of view. A multi camera setup means the editor can jump at any time from one point of view to another -- typically one camera shows the broader scene, while other cameras show closer shots of specific characters."
] |
Why do I hear so many radio ads for companies hiring truck drivers? | [
"It's because truckers spend a lot of time on the radio\n\nThe marketing ppl did a study and found out that truckers spend a lot of time on the radio so they put their ads targeting truckers on the radio\n\nThe problem is that truckers don't listen to the radio, the radio they spend so much time on is their CB radios. \n\nSince truckers don't listen to the radio that has the ads that target them, they don't get to hear about all the jobs that the marketing ppl are advertising. Because of this mix-up, the jobs don't get filled and the ads keep running. \n\nAnd that is why you hear so many ads for companies hiring truck drivers.",
"I am a truck driver. Most of the ads you hear on the radio for drivers are for Over The Road (OTR) drivers trying to fill an industry created driver shortage. Its crappy pay, crappy working conditions and generally a crappy life that very few people are willing to even try let alone stick with if they do.\n\nSeriously, you try living 24 hours a day 320 days a year in a space 1/3 the size of an average prison cell and you will understand why they have to advertise so much."
] |
What does a Master Sushi Chef to better/differently than a mediocre one | [
"A few small things that, together, can greatly affect the overall taste: \n\n1) The quality of fish. A chef may or may not have much control over this, depending on where their restaurant is and what sort of connections they have in the industry. However, for chefs who have more control over where they get their fish from, the quality of the fish itself can be significant. \n\n2) The rice. Sushi rice needs to be cooked well and seasoned well (usually with rice vinegar, salt, and sugar), and then kept at an appropriate temperature. The specific type (cultivar) of rice also makes an impact. Considering most sushi is like 80% rice, it's surprisingly important. \n\n3) Some sushi chefs put a light coat of sauce over their sushi. This would be their own recipe, and is obviously their own take on what should enhance the flavor of the fish.\n\n4) Some items that are cooked, such as shrimp, octopus, and egg, obviously need to be prepared and cooked well. \n\n5) Some items, such as \"spicy\" fish (e.g., spicy tuna), are more than just the raw fish. The chef needs to prepare those sauces as well and incorporate them with the fish in a way that enhances, rather than hides, the flavor. \n\n6) In higher-tiered sushi restaurants, the chef will prepare a course for you, rather than you picking out all of your own pieces. In these cases, the selection and creation of sushi is supposed to be artistic, similar to how wine tastings feature a certain order of dry-to-sweet wines to appeal to your palate.",
"If you haven't seen it, I **strongly** recommend watching the documentary *Jiro Dreams of Sushi*",
"Let's get one thing straight: the rolls you find in western sushi restaurants are delicious, but they're not what you should care about. From here on out, when I say sushi, I mean nigirizushi, not makizushi.\n\nThe majority of making sushi lies in the preparation. It's somewhat befitting. The minimalist appearance of a piece of sushi belies complex flavor. The little visible effort it takes to make two pieces of sushi belies the training and experience required to present truly good sushi in the first place.\n\nMost places will get their fish pre-processed. There's nothing to be done except cut it into the right thickness, dab a bit of wasabi under the fish, and mold it with the rice. There's a ton of preparation that goes into the rice. Other comments have already covered that.\n\nBut a real master knows how to judge fish. They don't get their stuff pre-processed, they go out to the fish markets, look through the offerings, and decide what's going to have the best flavor possible. Tradition aids you when you have longstanding ties with certain auctiooneers. The sushi chef knows how to separate the parts of that fish, and retrieve the most meat of best quality. This process can be complex and require more than just a knowledge of how to butcher a fish. Something that people often assume is that sushi is better \"fresh\". If you're after that perfectly fresh, out of the ocean flavor, sure that sounds great, but the traditions of sushi stem out of preserving fish for long periods of time. In the same vein, while you do want \"fresh\" fish, there's a perfect period after the fish has been caught where the flavor is the most mature, and judging this depends on the skill of the chef.\n\nThen there are marinades to deal with, most sushi goes in a simple marinade of sake + mirin, but other complex variations exist. On top of that is the sauce, and controlling how much sauce/wasabi. Grinding the wasabi and judging wasabi takes some skill, but not really as much as is necessary to deal with the fish. You can't get good, fresh wasabi in the US. I don't think the particular conditions to grow them to the right flavor exist. Wasabi also loses its potency quickly, so when you transport it, it loses flavor fast.\n\nBut honestly, any chef at a Michelin star level does work analogous to this anyway, so there's nothing truly special about being a sushi chef vs a \"normal\" chef.",
"There are lots of different angles to the artistry, so that is a bit like asking \"what makes a great painter a great painter - is it the handling of the brush\"? But, fundamentals are always important and the sushi chef has to contend with fish selection, identifying the best parts, aligning purchase to likely consumption, designing the menu, running a kitchen well, making recipes that people like and so on. It is true that in classic sushi the selection of flavors beyond the fish can be limited, but that only enhances the focus of evaluation of the skill. There are a number of things in Japanese art culture that share this sort of aesthetic - calligraphy comes to mind. Very simple, with the art in the detail and minutia.",
"If you have Netflix, I highly recommend watching Jiro Dreams of Sushi. \n\n_URL_0_",
"Yes, knife control is important. Knowing how to cut specific fish to maximize flavor is important.\n\nMy favorite sushi chef goes to the fish market himself and picks the fish out. Not only is this the best form of quality control, but it builds a strong relationship with the suppliers.\n\nHe does have a nice little glaze which he applies to certain fish. He also has excellent sushi rice. He pickles his own ginger and buys fresh wasabi, which he grates to order. He puts a little dab between the fish and the rice for certain items.\n\nIn his restaurant he only takes care of the people at his 8 seat sushi bar, and he only serves omakase, which is a multi-course meal picked out by the chef. You can ask for specific things, and order more if you wish."
] |
Is there a condition that causes temporary super normal hearing? | [
"Any particular triggers? I get something like that occasionally, but usually in a situation like being in a very quiet house and trying not to wake people up.",
"That sounds like a [migraine](_URL_2_) which can sometimes cause [over-sensitivity to sound](_URL_1_). Some people never develop the headache which is typically associated with migraines, but do suffer some of the other effects like seeing auras, nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light, sound, and smell. In my family, a \"minor\" migraine is nothing more than seeing an [Indian quilt pattern](_URL_0_) overlaying part of the vision of one eye.",
"Check out a condition called hyperacusis. I have these episodes of hearing (apparently) amplified frequencies. Soft things become loud. Small noises are irritating. I ask everyone to stop shouting. I can even hear the movement of the joints of my body being conducted back to my ear. A related condition that my mom has can cause it: superior canal dehiscence syndrome.",
"It never occurred to me that this doesn't happen to other people. I'm a little freaked out now. Ill be confronting my husband about this in the morning. I never worried about it because I thought this was a normal thing that happened to everyone."
] |
This may have been asked before but: How do radio waves travel in space? | [
"So if you think of sound traveling, it is using some kind of medium or material. It moves the molecules and they hit each other. When you hear something it is actually the pressure of the air changing minutely.\nIn space, however, sound cannot travel. This may be where you get caught up. \n\nLight, however, travels very nicely. Light is made up of it's own \"stuff\" and does not need to make waves out of other material. The \"stuff\" is subatomic particles which can be both considered a wave and particle (not for a 5 year old to understand).\n\nRadio is actually light. The light we see is visual light, but radio is just a different frequency of light that we cannot see, just like infrared, or microwaves. Our eyes can \"see\" only a small amount of the whole electromagnetic spectrum that all waves fall under.\n\n** They are made up of their own very small particles that travel at light speed through empty space.\n\nEDIT: When you think of an atom, they are made up of lots of pieces. If you change the energy of the atom (maybe with heat or hitting it with some other waves) sometimes those pieces \"pop\" off. Depending on the energy of these pieces they may be different types of waves. The light from the filament in a light bulb is the tungsten atoms getting \"excited\" from electricity and heat and popping off subatomic particles at an energy and frequency specific to yellow-ish light."
] |
- Why did a downgrade of the US Gov't lead to more people buying treasury bonds? | [
"I posted an answer already, but I forget to explain it like I would to a five year old. \n\nSay your friend owns a lemonade stand, and wants to grow. He tells you how at the moment he is making $10/day. He says that if you give him $20, he will make you part owner and give you back $2/month and you don't have to do anything. Sounds pretty good, right? \n\nYour parents want to borrow $20 too for 6 months, and they'll give you an extra $1 afterwards. \n\nNow you're not sure your friend can keep his promise but you are 99.999% certain your parents will. Anyway, one night you hear your parents talk about how things are a little rough and they need to watch their spending, but they still have their jobs and everything's fine. Your friends say their parents said the same thing. \n\nThis makes you worry about whether people will be able to buy lemonade, since parents might not be able to and won't be able to give their kids money. You start doubting whether your friend will be able to pay you that $2/month, or anything at all.\n\nSo, you, not liking to take risks with your $20 it took a year to save, lend it to your parents.\n\nSubstitute the stock market for your friend, and the government for your parents. That's about as close as I can get.",
"Not 100% sure on this, but, basically, when there is a lot of uncertainty about what equities will do, people flee towards safer investments and treasuries are still the safest investment around. Of course, buying lots of treasuries ups the price and lowers yields but it's better than losing money."
] |
What are the cultural and social reasons to throw a sexual bachelor/bachelorette party? | [
"Bachelor parties date back to ancient Sparta, where where men would eat and drink the night before a friend's wedding. That was all about celebrating the union, saying goodbye to the 'carefree' days before a man took on the responsibility of a family, and swearing allegiance to one another for battle and stuff. I think the same thing still stands today, minus the battle thing, and people celebrate in the same spirit in a lot of different cultures across the world. For most people I think it's about having a good time with friends and celebrating the past before you take a big step into another chapter of your life. \n\nLooking back through history, I kind of think it makes sense for bachelor parties to be sexual. For example in the 1800's (I'm generalising here) people often didn't marry for love, but rather for status/power, or because of social pressure. Marriage wasn't always a fun thing for people to do, it was sometimes pretty business-like, and it often meant the couple would take on the responsibility of children, more money with their combined finances, and more influence in their community (even if they did marry for love, that's still a lot of new responsibility). All that in mind, it makes sense that bachelor parties have a history of being rowdy and wild. I you're going into a loveless marriage to a woman who's expected to act a certain way, or if you're marrying someone you love but you'll have to uphold a certain social standard, you'd want to have fun before you did so. Again, I guess the same train of thought could be applied today in some cases.",
"Most major events in life have some kind of celebration tied with them. The Bachelor/Bachelorette party is a celebration with your close friends as you are ending the period of time that you have a massive amount of time to hang out with them and transition into one where you have less as you will be spending that time with your newly formed family. \n\nIf there is risk of infidelity then you are not mature enough to be married and you really shouldn't be be doing it. Also many if not most do not include sexual component. The most recent one that I was involved with we went camping for a weekend."
] |
Would an object fully submerged in water be considered wet? | [
"This is more of a philosophical question than a chemical one. What makes something \"wet\"? I'd say that objects that don't absorb water can't be wet, but surfaces with water on them are wet. So a caught fish can be wet (if it has not been dried), or a person can be wet, though when we say that we really mean their skin. However, the word loses its meaning when you describe something completely immersed in water. The quality of being submerged takes precedence over being wet.",
"There is such a thing as \"wetting\" described in science. It refers to how much a liquid will favor being in contact with another substance. Its determined by the amount of energy that the boundary between the two creates as compared to the boundaries with air. Its the difference between when on some surfaces you see water droplets that are very rounded, and on some surfaces you see water spread out readily into less rounded lower spreads. \n\nThat's the closest you'd really have of a sort of meaningful answer to things being wet. \n\nThe reason you don't feel wet when you're underwater is most likely because when you're wet but out of the water, you can feel some evaporative cooling from the water, and because there's a difference between some area's of your skin exposed to air and some not, because the hairs on your body will want to be bound by together by the water and unable to move with the air. If you were fully underwater, the hairs wouldn't be subject to surface tension globbing them together and to your skin. A lot of small sensations that don't figure in without also having air in the mix. \n\nBut as to what is \"wet\" well definitions in day to day speech are really just descriptions of how words are used. I'd say something submerged in water is definitely wet."
] |
Does it take more energy to heat things up or cool them down? | [
"Assuming your question implies that heating things is raising them higher than the room temperature and cooling them down is lowering them from the room temperature.\n\nThe second law of thermodynamics says that you cannot transfer heat from a cooler body to a hotter body without some additional work(energy) involved. So if you want to heat a body, you simply supply it with energy, but if you want to cool a body by the same temperature difference as the heated body, you'd have to first create a colder body to which heat could be transferred to and which would require higher energy transfer than in the heating case."
] |
What is the precise definition of a limit in calculus? | [
"Epsilon-delta was mysterious for me at first, too, but became quite intuitive later on. Think about it like a test.\n\nSuppose Bob says \"*L* is the limit of *f(x)* near *x=a*. I'm sure of it!\". Alice says \"Oh really now... prove it to me! Let's zoom in on a graph of *f(x)* and check it out. Show me a plot of *f(x)* in a region including *x=a*, with the vertical scale going from *L-0.001* and *L+0.001*. And *f(x)* is not allowed to go outside the vertical scale in this plot, except leave out the point *f(x=a)*.\"\n\nBob thinks for a moment and then prints out this really zoomed plot of *f(x)*. Sure enough, it stays within the vertical bounds of *L-0.001* and *L+0.001*. The width of the plot is really small, but it still includes the point *x=a*.\n\nAlice is impressed but not totally convinced. She asks for another plot with the same rules, but now with *L-0.000001* and *L+0.000001* as the vertical range. Bob sighs and produces another plot -- even more zoomed in, but sure enough it follows the rules.\n\nAlice is still not 100% convinced, and Bob is getting the feeling that she will never stop asking. So, he says \"I'll tell you what, I am going to mathematically prove that no matter how small of a vertical scale you ask for, I can produce a plot satisfying your conditions. Let *L-epsilon* to *L+epsilon* be the vertical range that you ask for, and let *a-delta* to *a+delta* be the horizontal range that I plot....\" He then launches into a proof that no matter how small of an *epsilon* Alice asks for, he could produce a *delta* which satisfies her plotting condition, that f(x) stays within the vertical range.\n\nAlice is finally convinced. \"You're right. *L* indeed is the limit of *f(x)*, as *x* approaches *a*.\" Alice is a mathematician.\n\nSo why didn't Bob just calculate the value of *f(a)*? Well, sometimes *f(a)* isn't defined even though *f(x)* is defined for all parameters near *x=a*. Other times, *f(a)* is defined but doesn't at all fit in with nearby values. The limit tells you exactly **what *f(a)* ought to be, based on its surroundings**.",
"Back when you were in middle school you first started to look at functions. A function was a magic machine where you would take a value of x, and it would give you a value for y. Then you would put that point on an XY coordinate plane. You only cared about the individual *point*. Later on as you got more math sophisticated, you care about the entire shape of the function. Parabola's were shaped like a U, linear functions were just a straight line, etc.\n\nIn limits, you are going to look at the shape of the function ***except at the point***\n\nIf you have the limit of x as x approaches 2, you are going to look at the graph around x=2 but not at x=2.\n\nAll that other mumbo jumbo basically explains just how close a limit needs to be. You won't need it for the rest of Calculus I",
"The explanations here are good, but I *highly recommend* that you spend some time getting comfortable with the \"epsilon-delta\" definition of a limit. Once you are comfortable with it, you will see that it is not counter-intuitive at all, and it will help you so much in the years to come, especially when things get more generalized as Not_Me_But_A_Friend mentioned."
] |
What is the likelihood of a US economic crash and how likely is it? | [
"Here's what you have to remember: we have *real* wealth. I don't mean numbers in a computer. I mean real, tangible things: strong houses, excellent roads, high-tech factories. We have a very skilled workforce. We have farms that produce tremendous amounts of food per square foot. We have incredible technology. That's not paper wealth - that's stuff is *real*. That kind of stuff doesn't just vanish.\n\nHere's what you have to remember about paper money, bank accounts, government debt, and other numbers in computers: computers can be reset. It's real, physical, tangible wealth that can't be reset.\n\nThe reason countries like Zimbabwe can't just print new money and start over is that they have no *real* wealth to build on. They don't have a skilled workforce. They don't have good roads. They don't have high-tech factories. They can reset their money, but they can't reset their lack of factories.\n\nIn the past, many countries have had economic (paper) meltdowns. The ones that have real, physical wealth to build on tend to recover quickly. The ones that don't, recover slowly.\n\nBut the interesting thing is: the fact that everyone knows this makes it that much less likely that we'll have any real meltdown, even a paper one. You see, everyone knows our economy will be fine in the end. So they don't lose faith in our economy or our currency, even when things seem a little rocky.\n\nAlways remember this about economics: look past the paper money, look past the numbers in computers, and be aware of the real physical, material resources that are moving around. You'll find that many things become clearer.",
"I don't know if you meant to do this but your title is the same question twice."
] |
Why do commercial airlines rarely have accidents whereas private jets and planes are frequently involved in accidents? | [
"Because the commercial airlines usually have the stricter training requirements, the higher cutoff point and their pilots fly even more regularly."
] |
What are pressure points? Do they work like they do in movies? Can you really disable someone by tapping or pinching specific places? | [
"Best I can tell they are nerve bundles, and yes you can. Generally, it's not a 'incapacitate' but rather can cause intense pain which most people react to. Some people you, can it fact hit them and they can take the pain."
] |
Why do some drinks need foil seals bellow their caps and others don’t? | [
"If you can open the lid/cap and replace it without out someone knowing, it needs a seal underneath. If the lid had a plastic piece that breaks, or you have to rip a wrapping to get to it, it doesn't need a seal underneath. It's all about whether you can detect tampering or not.",
"Drinks with foil seals aren't carbonated. That allows them to be sealed under vacuum after they are made so they do not get contaminated. They go through a \"canning\" process to make sure they stay fresh on the shelf. Carbonated drinks can't be vacuum sealed."
] |
Why must our vote for president have to be private? Wouldn't E-voting be alot easier if we didn't care who saw? | [
"The challenges with e-voting have nothing to do with preserving the secrecy of a voter's choice.\n\nAlso the reason to protect that secrecy are very important. Being forced to reveal your vote can lead to voter intimidation which is disastrous for democracy. \n\nIt might seem counter intuitive because so many people openly share their voting choices but just having the choice to keep it a secret is enough to prevent the kind of election rigging that happens all the time in dictatorship countries.",
"Taking privacy out of voting is a bad idea. It's important that we be able to avoid social, economic, employment and any other form of recourse in response to our voting. For example, what would it do if we thought our employer had a strong position on an issue and that we knew they'd see our vote? Would that change at least one person's vote? What if I live in a city like San Francisco where everyone is liberal and I'm not and I'm worried about the social repercussions of my vote? Will that change how at least one person votes? Additionally, it enables vote-selling. If I can verify who someone voted for I can pay them upon having voted.",
"I don't think the problem with e-voting is privacy. Many experts have stated that an electronic/digital vote-casting system is very vulnerable to manipulation. \n\nAs far as to your question, privacy keeps voters from fearing retribution from voting for a certain candidate, as well as maintains the voters right to privacy. People can choose to share their decision if they choose."
] |
why is it bad to ask a woman's age? | [
"Ask her if she knows what VHS is, if yes, she's old enough.",
"It is because of the societal view that women should look the same age as, or younger than, what they really are. If you ask a woman how old she is, it is considered offensive because that means you could not tell by just looking at her. Try asking if she is around your age. If she is older, she'll be delighted that you thought she looked young.",
"It's OK to ask young women their age, it's when they get older that it's treasonable and possibly a capital crime."
] |
Why there's a shadow of heat, but I can't see it with my eyes? | [
"The reason you can't see heat is because it is emitted as infrared radiation which has a much higher wavelength than the eye can pick up. The heat waves you see and this shadows are caused by the varying density in the air. \n\nHot air is less dense than cold air. Fact. \nAs light passes through air, we don't see any refraction because the air is the same density. However, when there is a massive variance in density in the air, the light is radically refracted through the less dense parts. This is why the light appears to bend and cause cool shadows."
] |
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