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Why do objects have genders in languages other than English, and how are those genders assigned? | [
"One possible explanation as to why grammatical gender arises is redundancy. It is a good thing for a language to have a certain degree of redundancy; that way, if part of a message is cut out or somehow misunderstood, it is still possible to understand the whole meaning, as redundancy means it was transmitted more than once.\n\nAnd what does redundancy have to do with grammatical gender? The link between them is the concept of agreement. English has a few examples of this: a third-person singular subject makes the verb take an \"s\", pronouns have to agree with number (singular/plural) and, when applicable, the physical gender of the people they refer to, and that's pretty much it. In Latin, for instance, you could have a sentence like *illae pulchrae puellae flavae sunt Romanae* (those beautiful blonde girls are Roman). All the words here indicate we're talking about more than one thing (plural), and all but the verb *sunt* are specific for feminine nouns. All but the verb also indicate they are either part of the subject of the sentence (those beautiful blonde girls), or they refer to it (are Romans). So, agreement leads to redundancy, which is positive for communication.\n\nNow, if your native language is Latin, you simply cannot express yourself without putting the right agreements; they come spontaneously to you. And while the word in my example refers to an entity which has a physical gender, a girl, other nouns might happen to end similarly to *puella* (girl); for instance, *tabula* (board, plank). And, because the agreement in Latin depends on the ending of the word, you just add the same letters to the end of *tabula* as you do with *puella*. That way, *tabula* ends up also being a feminine noun. Because every word ends up having one of the possible genders in a language (masculine, feminine or neutral for Latin; other languages may differ), when you create a new word you create it with a gender.\n\nAlso, sometimes there are exceptions - one word totally looks like it should belong to a gender, but actually belongs to another - or confused genders - some speakers use one for a word, others use another for the same word. And this is influenced by etymology (the origin of the word) and, to a lesser extent, by language contact. It should finally be pointed out that, even in languages whose possible genders are the same (for instance: Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian all have only masculine and feminine, but no neutral), related words don't need to have the same gender. The word related to English *passage* in these four languages is masculine in all of them, except Portuguese, for example.\n\nSome non-Indo-European languages even have \"classes\", which behave like grammatical genders but have no relation to physical gender, and might be quite numerous (6, 8, 10 or more). I've once read the language of the Navajo Native Americans has one \"gender\" for elongated, rigid things like an arrow, another for elongated and flexible like a bow, a third for flat an flexible like a blanket, and so on. And, in their agreement system, the agreeing words have to change according to these nouns' \"gender\"!",
"As an Arabic student, who now is near fluent in the language this was one of the most frustrating things at first when I started learning it. However now that I understand the nuances of the grammar much better it's helpful in many of the ways the previous posters have said. The gender assignments also help to identify which verb is referring to which object in the sentence, as well as their adverbs and adjectives. In general Arabic does not make use of a lot of punctuation so run on sentences are a big thing, where you might have multiple subject/verb/adjective interactions in each sentence. Each verb in Arabic is able to be conjugated by not only plurality but also gender which shows which subject they're talking about. For example a sentence could read: \n\"ذهبت البنت الى السوق ولكن قد غلق الرجل الدكان \"\nNote, Stupid sentence but it illustrates my point. \n\"The girl went to the market but the man had closed the store.\" \nThe verb \"to go\" , \"ذهب\" is conjugated past tense feminine, \"ذهبت\" because it describes the girl. While in the same sentence the verb \"to close\" , \"غلق\" is left in the past tense masculine form (the form all Arabic verbs are found in root form ) because it's describing the man who closed the store. \n\nThere's way more complications they like to throw in, but in my opinion that's probably the most important use of gender in Arabic.",
"You know how some words are pluralized by adding \"s\" and some words are pluralized by adding \"es\"? It's an extended version of that. There are different groups of words that obey different grammatical rules about how to modify them. This concept became known as \"grammatical gender\" because, in European languages, two of these groups tend to also be used for male and female people."
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Am I really saving gas by turning off my car's engine at red lights? | [
"I believe 10 seconds off will make up for the gas to start it up. However if you stop your car at every light you will wreak havoc on your starter.",
"Forget the original question for a moment. When I learned to drive fifty years ago, my dad made the point that there are idiots on the road (there still are) and you have to be ready at ANY MOMENT to get the hell out of wherever you are.\n\nIf you have a stick shift, don't sit there in neutral with your foot off the clutch unless it IS for a long time. Always be ready to go. If you have an automatic, be ready to go. And if your car takes more than a second to start up...then more time to put into gear... remember that the idiot bearing down on you at \"ONLY\" 30 miles per hour covers 44 feet every second!\n\nDon't let your car be in traffic, which includes red lights, without the capability of getting the hell out of there.",
"The amount of gas it takes to start depends a lot on the engine - size, fuel injected vs. direct injected, etc.\n\nEven if you save a little gas, you're also putting more wear on your starter.\n\nTL;DR not worth the hassle either way. It's going to be, at most, pennies of savings.",
"If you drive a fuel injected vehicle, then yes. Non-fuel injected vehicles use more gas than at idle to start the engine.",
"It's too dependent of a situation. If the red light lasts 1 second than no, you do not save anything, if it lasts 30 seconds you do , depending on what your car is. If your car is a simple civic, you will not burn significant gas keeping it on, if it's a teched out with on screen controls etc, (lots of tech in it) it will. It's very situation dependant, and in the end the gas you save is not worth the hassle."
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How do people figure out what colors to use when coloring an old black and white photo? | [
"\"Black\" and \"white\" are actually a ton of different shades of grey. If you know the method the picture was taken with and how it converts visible light into something that can be put onto film in greyscale, you can tell with a pretty high degree of accuracy which shade of grey corresponds to which visible light color.",
"Historical perspective, contextual clues, hues and saturations, going with \"expected colors\".\n\nThe sky is blue, the grass is green, cement is gray. Certain militaries wore certain colors, we have their uniforms today. Once you get through the \"basics\" and what we expect to see, you have quite a bit of info there. Then the other clues can help fill that in. \n\nAll the colors may not be perfect, but there is still plenty of information in a photo to get buy and colorize it."
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How does my car radio display the station's call letters? | [
"Via [RDS](_URL_0_). There's another signal tucked away inside the FM broadcast that can carry information like text. The station chooses what to send.\n\nThis is also how radios can identify the type of music playing like 'Rock' or 'Jazz'."
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From a technical standpoint, how are hackers able to "crack" online passwords? | [
"On most sites user names are very easy to find. For example I can see yours right on this page, SonicPavement. For every way a website tries to block hackers, those hackers will come up with some clever way to get around it. For example, they could use a botnet (many computers that they are under their control) to get around password attempt limits. Longer/more complex passwords make botnets less effective. \n\nThere's also the issue that the password database could get hacked. In this case you wouldn't want the actual passwords to be available, so they are hashed (see the link to my comment below for more on this). If a hacker gets ahold of the hashes a guess attempt limit cannot be enforced and therefore a complex password is very important. There have been quite a few major sites which have had their password databases hacked recently, [Evernote being one of the latest](_URL_1_). \n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"
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Do special forces count as "boots on ground" or do they have their own separate rules? | [
"\"Boots on the ground\" isn't a really helpful term since it basically means whatever the speaker wants it to mean. That said, it doesn't typically apply to special forces or \"advisers\" or the like. Assuming the figures in [this article](_URL_0_) are correct, the US has/had 1,000 advisers in Iraq while insisting that there weren't \"boots on the ground\". \n\nClearly there are literal boots on the literal ground. But the phrase there refers to \"ground troops\" or the like rather than advisers or special forces.\n\nAlso, we aren't enemies with Iran. There are clearly plenty of problems between our two countries, but we can still work together when it benefits both of us.",
"They don't count as boots on the ground in political terms. \"Special operations\" or sometimes \"military advisors\" would be the terms tossed around. \n\nAlso, we are at odds with Iran but we have a common interest in stabilizing Iraq that neither group could do on its own. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, something like that?",
"The President makes the rules for everyone in the military. He has help from a bunch of people, but he's the boss boss. The President lets some people do sneaky things for him. He wants them to be sneaky because if they get caught doing these things, people may not like the President as much. Most of these people doing sneaky things work at a place called JSOC. The people at JSOC are like the President's sneaky ninjas. When the President is telling people about what he's doing, he doesn't usually talk about his ninjas, but sometimes, when the ninjas have done something really good, and the President is proud, he'll tell everyone what happened. The whole point of the ninjas though, is that the President can choose if he wants to tell people about the good things, or not tell people about the bad things."
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how did we as humans collectively decide on the location of the international date line? | [
"It didn't.\n\nThe date line is the opposite side of the globe to the Prime Meridian (roughly).\n\nThere were multiple Prime Meridians throughout history, typlically countries with large a large navy or merchant shipping fleet would have their own. Eventually they all lost out to the current PM.",
"you'll notice the exact opposite longitude goes through London. \n\nwhen they started timezones etc, Britain was basically the Great Power. They decided that all longitudes, and, later, timezones would be counted from there. And nobody really argued with them, because they had less boats.\n\nFortunately the 180 degree longitude that (more or less) the date line falls on is in the middle of the pacific so it worked out quite well since people wouldn't be constantly crossing it on their way to work (it'd be daft if it fell in the middle of, say, the US)",
"The decision to put the Prime Meridian through Greenwich, England was made at at the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington DC in October, 1884. But each country has traditionally decided what time zones to use and where it sits relative to the date line. \n\nNote that the day doesn't begin in Japan, it begins in Kiribati, where the time zone is UTC+14 (14 hours ahead of the meridian), so that the country is all on the same day. The Philippines used to be on the *east* side of the date line until 1844, so as to be on a common day with Spain and Mexico."
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How do self-driving cars reduce accidents | [
"> Can a self-driving car keep tabs of all the pedestrians around it too? \n\nYes. A self-driving car also has (depending on how its implemented) a 360 degree field of vision, and has a reaction time that exceeds human reactions by an order of magnitude. A computer can begin stopping the car before you've even *noticed* the child in the road.",
"93% percent of accidents are caused by human error. Beyond that, a self-driving car will always be paying attention, will have vastly superior reaction skills, and will never panic or react incorrectly. \n\nGoogle's cars use a combination of LIDAR, RADAR, cameras, gps, internal maps, and interial measurment to understand their position in the environment around them.\n\n/r/selfdrivingcars",
"They can keep track of pedestrians and computers can't get distracted while driving.",
"> Can a self-driving car keep tabs of all the pedestrians around it too? \n\nYes. Some cars already have this feature, with sensors that basically detect the proximity and speed of objects, and react to them appropriately, either by warning you, or actually by braking. [This is a presentation on the subject,](_URL_0_), and [this demonstration of the technology](_URL_1_).\n\nAll of these can be added to the GPS-guided driving of a self-driving car to prevent accidents and ensure safety.",
"Even better, a self driving car can have cameras watching in every direction at once. Humans can basically look in one direction at a time. Furthermore, self driving cars can react much more quickly -- humans have to see something, process it in our brains, decide to act, and then either swerve or move a foot from one pedal to the other. Computers can see, process, decide, and then the reaction is triggered basically immediately."
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If a woman became president of the US, and got pregnant, would she get a maternity leave? | [
"On the off chance a woman of child bearing age became president, which is unlikely, the VP would step in if she were incapacitated following the birth, or when she couldn't do things like flying, but as it isn't a very physical job, and the baby could always be in her office, I imagine she wouldn't take a complete maternity leave.",
"Jane Swift was the governor of Mass.. She delivered her twins one month after taking office. She had executive authority and videoconferenced from her hospital bed. \n\n_URL_0_",
"She wouldn't go on maternity leave, her husband would take care of the child. A woman president, like any candidate would have to work extremely hard to become the \"leader of the free world\" and I doubt she wouldn't give that up once she got pregnant.",
"The formal answer to your question is that this would be handled politically, not legally. If the president wants to take time off for any reason, he can. Obama can play as much golf as he'd like. Presumably if the president went really conspicuously absent, he would be impeached by Congress. And he almost certainly would not be reelected. \n\nSo if a woman president had a child while in office and wanted, say, 6 months maternity leave, she could take it. But congress and the voters would decide whether she continued to be president. \n\nThe president would keep her legal authority while on leave (so long as she isn't incapacitated) and would delegate duties to staff as appropriate.",
"Not sure what the issue would be. Presidents have illnesses and surgeries. Nothing new here.",
"The president has certain powers and duties under the constitution, but his or her actual day-to-day job is self-determined. The only person who regulates the president's work hours and attendance, on a daily basis, is the president.\n\nUnless she did the job so poorly as to be impeached by the house of representatives and found guilty of a crime by the senate, she would stay in office during her pregnancy and childbirth, and would be able to make her own decisions about how much or how little actual \"work\" to do, and how much to delegate to others.",
"More importantly, would she take it? I personally doubt any woman who actually made it through everything a female president would have to make it through would give it up so easily. Every day absent, every minute absent gives her political opponents an edge. No, she'd have a keep-in nanny, probably and take lots of pictures with her new baby.",
"I believe you must be at least 35 years old to become president. Most are rather older than that. Apparently the youngest president we've had was Teddy Roosevelt, at 42. So, pregnancy & childbirth in a sitting president is rather unlikely. \n\nBut if it did happen? She'd have to take some time off for the birth, presumably. I guess the veep would take over. But given the nature of the job, I can't imagine her choosing to take much of a maternity leave at all. She's kinda, you know, busy. As for if she *could* take six weeks if she wanted? I doubt very much that there's any rules in place for that. \n\nAlso, the Right would bash her for being a bad mother and not caring for her children and being a working mother is bad enough and oh what a terrible example etc. etc. And the Left would call the Right sexist poo-poo-heads. And blah blah blah. So ladies, if you become president, don't get knocked up.",
"Not sure if this will get buried but, the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution Sections 3 and 4 addresses issues like this.\n\nSo whenever the president needs to step down, he/she writes a letter to congress letting them know and the VP takes over(and the Speaker of the House becomes VP I believe). Then later, if the president wishes to continue presidenting, he/she writes to congress again that he/she wants to come back. At this point, simply put, if the VP and majority of Congress don't want the president back then they have four days to write backing basically saying \"no.\"\n\nIf President M'lady were to get pregnant, she could take off until she was ready to be back, leaving the VP in charge.",
"*Pretty* sure she'd be on hella birth control. If my girlfriend is smart enough to religiously take it because having a baby in college is a bad idea, the President of the United States would be smart enough to do it too. \n\nBut, hypothetically, she would do all the work possible. I doubt she'd actually be hindered from doing something until about 1-2 months before she gave birth. After that, she'd hire people to do 99% of the work until she finished her term. Nannies are a thing.",
"Maternity leave? United States of America? \n\nOP must be European.",
"As a Federal employee, the President would accrue four hours of sick-pay per two-week period. The President would then, if needed, get up to 12 weeks off without pay per Federal employee policy.\n\nDuring the delivery, the Vice President, would assume the duties temporarily. But assuming that there are no complications, the President could assume the responsibilities of President, if not the daily schedule almost immediately.",
"If the President becomes unable to lead the country for whatever reason, the Vice President acts as President. If the President were a woman and went on maternity leave, the Vice President would become \"Acting President\", but it would be foolish to assume that the President would not be consulted for any major actions that the VP would be taking while the President was on maternity leave.",
"As a federal employee I assume even a male president could take maternity leave if he wanted to.",
"I don't know how the maternity leaves were handled but [Pakistan has had a Prime Minister give birth while in office.](_URL_1_). She also gave birth a couple of months before taking office. And her third child was probably born between her two terms in office (can't find dates, but its what I recall). People started to refer to the PPP as the Permanently\nPregnant Party. Her government was dissolved both times on corruption charges (not maternity leave issues).",
"Under article 3 of the [25th Amendment](_URL_3_), the President writes [a letter to Congress](_URL_4_) declaring her inability to carry out her duties, and the next person in line becomes the acting President. Then, when the President is ready to resume her duties she would write [another letter to Congress](_URL_4_) and immediately resume her powers.",
"If the president is incapacitated, for ANY reason, does not matter WHAT that reason is, the Vice President becomes No matter HOW long it lasts. \n\nDon't worry about it though, because you could count on your fingers the number of presidents where a woman that age could still have gotten pregnant. Most times, by the time they get that far up the ladder, they are at least in their mid 50s. A woman, to break through the glass ceiling is going to need that long. \n\n Pretty unlikely to crop up!!",
"I imagine she'd only need to take a couple days off for the birth and then I'm sure if she were married her husband could take care of the baby while she were at work or hire a nanny. Men in big positions have kids often and it doesn't usually affect their professional careers too much.",
"We haven't had any women presidents, and we don't really have maternity leave. Ask a civilized nation like Germany.",
"Benazir Bhutto was pregnant and had a baby while she was Prime Minister of Pakistan and became the first leader to do so. At the time, she was under a great deal of pressure from the opposition and underwent emergency C-section to have her baby. She was back on the job the next day. \n_URL_5_",
"Nevermind maternity leave, can you imagine the shit flying off the fan if she got an abortion?",
"I would imagine that the Vice President would take over for as long as the President deems necessary.\n\nIn practice, this will probably never happen because you have to be over 35 in order to be elected, and most presidents are much older.",
"Refer to the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution. It completely details what should happen if the president (or vice president) is unable to fulfill their duties.\n\n\n\n > **Section 1.** In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.\n\n > **Section 2.** Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.\n\n > **Section 3.** Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.\n\n > **Section 4.** Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.\n\n > Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.\n\n\n\nI kind of did a lot of research on the Constitution while I was in high school and gave some speeches for an Oratorical. The 25th Amendment was one of my large speeches I gave.",
"In America, pregnancy is classified as a \"disability.\" So, yes, she would be able to use her FMLA.\n\nThe Vice-President would be sworn in as President until she came back. It really isn't that big of a deal. If the president needed an appendectomy in office, he'd be under general anesthesia and power would need to be temporarily transferred. \n\nSource: I teach college level government and [the 25th Amendment](_URL_6_)",
"The comments about governor Swift explain what happens perfectly but I feel the need to add a quick point. We have never had a president under 43 years of age and the youngest possible is 35. So while the scenario you describe isn't impossible, it is improbable.",
"A very short answer: you need to be at least 35 years old to run for president, which is about the age you hit quite a number of risk factors for conceiving a child.",
"This is America women don't get maternity leave.",
"It depends on what you mean by \"get\" maternity leave. This could mean two different things:\n\n1. Would Madame President receive paid vacation time to deliver/care for the baby?\n2. Would Madame President be ALLOWED to take vacation time to deliver/care for the baby? (And would it be paid?)\n\nThe answer to #1 is \"No.\" While the U.S. is one of the few places that doesn't require employers to provide maternity leave, the Federal government does allow employees to take up to 12 weeks of accrued sick leave for maternity (and paternity, for that matter). But that doesn't matter because even though the President is a Federal employee (as in, she works for the Federal government), the usual laws regarding Fed. employees don't apply to elected officials. The President doesn't \"get\" leave in any real sense of the word.\n\nBut that takes us to #2 - the answer is yes, the President can take as much time as she wants! And it's paid! The President earns $400K/year, and none of that is subject to any strings - if our new-mama President wants to just take care of the baby all day, there's nothing anyone can do about it until the next election. (The Constitution requires that Presidential pay remain constant throughout her term).\n\nOf course, people might get upset, so Madame President could invoke the 25th Amendment to have the VP become the Acting President until after the birth. This would be particularly important if the President has put under anesthetic for the birth.",
"Okay side note. If you were a female president what makes you think thats the right time to have a child? Also remember you have to be at least 35 to be the president. The average age is 54 and the youngest was Teddy Roosevelt at 42, so chances are she would have gone through menopause already.\n\nEdit: TIL: JFK wasn't the youngest president it was Teddy Roosevelt. JFK was the youngest elected president",
"Most likely she would be past her reproductive age when she would be president.",
"In theory, sure. But since we have a minimum age requirement of 35 and no one has yet been elected younger than 43, likely she would have already had any children she was likely to have already. Any pregnancies after age 35 are considered \"advanced maternal age\" and high risk, with a higher chance of various birth defects, and a woman capable of becoming president would know that and have planned accordingly. Of course, birth control can fail but I just don't see it happening (if for no other reason than not wanting to be pregnant while living under a microscope, since pregnant women are second-guessed over every decision anyway, and she also wouldn't want the constant \"Hormones, amiright?\" after every action).",
"One must be at least 35 years old to be eligible for the office of president. The average age of men beginning their term as president is 54 years, and the youngest man to become president was 42.\n \nNow, on average, women go through menopause at age 51. So if women presidency statistics behave like men's statistics, then the average woman president would have gone through menopause by the time she was inaugurated. Even if the woman had not gone through menopause, it would be unlikely for her to be pregnant at that age.",
"I'm talking out of my ass, I think, but--\n\nI'd imagine they would. Why not? Presidents are allowed to take vacations, yes? This would be a similar situation, just possibly for a longer duration. The day to day workings of the government would be managed by the rest of the staff, while the President would be \"on call\" for emergencies. If an emergency were to occur, I'd imagine that her staff would \"take the problem\" to her, instead of her working from her normal office. \n\nThat'd work out okay, wouldn't it?",
"This is an excellent question. I never thought about that. In reality though, I would imagine that when a woman eventually does become president, she will already have had children, OR if she does not, she will be so career minded as to forgo having children. \n\nBut I think if she DID become pregnant while in office, it would be treated like any medical leave and the Vice President would assume presidential powers.",
"If you are so motivated and driven and hard working and ambitious that you become president, well you sure as fuck aren't stopping just for a baby. The first husband and a team of aides can look after the baby, Madam President will be too busy with her 19 hour work days seven days a week. And loving every minute of it.",
"FMLA would apply just like it would to any other situation requiring the president to take time off, whether it's to care for a newborn or an ailing family member isn't really relevant.",
"I would say it would be completely inappropriate for the president of the united states to get pregnant while in office.",
"She's... a woman!\n\nShe's... the President!\n\nAnd she's... _pregnant?_\n\n_record scratch_",
"A couple of things: first, it's simply the nature of the confluence of American politics and American sexism that a woman of realistically child-bearing age would never be elected to the executive office. I cannot see that happening at least within the next century. Our most viable candidates for a female president at this stage in the 2016 election are Elizabeh Warren and Hilary Clinton, one of whom is a grandma and both of whom are way past the possibility of pregnancy. We don't seem to put a lot of stock in young women, at least in terms of holding office, a fear which I can't help but guess would be amplified in a presidential race (think how Mitt Romney's religion followed him in the 2012 race. Mormons aren't even a particularly marginalized group, but opposing politicos cling to what fears they can). It is also pretty unlikely that a First Lady will give birth in the White House any time soon. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Jackie Kennedy pregnant at one point and then lost the baby? I'm gonna say the Kennedy administration was probably the last presidenial pregnancy we will see because it was both prior to the wide-spread adoption of hormonal birth control methods and involved our only Catholic president. Simply put, I don't think a theoretically-elected, relatively young (she'd realistically have to be younger than the youngest president, Theodore Roosevelt, 42 when sworn into office) woman president would be reckless enough to become pregnant as president. Any woman who has worked as hard as it takes to get to the Oval Office, and even harder because she's a woman, would never risk letting pregnancy ruin her public-image, control over Congress or availability to serve. And even if she became pregnant, there is no doubt in my mind that she'd choose to get an abortion. A woman simply cannot make it to the highest office in America without being at least personally pro-choice. In addition, let's say that we elect a female president in her early 40's. While it's still possible for her to become pregnant, it is highly unlikely for her to get *accidentally* pregnant. She'd have to make the conscious choice to get pregnant, and then probably undergo some form of fertility treatments, probably in-vitro fertilization. That being said, in the very very unlikely event of a woman president having a baby in office, I would expect her to have prepped the American public well in advance of her plans for the delivery and the first month of the baby's life. I would assume that she would retain executive power but delegate her day to day appearances to the VP. After the first month, I'd think the baby's care would primarily go to a team of presidential nannies and, hopefully, the First Husband. So to answer your question, I don't think she'd take traditional maternity leave. This is amplified by the fact that the US rates 20th in maternity leave benefits out of our wealthy-country peers, only guaranteeing 12 weeks of unpaid leave for a new mother. For comparison, Canada ensures women 29 weeks *paid* leave in addition to 23 weeks unpaid. It would just be weird of the president to put the country on the back burner to have a kid (wasting what amounts to a sizable fraction of a four year term) when a middle-class mom couldn't do the same.",
"1) It's unlikely partly because to be voted in as president you need to be at least 35, but the average age of president when voted in is something like 54. Considering having a child after 40 carries risk factors and menopause kicks in at some point.\n\n2) Even if she did, she's have a huge staff and $400,000 a year salary, so she could afford personal child care which would minimize the length of maternity leave needed.\n\n3) I've seen women work up unto the day they gave birth. So barring certain medical complications, she would be able to perform normally, and if there were any medical complications, it would be the same as if a male president had a medical condition that needed special requirements.",
"Maternity leave is a paid absence from work. The President gets paid a flat rate, and can't really be absent from the job. The work of the President goes to wherever the President goes. If the President is going to be incapacitated (and giving birth probably counts), the 25th Amendment sets up the process to make the Vice-President into the acting President.\n\nTo do that, the President sends a letter to the Speaker of the House, the Vice President, and the Speaker pro tempore of the Senate saying he/she is going to be incapacitated. When the incapacitation is over, he/she sends another letter to the same people.",
"Most of the Presidents we've elected up to this point have been older than their mid-40s, and most women are past child bearing age at that point. If a woman were elected President and had a baby, I'm sure she'd get some time off like most Presidents do, but would continue to perform the duties of her office as much as possible. After all, George Bush took 407 vacation days during his two terms - over one year out of eight - and spent another year on 'working vacations' at Camp David. I'm sure a female President would be held to those same standards.",
"Good question, but with the age requirements for each office and how long it takes to climb the political ladder, when she finally took office she'd most likely be done having children/unable to in a healthy way. I can't remember the age requirements but you usually don't see people under 45 in presidential office.",
"can the vice president just take over for a month or something? and if the vice was a woman who got preggo, just next person down the line would fill in...that seems diplomatic to me...women do get preggo...i'd rather they took some time off and enjoyed the experience/were decent parents too.",
"Unless we elect someone who is at most 50 years old but probably would be much younger this won't be a problem. The 2 women most likely to run for President right now are both too old to encounter this problem. Hillary is 67 and Elizabeth Warren is 65.",
"While I agree with maternity leave in a non-elected role, public figures that have been voted into office should wait to have children until they're out of office. Their focus should be on the citizens, not their young.\n\nThis sounds cold, I know, but it's politics...",
"no post menopausal women can't get pregnant, Jenni from the sorority house across the way will never be president.\n\nIf some how that happened the Vice President assuming she wasnt on maternity leave at the same time, would be acting president for a short time.",
"After seeing all the (completely normal!) emotional ups and downs my wife experienced after the births of our kids... I'm not sure I would want POTUS experiencing that kind of roller coaster while trying to run the executive branch. Just doesn't seem wise somehow.",
"It should be law that men get maternity leave. I had to use fmla without pay, pissed off my company, and had to hear about why i shouldn't have taken 2 weeks off (wife had a c section).",
"I'm guessing that any woman who makes a serious run for President would have already had her kids. She would have needed those kids for photo ops during her previous runs at public office.",
"You have to be at least 35 to become president of the united states. So I doubt any woman young enough to conceive a child will ever be president.",
"I don't know about the US, but the Netherlands had a constitutional amendment in 2005 to allow members of Parliament to take maternity leave. \n\n[Source](_URL_7_) - in Dutch.",
"Presidential candidate has to be at least 35 years old. While it's not too late, she still will be putting her presidency at risk this way.",
"Interestingly enough, Only one president has ever had a child while in the white house in the first place. That alone is telling.",
"Do you know how many vacation days the president already takes per year? It wouldn't be an issue.",
"Presidents dont have sex, silly. Plus they're not allowed to. Thats why Bill Clinton got in trouble.",
"I'm sure any women who'd be able to take office would not have a working oven",
"If we ever elected a woman, she most likely would be too old to have children.",
"She'd have to get an abortion. Can't have a world leader loopy on hormones",
"Only if she wants to be sure that no woman is President ever again.",
"i think a female us president would more than likely be post-menopause",
"What if Putin was the father? that would be pretty awkward...",
"This is America. We don't have any *paid* maternity leave.",
"Would extra secret service be assigned to the first fetus?",
"Would they change the name to the ovulating office?",
"Most presidents take enough vacation you wouldn't notice.",
"Hard to say, such a situation is unpresidented.",
"Most politicians are beyond childbearing years aren't they?",
"Would that make her husband the first man?"
] |
Is the heart like a ticking time bomb, or are we harming it over the years before death? | [
"Usually not. It's usually a gradual process. There are many different things that can go wrong with your heart, the most well known is a heart attack, in which some of the muscle tissue actually dies. But there are many other things that can cause problems in your heart. \n\nHowever, usually when something does go wrong, it's pretty sudden. For example, most heart attacks are caused when you get a blood clot in one of the blood vessels that goes to your heart. This causes the muscle to die because of a lack of oxygen and this causes a heart attack."
] |
Why is it not possible to control your heart the way you do your lungs or any other muscle? | [
"Two points here:\n\n1) Your body is programmed (for want of a better word) not to die, so for example it's extremely difficult to hold your breath until you die or even until you pass out. Your autonomous nervous system keeps necessary functions going regardless of what the conscious passenger in your body thinks it wants.\n\n2) I understand you can in fact control it to a certain extent. I believe it's possible to learn to increase or decrease your heart rate at will. I think it needs some concentration. I think I read something by Derren Brown on the subject."
] |
Why did Sarkozy call Netanyahu a liar? What did he do? | [
"Palestine and Israel are pretty much enemies today, though they would like to share the same land. So, a lot of other countries (including France) want peace to appear there.\n\nSarkozy probably had some verbal agreement with Netanyahu. Sarkozy put some weight on the discussions between Israel and the EU. He also helped Israel being a member of the OECD. He also asked Abbas (the head of Palestine) to remove his proposal to make Palestine part of the UN. \n\nSo, I think he was fairly angry when the quartet (UN, EU, USA, Russia) asked for the restart of discussions between Palestine and Israel and Netanyahu said no to all initiatives. That's not very nice, and probably in contradiction to what he agreed with his friend Sarko.",
"During a (private) discussion on Israeli-Palestinian policy (concerning how France would be voting in favor of the Palestinian membership bid in UNESCO despite the US's strong objection to the move) between French President Nicolai Sarkozy and US President Barack Obama, Mr. Sarkozy gave an unapologetic assessment of his views of Mr. Netanyahu to Mr. Obama."
] |
Why was Princess Leia on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan if she was *FROM* Alderaan? | [
"The Galactic Senate wasn't on Alderaan, she could have presumably been heading home between legislative sessions.\n\nOf course nobody in the galaxy bought that story either way, since Tatooine isn't close to either.",
"I think it's unusual, but makes sense. Let's think of it this way:\n\n**It's 4am at Schipol Airport, near Amsterdam. You're a customs inspector at the arrivals gate.**\n\n**A woman approaches you with her passport and documentation. Her documents say she's the British Ambassador to Japan. You ask,**\n\n\"What's the purpose of your trip?\"\n\n**... and it wouldn't be unreasonable for her to say,**\n\n\"I'm a member of the HMDS and I'm on a diplomatic mission to Britain.\"\n\nIt's a *bit* of a strange phrasing, but not entirely out-of-place. Remember, it's 4am and she's probably tired; Leia in the movie was at gunpoint and stood in front of Darth Vader.",
"Let's say a guy is born in Yorkshire. After college he goes to work for the UN. One day he is sent with a team to London to assist in the negotiation of a treaty. He would be on a diplomatic mission to the UK, even though he's from the UK. \n\nLeia was a member of the Galactic Senate, they or agencies under their domain could have relations with any number of planets/system, so it's entirely conceivable that she was travelling with diplomatic envoys to Alderaan as part of her duties as a Senator.",
"If she's returning home from a diplomatic mission, it'd be safe to say that she's on a diplomatic mission to Alderan, because she is both actively on a diplomatic mission, and travelling to Alderan."
] |
How can a 64gb SD card hold more data than a 32gb SD card if they are the same physical size? | [
"We're talking about storing information, not an actual physical substance. If we're talking about something physical, like water, it would make sense that two buckets the exact same size would hold the same amount of water.\n\n\nHowever, we are talking about information, and information can be represented smaller and smaller as technology improves. How many letters can you fit on a page? if you halve the size of the letters, you have suddenly doubled the amount of letters (and thus information) you can fit on the page, without changing the size of the page. This is analogous to what we see with electronic data storage."
] |
Why can I watch Netflix or porn online seamlessly but when I watch a video on _URL_0_ it's choppy as fuck? | [
"ESPN has horrible video technology. They use an in house video player that hasn't been updated in some time.\n\nOn the other hand, Netflix and Youtube's whole business model relies on having good video service. They spend a lot of money making sure they have a great video player.",
"Bandwidth and just expertise. Youtube has very good technology, specifically to handle this, files in different qualities and formats to work seamlessly, stored in many many servers to deliver it to you."
] |
Would you die if you injected water into your bloodstream? | [
"Depends on how much water you injected. A small amount (a drop or so) probably won't kill you. A larger amount would cause your blood cells to rupture because the concentration of water inside and outside the cell would be different. Water would rush inside the cell and blow up the cell membrane. If you kept injecting water eventually enough cells would blow up that you'd die. Even assuming that the cells could survive blowing up, you'd still die from your cells not being able to perform certain functions which require exact salt and sugar concentrations in your blood.",
"But what about when people shoot up, they use water in the drugs. Is it because of the small amount?",
"Depends on how much and what type. Tap water, perhaps since its not sterile. Sterile water, well too much of it would decrease the concentration of electrolytes in your blood. This would lead to problems. Your low Na would cause neurological problems and the low K would cause cardiac problems. Also your cells would lyse.",
"I have read that nursing students learn to give injections by first practicing on inanimate objects (oranges, mannequins.) Then they practice on each other with injections of sterile water. But perhaps this referred to saline solution. I could not find a good link on this topic."
] |
How smoke detectors work | [
"Smoke detectors are a really cool piece of technology. They contain a bit of radioactive material in them (not enough to cause any serious harm to people). This radioactive material decays every now and then, which generates alpha particles, which in turn knock electrons off the atoms in the air. This generates a tiny electrical current that propagates through the air and hits a metal plate. There is a tiny device in the smoke detector that monitors this electrical signal. When the signal changes and becomes weaker, it's because smoke went into the chamber, and the alarm is triggered.",
"_URL_0_\n\nThe Engineer Guy is fine in my book!"
] |
Why do industries stay close together geographically | [
"A lot of it is because that's where the good employees are, because that's where the jobs in that industry are. That's kind of a chicken and the egg thing, but it's there now, so it perpetuates. There are businesses that do that there, so the colleges start having curriculum around that industry, and it snowballs.\n\nWhy did it start in the first place? Maybe tax incentives, maybe 1 or 2 big companies started there, maybe a college doing research. \n\nIn silicon valley's case, it's because of Stanford. You can read about it on the wikipedia page: _URL_0_",
"The case of Silicon Valley is not so different than others:\n\n1. If we had to pick on factor it is human capital - the driver of any business, especially on dependent on innovation. You build your business where the people who will drive it are and the act of building said business creates people who are knowledgeable about the field that business operates in. So...in the case of Silicon Valley we can look at Stanford as great educator of engineers in the 40s and 50s, the defense industry that received a lot of funding during WWII and thereafter and then Hewlett Package who was both a tech pioneer (i'm being unfair in not mentioning fairchild and others who were critical - but...HP is pretty standout), but more importantly took things to a scale that produced and demanded a shit-ton of people.\n\n2. Following this people came the money. Silicon valley funds a ridiculous number of start ups. If you've got human capital capable of innovation, the smart money will find it. The venture community in Silicon Valley pumps a lot of money into tech and then biotech.\n\nAt this point it's part of the culture of the area - if you want to do innovation in a variety of fields, if you want to fund early stage or you want early stage, it's just a good place to be. It's self-perpetuating, but I think you have to look at the symbiotic relationship of human capital and financial capital to explain it.\n\nA similar thing can be found in other areas, but...the same forces . Money - not always venture, but sometimes government or even a single company (e.g. washington's tech scene is largely the result of Microsoft being there - a pretty singular force and portland has an industry built around sport-associated fashion due to Nike (but now columbia to north face to REI all have design and marketing functions in the area because of the human capital and financial capital focused on this industry there).",
"Specific municipalities set up zoning laws to regulate where companies/buildings can be built. In terms of specialized industries, this has things to do with special tax breaks to locate in area X, transfer of knowledge and ease of transport for industries of similar type, and a social desire to be around like things."
] |
Politics aside, why is pet euthanasia considered humane, while lethal injection is considered cruel and unusual? In other words, why can't we put people to sleep and then administer drugs to stop the heart? | [
"Lethal injection is technically the most humane method of execution that we have. It's not that lethal injection in it of itself is cruel and unusual it's just that the death penalty system isn't the greatest. Lethal injections usually use 3 drug cocktails that anesthetize, relax muscles, and stop the heart. The problems with this procedure are that drugs are in short supply so sometimes untested drug combos have to be used, the doctors do not assess previous drug use (especially if it was intravenous), individuals are not monitored well while the drugs are being administered so they run under the assumption that they become fully unconscious and then die peacefully. For all intents and purpose, it's suppose to be just putting people to sleep and stopping their heart, but there are so many errors that can happen that lead to botched executions, making it cruel and unusual.",
"Pet euthanasia *in the case where the pet's quality of life would be extremely low* is considered humane. It's a case of it being better than the alternative, and the injections used being considered the most humane method available. Euthanasia of perfectly healthy animals usually *isn't* considered humane. Likewise, lethal injections performed on humans who don't want to die is not humane, though *if* we accept the death penalty they may form the most humane method available.\n\nA discussion on whether execution is acceptable is of course beyond the scope of the question, and of ELI5.",
"Idk people are weird man. I'd be happy to have all the worst criminals mass executed at once. Fuck making them wait and waste taxpayer money when they're murders."
] |
How do skulls and, specifically, brain cavities grow in humans? | [
"The skull does not start out as one solid chunk of bone. At birth, it consists of multiple plates connected by cartilage. Infants have a soft spot, aka a fontanelle, where you can feel that bone has not fully formed and even see the baby's pulse. The plates grow larger and the cartilage is replaced by bone, which eventually fuses the plates together into one solid skull."
] |
why are some people fresh and upbeat in the morning ("morning people") and others can barely get out of bed no matter much sleep they have, but can stay up all night easily? | [
"I think its a habit thing ... Whenever I get used waking at certain time, I'll always wake up at that time. Ex. Its been a week waking up at 11 am ... Next week I'll sleep at 5 am and still wake up at 11 am"
] |
.. How can H & R Block afford to give away 1000$ everyday for a year? | [
"H & R Block is valued at [over 8 billion dollars](_URL_0_). $365,000 is basically nothing on that scale."
] |
why does South Park have all of its episodes to stream, for free, on the internet? | [
"If you're talking about the southparkstudios website, they show ads during the episode streams, and since they've been doing it for a long time, they probably make enough money from those ads that the website turns a profit."
] |
How do people who make song mashups isolate the vocal tracks to songs? | [
"Vocal-only tracks for many songs can be found publicly. For many songs for which vocal-only tracks aren't publicly available, producers of those mash-ups may have connections to labels/artists and can get the vocal-only audio for a track privately. \n\nI've done music composition/DJing/remixes for 20 years (as a hobby), and have found vocal-only tracks with which to create remixes. I've also taken songs just as they are - including instruments and vocals and all mixed together - and remixed them, splicing different sections together and overlaying additional instruments. I've been surprised with how well that works in some cases. \n\nYou can search for \"acapella version\" or \"acapella mix\" on services like the iTunes music store or _URL_0_ & you'll find a lot of vocal-only tracks perfect for remixing. Have fun!",
"Easy. Most of the music tracks come out with an instrumental version. Audio edition software like SoundForge etc have a function called \"Invert Phase\". In simple words it allows you to \"cut-out\" vocal version out of full track if you have same track instrumental version. For best clean effect Both tracks have to be same duration same quality and same tempo and volume level.\n\nOther than this if you do not have an instrumental version you can mess with qualizers and cut out most of the unwanted sound frequencies. But that acapellas are mostly garbage.",
"Usually if you isolate the center channel, most mixes carry the majority of the vocals up the middle."
] |
Why did Obama Care raise the cost of private health insurance for many middle and upper class Americans? | [
"Insurance is pooled risk. Everyone puts in a dollar in case they need 10. \n\nThe company collects 100 knowing that they will only need to pay out 3 lots of 10. Everyone is still paying a dollar so all is well. However the company knows that some people are at a higher risk than others, to protect its profits it either makes these people pay 8 dollars or simply turns them away.\n\nObama care to my understanding removed the ability for the insurance company to turn people away, even based on history. So they were forced to take people who they know will need to claim 10 every 3 months. \n\nTo cover this they had to increase everyone how was paying a dollar now has to pay 3 to cover the companies profits and the people who would normally have been turned away."
] |
In movies and TV shows, why are streets at night always wet, like it just rained? | [
"Because it looks better on camera. Lights reflect in the surface and it just gives it a better look on screen.\n\nThe movie crews generally wet down the street before rolling.",
"Because it looks cooler. TV and Film are a visual medium, and the realism of \"how could it always have been raining?\" is ignored over \"Man, this makes the colors and light in this shot so much prettier!\" \n\nThere are a lot of things that films do which don't happen in reality because it looks nice."
] |
How do power-washers only take the dirt and grime away and not the underlying paint on a car or house? | [
"Dirt and grime are only physically stuck to the paint. Paint actually undergoes a chemical reaction and becomes chemically bonded to the underlying surface. You could remove it with a pressure washer set to high enough pressure or pointed at it for enough time just as you could sand it off. but the dirt and grime are much more loosly stuck on compared to that chemical bond, so a pressure that wouldn't take off the paint can take off the dirt.",
"Paint that is already chipped will remove under the pressure of a power washer, moving the nozzle at a quicker rate over paint avoids damage. Dirt and grime will always have more density than paint."
] |
people's fascination with Albert Einstein | [
"His theories were groundbreaking. It's hard to sort of get in touch with that nowadays since many of our attention spans are so small and we tend to take a lot of things for granted (internet, computers, etc) and there isn't that much going on in terms of mindblowing theories, at least on the level of Einstein. But he was. Before him, a lot of people thought that they had figured out all there was to science. We had electricity, magnetism, gases, kinetics, xrays, radioactivity, joules, and machines to control all of these things. But Einstein brought in a completely new generation and era of science. Along with his famous e=mc^2 equation (stating that anything with mass contains a massive potential reserve of energy), he explained the nature of light, his theory of relativity, and proved that atoms existed, which was still in dispute back in his day.\n\nTaken from wikipedia:\n\n\n > During 1911, he had calculated that, based on his new theory of general relativity, light from another star would be bent by the Sun's gravity. That prediction was claimed confirmed by observations made by a British expedition led by Sir Arthur Eddington during the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. International media reports of this made Einstein world famous. On 7 November 1919, the leading British newspaper The Times printed a banner headline that read: \"Revolution in Science – New Theory of the Universe – Newtonian Ideas Overthrown\".\n\n\"Newtonian Ideas Overthrown\". Those are some big words. It essentially meant that for in the realm of big things, Newton's laws would apply, but when getting to the subatomic realm they didn't necessarily. His discoveries lead to the development of television and as you know the atomic bomb, which interestingly was first started on because of Einstein's warning to Truman that the Germans were probably working on one (he emigrated to the US luckily for us in 1940). That would be like Neil deGrasse Tyson sending an e-mail to Obama in a completely badass way that I don't think would be possible anymore (since there's really nothing that advanced that we can do nowadays, in comparison to how advanced the atomic bomb was back in that day, correct me if I'm wrong anyone. Plus those were Nazis, we don't really have any modern-day equivalent of that either, besides may be North Koreans but it's nothing in comparison to the technological and political and economical issue between the US and Germany back in the day).\n\nI highly recommend checking out \"A Short History of Nearly Everything\" by Bill Bryson, either the book or the audiobook, he talks about Einstein and a lot of other famous scientists you've probably heard before (Ernest Rutherford, Edwin Hubble, Max Planck, Lord Kelvin, Newton) and the history behind them and their discoveries. And it's actually pretty funny and very enjoyable.",
"almost all he ever discovered was when he was in early twenties but he did not have prof for it. and for next 50 years people who where in practical physics was trying to prove or disprove his work and challenging each other who will do it first. This created big media attention for him and science in general. He was guest on many shows and news articles in time witch made him more popular then other people like max plank \n\nsimilar how today people like hawking are most famous but not generally best"
] |
Why are cork caps still used in wines when they only pose a risk for the wine to taste like cork? | [
"The short answer from what I can find is that it's more tradition, and a wine-drinking populace that is unwilling to accept that a screw cap could treat their wine better than a cork when cork has been used for ~~millennia~~ several centuries to keep wine sealed and aging well."
] |
Why is that when I drink water or soda, I feel full after a while, while with beer, there's no stopping me? | [
"By the time you have drank enough to feel full [for me it is 3 glasses of water] you have had enough alcohol for the fun to start. Lack of inhibition is enough at that point to make you want to drink more. On top of that the ethanol being metabolized in your liver causes a sudden blood sugar drop. Drops in blood sugar encourage eating and drinking so you want even more. Plus who really wants to stop drinking?\n\nTL; DR: Beer makes you dumb n thirsty.",
"If you're like me, alcohol makes you urinate every 30 minutes. So maybe you're able to drink more?"
] |
With ice caps melting, ocean levels rising, and higher global temperatures, this theoretically would be a perfect storm for massive rainfall. Why aren't we seeing an increase in precipitation within dry arid area's, instead of increased droughts worldwide? | [
"Dry arid areas like north texas where we've gone from 10 years of drought to massive flooding in 6 months?",
"All of the above does not dictate specifically how precipitation occurs. Precipitation is also affected heavily by ocean currents and geography. \n\n\nSo for example, Nevada and the Rockies in general will continue to be dry places because rain clouds and water vapor from the Pacific ocean will continue to be unable to pass the mountains, which is the primary reason those places are so dry to begin with. \n\nHandy picture: _URL_0_\n\n\nOcean levels rising and higher global temperatures will have the biggest impact on coastal areas, which something like ~25% of the world's population lives near.",
"When air temperature rises, it increases its ability to retain water. This means that areas with warm air will absorb all the water from the land beneath it, making dry places even dryer. \n\nHowever, the vast majority of temperature increases are absorbed by the world's oceans, not the air. When ocean temperatures rise, it makes it easier for water molecules to evaporate into the air. This will result in heavier rainfall in places that are near the water, making wet places flood. \n\nThe end result of both these effects is more extreme storms and climates as the global temperature continues to rise.",
"There are portions of Africa that have historically been desert that are now planting crops because of the increase in rainfall",
"The reason places like the Sahara and southern US and mexico are dry is because they lie close to the 30 degrees north latitude. Rain works based on convection currents, at the equator you see a lot of rain, 30* north and South you tend to find deserts. \n\nWarm air holds more water then cold air, in addition war air rises. So at the equator water is lifted high into the air because it is warm, it then starts to move, lets say north. As it moves north it cools down and rain falls out, it continues until there is little water and it is relatively cool it falls down towards the ground and starts moving south. This image shows the major convection currents around the world. _URL_1_\n\nThis means that it just rains more in places that normally are wet, not that the water is carries further.",
"This MinuteEarth [video](_URL_2_) does a fairly good job of explaining changes in rainfall patterns due to global warming.",
"Severe flooding in Texas this year, Arizona and Australia last year. While that isn't enough to show climate change there are all points of interest in a larger forming picture."
] |
Why are Junior, the II, the III etc. only used for males? Is there a female equivalent? & if there is, why isn't it used as often? | [
"I'd think it's because 99% of sons keep the same first and last name their whole lives. Then you can have Bill Jones, Bill Jones Jr, Bill Jones the Third, from birth onward and the name sticks.\n\nWhereas women are much more likely to change their names. Mary Smith's daughter is Mary Jenkins, her daughter is Mary Franklin, so it'd make no sense to say \"Mary Jenkins Jr\" when there is no Mary Jenkins Sr.\n\nSure, daughters originally share the same last name as mom but usually not after marriage.",
"Historically, a married woman's identity was determined by here husband's family, not hers, and her daughter's identity would be determined by their future husbands. \n\nThe man had the trade and the property and the reputation and his wife was subsumed into all of that. Giving his son his same name was a way to capitalize on and extend his legacy. Since woman didn't really have identities apart from their husband, extending that identity to their daughters didn't server any purpose."
] |
Why doesn't the strength of the strong interaction (of the fundamental interactions) diminish with distance? | [
"There is no fundamental law that forbids forces from exhibiting \"weird\" and non-trivial behaviors, and the strong force is an excellent example of a very, very non-trivial force. Between quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, it doesn't fall off with distance, but rather grows stronger. This actually means that you can never find a quark all alone, they will almost come in at least pairs, or in triplets like in the proton and neutron, which each is built out of three quarks. \n\nNow, the strong force also acts in between pairs or triplets of quarks, which is why the atomic nuclei holds together. But when it does this, its strength does fall off with distance, in fact much quicker than the electromagnetic force. So thats why we don't see arbitrarily big chunks of protons/neutrons, but only see tiny atomic nucleons. How all this works is really very complicated, and one has to employ a lot of clever mathematics, or simulate it on a computer, to understand how it works. \n\nAs for why the neutrons doesn't get crushed, well neutrons and protons and quarks and so on are not really small physical balls that can \"get crushed\". They are rather much weirder, quantum particles, that we believe are point-like, i.e. with zero size.",
"> Why wouldn't distance make it weaker/stronger?\n\nI'm not sure this has a meaningful answer. It just doesn't; there's no reason to expect that all interactions *should* exhibit that kind of variation.\n\n > Doesn't it being unlike all other interactions in this regard make it strange/unrealistic?\n\nYes! It's very weird, and very unintuitive.\n\n > If the strong force is what is holding the nucleus of an atom together, why don't the neutrons get crushed?\n\nThe strong force between neutrons mostly cancels out to zero. The interaction that isn't cancelled out *does* decrease with distance."
] |
The supposed manifestations of 'Qi' ("Chi") | [
"Parlor tricks. The tips of the \"spears\" are rounded. Line them up carefully with a meaty part of your leg and they'll hold you up with enough \"comfort\" and cushion to not cut into you. Line up the third with a relatively cozy spot between your chest while holding yourself up with your arms and you do the \"magic\". I promise that if you replaced those spears with sharpened tips, he wouldn't do the same trick. \n\nThe drillbit is dull and he's the only one controlling the pressure of the drill. It helps him safely put the show on. \n\nI only watched a small bit of the video because it seems to be little more than romanticized far-east mysticism. The term \"Bullshito\" applies as well."
] |
How can I move around so much when I sleep in my bed, but don't move an inch when I'm sleeping on the couch? | [
"I'm guess would be that you have more room to more."
] |
I've read that the simulation hypothesis is extremely unlikely because of something called Lorentz Invariance, but I don't know enough about physics to understand why. | [
"LmOver isn't quite right. You've got it right, though! Lorentz invariance is a symmetry (think - something you can do to an experiment without changing the results) of spacetime that can be easily understood as rotations (plus \"boosts\" - think rotations between space and time). If the universe was a simulation, then the most practical way to compute anything in it would be to have a grid defining every point in space. However, the moment you have a well-defined grid on your spacetime, you break Lorentz invariance - you can't rotate by any tiny angle you want - only specific intervals of angles would maintain the symmetry (think a square can only be rotated 90 degrees at a time). But, Lorentz invariance is a fundamental symmetry of the laws of physics that we think the universe obeys. If it didn't obey this symmetry, we certainly would have noticed it by now. In fact, there are very strong experimental bounds on the maximal size of the grid before we would notice it - and it would be way smaller than anything we could measure, if it exists.",
"I think the idea is that simulations have an absolute time (the time of the computer). Lorentz transformations transform time too so any viewpoint has it's own time. If all viewpoints are equally valid then there is no absolute time for the whole universe. Of course the simulation may take all that into account and simulate a separate progress of time for everything. Then it is weird why the simulators deal with the complexity of non-absolute time even though they could have easily avoided it"
] |
why do houses tend to go up in value? | [
"It's not so much the house as it is the property that the house sits on. Land is expensive and continues to grow in value because we can't make more land."
] |
Why is wine only served in 5 oz (150 ml) portions, while other alcohol may be portioned out differently? | [
"It's not, really. It's just that 5 oz of wine is a good measure to use to compare to a 1.5 oz shot of liquor, or 12 ounces of beer in terms of alcohol content. Of course, it's not perfect as beer and wine can vary in the amount of alcohol they have per ounce. Liquor, on the other hand, is almost always the same amount of alcohol per ounce.",
"In the UK pubs usually offer a large/small glass choice. They are 250/175ml IIRC."
] |
Why bugs come towards you when you spray them with Raid. | [
"If it looked something like [this]( _URL_0_) they are called basement / cave / camel crickets. They will jump after you if they feel threatened to scare you away. It is their only defense mechanism for large predators and it works like a charm! \n\nThese have sent me running on several occasions. We had a large group of them in our basement and they would send out one at a time to attack us. It was horrifying at 10 years old. Next time, have a tennis racquet handy. Not so sure raid will kill them."
] |
How does the army work? How does one get a promotion and such? | [
"Military promotions are not nearly as sexy as they appear on TV.\n\nIf you're enlisted, you earn rank by passing formal tests, doing your job well, and earning time in rank/service.\n\nIf you're an officer, you earn rank by earning time in rank/service, meeting educational goals (like getting advanced degrees), and doing your job well.\n\nYou then get to be evaluated by a board, who puts you against everyone else who is up for another rank, and they decide if/when you get to be promoted.\n\nBattlefield commissions and promotions (like going from SSgt to 2dLt overnight) really don't happen anymore, because officers are required to have 4-year degrees and graduate from a commissioning program.",
"For enlisted, E-1 to E-4, it's time-in-service, time-in-grade, and commander's discretion.\n\nFor enlisted, E-4 up to E-7, it's all about the promotion points and s time in service, time in grade, required education, commander recommendation, board recommendation.\n\nRegarding promotion points, the maximum cut-off score is 798. Nobody gets 798 points. It's virtually impossible. It's the Army's way of saying, 'nobody in this field is getting promoted.'\n\nThere are a few ways of earning promotion points. Your commander can give you up-to 200 points. Your promotion board can give you up-to 200 points. Your PT test can earn you up-to 200 points.\n\nCertain awards can earn you 5-10 promotion points. Schools give you 2 promotion points per week. College classes can give you some points (5 per credit? 2?). All of those things that have maximum caps such that you can never quite get to 798.\n\nNow, when the Army runs low on E-5s in a certain job, they lower the cut-off score a bit to get the top ranked E-4s to fill the E-5 jobs. Similarly, when they run low on E-6s, the lower the cut-off to move the top E-5s.\n\nEventually, you get to E-7 and that has some additional requirements but, by the time you get there, you'll already know the answers.",
"'How does the army work' is a little too big to fit into this, and I'm a little wary of trying to make contrasts of real world military against sci-fi anime, but I'll try to sum up how military hierarchies work.\n\nIn the US army, and in many organized armies around the world, you have two separate 'lines' of ranks - enlisted personnel, and officers. For both lines there is a generally increasing amount of authority and responsibilities, but enlisted non-commissioned officers (higher ranking enlisted, like sergeants) will fall under the authority of commissioned officers (lieutenants and so on). Officers are the decision-makers of the military, NCOs are the leaders who closely supervise the junior enlisted in putting those decisions into action.\n\nIn order to become an NCO you must spend enough time in the military after enlistment to develop and show leadership qualities that let you go through extra training to be given responsibility in leading soldiers. There are several routes to become an officer, but generally they require a college education and appointment by existing officers. Some officers spend time enlisted before deciding they want to become an officer, but it isn't a requirement."
] |
What would water feel like at the deepest point in the ocean? | [
"You'll feel like you're being crushed from all directions (in reality you'd already be crushed into a pulp). Imagine being buried alive but x1000"
] |
The OJ Simpson court case | [
"*\"The People vs. O.J. Simpson\"* TV show sums up most of the basics pretty well. In short, there was a *lot* of incriminating evidence against O.J. Simpson, but his \"dream team\" of defense lawyers was able to sow reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors based on the fact that the LAPD officer who acquired much of that evidence was known to be a racist and he perjured himself on the stand about his use of racial slurs. When the defense produced recordings proving he was lying about that, it completely damaged his credibility. Racism aside, he also pled the Fifth Amendment when asked under oath if he had planted evidence in the case. Obviously all this doesn't mean that Simpson *didn't* do it, but the defense made a good case that the lead detective responsible for gathering most of the prosecution's evidence was unreliable. It also didn't help the prosecution that general knowledge about DNA testing wasn't very good back then when it was still fairly new, so jurors didn't realize or believe the significance of it. So, all of the DNA evidence that would pretty much have someone nailed dead-to-rights by today's standards just went over the jury's head.",
"It was an absolute circus. The only thing that compared was a Michael Jackson trial. More than a year of CNN covering it every day. Not just updates, but complete wall to wall immersion. It made the careers of several talking heads like Greta Van Susteran and Mark Fuhrman.\n\nIt was one of the earliest indicators that forensic science was sloppy and driven by police rather than science. The LA crime lab made numerous mistakes that a very expensive legal team was able to raise doubts about. The case was very good proof that justice works differently for those with resources.\n\nKato Kalin was such a stoner. The prosecutors and judge were put through the kind of background reporting typical of celebrities and and scandalized politicians.\n\nThe defense lawyers were really good. Barry Scheck was my favourite at the time.",
"ESPN's OJ Simpson: Made in America is long but is really worth watching if you're interested in the whole story. It includes a lot of background on why OJ was such a popular figure, the long history of bad race relations in LA and the LAPD, etc. Unlike People vs. OJ Simpson it's a documentary and relies primarily on interviews with people who were close to Simpson, including people from the prosecution and defense team and people who were close to him before and after the murder trial.",
"There were dozens of pieces of evidence that pointed to guilt, some conclusive and some supportive.\n\nThere were half a dozen points, lines of argument, that pointed weakly in the other direction.\n\nThere was no prioritization by the prosecution. They fought every single point, important or not, for days. Every minor little point got fought like anybody who disputed in the smallest way a minor prosecution point (say Dr. Lee) was treated as a contemptible enemy. No focus, no cohesive story, continually attacking on irrelevancies with (seemingly) equal weight to the major evidence of gullt.\n\nAn overwhelmed jury did remember from this maze a few simple points: LA law enforcement was comically inept and criminally prejudiced.",
"In context, it was right after the Rodney King riots, so everybody at the time thought it would be the fuse for a race war.\n\nWhat no one seems to remember is the 5 white cops got off scott free so the OJ case was under incredible scrutiny.\n\nMost black people expected OJ to go free as payback for the cops.",
"The 7th most famous American cut of his ex wife's head and stabbed her boyfriend to death.\n\n He had tons of money to pay for the best defense.\n\n The lead detective is an admitted racist, the defendant is black.\n\nWhen asked if he planted evidence, the detective plead the 5th.\n\n Lots of evidence including DNA linking him to the murder scene.\n\n Only 8 people on Earth had heard of DNA at the time of the trial.\n\nOJ found not guilty.",
"I lived in LA at the time, and my Mom watched the entire trial on tv. In *her* opinion, OJ was covering for his older son, a trained chef who was very good handling knives."
] |
Why doesnt your soda get "shaken up" when it falls out of the vending machine? | [
"Two reasons that both contribute:\n\n1) The vending machine acts as a fridge, and at a colder temperature the CO2 gas requires more force to seperate from the liquid\n\nBut more importantly:\n\n2) The \"drop\" you see in these machines isn't as dramatic as you may think. There are [columns](_URL_0_) of each different type of drink and the bottom drink (the one next in line when the consumer selects that drink) has a 5-10cm fall to the slanted surface that brings the drink to them. \n\nThe ~~kinetic energy~~ forces acting upon it during the 5-10cm fall and sliding down the slant is barely more than how much you impart when you put the drink down, so it doesn't get shaken up that much."
] |
Pseudorandom numbers and how it is different from truly random numbers. | [
"Pseudorandom numbers are generated by a formula. They look random at first glance, but if you know the formula, you can predict the next number with 100% accuracy.\n\nAlso, if the formula is not very good, then you can detect patterns in the numbers that it generates, or determine that it might favour certain numbers over others.\n\nThis is why truly random numbers are preferred for things like lotteries, because otherwise intelligent people could figure out the patterns and beat the odds.",
"Psuedorandom numbers are generated according to a formula. If you know what number was first plugged in (aka the seed) then you can predict exactly which numbers will appear and in which order.\n\nTruly random processes are completely unpredictable but are also not required for most computer applications. Psuedorandom numbers are usually good enough.",
"It's not good enough to say you can predict the next number of a pesudorandom generator, given the seed and the formula: it is more accurate to say that you will generate the sequence of numbers exactly. Let us remember, this isn't truly random, there is no non-determinism here. If we couldn't reproduce the pesudorandom sequence exactly, then a lot of crypto and error correction wouldn't work.\n\nTruly random is just that. There's no way to determine the next value of the sequence, and there is no way to reproduce the sequence. As far as which is faster, that's a hardware problem. There's no reason a hardware generated number can't be faster. Is it in practice? For most consumer products, probably not.\n\nHow does hardware do it? The only way I know needs a noisy circuit you take a sample from at a regular frequency. If the circuit is high, it's a 1, if it's low, a 0. There's your bits for generating a random binary value. Faster hardware samples at a faster frequency, but there's an upper limit, where you end up sampling faster than the circuit can transition, and end up with blocks of zeros or ones. What sort of circuit is noisy? Well, you can use a radio antenna, I guess, but that can be influenced too easily by the user with some amature radio knowledge. Nope, I prefer the good ol' noisy diode. The thing flickers on and off at random, and isn't easily influenced.\n\nThere is a place for each way to generate random numbers. Clearly, if you want to reproduce the sequence, as for many crypto algorithms, then pesudorandom is the way to go. If you're generating a one time key, then true random is probably better. If you need speed, then which ever is fastest. Portability? Pesudorandom (not all hardware has a true random generator available). You can also change code faster and cheaper than you can change hardware. Software is also more consistent than hardware, if multiple platforms are supported, some hardware generators perform better than others. Maybe you're working with algorithms that are sensitive to the distribution and period of some weaker pesudo random generators, or a specific pesudo random generator...\n\nSo, you weigh the costs and benefits, and choose from whatever is adequate for your needs."
] |
Why do dogs have to sniff about before going for a dump? | [
"It's an instinct from when they were hunters in the forest. If they poop near a game trail, the deer will be scared from that trail because they can sense that a predator was nearby recently, and then the wolf will lose a food source. By making sure they always poop far from game trails, they increase the likelihood they get to eat. In addition, they use poop to mark their territory, and they are checking around to make sure they aren't (or are) marking anyone elses' territory before going."
] |
How is it possible to program a random number generator? Wouldn't it need an algorithm | [
"The programmer provides the seed number, often choosing the time in milliseconds (a pretty random number).\n\nEncryption software uses stronger methods of randomness like asking you to move the mouse for a few seconds and pulling random data from that."
] |
How is the position on the Earth's Surface determined by a GPS? | [
"There is a cluster of satellites in orbit (the much cooler term is \"constellation of satellites\").\n\nEach one has a very accurate clock and they continuously broadcast their current time and which satellite they are. Your GPS device receives these time signals and since it knows (a) which satellite sent which signal, (b) where each satellite is supposed to be at that exact moment in time, and (c) that times three, it can use a technique called \"trilatteration\" to figure out where it is. \n\nYour GPS device never sends anything out, it only receives. The satellites never send out location information, just times and IDs. We just know where they are supposed to be at given times.\n\nIn the end, it's the same basic mechanism of star navigation sailors have used for centuries, except that this time we made the stars.",
"GPS is a constellation of over 30 satellites that constantly orbit the Earth at about 20.000 km. With those satellites, the entire globe is covered. It's the equivalent of looking at the stars to know your position, but all day round.\n\nNow, what you need to know your position is to connect with at least three satellites (usually four). Your receiver constantly connects with them. It calculates the distance to all of them and from it, it can derive its latitude, longitude (and altitude). How does it calculate the distance? All satellites have the same time stamp that they send along with their name. The receiver gets all these time stamps but they are all different from one another, the ones very delayed have traveled a greater distance than the ones closer to the current time. It can calculate with the lag the distance to each satellite, and once it knows it, the exact position of the receiver follows.\n\n[Take a look at this](_URL_0_)\n\nAn easy 2-D example. You got the time stamps, calculated the distances: \n\nYou're 30 m away from your friend John (you can be anywhere in a circle centered in John)\n\nAND 30 m away from your friend Sally (you can be in either of the two intersections of the circle centered in John and the circle centered in Sally)\n\nAND 14 m away from your dog (you can only be in one exact point, where all three circles cross).\n\nGPS is the same but with spheres.\n\nAh, it doesn't send the time stamp in hh:mm:ss, it sends a signal from which you can very accurately derive the time stamp.\n\nNow, it would be very helpful if someone could shed light about how (step by step) does the little receiver guess the best route from all possible routes to go from A to B. Does it consider ALL routes exiting from A? Even the ones in the wrong direction?"
] |
How can someone with type AB blood be the universal recipient for blood donations, and only eligible to donate blood to other type AB patients, yet is the universal donor for plasma? | [
"[This image kinda sums it up](_URL_0_). The important thing in blood donation is that the plasma can't have antibodies against the antigens on the red blood cells. \n\nYou either have A-antigens on your red blood cells or (you're pretty likely to have) anti-A antibodies in your plasma. B-antigens and anti-B antibodies are the same way. \n\nSo because someone of type AB has neither anti-A nor anti-B antibodies in their plasma, they can accept anyone's blood cells and anyone can use their plasma. \nSomeone of type O has neither A-antigens or B-antigens on their blood cells, so their blood cells won't react with the antibodies in anyone else's blood plasma. On the other hand, they can accept anyone else's plasma (because they don't care what antibodies they have in there) but can't donate it because theirs likely has antibodies to everything.",
"When donating blood, it is separated into several fractions and each is used in different cases as needed, because blood is a precious commodity. The major fractions are:\n\n* erythrocytes (red blood cells)\n* leukocytes (white blood cells) (these two first groups may be dumped together during fractioning)\n* platelets (for patching up holes)\n* plasma\n\nThese can be separated further, but that's not the topic at hand.\n\nTo the immune system, an antigen is a molecule that is attacked by a specific antibody. Your body produces specific antibodies to mark specific outside agents for destruction.\n\nA and B groups refer to the molecular markers on the surface of red blood cells. If you have the blood type AB, your erythrocytes will have those markers, and you won't have antibodies against them.\n\nThese antibodies are small free floating molecules. In the fractioning process, they stay with the plasma, while the cells and their antigens are in a separate fraction."
] |
What is a blind and a double blind experiment in science? | [
"Blind: The participants in the study don't know whether or not they're receiving the treatment being tested.\n\nDouble-blind: Neither the participants nor the researchers know which participants received the treatment being tested (during the course of the experiment, in the case of the latter, they obviously find out after the fact who was treated and who received a placebo).",
"Think of it this way: suppose you were testing a new cancer treatment. In order to determine if the treatment is effective, you need to create a \"control,\" a second group that doesn't receive the treatment. In order to ensure that the placebo effect isn't responsible for any improvement, it is good practice to do everything to the control group that you do to the test group: put them in the same room, tell them all the same things, and administer a fake version of whatever treatment you're testing (say, a fake pill with no medicine). \n\nYou can't tell the test subjects which group they're in, because it would affect the results of the test. That's called a blind study. If you tell the subjects, then the placebo effect may be responsible for any benefits or detriments the subjects experience. However, if you were the person administering the pills to these patients, you shouldn't know which pills have the medicine either. Consciously or unconsciously, you may treat the control group differently and compromise the study. Maybe you have more sympathy for the control group that isn't getting the medicine, or maybe you treat them with more disinterest because you want to get back to the non-control group and see if there's improvement. Either way, the experiment is compromised. If the people administering the medicine don't know which pills have medicine and which don't, there's less chance of the study being compromised. That's a double-blind experiment.\n\nRemember, the purpose of an experiment is to alter only a single variable. Controlling people to that level is basically impossible, so it's best if the people administering the treatment don't know which is which."
] |
Why is The Interview receiving much more hostility than Team America:World Police? | [
"Probably because back then north korea didn't have internet and a different \"president\"."
] |
What's the difference between stellarator and tokamak fusion reactors? | [
"Fusion scientist here, let me try to explain things. First I should probably clear up some misconceptions.\n\nThe stellarator design is actually just as old as the tokamak. The problem was for a long time we couldn't make stellarators that were good enough to compete with tokamaks. Now we can so they've gained a lot of renewed interest in the last 20 years.\n\nIf I truly want to try to explain everything from the beginning at a 5 year old level, it will take a long time and a lot of effort. And since at this point you're probably the only person that will read it, I'll be a bit briefer.\n\nSo, a plasma is an ionized gas, as you note, which means it's made up of charged particles. Charged particles interact with magnetic fields in weird ways, specifically, they tend to spiral around them. It's really hard for charged particles to travel across magnetic field lines, but really easy for them to travel along magnetic field lines. Both tokamaks and stellarators exploit this by taking the magnetic field and turning it into a circle so that the plasma continues following along it.\n\nHowever, it turns out this is not good enough for confinement. You know how when you go around a turn in a car you feel like you're moving to one side? Well the plasma does this too. (In reality it's a bit more complicated, but this is the end result). So if all you have is a circle, then the plasma will all eventually leak out. It turns out this leaking is too fast, but there's a solution. The solution is that instead of making a circle you make the field helical. It looks like [this](_URL_2_). You see how the field lines curve around the donut from inside to outside as you follow them along? That means plasma will sometimes be pushed out away from the center and sometimes towards the center. Net, it won't drift at all.\n\nThe difference between a stellarator and a tokamak is how you make those fields. A tokamak does it by driving a **plasma current** in the plasma. There are many ways to drive current, but the easiest one is to put a coils in the center and use it to drive current in the plasma. The upside to this is that it's really simple. The downside to this is that to actually drive the current in the plasma, you have to actually have the current change in that central coil. You can see the tokamak coils [here](_URL_0_). The yellow is the plasma. The green coils make the field that goes around the circle the long way. The orange thing coil in the middle that looks like a spring is the coil that drives a current.\n\nThe stellarator does this differently. Instead of having a coil in the middle, it gets the magnetic field to bend around by changing the shape of those toroidal coils (the green ones in the previous image). So you can see an example [here](_URL_1_). \n\nSo the main advantages for stellarators is that you no longer have that center coil, the main disadvantage is that they're a lot harder to build. There are lots of other advantages and disadvantages, but that's probably enough for now.",
"I don't claim to have any credibility, but I too had an interest. As far I can tell the main difference between the two reactors is their shape.\n\n Both reactors are examples of magnetic confinement fusion. Hydrogen is heated into a plasma, and fused into helium under the the immense pressure of a magnetic field.\n\n The tokamak is a simple donut shape, that has a conductor wrapped around it like a solenoid to create a toroidal (along the donut) magnetic field to contain the plasma. Because the magnetic field is stongest towards the center of the donut, and because electrons are moving the opposite direction of ions within the donut, the plasma tends to escape. A poloidal (perpendicular to the donut) magnetic field remedies this x axis shift.\n\nA stellarator works in the same fashion, but avoids an x axis shift because of it geometric design."
] |
why movies with good screenplays only have one or two writers, while the typical (and bad) blockbuster scripts often have up to three to four writers? | [
"Because with more writers some movies tend to get written and rewritten, to the point that the story makes no sense anymore. An example would be [Prometheus](_URL_0_), which was passed repeatedly between two writers. Obviously a screenplay with one or two writers would be more \"focused\". Of course that does not always apply, but that's a pretty realistic scenario.",
"You end up with a diluted artistic vision. A single writer knows and understands their characters and plot inside out, and can devote every single word in the script to bringing that out.\n\nWith two writers they have to communicate and make sure that their interpretations of the characters are the same. But they can also bounce ideas off each other. However, if they disagree on something important or disagree on too many things then they try to pull the script in different directions, and it doesn't make sense.\n\nWith three or four writers this is far more likely to happen: you only need one writer who doesn't get it to ruin things.",
"A single writer, or a duo, are probably more in sync. Having more writers usually means that there was something wrong with the original script, and it needed to be improved upon. Note that there's a difference between \" & \" and \"and\" in the credits for hollywood movies.\n\nA \" & \" between names means that they worked together, \"and\" that they came in at another time and fixed/rewrote parts. For example, \"Written by: Ube & Kame and TheCaperman\" means that the team \"Ube\" and \"Kame\" worked together, then at some other time \"TheCaperman\" also worked on it (without \"Ube and Kame\").\n\n_URL_1_",
"If a screenplay needs that many rewrites it probably wasn't too coherent to begin with."
] |
Why is it that some food items, when we taste them once, we continue having more and more, even if our appetite is full already? | [
"Because things like fat, sugar, and salt are rare in nature. You are biologicaly driven to consume them in excess to create reserves. The food industry takes full advantage of these innate addictive properties."
] |
LI5 Challenge: The Forth Dimension | [
"Disclaimer: I do not study geometry or topology.\n\nI'll walk us through each dimension step by step until we reach the fourth **spatial** dimension. When I say spatial I mean that we're dealing with shapes that we can draw, or objects we can see. We won't be including time as a dimension, that's for another day. *The fourth dimension is not something we can see in nature, we have to imagine what it looks like to the best of our abilities.*\n\nOkay, let's grab a piece of paper and a pencil.\n\n* **1D**: On our paper draw a straight line. Our line is 1D because it has a length. Obviously on the paper it has a width, or thickness, but for this example let's imagine that we can't see how thick it is, very very thin line!\n\n* **2D**: Now, let's draw a square on our paper, we can see that if we grab a ruler we can measure the length and width of the square! It is the fact that our square has length and width that we call this a 2D shape.\n\nNow, because our paper itself has only height and width we can't draw any 3D shapes on it. We can draw a \"2D projection\" of a cube, for example [here](_URL_0_), but this isn't a true 3D shape, it's still on paper. So let's grab some legos! :)\n\n* **3D**: With our legos, make a house or a moon base if you so wish. Our new creation is 3D because it has a length, width and height! Notice how when looking at our square we can't look inside it beneath the paper? With our lego model we can actually open it up and look inside at the rooms.\n\nOur world is 3D, and just like how we couldn't use 2D paper to make a 3D house or moon base we can't use anything in our world to make a 4D shape :(. But we can make a 3D projection of the 4D shape!\n\nJust like a square turns into a cube when we make it go from 2D to 3D, our cube to turns into a \"tesseract\" when we make it go from 3D to 4D! If we get our lego and try make the projection of a 4D tesseract it would look something like [this](_URL_1_), but with lego.\n\nWe can't make a 4D shape because there is no other \"direction\" to measure a shape in, we've covered it all!\n\n**Summary**\n\n* 1D has a length\n\n* 2D has length and width\n\n* 3D has length, width and height\n\n* 4D has length, width, height and something else, which we can't make or imagine in our world\n\n**Bonus non-ELI5 mode**\n\nI like to imagine the dimensions mathematically, by the amount of parameters needed (or the number of axes) to describe a points position in space. A 1D line can be described as a distance from an origin point. This distance is a single number, hence one parameter to fully describe it. We can continue adding extra parameters to represent these n-dimensional points in space. Obviously past 3D we can't visualise without some sort of 3D projection.\n\nEDIT: Cleaning up and making things a bit more clear.",
"you exist in 3 dimensions. By 3 dimensions I mean that you can move [up,down], [left, right], [forward,back]. Let's say that there is another space. What does that mean? It means that you can also go [em, wo]. Going in the direction of em or wo means you have access to another space. If you move only in either direction [em, wo] then you're not moving left or right or forward or back or up or down. All of those can remain the same while traveling in em or wo.\n\nFor example, think of an elevator. You're moving [up, down] with going [left, right] or [front, back], right? Same with [em,wo]. If you were in the fourth dimension, you'd have part of your body in the 4th dimension. Some extra feature that only projects into that dimension. Think about your height. In only exists in the third dimension. We could say that your woight only exists in the 4th dimension. \n\nheight is called height because it describes your value in the vertical dimension. If they were four space dimensions you'd have some attribute that describes your value in that dimension also. If you could see four dimensions you'd be able to say, hey, look at that guy, his woight is huge/tiny.\n\nImagining a spatial 4th dimension doesn't make a lot of sense because we can only see 3 spatial dimensions. It makes more sense that a 4th dimension is not spatial because the space we're in is 3 dimensional. It's like if you imagine that you exist in the second dimension and you're explaining to a 2d friend what 3d is like. You can't because you're stuck in the 2d. Everything you try to draw just looks like 2d lines Nothing looks 3d. Drawing a 3d cube just looks like a bunch of criss-crossed lines. The only reason a 3d cube drawn on a piece of paper looks 3d is because we are in the 3rd dimension.",
"Paper Johnny lives on a piece of paper. He can move all around the paper, back and forth, left and right, but his whole world and concept of movement exists in this paper world. This is two dimensions.\n\nSay Paper Johnny comes up to a wall (in this case, a line drawn on his paper world.) In Johnny's brain, he has no way to go around it. He can move up and down, but the wall blocks his way. The only movements he knows would bump him into the wall.\n\nNow here comes Paper Jane. Paper Jane knows a trick. Paper Jane knows how to move back and forth, left and right, but she also knows a THIRD dimension: up and down. Paper Jane goes UP off of the paper world, and can now move freely above the wall, float right past it if she wants.\n\nPaper Johnny's mind is blown. To him, Paper Jane has just disappeared - he can't see into the third dimension. To Paper Johnny, Paper Jane can walk through walls.\n\nNow, the fourth dimension is like this to us, just one number up. We can move back and forth (1), left and right (2), and up and down (3). If we could somehow find the FOURTH dimension (sometimes called ana and kata), we could peel ourselves off of our third dimensional world and look at it \"from above.\" You could see past walls, look inside rooms, even see inside drawers and cupboards.\n\nI owe a lot of this explanation to \"The Boy Who Reversed Himself\" by William Sleator."
] |
Why can non-American actors so commonly mimic a perfect American accent, but rarely can an American actor accurately mimic a foreign accent? | [
"In part there's a survivor bias. If you can't do an American accent, you won't land a role playing an American. So we don't get to see actors with poor American accents.",
"Money, mostly.\n\nThe US has the largest, richest media market in the world. If there is one accent that with enhance a non-American actors earning potential, it is the American accent.\n\nAmerican actors don't have anywhere else to go that will greatly increase the opportunities. And even if they wanted to work internationally, which accent do they pick? British? Mexican? Brazilian? There is no one clear choice.",
"Consider also that many English speaking actors have likely been exposed to American accents in music, movies, stand-up comics, and television shows all their lives.",
"Check out Poirot on Netflix. You'll hear American accents that will make your ears ring.",
"Exposure. \n\nAmerican media is seen and heard all over the world more than any other country's media. \n\nEspecially back in the day. Most people wanted to see those Hollywood hits and popular shows over what their own countries had to offer because there was more and arguably better quality (visually). \n\nFlip to Americans and they are also watching mostly their own stuff. Not a brirish tv show or a spanish one. So everybody got exposed to america while america exposed their oil. I mean nothing."
] |
- Do bees know they are going to die if they sting you? If so how? | [
"No. Bee stings are supposed to work against other insects, so they shred the carapaces with their barbed stings. But humans have soft and spongy skin, so the barbs get stuck inside, instead of shredding anything, and the bee accidentally rips out half it's organs trying to fly away.\n\nA single dead bee is not really that dramatic for a hive, because workers are disposable and don't lay eggs, so they never evolved to counter that one specific case, but other bees pick up on the death and go into defense mode.\n\nAnd as others already said, bees don't really think or learn like we do. It's propably easiest to imagine them as little robots that see things and act according to their programming. Flower? Eat! Danger? Sting!",
"I don't believe so. Animals have different levels of higher thought, but insects tend to be about as basic as you can get. Insects don't even know the purpose behind their actions, bees stinging someone is an entirely automatic reaction, if their tiny bug brains think you are a threat or they are in danger, instinctually they will attack you, with no regard for their own health.",
"This episode of NPR's How To Do Everything covers this topic (spoiler alert: the bees don't know)... _URL_0_ \n \nPretty interesting!"
] |
Realpolitik | [
"politics or diplomacy based primarily on power and on practical and material factors and considerations... \n\npragmatical rather than ideological. \n\nfor instance: the US's good relations with China, despite being anti-commie.",
"About 2,500 years ago there was a big war and a big powerful city (Athens) decided it wanted to take over a weaker city (Melos) even though the weak city was neutral. A really smart man named [Thucydides tells us](_URL_0_) that the strong city went to the weak city and offered them a chance to surrender, telling the Melians that they could give in to Athenian demands or be totally destroyed. The Melians attempted to argue about how what Athens was doing was wrong, unjust, or that the gods or other city states would intervene to protect peaceful Melos. The Athenians said that none of these things would happen, and that Melos must surrender or be destroyed because, in the immortal words of the Athenian envoy 'the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.'\n\nRealpolitik, or Realism, is a theory of international relations that basically corresponds with how the Athenians perceive the situation. The fundamental assumptions of this theory are:\n\n1) The world is a fundamentally dangerous, anarchic place, in which no higher authority than that of the state is relevant. The only real constraint on the state's ability to act in any way is the potential costs of retaliation from other states.\n2) States tend to be preservation-seeking, self-interested, etc. \n3) These factors combine in an ever shifting 'balance of power,' where actors continually attempt to maximize their own gains relative to the gains of other actors. \n\nWikipedia sums up the basic process of Realpolitik thinking pretty succinctly.\n\n\"Distribution of power in the international system (independent variable) > > > \n \nDomestic perception of the system and/or domestic incentives (intervening variable) > > > \n\n\n Foreign Policy decision (dependent variable) \"\n\n\nIf you'd like to know more read the page of [Kenneth Waltz](_URL_1_). His writing is the theoretical basis for much of the work done by realist diplomats/scholars today."
] |
When people say they've lost their appetite, what's happening in the brain to cause it so? | [
"I've heard it explained in this way: if you weren't taught not to eat rotten food by your parents then you will try to at one point or another, when you smell the rotting food your body loses it's appetite so you simply have no desire to eat that rotting food anyway, therefore not getting sick/dying.",
"All those saying that this has to do with fight or flight responses or parasympathetics / sympathetics are partially wrong. This mostly has to do with a separate part of the autonomic nervous system called the enteric nervous system that can function entirely separately from the higher centers and parasympathetics / sympathetics, but still receives input from the rest of the autonomic nervous system. \n\nThe body activates the parasympathetics or the \"rest and digest response\" after the hunger center in the brain is stimulated and food intake is initiated, however it is a result of the food intake and hunger not the cause.\n\nComing to the exact answer of your question. The hunger / satiety is controlled mostly by the hypothalamus in our brain. The ventromedial hypothalamus is where the hunger center is located. Similarly, there is also a satiety center in our posterolateral hypothalamus. It creates the feeling of satiety and causes you to lose your appetite when stimulated by some very specific hormonal and nervous pathways. These are\n\n1. Distention of the GI tract: There are receptors in the GI tract that communicate with the brain via the vagus nerve. When your GI tract is stretched, this sends inputs to the brain that tells it that you have food in your stomach and causes your hunger to disappear.\n\n2. Leptin: This hormone is produced by the fat cells in your body. It tells the brain how much energy is stored in the body and modulates your hunger accordingly.\n\n3. CCK / Peptide YY / ...: These are all hormones produced by the gut and the enteric nervous system that tell your brain that it doesn't need you to get hungry. \n\n4. Cortical input: The hypothalamus also receives input from your senses, meaning that if you smell a foul odor or you experience an unpleasant taste your satiety center is stimulated. Body temperature also affects your sense of hunger. Your hypothalamus is also in very close relationship with your limbic system which is the part of the brain in charge of your emotions. Thus, a shift in mood can cause drastic changes in your appetite.\n\nIt then relays this information to other centers by some neuronal pathways and specific neurotransmitters, these pathways are much more complicated but some basic ones are POMC, CART, alpha-MSH, AGRP, NPY, etc.\n\nAny damage to the hunger stimulating pathways, overproduction of satiety producing pathways can result in disorders such as anorexia and the opposite can result in chronic obesity."
] |
Is Everest growing or getting smaller? | [
"Mount Everest is subject to erosion, such as wind... BUT the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates are still colliding, pushing the Himalayas upwards. The latter is more significant than the former, so Mount Everast is actually increasing size/height."
] |
Why can't the prison system agree on a "painless" execution method, when any veterinarian in the country can painlessly put down a dog? | [
"Part of it is, it's getting increasingly more difficult for states to get the drugs necessary. Some drug companies will not sell the drugs to states if they know it will be used in executions. \n\nIf the states could get all the drugs they need for an execution, instead of having to alter the process, or use off-label drugs, it probably would be as painless as a euthanized animal. There is a reality that some people don't want the state to execute people and trying to make it difficult for the state to do so.",
"Well, the problem is we're not exactly sure it *is* painless. It's hard to ask how it felt after someone is gone. However, there have been instances where the cocktail of drugs they use has failed, and it is obvious that the prisoner is in excruciating pain.",
"Another reason is a doctor is not there for a human unlike a vet putting an animal down. There is usually not even a nurse so the person putting in the iv and administrating the drug is not a trained health professional. This is because all health professionals take an oath to do no harm so performing an execution would violate that oath.",
"We don't know for certain that the dog is painlessly put down, but that's not something we want to admit to the dogs owners.",
"I actually did a research project on this once. One reason is right now there is a problem getting the drugs as others have greatly explained. The other reason is it was thought that executions needed to be, for lack of a better term, \"viewer friendly\". Many drugs which can create a painless death, such as sleeping aids, cause the body to convuls, which is disturbing to the friends and families of the victims invited to watch the execution. For that reason, the switched to drugs that, while they can hurt the individual being executed, they are less visually disturbing to spectators. This may have changed since I did the project and I am not an expert by any means, but this was the information I found at that time (2009).\n\nEdit: added \"it was thought that\" for clarification.",
"The problem is not technical, it's political. There's no scientific doubt that simply introducing the condemned to a room containing an atmosphere of pure nitrogen would kill the person both quickly and painlessly. The problem is that death-penalty opponents want to ensure that the process is as fraught and difficult as possible.",
"Because the death penalty is all about bloodlust. It's not an effective deterrent in the least. It's clearly not a rehabilitative effort. The only real reason for it is retribution. So it makes sense that people *want* the death penalty to not be painless. They want people on death row to suffer.\n\nMyself? I think the death penalty is barbaric and should be abolished.",
"They could gas them with nitrogen, as far as anyone can tell its a painless method. When they tried it on pigs, they didnt seem the least bit phased when they passed out from it: so much so that they stuck their snouts back into the nitrogen filled troughs immediately when they woke up.",
"I was a vet assistant for a few years. And I don't think we can actually say going under is painless. Some go easily, some do not.",
"Because of the same reason that the existing cocktail of drugs is no longer usable -- the companies that sell drugs for putting down animals only sell them on condition that they're not used on humans. If a state started using them for that purpose then the manufacturer would immediately refuse to sell the drugs to any veterinarians in the USA, which would have devastating consequences for anyone who wanted their animal humanely put to sleep.",
"I saw an interesting documentary about execution and how painful / unreliable methods are.\n\nIt ended by recommending breathing inert gas like argon which doesn't react and puts you into blissful oxygen deprivation until you die.",
"The simplest answer is that while there are painless, cheap, easy options such as nitrogen asphyxiation, some people actually don't want it to be \"too\" painless.",
"How are people killed in countries where euthanasia is permitted? I'm sure that's not painful.",
"One of the reasons often given is because doctors will not take part in the process - but there was an interesting documentary I now cannot find on YouTube that examined many methods, and came to the conclusion that there is an easy, painless method that can be applied by an amatuer. You just put a gas mask on the person, and feed them gradually increasing amounts of nitrogen. They feel a mild euphoria, pass out, and are dead in minutes.\n\nHowever, it will most likely never be instituted. The interesting conclusion when pro-death penalty supporters were told of this method, the response was \"no, I don't want them to have a painless death. They should suffer\".\n\nAt heart here I think is that despite the claims of pro-death penalty supporters, they desire revenge and retribution, not just the painless removal of a threat to society.",
"I'm not sure that I agree with the death penalty, but if we're going to kill people, there is no humane way to go about it really. The only way to kill a murderer is to become one. That fact aside, why not just use all the illegal heroin we confiscate. It is quick and deadly, not to mention the irony behind criminals making sure we can execute criminals."
] |
How do programs like Tor help to provide anonymity on the Internet, and are the methods they use effective? | [
"Tor creates a mesh of connections.\n\nA simple way of people figuring out who you are is based on your IP address. (There are more, but I won't go into details)\n\nFor example, your home connection has the IP address of 123.123.123.123. When you connect to a website, say _URL_2_, reddit's servers will see a connection originating from 123.123.123.123, thus partially being able to identify you (the way to identify someone is much more complex, but this is one of the basic way).\n\nTor actually has a page describing how it works, at: _URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThis shows how your computer, \"Alice\" want to connect to the server \"Bob\".\n\nNormally, without Tor, Alice would connect directly to Bob, so that will make Bob see Alice's IP address.\n\nWhat Tor does is route this connection trough several nodes in the \"Tor Mesh\" (minimum of _3_).\n\nWhy 3, you ask?\n\nWell, let's call the nodes in the network N1, N2, N3;\n\nIn this case, Alice connects directly to N1. N1 will be the ONLY node in the network, on the path, that will know Alice's IP address. Once N1 receives the data, it will forward it to N2. N2 doesn't know Alice's IP address. It only knows N1's IP address. Even more, N2 will pass it's information to N3. N3 will not know the IP address of N1 or N2! \n\nAfter that, N3 will forward the data to Bob, the server that Alice wanted to talk to in the first place. Bob will only know N3's IP address. It doesn't know N2 or N1 or Alice's IP address. Thus Alice remains, technically, anonymous.\n\nPlease keep in mind that other applications on your system could leak your private information thus making identifiable. This is a much more complex process that I won't go into."
] |
how can my cat crawl under a mountain of blankets on my bed and sleep comfortably for hours but I feel like I'm suffocating after just a few minutes? | [
"The amount of oxygen a mammal needs is directly proportional to its mass, ergo your cat is way smaller than you are and needs a lot less air than you do. \nBasically it's just pure math, a cat that is 1/100th your size will need 1/100th the air."
] |
Why aren't electrical outlets universal? | [
"The infrastructure was created independently, and once it made sense to standardize it was just too expensive.",
"The different international organizations that control the power grid set different standards for the amplitude and frequency of AC power that comes through a wall socket. When each organization developed these standards, they probably weren't considering the other organizations, or they had special reasons for setting their standards that way that differ from the others. \n\nOriginally, electrical appliances were static. You'd plug something in and probably not unplug it unless you were rearranging your furniture. Thus, when people from America travelled to Europe, there wasn't much of a problem because people didn't bring American appliances with them and just used the European ones that were already plugged in. It was likely that people didn't even know the plugs were different.\n\nBut then along came mobile appliances like cameras or projectors, and eventually the rechargeable battery. Suddenly, people had to frequently plug in and unplug things, and would often bring things with them when they travelled. Imagine if the American and European sockets looked the same, and someone brought an American appliance to Europe and plugged it in. The amplitude of the AC power in Europe is double that of America. The device would be fried. \n\nIt was likely that the sockets were different from the beginning, but the reason they are still different is to prevent accidents like that from happening. Bring an American appliance with you to Europe? You need an adapter if you want to plug it in at all. Those adapters contain transformers that step down the voltage to match the American voltage standards.",
"Obligatory xkcd link: _URL_0_\n\nSimply put, there is not enough pressure to standardise internationally.\n\nCompanies would probably prefer standardisation because they can make all their products with the same power cable, which is cheaper for reasons I won't go into here.\n\nBut there would have to be a time while everyone changes, at which point some people would have the old sockets, and some would have the new, so there would be a time where they have to use an EXTRA power cable instead of fewer.\n\nSo the short term pain of switchover means that there is not likely to be anything done anytime soon.",
"Different power grids. You don't want to plug in your cord meant for a 60Hz 120V power supply (USA) into a 50Hz 240 V power supply (much of Europe). So they have different plugs to prevent you from doing so and potentially ruining your device."
] |
In World Politics, what are the USA, Russia, and China individually trying to accomplish? | [
"The USA is an electoral democracy so its international policy sometimes seems a little deranged. Policy experts tend to have a pretty clear view of what is \"good for\" the US - extend defensive alliances with countries around the world, make it difficult for local rivals to benefit from aggressive war, extend free trade agreements, try to help backwards countries develop, extend \"American values\" like freedom of speech and free and fair elections. However, this *prix fixe* menu of American projects ends up looking pretty incoherent because sometimes we hand over power to kind-of electoral government that end up being repressive or unable to protect their borders, and at other times we cuddle up close with kings and dictators to defend their borders (Saudi...) or accomplish some other goals. And to this is added the fact that every \"policy expert\" is an expert in his own area and tends to think that area is most important; economists will tell you rising standards of livings will produce international stability, defense department consultants will say that you need order before you have the stability to invest in your own country, etc.\n\nBut on top of this nonsense, America has overlapping interest groups that play a large role in the political process. For example, for at least 30 years America's hard-line attitude towards Cuba was driven, not by policy considerations, but by a million or so hard-line Cuban immigrants in Florida (an important state in our Presidential elections) who didn't care about anything other than isolating Castro. Our alliance with Israel was originally driven by respect for Israeli democracy and security concerns, but for at least the last 20 years the guiding force has increasingly been an alliance of Jews and evangelicals. Attempts to fund family-planning campaigns in the third world are held hostage to religious fundamentalists who are opposed to contraception and even providing information about abortion. Attempts to encourage mothers to nurse their children are held hostage to corporations who make money off baby formula. And on and on...\n\nRussia's goals are largely inscrutable. The best explanation for them is to look at Russia's internal politics. After a brief flirtation with representative government, Russia is returning to authoritarian rule, with Putin the emperor in all but name. Dictators of this sort usually claim that no other leader or form of government is \"strong\" enough, competent enough, to lead the nation. But conversely, this means that as soon as it appears the leader is \"weak\" or incompetent, he is vulnerable both to popular unrest and military coups. So what to us might look like a minor set back (pro-Russian puppet replaced with an opposition leader; Russia loses some regional influence) is an existential threat to Vladimir Putin's regime. A French president, German chancellor, or English prime minister can preside over a decline in national power without being afraid of a military coup, but a dictator cannot.\n\nChina isn't exactly a dictatorship because power is concentrated much more strongly in the Chinese Communist Party as an independent entity than in the President or Party Secretary. But it is still true that in order to maintain legitimacy, the CCP needs to bring constantly rising standards of living or else face unrest. This means most of their foreign policy is aimed at maximizing Chinese exports (for example, their management of the dollar/yuan exchange rate). However, they are also very aggressive in pursuing China's territorial and symbolic disputes with other countries, either because they think these claims are actually a potential source of wealth (like energy resources in the South China Sea), or because, like Russia, they worry that appearing weak will unleash nationalist fury that will be very difficult to control. China also has a problem that the territory they control could easily break into dozens of smaller countries, each speaking its own language and so on. As a result they are very aggressive about defending Chinese territorial integrity and attacking separatist groups, and also (to some extent) try to get respect for borders and hostility towards separatism accepted in general as principles of international law."
] |
How is our sense of taste and smell connected? | [
"> How is our sense of taste and smell connected?\n\nMost of what you think of as \"taste\" is actually smell. For instance, an apple and a raw potato taste almost exactly the same. If you hold your nose (which stops air flow past your olfactory nerves), you can't tell if what you're biting into is a raw potato or an apple (assuming that your eyes are closed).\n\nThe only things you can actually taste are: salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami. All the rest is smell.\n\n > And how is it that some things smell great, like perfume or cologne, but taste awful?\n\nThis is usually because the chemicals used very strongly activate the taste buds that react to bitter, which you can taste, but not smell. It's just like if someone dumped an entire salt shaker into your soup. It would smell just the same, but it would taste way too salty.",
"taking a stab at this, but i think they're similar because they're the only 2 senses whose receptors each work solely by binding molecularly to the 'sensed' objects. By doing so, both smelling and tasting identify (to some degree) the chemical composition of the foreign substance (As opposed to touch, hearing or sight which function of physical properties rather than chemical) And I'd say for something like a perfume or cologne the human brain has developed to recognize those compositions as pleasing to be around (by sense of smell) but not acceptable for passage into the digestive system through consumption (by sense of taste)"
] |
Why do my computer speakers occasionally pick up radio or (phone?) conversations? | [
"A piece of wire can be used as a radio antenna, as a conductive material can pick up the electromagnetic radiation that makes up radio waves. Your car radio, for example, has an antenna that picks up electromagnetic waves, and the tuner in the radio isolates which frequency to isolate. From there, the received signal is amplified and played through speakers. \n\nYour computer speakers, external I'm assuming, are picking up radio waves, which are then being amplified and played through your speakers. This is due to poor shielding in your speakers. It just happens that your location and speakers are tuning in to a particular frequency consistently.\n\nTry wrapping aluminum foil around the back and sides of your speakers and around the cables connecting them/coming from your computer.",
"Your speakers probably aren't shielded well enough, causing it to pick up the signals."
] |
How can a camera take a clear picture underwater, yet when I open my eyes everything is blurry? | [
"Light bends when it changes the stuff that it is going through. Lens bend light in a special way to help cameras and eyes see. How much the lens works depends on what the light is moving from before it enters the lens. The lens in your eyes work when light moves from the air into them. When you put your eye in water, the lens doesn't work as well.\n\nImagine when you are playing with a pair of wheels connected side by side. If you roll this wheels down the sidewalk and they hit a patch of mud, the wheels will slow down. If the wheels hit the mud at an angle, one wheel wheel hit the mud before the other. Because one wheel is still rolling on the sidewalk, it goes faster than the other wheel until it too hits the mud. That little bit of time when one wheel is traveling faster than the other causes the wheels to turn. If the wheels start out in mud, and travel into slightly different mud, they won't change directions much.\n\nThe air is like the sidewalk. Light can travel through it easily. The lens in a camera or your eye is like mud; light has more trouble moving through it. Water is also like mud. Just like wheels that wouldn't change direction going from mud to mud, the light doesn't bend much when it goes from water into your eye's lens. Because the light doesn't bend as much when your eye is in water, the lens doesn't work as well. This is what makes the world look blurry.\n\nUnderwater cameras have a special lens that bends light enough in water to see clearly."
] |
Can someone dumb down (u/latros explanation on) why US healthcare providers are allowed to overcharge patients? | [
"[Here's the explanation I assume you're talking about.](_URL_0_) The post already seems relatively straightforward. Please clarify if there's a particular point from Iatros' explanation that's been confusing for you. \n\nBullet Point 1: Doctors get paid by insurance companies. The doctors have arrangements with insurance companies in which the insurance company will only pay a low rate. No matter how high the bill is, the doctor will get that low amount of money, as long as the original bill is at least as expensive. As a result, the doctor's office is focused on making sure all billed items are listed at at least as high of a price.\n\nAlso, if you don't have insurance, you can generally get the dollar amount lowered just by asking. The uninsured also get overbilled because the doctors are expected to bill everyone at the same price for the same procedure. They're happy to take a lower rate if that's what the patient is able to pay.\n\nBullet Point 2: Lots of complaints about healthcare costs ignore a lot of realities about practicing medicine. There are lots of expenses beyond just the doctor's salary and the cost of a drug. \n\nBullet Point 3: Lots of patients are uninsured and unable to pay. Hospitals are still required to treat them. Hospitals lose money/resources by doing this. As a result, paying patients need to be charged more to make up for this extra expense.\n\nBullet Point 4: Particularly with the recent Obamacare legislation, the procedure from the post should've been affordable. (If you're unfamiliar with it, Obamacare is a recent law that, among other things, makes it easier for more people to get insurance.) \"Catastrophic medical emergencies,\" such as the one in the original post, are the exact thing Obamacare is supposed to help people get coverage for. In other words, this life-saving procedure should only cost the patient a few thousand dollars.",
"The US generally has no laws that set prices for what a private company charges for its services to members of the public. A healthcare provider charges whatever it wants (with an endless list of exceptions that apply to no other segment of the economy except perhaps military equipment).\n\nThe free market is supposed to discipline companies that charge too much. Buyers are supposed to make rational choices about selecting whom they do business with based on price signals.\n\nOne obvious flaw in this theory is when a monopoly develops. Classically we think of a monopoly as something that happens because a company can force its competitors out of the market.\n\nHowever, a de facto monopoly occurs when you show up at an ER dying of a rattlesnake bite. You really don't have the choice to shop around for the best price. You pretty much have to just take whatever price is offered, or die. (This is why free markets for healthcare will never work).\n\nIn the US healthcare system every price everywhere is listed as much much higher than anyone is expected to actually pay. That way everyone in the system gets a pat on the head an an annual bonus based on how much of a \"discount\" they are able to negotiate. Let that feedback loop churn for a few decades and every \"list price\" becomes irrational.\n\nThen, very very rarely, someone gets stuck without any way to negotiate a discount, and the price they're confronted with is ridiculous."
] |
How does smell transmit? Does it radiate like sound or 'float' like gas? | [
"Odor is carried by molecules. When you smell lemon, for example, little molecules from the lemon are making their way through the air to your nose.\n\nNow think about what happens when you smell shit...",
"Think of smell as water. If I poured water on a surface, it naturally spreads out right? Just the same with Smells. The smell moves from a high concentration to a low concentration. From the point or origin (which is the highest concentration because it started there) to everywhere else it hasn't been. And the way it moves and the speed it moves depends on the current humidity, wind speed and other variables that are going on. \n\nSource: Learned this in college in one of my Chemistry Classes",
"Smells are molecules that come into contact with tissue in one's nose. Stuff floating around in the air. They get there either passively on the air currents or else forcibly by our inhaling.",
"Smells float like a gas, because, in essence, that's what they are. \nA smell is nothing more than tiny particles of the smelled item, interpreted by your nose."
] |
Why can I Crack my knuckles multiple times a day but never multiple times in a row? | [
"The \"crack\" you hear is caused when a bubble of vacuum is formed in the synovial fluid in the joint. Gasses which had formerly been dissolved in the synovial fluid (mostly carbon dioxide) rapidly fill the joint resulting in the sound (the technical term is cavitation). You can't crack it again until the gasses dissolve back into the surrounding fluid and a new vacuum pocket can be formed.",
"There needs to be time so that a pocket of nitrogen gas can build up in the knuckle. That is what you are hearing when you \"crack\" them. If you can crack a joint multiple times in a row, there might be something wrong with the joint and you should see a doctor.",
"tag-on question: what is going on when some knuckles CAN be cracked repeatedly? I can do that with my knees, for example, and elsewhere, although some are limited to only several repetitions. Is that not the same kind of knuckle, or am I just a weirdo?"
] |
Where are all the famous artists from before the Renaissance? | [
"In whatever iteration of the afterlife they believe in, or just a couple of meters underground"
] |
If automation in companies, driverless cars/trucks, and AI is can do the work of thousands of people in a handful or robots/machines, why do scientists and economists still insist that it will create lots of jobs? | [
"Each level of automation in low-skilled labor eliminates the low-skilled job that pays minimum wage but creates even more jobs at medium to high skilled levels to maintain & service those same machines.\n\nFast food example:\nTaco Bell currently needs ~30 employees to cover all the minimum wage & managerial jobs in one restaurant: maintenance, cashiers, food prep, fry cook, assembly, etc.\nW automation, they would eliminate cashier, food prep, fry cook & assembly but would add stockers, technicians, & computer operators. Total crew would reduce to ~20 per store. \n\nWhile the cost of the store would increase slightly to build, the cost savings in fewer employees per restaurants would be attractive to build more restaurants. Thus from one restaurant w 30 employees, they would build 2 restaurants employing 40 total. Net gain: 10 jobs.\n\nThis is even more significant in tight labor markets or smaller towns. Before, there was insufficient business to open one. W reduced cost per restaurant because of automation, they can. Net gain in jobs: 20. Plus net gain of one restaurant in a town that had none.",
"Yes, the automated functions would take over the menial jobs but if looking at a company's leadership that is loyal to its employees, the focus would simply shift. In your example, rather than working a factory floor, folks would be redirected to other areas like financing, marketing, tech support, QA. \n\nThe use of tech would cut costs in some areas, thereby opening up opportunities to dedicate resources to improve in others. It's up to the employer / leadership's vision and creativity, but the advancement of tech can indeed create jobs. Or, at least not completely replace those in play.",
"Historically, each major new technology has created immense new prosperity, enabling people to buy more of everything (even unrelated products and services); and immense new opportunities to create related products.\n\nThere is no proof that the number of jobs created will always exceed the number destroyed. Typically that's what has happened.\n\nSome experts argue that \"this time it's different,\" because machines will take so many millions of jobs at the same time, leaving no place for many workers to go. See /r/Automate for some discussion of the problem and /r/BasicIncome for discussion of one frequently discussed economic answer.",
"Because any time a new technology is invented that takes away jobs, it also creates jobs. Someone is making those processors for those computers, someone is making the plastic casing for the computers, someone is making all the moving parts, someone is taking orders for those computers. Now obviously with ai some of these tasks will be taken by ai computers, but unless the government thinks it is a good idea to have computers making computers (skynet tinfoil rustling), there will still be jobs created",
"The jobs making and maintaining those machines are created jobs.\n\nThen more people will get things cheaper and be able to get by with less wages, part of the time, but food & power are still an issue for cost.\n\nIt's not good for jobs over-all, it's good for a wage for who is qualified. Who is not qualified will starve and die."
] |
Why do we know so little about ancient Egypt? | [
"Our troubles with understanding Egyptian culture and history are multifaceted. \n\nPart of it is that we don't necessarily understand the language quite so well as we understand Latin- there's been an unbroken scholarship of the Latin language since Latin was actually spoken thousands of years ago. We've never NOT known Latin. Ancient Egyptian was largely lost to time, and was only made translatable by the Rosetta stone 200 years ago- before which, we literally knew nothing about the Egyptian language for thousands of years. There are MASSIVE gaps in understanding the evolution of the language.\n\nPart of it is grave robbers, defilement, and destruction. People in the past generally cared even less about preserving history than we did today. The interiors of the Pyramids are still studded with thousands of years of graffiti. Entire tombs were raided and destroyed by robbers. Hell, some Ancient Egyptian tombs were destroyed by OTHER Ancient Egyptians- a Pharoah of the 17th dynasty might destroy all the tombs of the 16th dynasty to erase any memory of that history. \n\nPart of it is also, to some degree, cultural. Cultures which we know a lot about are cultures which wrote a lot, and wrote on things which were well preserved. Why do we know more about the atrocities committed by the Nazis than the atrocities committed by the Japanese in WWII? The Nazis were meticulous record keepers compared to the Japanese. Why do we know so much about the Roman empire compared to other civilizations? The Romans fucking recorded EVERYTHING. They had incredibly intricate systems of bureaucracy which left behind volumes and volumes of records which we can study today."
] |
Why was the King of Thailand so revered by his people? | [
"The recently-deceased king of Thailand is generally well-loved by the population. There are many reasons for that, but generally speaking, it is a combination of his long and quite successful reign (the longest certified reign barring that of Louis XIV of France), as well as a very good public image due to his general lack of conspicuous consumption and extravaganza (at least as perceived by the public), as well as being rather diligent in his work. It is quite famous of him that he would be visiting other (usually the rural and poor) part of his country to see how his people lives, and there are records and news report of him personally helping the people. While one might claim it is all publicity stunt to keep his throne, all these actions nevertheless cultivated a genuine love and respect from the people.\n\nAnother factor is that Thai politics is far from being stable, as indicated by the semi-regular interval of military coups. In many cases, especially the more recent ones, the king is tend to empower the military to overthrown unpopular governments and have them reform the government in a more acceptable way. Despite having influence more than constitutional monarchy would usually have, the king generally only use said power when it is needed, further reinforcing his image of being a compassionate and just ruler that safeguard the people from the occasional corrupt officials."
] |
How did the business suit become standard fashion for men in a diverse number of cultures around the world? | [
"The fact that Europe colonised almost the entire world about 150 years ago and spread their culture all over their colonies made it happen.",
"Follow up ELI5: Why isn't there a summer version of a man's suit?",
"Other cultures didn't see it as \"copying the West.\" They saw it as \"This is how rich people in rich countries dress.\"\n\nIt's like how the preppiest preppies started popping their collars in the '80s, so it spread because anyone who wanted to consider themselves a preppie started popping their collars, too.\n\nExcept on a global scale.",
"The original purpose of a business suit was to set management and ownership apart from labor. A suit says, \"I can wear expensive, delicate, hard to clean fabrics because I am so important I don't have to get dirty and sweaty anymore.\"\n\nAbout the same time, industrialization was in full swing and European colonization was at its peak. Even in countries that resisted colonization, like Japan, were trying to imitate Europe so they wouldn't fall further behind. This lead to European style business practices being spread around the globe. In those places, the message was even stronger, the suit said you were part of the future.",
"I see a lot of different answers with different aspects of this but none that really line up to the perspective that I read about when I studied historical fashion!\n\nThe suit became fashionable at the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie.\n\nWhen people, men, started gaining power and influence because of their accomplishments, which is tied to the industrial revolution, and it was no longer something that was strictly inherited the philosophy and society changed and the view of the nobility was that they were lazy, gaudish, extravagant, decadent, wasteful and just terrible overall.\n\nSo the old power fashion with extravagant and overdone clothing became the symbol for something bad. Like this: _URL_0_\n\nAlso, look at the legs, and heels on the shoes. Those kind of things became very feminine and the anti-thesis of men. Men where supposed to be rational and strict and those kind of expressions where for women who are more emotional etc. The view on sexuality also changed a lot at the same time, especially female sexuality. Sexuality was seen as something irrational and the purity of women and romance of love became more prevalent as well.\n\nSo the suit became the fashion for men with power. But how do you differentiate a bad suit from a good suit from a great suit? You really need to understand the details to actually tell the difference and that played into the idea of your own accomplishments etc. In many ways the fashion became so much more elitist. With the old fashion it was pretty much bigger was better, the one with the biggest and most extravagant clothing had the most power. Everyone could tell, from the poorest farmer to the king himself. But with the new fashion of the suit only the people in the know could tell. A poor farmer could impossibly tell the difference from what was considered a great suit from a simply good suit. So by simply knowing that it gave someone power.\n\nMy favorite example of this is the male fashion of watches that is still big today, unless you actually know you can't tell the difference from a superexpensive watch and a regular watch. Most of what makes the expensive watch so expensive is on the inside, it is the engineering and craftmanship that makes the watch special more than its gold and diamonds etc.\n\nThis also plays into the ideal of men as being rational and logical, there is a certain worth in craftmanship, jewelery is just pretty and doesn't have an inherent worth. Things that are just pretty are for women to appreciate, men appreciate things with absolute worth, or that is the idea anyway. \n\nAnd you can see this ideal and philosophy in a lot of things, it plays into why men care so much about sports, because it is seen as having an absolute worth, it is something you can measure. So it is seen as more important than other things.\n\nAnd of course, Europe where this all started have been the powercenter of the world and been seen as the ideal for most of the world in many ways so other cultures adopted this as they were dealing with Europe in different ways. Or you know, the whole imperialism as well where we pushed our ideals on other cultures.",
"You should ask this question over on /r/AskHistorians if you want an answer that isn't pulled out of someone's ass.",
"Everyone is grouping up China and Japan into the same \"Eastern wears Western\" status, but the way western suits are worn in Japan and China are entirely different. In Japan it is a very formal symbol of being a Business person. But in China only businesses which are partly foreign owned and make most of their money dealing with foreign clients require this. Most regular business (at least in Beijing) dress smart casual to the office and the formal places would just require a dress shirt and dress pants. Actually it is a joke in China that if you wear a suit, people will think you are an apartment rental agent (real estate) because that is the only job that really requires all their workers to wear suits.\nYou will be surprised to know that Chinese people don't wear suits to formal occasions - if you go watch an opera or to an orchestra performance or go to a nice club you will rarely see any guy in a western suit. Most regular middle class Chinese men don't have a formal suit in their closet.\n\nEdit: Also why is no one talking about Thailand. They have their own business suit that is pretty common.",
"Ha, in Oman the standard (for Omani guys only) is a white Dishdasha, a long white robe and head covered with Kuma or turban if you work in government position. It's very cute actually. Every Omani wears it at work. And it absolutely has to be white. After work you can wear whatever color you. Want, and I have seen some very colorful Dishdashas in my life.\nI lived in Muscat for 7 years, only just moved back to Europe this month and do miss the look of Omanis in their spotless, crisp white Dishdashas. They are very noble. [Check out this blog post](_URL_1_)",
"The most apparent answer is the history of British colonialism, and the rise of English global domination (USA and UK as amongst economic powerhouses, leading to a spread of Western culture, language (English), and standards). You may argue otherwise, but the colonial effects are still alive in many regions, such as Southeast Asia, where I am from. Even beauty standard still pathetically look up to Western one; there are many skin bleaching products for example, marketed not only to women but even to men, as dark skins in this region are deemed 'lower class'/'inferior'/'not beautiful'. It's a hard truth to swallow, but a truth nonetheless. (sorry I digress a bit)",
"The suit is typically British in origin, and when the suit was becoming popular in Britain, Britain ruled most of the world, so it spread.",
"The \"business suit\" as we know it stabilized its current form in the late 19^th in Europe, which was then the center of the universe while being unbashedly engaged in world-wide colonialism. The later allowed some rare occurences of gifted natives being sent off to the best European universites then accessing high ranking posts in the colonial machinery.\n\nThis contributed to the worldwide acceptance of *the suit* as the uniform of the trustworthy businessman.\n\nSome colonies acceded independance through brutal wars, and some of the newly formed nations struggled with dictatorships, civil wars and foreign influences in full Cold-War mode, which led to some brutal de-europeanisation campaigns.\n\nAt some point, in Cambodia, wearing a suit would have been reason enough for the revolutionary police to shoot on sight, as would have done the Red Guard in Mao's China. \n\nBy the last decade of the 20^th century, the concept of violent revolution was becoming unfashionable while international commerce soared, reviving the need for buisnessmen across the globe to speak a common language, including sartorial language.",
"The \"it's colonization, bro!\" seems to suggest Asian countries were forced to wear suits. This hypothesis does not make sense because they would have got rid of suits after independence. Colonization put these countries into contact with the West, but it was the prestige of Western culture that was attractive to these countries. They felt suits looked modern, efficient, professional and this is why suits have been adopted in the entire world, not because westerners forced them but because they wanted to look like westerners. You can check each single example in history and it is always like this _URL_2_",
"Recently, the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association refused entry to a High Court judge because he was wearing a dhoti, a loose sarong-like garment that is perfect for tropical India.\nDhotis, also called veshtis, have largely slipped out of fashion as more and more men turn to Western outfits such as tailored trousers, which they consider more comfortable and professional. The same Indian men wear dhotis at home or for religious ceremonies.\nThe issue gained heat when Jayalalithaa Jayaram, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, threatened to take away the licences of clubs that denied entry to men who wear Indian outfits. She called it “sartorial despotism” and an insult to local pride. Ms Jayalalithaa has vowed to introduce a new law that will prevent clubs from enforcing their existing dress codes.\nThe objects of the chief minister’s ire include the Madras Boat Club, Madras Gymkhana Club and the aforementioned Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, all of whom frown upon men entering their premises wearing Indian attire. Women aren’t accorded the same level of indignity. They can sail through wearing a sari or salwar kameez.",
"The western suit is descended from military clothing. They make fit-ish blokes look fitter, stronger, more organised, etc. Most traditional clothing is more about either basic practicality or showing off wealth so the suit is an extra type of costume men can add to their culture rather than replacing something they already have.",
"I always thought a standard business suit would be the best outfit for time travel if you had no idea what period you would end up in.",
"It's the worship garb for the religion of economics. The only unifying worldwide institution.",
"It's worth noting that western attire is very much a melting pot mixture of the evolution of western clothes + the adoption of imported materials. You can trace back the modern business/lounge suit through western men's clothes like frock coats back through the clothes you picture on George Washington etc, all the way back through history getting less and less recognizable all the time.\n\nOne major example is the cummerbund. This doesn't apply to business suits but it applies to formal wear. It's just a self-tied sash taken from India in place of a waistcoat.\n\nSo basically western culture evolved into the modern lounge suit (around the mid-1800s it all became recognizably modern but the lounge suit took a few more decades to become the standard daywear as it is now, sometime in the 1900s..by modern I mean that it looks familiar but of course 1800s clothes will still look dated and old fashioned for the most part) and also the world at the time became increasingly westernized due to colonialism and globalism.\n\nThings like silks are eastern and incorporated into menswear but the toning down of men's clothing occurred mid 1800s due to a few factors...the most \"fun\" being a socialite named Beau Brummel singlehandedly convincing people to stop dressing in a style of extravagance similar to the stereotype of French courts and in a more somber yet elegant pallet which is the basis for men's clothes being charcoal and gray anf navy and in the case of formalwear, black. Of course that's probably more of an exaggeration to make him the only reason, but it's a well known factor. And since this all corresponded with the globalism and imperialism of the time it locked itself in as the business and formal wear of the dawning global age.\n\nEdit: regarding Brummell, here is a Wikipedia quote\n\n > when asked how much it would cost to keep a single man in clothes, he was said to have replied: \"Why, with tolerable economy, I think it might be done with £800.\" [13] That amount is approximately £103,000 ($160,000) in 2012 currency; the average wage for a craftsman at that time was £52 a year.\n\nBrummel was not an aristocrat by birth but he joined their society. As much as I like menswear he sort of represents the pit of modern consumerism. He lived beyond his means and sadly died in a syphilis asylum. Someone else mentioned that part of this is due to how the rise of capitalist societies leading to civilians gaining wealth and power had its role and I guess that too is part of it. Now people can and want to buy their way into royalty status. Perhaps it's better that one can versus how it used to be just luck with who your mother was, but the dark side of it is the consumerist desire to always have more and keep up with the people richer than you. And a symptom is always knowing people richer than you because you're goal is to always move vertically.",
"The British Empire once governed ~1/4th of the world's land and about a quarter of its people. However, they were *primarily* a Mercantile Culture which desired to have everyone else dependent on their goods and products. *They were fairly successful.*\n\nThe English held a fairly dominant position over the world for a time. This meant that those who were involved in trade, and some rulers, became interested in better relations with the English. They began to adopt some English customs for the purposes of negotiation, and the Western Business Suit is one of them.\n\nThose under direct English Rule picked up on the Business Suit due to all these tea-drinking bullies that stare disapprovingly at you from over their teacups when you don't obey the customs of their culture. They started wearing them to fit in with their conquerors.\n\nA lot of other countries picked up on the Business Suit from *other* Colonial Powers. However, the English version is the one that wound up the most wide-spread.\n\nThe Business Suit remains prevalent due to a combination of inertia and American Economic Dominance. Eveyone already has Business Suits, and they mean the same thing across cultural lines, so the convention has become self-reinforcing. Also: When the British Empire went into decline, their rebellious teenager went and took over their role as the Global Trade Power. Americans like a man in a suit at the negotiating table, which reinforces this state of being.",
"When George Washington won the Revolutionary War against England he did something that no other conquering General had done in history - He went home. Turning the power of a new country over to the Founding Fathers. Instead of taking Power himself as a Emperor (Napoleon), Monarch or Dictator.\n\nWhen he did come to the new Capital to be President he wore a suit. The second thing that was never done in history. Until then Leaders around around the world either wore their Military Dress uniform or dressed like a King / Queen.\n\nWashington changed all of that. And the suit became a symbol of Democracy. Anyone can wear a suit and be afforded the same respect - President, business leader, Prime Minister etc. As Democracy spread throughout the world the Suit followed.\n\nIt is why I believe that Washington is a even greater President than most realize.",
"I think it's less to do with colonialism and more to do with dominant economies. The UK was the dominant economy (certainly dominant trading nation) for the nineteenth century. The US - in many ways the \"child\" of the UK - succeeded it in the inter war period and rose into the ascendency categorically post WW2.\n\nA lot of business boils down to perception; people want to trade with others they feel \"understand\" them and that they can trust. You wear a suit because you want an Englishman or an American to trust you. In the same way, English became the lingua Franca of business. \n\nNow, of course, these fashions just have incumbency. They've become the go to for globalised business; it's easy for men to find appropriate suits. English is almost everyone's second language.",
"We are America. Lower your import barriers and surrender your identity. Your technological and cultural distinctiveness will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.",
"I am just going to leave this poem here: [Ode on the Lungi] (_URL_3_)"
] |
why we are in a "war" right now? | [
"The invasion of Afghanistan occurred as a direct response to 9/11. The goal was to go after the terrorist organizations that planned the attacks and find the people responsible. \n\nIraq is a bit harder to explain. Basically, the American people were told that the dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (he didn't). We invaded that country and that's pretty much that. \n\nTroop withdrawal is a very slow process, but we're already starting to see it unfold. After years of fighting, Afghanistan has been mostly cleared of the terrorists and Iraq has been ousted of their dictator. The reason the troops are still there is because it would be pointless to withdraw them immediately...by going slow, we can ensure a smooth transition for the country to go back to being on their own. Plus, in both Iraq and Afghanistan our military is training soldiers from those areas to serve and defend their country once we leave.",
"If you were truly five, I would explain it like this:\n\nSome people believe that America is a bad place that is taking over the world. \n\nA few of these people want to take matters into their own hands and \"stop america.\" \n\nA few of these types of people met up and formed a group based on hate and decided to attack the United States by hijacking a plane and crashing it into a building, killing many people. This particular group is known as Al Queda, though other similar groups exist.\n\nThe American people were very angry about this, and the current president (Bush) declared a war on terrorism, so it was a war against the people above, not a war against a specific country.\n\nWe went into the countries looking for leaders of Al Qaeda and nuclear weapons that would be seen as a threat to the United States.\n\nBecause of this, we were seen as \"invading\" their homeland, encouraging more people to join the anti-america group. This meant that we needed to send more troops to protect our old ones and the citizens of that country, whether they wanted the protection or not.\n\nSo basically one country got a parasite, and another country tried to get rid of that parasite by sending its own medicine, but it didn't really work well against the parasites. \n\nAnything else?",
"If some neighbor kid came over to your yard and built a fort in your tree and didn't let you in it, and then started shooting you with arrows every once in a while, you probably wouldn't like it. You might ask him to leave. You might even decide to throw some rocks at the tree fort until your mean neighbor gives up and goes home. He might start throwing rocks back at you and shooting you with his BB gun and urinating on you.\n\nWell, the United States is the neighbor kid. We built some tree forts in some other yards because we liked to eat the apples on their trees. After a while, the kids who lived there started telling us to leave, so we started shooting them with arrows and missiles and whatnot. Eventually they ran some airliners into our treehouse, and our treehouse fell down. We started shooting people and wrecking their bikes and throwing their marbles in the sewer. Then we burned down the garage next door because it seemed like a good idea.",
"The policies and actions abroad are not new, nor are they directly the result of 9/11, in my personal opinion. In recent decades, The West (and the US in particular) has rejected traditional imperialism, where they colonize other lands to build a vast physical empire, with economic imperialism (of course, they don't call it that themselves), where various pressures are put on developing nations to allow free reign for US corporate and military interests in their countries. To explain, let's look at why the Middle East is important. Sometime in the early 20th century, it was discovered that the region has some of the biggest oil reserves in the world at a time when oil was becoming one of the world's most important resources. It's not simply, as many people think, that the US just wants to take the oil for their own energy needs. It's more complex than that. To retain its role as the world superpower, controlling the flow of this resource and the markets they trade in, is crucial. \n\nSo how does this work? The United States identifies countries of strategic importance, such as Saudi Arabia or Iraq. They begin to develop diplomatic relationships with those countries where they say, \"If you let our companies come in and control the oil production, we'll support your government, diplomatically, financially, maybe even militarily.\" If the other government agrees, they become a strong ally of the United States. However, such agreements are often unpopular to the masses of those countries. Intellectuals and political dissidents point out that if they had control over their own resources, they could prosper much more quickly than with the foreign corporations taking their share. The governments then have a choice between suppressing dissidents or changing their agreements with the US. When they do change their agreements, this affects our economy, and we will generally respond in a number of ways. We may send military support for the government against the dissidents, attempt to work with the rebels and keep them on our side so that we can negotiate with them after the revolution, or we send our own troops in to fight.\n\nLet's look at some examples. Saddam was a major US ally for a long time. We were arming Iraq in the 80's when they fought a war against Iran. During that time and after, the opposed Kurdish community attempted to rebel against Saddam's rule, which his regime crushed with approval and support of the US. Some time later, Saddam started to not listen to US orders. He invaded neighboring Kuwait, which has its own oil supplies, leading to the first Gulf War, but still served as an ally after. \n\nThere is a belief in international relations that those nations who have nuclear weapons gain negotiating power. They can't be as easily bullied around by the world's military powers because they have a kind of deterrence ability. It is most likely for these reasons that Iraq may have been considering a nuclear program and removing the UN weapons inspectors, although we can never know for sure how serious that was or what the intended use might have been. Regardless, we do now know that plans were made as soon as Bush got into office to attempt regime change in Iraq, even before 9/11. \n\nSo what did 9/11 have to do with anything? It was known that Bin Laden and Saddam were not allies. Ideologically, they are polar opposites, as Saddam supported a strong, secularist state similar to the Soviet Union. The Bush administration was careful to never say that Saddam was involved in 9/11 because they probably knew he wasn't, but statements did help put the idea in people's heads. When that became impossible to prove, the war became about the search for nuclear weapons, we never found and may not have ever existed. They then put a spin on the war to make it about humanitarian intervention, citing the crimes against the Kurds, the same crimes that the US had previously supported, to try and execute Saddam.\n\nI suspect the reason why the Iraq invasion happened after 9/11 is mostly public opinion. Since Vietnam, it had become increasingly difficult to convince Americans that these kinds of ground wars are necessary or morally justifiable. 9/11 saw Bush's approval rating hit unprecedented levels, outpourings of international support, and very little resistance from the media. Some people might remember that on February 15, 2003, a month before the invasion, the largest worldwide protest in history took place against the war. Incredibly, it was largely ignored by the media and Bush continued to believe his mandate for invasion. \n\nEDIT: I know this was all about Iraq. There are different details for why we are/were in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya, but I figured this post was long enough with one war.",
"After the 9/11 attacks, it was determined that Al Qaeda was to blame. They were believed to be based out of Afghanistan. So we invaded them. After that, we invaded Iraq because it was believed they had WMDs and posed a threat to American interests. So we invaded them and kept fighting until we captured Saddam Hussein. \n\nNow we find ourselves in a position where we have destabilized two countries by removing their previous system of government and replaced them with A new group. This borders on speculation, but there is too much risk that leaving now will leave the door open for anti-american parties to seize power.",
"The US would like you to think we are there to help combat terrorism, but anyone with half a brain knows that terrorism is a tactic not an enemy, that being said the real reason we are there is to assert military dominance over the region, control oil reserves, and flex our military muscles so to speak, its nothing more than US imperialism at its fines,t controlling resources in the area, and showing the world theres not a damn thing they can do about it."
] |
Why do salt lands have such reflective properties? Example: Salt Land in Bolivia looks like the world's greatest mirror | [
"They're formed by dried up seabeds, so they are perfectly flat. When it does rain, the rain has nowhere to drain to, so it forms a perfectly flat reflective puddle."
] |
How do we know that we are "done" with a hug? | [
"There are many subtle clues. One person will slightly loosen their grip, and the other person will take this as the cue to end the hug. There also tends to be a \"normal\" hug time, which you also subconsciously track. After the \"normal\" amount of time is up, you loosen up, and the other person gets the message that it's time for the hug to end."
] |
How do people eat and drink in space? wouldn't the food just float around and not go straight to the stomach? | [
"Swallowing does not rely on gravity. The muscles around your esophagus (and all through your digestive tract) contract in series to squeeze food through you. This motion is called \"peristalsis.\"\n\nAs for getting the food in your mouth, that's just a matter of getting a food that clumps together pretty well, directing it to your mouth, \"Here comes the airplane,\" and then nom. Some foods are also eaten from tubes/pouches that can be squeezed directly into the mouth.",
"The digestive system works by peristalsis, whereby food and drink is forced into the stomach by regular muscle contractions in the throat. Once in the stomach, solids and liquids are kept there by a sphincter which closes off the access to the throat and stops it coming back up. You can stand on your head against a wall and drink from a cup (with a straw) and it'll still go to your stomach.",
"Besides the whole swallowing being a muscle thing, a lot of food items like water will also clump together in space. Making a mess is a real concern though, so most of it comes in sealed pouches.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThat video doesn't answer the question directly, but it links to plenty of videos on the subject.\n\nHadfield having cake and coffee aboard the ISS _URL_0_"
] |
Why can't/don't we use salt water in our toilets? | [
"This would require running two separate water lines into your house, one containing salt water specifically for your toilets, and keeping that water separate from the rest. It would also require towns / cities / whatever to have two water reservoirs - one for salt water (for toilets exclusively) and one with fresh water for everything else. This is, obviously, impractical to solve a problem that isn't really a problem in 99% of locations.",
"The hydrologist that did an AMA not long ago said toilets aren't really much of an issue when it comes to water conservation, as the water is treated and returned to the water table.",
"Most boats have toilets which flush with seawater. It can discolour the fixtures and is hard on rubber fittings etc. They seem to require a lot of maintenance.",
"The cost to put in the infrastructure (pipes, pumping stations) for only salt water would be astronomical. \nAlso when you flush your toilet it goes to a wastewater treatment plant and now they would have to deal with salt water which could prove difficult to treat. And not all treatment plants discharge back into the ocean some go to rivers and streams(freshwater).",
"It does in some places. A lot of buildings in Hong Kong use seawater for flushing. However this leads to problems, mainly in rusting. This is why people don't drink out of pipes in Hong Kong because although *theoretically* it's safe, that water might be contaminated after running for miles in rusty pipes."
] |
Why do job applications ask for my ethnicity when they are apparently not going to be used in my application for equality purposes? | [
"Companies are required to ask and keep that information so that it can be reviewed if there were ever a complaint. The company isn't required to hire to maintain any ethnic balance, but they have to show that they are not discriminating in hiring because of ethnicity. \n\nIf someone complains, and there's an investigation, the investigator will compare who was actually hired and why to the pattern of the applicants. 99 white guys and 1 Hispanic on the shop floor might or might not be evidence of discriminatory hiring practices depending on who applied and their qualifications.",
"The only reason I can think of is that they collect the information for \"trending\" purposes...? \nLike saying they have 30% white employees, 28% blacks, 10% Asian, yada yada yada...52% males, 48% female...then again, it would make more sense to collect this information AFTER someone has been hired.",
"So that if they are ever accused of racism they can show them the ethnicities of everyone who applied and everyone who was hired to show that they were not discriminating.",
"I always put \"Other\" for every form that has that bullshit on it and you should too. If you keep drawing the line, then the line will always be there."
] |
Why is Adele's Hello song & album, 25, released in 2015 nominated for the 2017 Grammys? | [
"The Grammys don't use the calendar year for eligibility, instead they use October 1-September 30. Since *25* was released in November of 2015, it's part of the 2016 eligibility year (which ran from October 1, 2015 to September 30, 2016).",
"The Grammys is usually on February or the first quarter of the year. Her album came out November 2015, which is just a few months before the 2016 Grammys. That's not enough time for the academy to judge her album."
] |
How do mom porcupines and hedgehogs give birth without the babies' spines causing any harm to the mother's insides? | [
"A porcupine's quills are hair, not stiff rods. When they give birth, the quills are soft and wet. That is also why the quills can be replaced constantly.",
"I'm not a porcupine expert, but my guess, is they the baby's quills are still soft/not fully hardened, and the babies are probably pushed out head-first, so that the quills lay down.",
"The real question is how do they have sex? I'm guessing missionary"
] |
Why did we ever start counting things in 'Dozens'? Why not in tens, or something easier to work with? | [
"Base 12 was used in ancient Egypt.\n\nYou can count to twelve on one hand, using your thumb to move on each finger joint (four fingers, each with three joints).\n\nArguably, base 12 and base 60 make more \"sense\" than base 10, because you can count to 12 on the one hand and keep track of five groups of 12 with the other.\n\nSome have argued that this using 12 carried forward directly, some argue that it developed independently in lots of different places, which makes sense to me because it works really well.",
"12 can also be divided evenly into more combinations.. with base 10, you either have 1 group of 10, 2:5, 5:2, or 10:1.. Base 12 would be 1:12, 2:6, 3:4, 4:3, 6:2, 12:1",
"This is actually a very interesting question and I once looked into this in very much detail. The 12-base counting system was used by many ancient civilizations but it is believed it was first used by the Sumerians (a very old civilization). While there are a lot of advantages to a base 12 system, it is not plainly obvious as to how this could easily make use of this in daily life. With a base-10 system, one can easily keep track of the numbers on their hands, using each finger to count as one digit. \n\nBefore computers or writing systems, it would be essential for this \"finger counting\" to keep track of numbers, so how does one count to twelve with their hands in an easy and simple way? Well its actually ingenious. Using the thumb as a pointer, each segment of one hand can be counted until tallying up to twelve as seen at this [link](_URL_0_). As you see, our four fingers (not the thumb) each have 3 separate segments. So instead of counting with whole fingers, one can simply use the segments of their fingers. \n\nThis was actually taken a step further by the Babylonians. They had a base-60 counting system (which is the reason for 60 seconds/minutes in a minute/hour) This can be achieved by counting the same way as before, but then the other hands digits can serve as a place holder, so you can count all the way up to 60."
] |
Why do home-made burgers get fat in the middle (even if you put a thumb indent in the middle) while frozen, fast-food burger start out flat as a pancake and stay that way after cooking? | [
"home made burgers are flat if you put a weight on em.\n\nburgers made in fast food places are cooked on a grills that close like a clamshell and press the burger down while it cooks so it can't expand in the center.\n\nthe real interesting thing is \"why do hamburger patties get fat in the middle?\"\n\nwhen hamburger cooks it loses a lot of it's fat and shrinks down. if you place it on a grill or skillet the outside cooks faster than the middle. there are a few reasons:\n\n1. the outside is usually thinner than the middle unless you cut the shape out with a cup from a sheet of hamburger you rolled out with a rolling pin\n2. the heat being applied is usually uneven and just at the bottom until you flip them. this makes the edges and bottom, which are getting all the heat, shrink pushing the middle up\n\nfast food burgers are uniform in thickness and shape and the clamp presses down on them and heats them evenly on both sides.\n\nif you place a weight on the burger (we had a heavy black iron press) the burger can't expand upwards so it has to push outwards giving a more even expansion."
] |
If most water is absorbed in the colon, then why does thirst resolve immediately after drinking? | [
"Yes, but it's your brain and not your colon that makes the decision of whether you feel thirsty or not. There are whole lot of times there will be a disconnect.\n\nConsider the experiments with infinite soup bowls. People will eat more when offered bigger portions, regardless of hunger, and if you covertly keep filling up their soup bowl, they will very rarely stop.",
"Most of the water by volume is absorbed by the small intestines, not the colon. But the water absorbed by the colon is the water hardest to absorb, even though it is smaller in volume. \n\nThe water that was in the chyme when it entered the large intestines is not there because no other part of the digestive is capable of absorbing it; it is there because its presence is necessary for digestion to work properly. If you drink a lot of water without a meal, it will be absorbed quite quickly because it is in excess of what is needed to aid digestion.",
"Actual ELI5: After drinking, your brain fools you into being satiated until the water has actually been absorbed.\n\nNon-ELI5: This actually only recently has been found out by research. In the end, there are two parts of your brain that interact: one part that registers your actual body's need for water (which as you point out takes a long time to change after drinking), and a part that for lack of a better term, is a \"gulp counter\". That part knows how many gulps of liquid are enough to change the slow-changing water balance in your body.\n\nWhat the research found was that this second region is activated to a certain level when you are thirsty, and every time you drink a gulp, the activation would diminish with each gulp until it was entirely gone. The suppression stayed around until your water balance was equalized, after which you *truly* aren't thirsty anymore. Interesting side outcome of the research: cold water makes the counter go down faster, that's we feel cold water is more refreshing."
] |
Why are written and spoken English so different? | [
"English is the result of a linguistic mishmash of Low German dialects, Norman French, Scandinavian languages, Church Latin and Scientific Greek, and loanwords from a hundred other languages from Italian to Arabic to Swahili to Cherokee to Hindi to Japanese.\n\nAs a result, it has lots of different rubrics for how letters should be pronounced inherited from its various parent languages that often contradict one another.",
"As a native English speaker who has been reading almost as long as I've been speaking, I had trouble getting through that right."
] |
Why do undercooked potatoes taste disgusting, even though other root vegetables like carrots and parsnips are fine to eat raw? | [
"Because of the starch content; potatoes basically store their energy as starch, whereas carrots store energy as sugar."
] |
how rugby is played. | [
"I'm going to describe Rugby Union, other types of Rugby are similar but have a few slightly different rules.\n\nFifteen players on each team on the field. The main objective is to get the ball to the other end of the pitch and either put the ball down over the line (scoring a Try) or kick it between the posts and over the bar (drop goal if done during open play or penalty if a kick is given after an opposition foul). The ball is carried in the hands and can only be thrown backwards. It can be kicked forwards, but this often means the opposition collects it as the kicker's team mates must be behind the kicker when he kicks it in order to chase it.\n\nA defending team tackles a ball carrier by grabbing them and forcing them to the ground. At this point the ball carrier must stop holding onto the ball and generally tries to place it behind him so that his team mates can easily pick it up. The defenders can try to get over the player on the ground to pick it up and be wrestled back by the ball carrier's team mates - this is called a ruck.\n\nScoring is as follows for rugby union (different in other codes):\n\n* Try - 5 points\n\n* Drop goal - 3 points\n\n* Penalty - 3 points\n\n* Conversion - 2 points\n\nWhen a player scores a try his team is allowed to make a kick at goal in line with where the try is scored (so if the try is scored in the middle of the pitch this is easier). This is called a conversion.\n\nIf the ball leaves the field of play on the sides (going into touch) then a line-out is awarded. The team who didn't throw, kick or carry the ball out is awarded possession. Their player must then throw the ball over his head in a straight line perpendicular to the touch line. The two teams are lined up like [this](_URL_0_) and attempt to catch the ball. Players are often lifted up by their team mates to catch the ball.\n\nIf a player commits a foul then they may be disciplined by receiving a yellow or red card. A red card is also given when a player receives two yellow cards. If a player is given a yellow card he must leave the field for 10 minutes (which is called being put in the sin bin/being sin binned). A red means the player leaves the field permanently.\n\nIf a foul is committed then the other team may be given a scrum, a free kick, a penalty or a penalty try. A penalty allows the team to either kick at the goal or kick towards the touch line - in this case if the ball goes into touch then the team who had the penalty keeps possession. A free kick is a simple way to restart the game and isn't often used. It acts like a normal kick for the team with possession with normal rules for touch and can't be a kick at goal. A scrum is complicated, but involves two teams pushing each other over the ball. Because of how it's currently refereed, the team who has the scrum awarded to them nearly always ends up with the ball. A penalty try is awarded when a foul is the only thing that stopped an attacking team from scoring a try, and means the referee counts a try as having been scored in the middle of the field awarding 5 points and an easy conversion kick.\n\nIn practice teams often have most of their players spread across the field in a line and try to run and pass to get to the other end of the field. If they are deep in their half they often kick the ball to the other end of the field to make it less likely the opposition get an easy to kick penalty or regain possession and score a try.\n\nI hope that's an ELI5 explanation!"
] |
Why is jupiter considered a planet when it is basically just a big ball of gas without surface? | [
"Because \"solid surface\" isn't a requirement to be considered a planet. The current classification is as follows:\n\n(1) A \"planet\"1 is a celestial body that:\n\n (a) is in orbit around the Sun,\n\n (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and \n\n(c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.\n\nJupiter easily suffices. It's also fair to say it is more complex than simply a 'big ball of gas,' while there is no discrete boundary where air becomes 'ground' you would instead gradually transition to more solid resistance as you descended."
] |
What's the difference between androids and robots? | [
"A robot is at it's simplest: an automated mechanical/electrical device that is made to operate with minimal or no human control and preform specific tasks. \n\nAn Android is a robot, a robot made to be specifically human looking or human like. \n\nA Cyborg is a combination of mechanical/electronic parts with biologic parts to make a half machine-half living organism thing.",
"Robots are used in assembly lines to take automobiles from start to completion.\n\nAndroids are used in hotels to take Japanese businessmen from start to completion."
] |
Why is it that when ice cream melts and refreezes it gets icy and its texture isn't how it's supposed to be | [
"Part of the magic of making ice cream is that little tiny air bubbles get whipped into it, and tiny globules of fat are mixed throughout the ice crystals. When it melts and re-freezes, all those bubbles get released and the fats can separate a bit, so you're left with something closer to greasy ice."
] |
What object physically mediates the push and pull of magnets? What causes the tension between all objects we call gravity? | [
"\"Force\" is not a verb in this context. It's a noun … but a noun that's merely *useful* and *illustrative,* not *explanatory.*\n\nForce, in physics, is the time derivative of momentum. In other words, it's the way physicists quantify how a thing changes its motion. A change in momentum will result in an acceleration proportional to mass; that's Newton's famous second law of motion. If you know a thing's mass — which is how physicists quantify inertia — and you know the magnitude and direction of the force acting on that thing, you can predict how that thing's motion will change. From there, you're just one second-order differential equation away from knowing where that thing will be at any arbitrary time in the future.\n\nThis is very useful for knowing where your cannonballs are going to land if you're an artilleryman in 19th century France. But it doesn't tell you the *why* of anything, which is what you're looking for here.\n\nWhile it's *sort of* true that, as you said, \"only physical things affect other physical things,\" it turns out to be a lot harder to distinguish between the physical and the unphysical than you might think. For example, take magnetism. Now magnetism doesn't actually exist as a separate and distinct thing from electrostatics, so we'll talk instead about electrostatics. Things with electric charge interact with the electric field. We can say quite imprecisely (but sufficient for this conversation) that electric charge *puts potential energy into* the electric field. Whenever two charged particles are in proximity, then, there exists a store of potential energy. That potential energy will be converted to kinetic energy, and those particles will move. That's just a fact.\n\nIs the electric field, then, a physical thing? Turns out it very much is. You can't see it or touch it or smell it or lick it, but it's very much a physical thing nonetheless. It affects charged objects, charged objects draw potential energy from it, that potential energy gets converted to kinetic energy, and things move.\n\nThe \"force\" on a charged particle is not physical, though. It doesn't actually exist in any meaningful sense. It's merely a mathematical description of the system that lets you figure out how the system is going to evolve over time. If you know the forces involved, and the masses, you can predict the evolution of the system at any arbitrary time in the future. Again, useful for artillery. Less useful for understanding the essential nature of the universe.\n\nGravity, about which you also asked, is a much more complicated topic. Not that electrodynamics *isn't* complicated, but it's pretty easy to explain electrodynamics in a way that's both simple and essentially correct. It's basically *impossible* to explain gravity in a way that's both simple and correct. You can have one or the other, not both. So we'll go with simple: An object in proximity to a gravitating body has potential energy. As with the charged particles we talked about earlier, that potential energy is going to get converted into kinetic energy, and so that object will fall. You can model this with something called a \"gravitational field,\" and postulate that objects get their potential energy from the field, but that turns out not to be a good approximation of what really happens. That model fails to predict some of the other effects of gravity, like the fact that clocks at sea level tick more slowly than clocks at altitude for example. So physicists had to set aside the gravitational-field model and adopt a far more complex model involving geometry, discussion of which is *whaaaay* beyond the scope here.\n\nSo short answer? \"Force\" is a useful quantity in physics that doesn't directly describe anything real. Physical things affect other physical things, but some things which sound like pure abstractions — like the electric field or the geometry of spacetime — turn out to be entirely physical, even though you can't see them.",
"> In reality, only physical things have affects on other physical things. Ideas like \"forces\" and \"fields\" do not.\n\nNo. That's where you're wrong.",
"[It's not possible to explain magnets using something simpler than \"The electromagnetic field\"](_URL_0_)",
"i think feynman said something worth considering about this: [link](_URL_1_)",
"This is a little above the ELI5 level, but there are subatomic particles that carry the forces from one object to another. These particles are called [bosons](_URL_3_), or [force carriers](_URL_4_).\n\n[Virtual photons](_URL_4_) are the subatomic particles that carry the electromagnetic force. The photons carry momentum from one magnet to another and mediate the push and pull.\n\nYou can think of it like two people on skateboards throwing a basketball back and forth. Each time one person throws the ball, it pushes him back a little bit, and each time the other person catches it it pushes *him* a little bit."
] |
How do we survive the Earth spinning at an incredible speed and rushing around the sun at the same time? Wouldn't the g-force kill us all instantly? | [
"Because you started with the same momentum as the object you were born on.",
"We're moving very fast, but the Earth is very large. The centripetal force required to keep us moving in a circle is roughly [1 part in 289 of Earth's gravity](_URL_0_). This is enough to be important for some applications, and in fact the Earth is slightly \"squashed\" in shape as a result of its rotation, but it's not enough for you to notice it during daily life when it's essentially constant.\n\nThe orbit of the Earth around the sun, on the other hand, is free-fall - we don't feel any force at all there for the same reason astronauts in orbit don't feel the Earth's gravity: the centripetal force pulling us toward the sun is equal to the centrifugal force pushing us out.",
"Let's find out together!\n\nYou are moving around in a circle as [Earth rotates](_URL_3_). Earth also [moves around the sun](_URL_3_) in a circle. When [an object is spinning around something (ignore the text in the image)](_URL_3_) you can find out the force on the object by knowing how fast it's moving, and how far away from the center it is. In this picture the speed is *v* and the distance is *r*. To figure out the G-forces we use this equation:\n\n a = v^2/r\n\nNow, Earth gravity isn't caused by circular motion, so it doesn't use that equation, but just so we have the right number to compare our values to, Earth gravity is:\n\n a = 9.8m/s^2\n\nAll of our numbers will be in m/s^2 so just focus on the 9.8.\n\nSo let's plug in some numbers. First let's see how much force Earth's rotation plays into it. At the equator, the surface of Earth is rotating around Earth's center at 465 meters per second. That is our *v*. The radius of Earth is 6,378,100 meters at the equator. Plugging into our equation:\n\n a = 465^2/6,378,100\n = 216,225/6,378,100\n = 0.0339m/s^2\n\nCompared to gravity's 9.8, this 0.0339 isn't very much. But what about Earth's orbit around the sun? We have some bigger numbers, but it's all the same process. Earth orbit's the sun at 29,780 m/s at a distance of about 150,000,000,000 meters.\n\n a = 29,780^2/150,000,000,000\n = 886,848,400/150,000,000,000\n = 0.00591m/s^2\n\nThis is even less than the forces from Earth's rotation.\n\nSo we can see now that there definitely is a force from Earth's rotation and orbit, but neither comes close to that of gravity.",
"I think most of the responses here are unnecessarily complex, or simply missed the simple solution.\n\nThere are no g-forces involved to begin with.\n\nG-forces have nothing to do with speed, only acceleration. You don't feel any meaningful force when cruising at altitude in a plane, only on take-off or landing. The same concept applies to orbital mechanics: **Unless the earth changes the direction or speed of its rotation/orbit, we will not feel it.**",
"Think of earth like a moving car that we are inside of. We move with this car but if it were to suddenly stop, say it was going 85 then i less than a second it goes to 0, then that would mean certain death.",
"If you're referring to the centrifugal force coming from the spinning of the earth, it is a small factor. [Gravity is known to be about 0.5% weaker near the equator.](_URL_4_)\n\n > In combination, the equatorial bulge and the effects of the Earth's inertia mean that sea-level gravitational acceleration increases from about 9.780 m/s2 at the Equator to about 9.832 m/s2 at the poles, so an object will weigh about 0.5% more at the poles than at the Equator.[6][7]"
] |
Why do we say "huh?" or "what?" when a person says something, even though we already heard it and answer the question before a person repeats themselves? | [
"for me personally often times is because I was really suprised to hear the person talk. It came out of nowhere and I was kinda \"unprepared\" to listen, so I intuitively interrupt them with \"huh what?\" to give my brain some time to prepare. \n\nBut most of the time I understood them anyways.",
"you are still trying to process it, and you want to speak...\n\nnext time you are in a convo with someone and they are talking and not listening when you do, real quickly say to them, \"do you wait to talk or listen?\" say it fast and usually people will be like, what? or even say 'right' because people want to talk. \n\nit doesn't fit 100% with what you asked, but it works.\n\nit's your mind still processing what they said, but your mouth wanting to talk",
"I read an article or heard something on the radio about this exact phenomenon. If I remember correctly.....\n\nBasically, it's a processing delay in your brain. The act of recognizing that you heard something (or felt something, or received some kind of external stimulus) is a separate neural function from language processing. This makes some sense, as it's related to how quickly you can react to danger. Also, language is a fairly recent development in human history and isn't really related to survival in the same way. The number I remember them giving out is 3 seconds. If you can train yourself to wait that long before asking \"What?\" you'll probably not need to anymore.",
"I do this all the time. Hard habit to break that's for sure. I think it's because I am not paying full attention to the person who is speaking with me... so I say what?... and then I realize I actually did hear what they said so I respond.",
"You mean when someone says something you don't understand, but after few secs you realize what he said?"
] |
Why is there so much backlash against Iggy Azalea in the hip-hop community, but not against other white rappers? | [
"Because she doesn't make good music, and she's made it to the mainstream music's Eye.",
"Hi /u/act_of_dog, your post isn't really a fit for ELI5 as it isn't asking for an explanation of a concept. I would suggest posting straightforward questions in /r/answers or in the case of entirely subjective questions, /r/askreddit instead. Thanks for understanding.",
"What's wrong with iggy azalea? I don't like rap but i don't Particularly hate iggy azalea"
] |
The difference between the Common Law System that we use in the US/Britain and Civil Law System used in most countries around the world. | [
"In Civil Law, everything is written down, if there isn't a law against, it isn't illegal.\n\nIn Common Law, judges are given more latitude to interpret laws and derive legal principles from them. Those interpretations are recorded and serve as precedent, non-binding mini-laws that other judges will take into account.\n\nCommon Law tends to be more flexible, you have fewer situations where someone can do something terrible just because no one bothered to write a law against it. But it also tends to be more contentious and inconsistent, as different judges have different opinions at different times, giving lawyers more to argue about.\n\nIn a Civil Law system, handguns are illegal if there is a law making handguns illegal. End of story. But if someone invents a shoulder mounted knife launcher that isn't covered by existing laws, it is legal until a new law is passed.\n\nIn a Common Law country, even if there is a law, it might conflict with precedents set others, less specific laws, which can require a complex and contentious legal process to sort out. But that same law can more easily be applied to unforeseen situations."
] |
Is it possible to make paper out of the outermost peel of onions or shallots or garlic? | [
"It is probably possible to make onion peels into paper. Handmade papers are just wood or rag pulp dried in a mold. But it would take a lot to be useful and nobody is going to peel onions all day just to make paper when they could just buy paper that’s thin and translucent—which is called onionskin!"
] |
Does a drug that prevents the spread of HIV mean we could eradicate the disease? If so, how do we coordinate that kind of effort? | [
"Supposing it was 100 percent effective, and we could get absolutely everyone to take it, and it could prevent transmission mother-to-child, then we could eradicate it in a generation. But the first two assumptions, at least, are false: the pill has 99 percent efficacy (still pretty great), and there's no way we could finance it for everyone, distribute it to everyone, and get everyone to take it, (because it seems like you need to keep taking it for it to keep working), so it would take a great deal of time. This would be like eradicating polio; find the places it's most prevalent, dose as many people as possible, and spend a few generations stamping it out. Then, stay vigilant for outbreaks."
] |
Why do people have pairs of chromosomes? What does that do? | [
"You get one chromosome from each parent. It increases genetic diversity by giving you one from each parent, rather than just one chromosome from one parent."
] |
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