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2nnhsd | if people having an education is good for the economy, why doesn't the government just make education cheaper/free | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nnhsd/eli5if_people_having_an_education_is_good_for_the/ | {
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"Everything costs something. The concept of \"free\" is invalid, as it costs money to maintain the buildings, utilities, and teachers as well as equipment, etc, etc. The government would have to foot ALL or most of that, which would no doubt require higher taxes, etc.",
"I am a bit biased in this regard. A lot of European countries have \"free\" education (as for paid by taxes), my country included. But this causes lower standards at universities:\n\n- University is paid per student, so many try to \"keep\" the students even if they're not doing so well, and they tend to take as many students as they can, causing overcrowded lectures and classes\n- Many people go to university just to get a degree, not caring for what they are actually studying, so we end up with thousands of people with political science or sociology degree. But they have no interest in those fields, nor are they interested in seeking a job in this area. They just wanted an \"easy degree\".\n- Some go just to get a student ID and thus for student discounts...\n\nThis also causes very silly pressure that everyone needs a degree. So now you need a degree in chemistry if you want to mop floors...\n\nSaying that education is always good for the economy is not really true. GOOD education is beneficial to economy. Low lever \"mass\" education not necessarily.",
"The setup cost is immediate and it takes a long time to see the benefits (longer than the average term of office). ",
"We would like to think that people in government want what is best for the population at large, but it looks, instead, as though most officials act primarily in their own interest.\n\n[Unfortunately, I think George Carlin was largely right](_URL_0_)",
"Tennessee has free community college for every graduating high school senior starting next year.",
"I'm assuming you're talking about college? Everybody going to college *isn't* good for the economy.",
"Nothing is free! Who is going to pay for the salaries of the educators and their pensions? That's right CoolanJay... you are, through higher taxes. That might be good for bigger government, but bad for the individual.",
"Who's paying for the school, teachers, books etc? There is no such thing as free."
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crycu1 | if transistors in computers act to switch off or on the flow of electricity, what mechanism acts to "decide" whether it should be switched? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/crycu1/eli5_if_transistors_in_computers_act_to_switch/ | {
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"Other transistors.\n\nYes, this sounds circular, and it sort of is. At the very \"start\" of the system (I.e. startup) there are some circuits which are not controlled by transistors and are hard coded to do specific startup actions; but from there it's all controlled by some transistors signalling others to switch, which signal others etc. and coming back round to the original ones at some point.",
"Computers (or to be more precise, the microprocessor at their heart) are controlled by programs.\n\nA program is simply a list of numbers and the computer, on each tick of a very fast clock, reads a number then does the instruction defined by that number.\n\nWhen a microprocessor has power switched on (or when it is reset) it loads the first instruction from a hard wired place.\n\nThe first few instructions will be commands to get the microprocessor set up, then to do some self checks before it starts the main operating system (Windows, iOS, Android etc.) that then allows user programs to be loaded and run.",
"If you tie a bunch of transistors together, and have them all control each other, you've basically made a microcontroller or a computer processor.\n\nInputs into the machine (key pressed, network traffic, whatever) are the thing controlling the transistors, which end up modifying other transistors. With clever arrangement those transistors that are activated and those that are not end up being cleverly made to do something useful, which results in some transistors being activated which then control outputs (e.g. the screen, a printer, a speaker, whatever).\n\nIt's like a giant puzzle, with billions of transistors arranged in very clever ways to make simple inputs get acted upon to produce simple outputs. Every game you play, program you run, etc. is just the result of those clever arrangements of transistors switching their output on or off based on their \"control\" deciding pin.\n\nIf you think \"How can that work, if you tell it to switch on, it switches on, otherwise it's off\" then you're right. But with arrangement of the circuit and the voltages on it, you can very simply make a transistor do to opposite (e.g. when you tell it to switch on, it \"shorts\" the output so it actually outputs the opposite of the input). That's a NOT gate, in logic-gate terminology.\n\nThe transistor itself is an AND gate... when input and control are both turned on, the output is on, but otherwise it's off.\n\nAnd with a bit of simple wiring of ANDs and NOTs (or just transistors themselves in a certain pattern), you can make an OR gate (where output turns on if \\*either\\* of two inputs is on).\n\nOnce you have the equivalent of AND, OR and NOT (actually you only really need two), you can make every other type of logic gate (e.g. XOR). And when you have all the logic gates, clever arrangement of them can form a Turing-complete machine, like your computer.\n\nAnd even the base, core language of the machine (machine code, represented to us as assembly language) literally includes AND, OR, NOT and XOR as instructions on the processor itself. So once you are there, every single machine code instruction is just a certain arrangement of logic gates/transistors to do what you ask (e.g. ADD, MUL, etc.).\n\nA transistor is just a single building block. Put together with wiring in certain ways, you can make more complex blocks. Put together in certain ways, those blocks can form logic gates. Put together in certain ways, those gates form everything you need to make a processor.\n\nYou need billions of them. They all need to be arranged in a particular fashion. But basically a simple \"switch\" can make all the computers you see today.\n\nIt's like a giant mechanical machine made of nothing but ball-bearings (electricity) and seesaws of wood (the transistors). Pop the ball bearing into the top, let it clack down and hit the seesaws on the way, and get redirected, etc. If you arrange the obstacles cleverly enough, it can do calculations. Basically the concept behind the Turing Tumble teaching game which some schools use to teach computing."
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4niyl8 | How did various firearm and artillery manufacturers decide upon the calibre of their weapons? | Mostly looking at 20th century here. Why .303 rather than .3, for example? Why 75mm rather than 80mm?
| AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4niyl8/how_did_various_firearm_and_artillery/ | {
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"Commonality is a big thing, especially in wartime. If I have equipped all my soldiers with the M1 Garand, which is a .30-06, I'm not going to buy additional M1s in the newer .308 without a good reason. That would just needlessly complicate things. This influences what calibers that commercially available rifles are chambered in because manufacturers aren't going to go through the hassle of clambering in rarer calibers just because. \n\nThe transition to the .308/7.62mm was ultimately political. NATO members wanted it so that everyone was on the same standard. This then trickled down -- the majority of rifles were available mainly in NATO calibers, especially after the move to 5.56mm. Nowadays these two calibers are kind of the default, though you can find specialty exceptions like sniper rifles chambered in .338 Lapua. \n\nThis rationale also extends to bigger guns. 105mm was the most popular postwar big gun caliber until 155mm came along. We also sometimes see weird parallel development. The famous German 88mm (8.8cm) would see its shell repurposed and used in the gun on the Tiger (with different primer). Some calibers would essentially just be rebranded: the famous .50 is often referred to as 12.7mm despite not changing and not actually being 12.7mm. \n\nSo how did the original standard wind up being the original standard? Usually because a military commission, like the one the Germans cobbled together after the advent of smokeless powder, evaluated different calibers and then picked one. Once that commission decided in the 8mm Mauser, that became the standard. Deviation was frowned upon. Germany adopted that caliber alongside the Gewehr 1888 and would keep it until the postwar era. It would only develop a competing cartridge in WW2, when it needed something heavier than the 9mm Parabellum and lighter than the 8mm Mauser for early assault rifles. \n\nHope that gives you a general idea on how calibers were selected. "
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29u0e9 | how do companies like java and adobe make money if their downloads are free? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29u0e9/eli5_how_do_companies_like_java_and_adobe_make/ | {
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"Adobe: they charge for products that create media that can be viewed for free.\n\nJava: enterprise support contracts.",
"Because both Java and flash player are only side items. Adobe makes Photoshop and flash animators. The more people with flash player, the more content creators that will buy their animation software. \n\nJava is used on billions of devices, and manufacturers pay Sun for software support. The more people with java compatible PC's, the greater the utility of java to device manufacturers.",
"The above answers are correct. Also both of these programs now install 'add-ons' as part of the package. Things like Google Chrome, mcafee security scan and the ask toolbar that are automatically opted in if you don't uncheck the box during the Adobe or Java install and Adobe and Oracle get fractions of a cent for each install that completes. \n\nSource : am it guy, uninstall this crap all day long. "
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q6mdx | why are left wing socialist parties associated with both workers and intellectuals? | I don't get the connection. At least in europe, leftwing parties such as the german SPD or the swiss SP (and I guess a majority of [european socialists](_URL_0_)) are **traditional** worker parties AND the traditional parties for "intellectual do-gooders".
Why?
Edit: Thanks to all of you for the responses. Maybe I should have stressed more that workers voting for leftwing parties is nowadays some kind of tradition for workers in labor unions. The other part of workers votes traditionalistic, conservative and nationalistic right-wing.
This are quite brute generalizations as I'm well aware. But I didn't mean to ask about the actual voting people, more the general(ized) image we all seem to hold - hence the "associated".
Edit 2 (at 123 comments): To make it more clear: I'm heavily relying on stereotypes. I know that intellectuals can be workers. It's more about the stereotype that leftwing voters are intellectuals and/or workers. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/q6mdx/eli5_why_are_left_wing_socialist_parties/ | {
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"Lets use the standard wild stereotype and say that the left wing party tends towards big government, including things like national healthcare, workers rights, high regulation of corporations, and so on.\n\nNow, this kind of party can (and does) present itself as *functionally* good for the workers. They can very much see the benefit of national healthcare, as they can't necessarily afford their own in a system without it (such as the US). They believe strongly in workers rights, because they're well aware of what their employers would do to rip them off if they could. And similarly, high regulation of corporations works for them, as otherwise the significantly-richer corporation could again stomp all over them.\n\nFor the 'intellectual do-gooders', these same policies (and the others that we might lump in with them) appeal *intellectually* rather than necessarily functionally. Healthcare for all and workers rights both have a strong logical case for existence, in terms of being fair, and in terms of actually being good economic policies for keeping the populace happy and the country in good shape. The same is true of corporate regulation; the alternative, such as the unchecked logging in the Amazon, is demonstrably worrying. To continue stereotyping wildly, though, both of these conclusions rely on a long term logical view; none of the policies can be supported based on short term money savings, because they're more complicated than that and will appear as cost increases, but that means that our stereotypical big business owner doesn't like them and lobbies for the other party.\n\nNow, this is very much a polarised view of things. Of course there are many intellectuals who support relatively conservative parties, and vice-versa, for good reasons. However, I think these examples illustrate the main difference between the 'two' (of course, two isn't really enough) sides of the political coin. A stereotypical free-thinking intellectual may find it intellectually difficult to support the policies of an inherently conservative and anti-change party that appears short sighted to them, and a stereotypical worker may find it functionally foolish to support the policies of a party that will withdraw the services he depends on.\n\n(I'll stress again that this explanation represents a polarised view of things, and of course real politics is much more complicated and nuanced)",
"Rough guesses forthcomming: \n\nSocialism as an idea originated with intellectuals. The kind of upper crust educated people who had the free time to imagine totally different economic and societal systems. Organized labor came later, especially in the United States, where the working class started agitating in the 1870's. At first, clashes between labor and management (or capital, as the intellectuals were calling it) generally focused on immediate quality of life improvements, not revolutionary change. They wanted shorter hours, less dangerous conditions, better pay, and so on. \n\nThere are, and were, some intellectual working class people. They bridged the divide. In the United States, you can see this in the IWW, the International Workers of the World. They provided organization and ideological underpinning to what might otherwise have been isolated disputes about wages and such. This attracted attention from left leaning rich folk, and a marriage of convenience was born. In the US, this culminated in the Roosevelt coalition, politically. \n\ntldr: intellectuals and educated people are more likely to want to transform society with the power of government. They have natural allies in organized labor, who want to transform their workplace. ",
"I think the idea that all intellectuals support socialism is really just a load of crap that socialists push. The have been a lot of brilliant men who support Austrian economics and anarcho-capitalism.\n\n\nEDIT: spelling",
"Easy there, SPD is not a left wing socialist party. That would be \"Die Linke\". SPD is left-middle. And that should also answer your question.",
"Left wing parties, also called progressive parties, are about changing things. This appeals to workers and intellectuals. Workers hope when things change they will do better financially. Intellectuals like change because it allows them to pursue their theoretical goals.\n\nRight-wing parties, also called conservative parties, on the other hand, are about holding up the existing status. This appeals to the rich, religious people, and farmers.",
"The association with the intellectuals and the workers with the left of the political spectrum is fundamentally down to the framing of issues. All political theories and ideas (generally) are developed by intellectuals or those at the top of society. However throughout the last 300 years or so western society has become far more 'liberal' and 'left-wing'. New ideas (as those on the left tend to be) come from the intellectuals because those are really the only ones capable of articulating these new ideas (not so true in the last 50 years, but broadly speaking in historical terms). However left wing politics is generally seen as the betterment of society as a whole, and the vast amount of any given society is made up of the workers. modern society today is still the pyramid structure it was in feudal Europe, just different people at the top. \n\nTo take an extreme example. The communist manifesto was drafted by Marx and Engels. Both very intelligent men, who were members of the intelligentsia. However, theoretically the benefactors of such a society would be the workers (if true communism was every a realisable goal, please don't confuse Marxism with Stalinist Marxist-lenninism that was the ideological blue print for the USSR) and not those at the top.\n\nplenty of intellectuals are also in favour of right wing politics. Many famous scientists and novelists were in favour of eugenics as and supported (and still do) what one might call the right. its just when in school or whatever we learn about these topics we are told about the intellectual involvement. \n\nalso the left wing usually involves the expansion of government. Now who could possibly benefit from an expanded government that would need educated people to work in it. oh yeah, those who are educated (again this works much better in historical terms than it does today because of the expansion of education to the masses - well at least a much larger percentage of people) ",
"1. They care about the workers.\n\n2. Smart people care about other people.",
"Intellectuals typically feel morally guided to help those who need it - the poor workers. Poor workers want some help now and again. It's a match made in heaven."
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243pzh | How could Hitler and other Nazis claim that the Jews started WWII? What evidence did they distort/invent to place the blame on "international Jewish financiers"? | I mean, the Nazis were snatching land left and right. I'm sure it's more obvious in hindsight that they were the aggressors, but what kind of propaganda did they use to specifically support the assertion that the Jews were responsible for starting the war? Was everyone just supposed to take Hitler's word for it when he gave this speech in 1939?
> "Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"
(I've looked for the rest of that speech, but I could only find it [here](_URL_0_) where it was really lazily OCRed and is hard to read. Also, I feel uncomfortable filling up my search history with Nazi speech queries.) | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/243pzh/how_could_hitler_and_other_nazis_claim_that_the/ | {
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"I've been working on this and the broader perspectives of this question for a while. I'm pretty sure the answers address a good portion of the modern hysteria concerning \"conspiracy theories.\" I'm going to directly answer your question and then move into a broader relm as I would like opinions on this as well. Hopefully all this qualifies and doesn't get deleted because so much written about this subject is conjecture and whitewash, and incredibly hard to cite, IMHO. \nThe Nazi's used a historically prevalent form of racial and cultural xenophobia to vilify the Jews, as I understand, the Ashkenazi Jews in particular. They were able to do this under the hysteria created by an opposing philosophy in the east, years of racial and cultural propaganda and the low morale of the German people after WW1. The \"Jewish\" financiers was by no means new rhetoric. Personally I believe this particular mindset goes with the whole usury argument, that during the renaissance and earlier, certain Jewish communities were later able to found the world monetary system since they had a leg up on finances in the region thanks to being able to handle money when Christians couldn't. Whether or not this is true, that idea has been used to stir emotions for quite some time. Enough so that pieces of fabricated evidence have been created, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which had long been proven fake before WW2. Still, the particular type of xenophobia persists today. As far as the Bolshevization bit, a philosophy so different and carrying such implications scared the German people enough that they were willing to turn towards mob mentality as had already been done, using these variables several times already, specifically the pogroms. \n Here's where it gets a little more opinionated, although I hear of a Norwegian history professor that is making these same claims. The hysteria used by the Nazis in this instance is one of several instances using fabricated and non-fabricated propaganda coming out of and as a result of the French Revolution and the ease of disturbing information. Personally I think that most all the hysteria surrounding the \"Jewish, NWO, Illuminati, Masonic, Rosicrucian, conspiracies\" comes first from the imperials reaction and then in turn from the industrialists reaction to the ideas of the French revolution, first Democratic Republicanism and then later Anarcho-socialism. Take Germany right before WW2, using old half-truths put out by the imperials against the french revolution to paint the socialists (Jewish) as murdering anarchists, which kinda came true to some degree. Of course that information was first used by the imperials to paint democratic republicanism as a greedy murderous form of government perpetrated by Jewish financiers that actually wanted to take over the world. Which financially from the imperials point of view, they did, though not exclusively Jewish. I hope that's not too off topic. _URL_0_, _URL_1_",
"Master's degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies here. \n\nFirst, you should probably read *Mein Kampf* where Hitler details his beliefs more on this subject, but the scapegoating of Jews as holding Europe's money strings goes back to the middle ages, where Christian law often forbade money lending with interest, thus [pigeonholing Jews into this profession](_URL_0_). No one likes the IRS here in the US, and it was similar in this regard with view toward the Jews and money over centuries. The [blood libel](_URL_2_) just added to this long history of Christian anti-Semitism. \n\nLet's fast forward to World War I. The Germans had defeated Russia and [gained a ton of land](_URL_4_). But the Americans enter the war and the Ottomans & Austria-Hungary surrendered. Without allies and much reserves, Germany signed the armistice ending the Great War. Thus began the [Stabbed-in-the-back myth](_URL_3_).\n\nAnd remember in your quote:\n > then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!\n\nHitler is equating Bolshevism with Judaism. Many secular Jews had experienced so much anti-Semitism in Europe, that [Communism was appealing to](_URL_1_) *some.* Key word is some. To many others, especially deeply religious Jews, Communism was never appealing. But many anti-Communists were happy to [paint the picture that Trotsky was Jewish](_URL_5_) and were happy to elevate any notable Jewish Socialists they could find. Even [non-notable Jews](_URL_6_) . . . with [terrible consequences](_URL_7_).\n\nHitler saw Bolshevism as a movement that would threaten borders, an ideology that was bound to spread throughout the world. Many proponents of Communism, also wished for this goal.\n\nKeep in mind, he made this speech at the beginning of 1939, before the non-aggression pact was signed with USSR in August of that year. \n\nSo my answer would be that there was a long history of anti-Semitism in Europe that targeted Jews with controlling money. Combine that with the fear of Communism in a post-Marx world and it gave Hitler with a casus belli in the eyes of his deeply indoctrinated supporters and sympathizers.\n\nI apologize on my alternating the terms of socialism, communism and Bolshevism. I used the terms where I thought they were most appropriate. "
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409vq6 | why are double negatives grammatically frowned upon, but often occur in situations like "not uncommon" without refute? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/409vq6/eli5_why_are_double_negatives_grammatically/ | {
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"\"not uncommon\" is not the same as \"common\". \"Common\" means it happens very often, \"uncommon\" means it's rare or even unheard of, \"not uncommon\" means it does happen somewhat often, but less than average. \n \nI'll use an analogy: \n \nSeeing a 5ft 10in male: common \nSeeing a 7ft male: uncommon \nSeeing a 6ft 3in male: not uncommon",
"That particular type of figure of speech is called [litotes](_URL_0_), for the record.\n\nDouble negatives are usually only really bad when using them obfuscates the intended meaning of the sentence. For instance in English the phrase \"I don't know nothing\" is almost always understood to mean \"I know nothing\" even though if taken literally it states the opposite.\n\nWhen used for stylistic effect, they're perfectly fine. English bends the rules for the sake of rhetoric all the time. \"Not uncommon\" has different connotations from \"common.\"",
"Double negatives should be avoided when they cause ambiguity. If I say, \"I don't have none\", it is unclear what I am saying, which \"I have none\" and \"I don't have any\" are perfectly clear. This is particular true with words that have strict binary meanings, as there is no reason for that kind of tortured logic.\n\nFor words that do not have strict binary meanings, negating its opposite can be used to express a middle ground, reservation, or a form of understatement. For example, there is isn't just attractive and unattractive, there is an entire subjective spectrum. If I say someone is not unattractive, that might mean I find them to be ordinary looking. Or many I do find them attractive, but I don't want to commit to that fact, so I simple say they are not unattractive. Or maybe it is clear I find that person attractive, and I am understating it for emphasis."
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29ypwc | does the human eye work with a continuous flow of information to create the image we see, or is there some sort of "frame rate"? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29ypwc/eli5_does_the_human_eye_work_with_a_continuous/ | {
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"The human eye starts noticing darkness after [16 milliseconds.](_URL_0_), but overall, the fastest humans have been tested at to notice an image is [220 fps](_URL_1_).",
"If you are just talking about the eye, it's somewhere in between.\n\nWhen a rod or cone, the light sensitive cells in your eye, is stimulated with light, through a chemical reaction it sends a signal through nerves to your brain. The rod or cone then takes some time to recover before being able to be stimulated again. This sets a rate in which individual cells can transmit signals.\n\nYour eye has roughly 100 million rod cells and ~7 million cone cells so with constant light, some will be firing and some will be recovering. For the brain, it looks like a constant flow of discrete packets of data much like a flow of individual sand particles falling down an hourglass.\n\nNow for frame rate, it's really how your brain interprets the signals from your eye. Sure, your brain receives all the data from your eye but it only selectively processes changes in data. If you were driving a car, you wouldn't want your brain to constantly tell you \"THERE'S A BLUE SKY ABOVE, THERE'S A BLUE SKY ABOVE\" but rather if there was a car appearing on the side of your vision that you need to care about. Large changes such as a camera flash or swinging your head back and forth between sights can overwhelm your brain and cause you to be disoriented. \n\nBut then there's one huge change in our vision that occurs every few seconds that causes everything to be black: blinking. Luckily, our brain is quite smart and ignores the lack of signals from our eyes when we blink so we never notice our vision getting obscured by our eyelids. Likewise, when you turn your head, it never seems like the quick panning blur effect in movies because your brain knows that your complete vision will be shifting. It ignores a lot of the visual data when your head is moving and it prepares to show you new information once your head has stopped. If there is any disconnect between the motion you feel and the motion you see, your brain can get confused and this is the main cause of motion sickness.\n\nIn terms of how fast we can detect small visual changes, our brains need to process them very quickly in order to respond. People often reference the USAF test that determines how quickly fighter pilots can respond to changes in vision. The pilots are placed in a dark room and then an image of an aircraft is flickered for a fraction of a second. Fighter pilots can identify the aircraft when the image is flickered at 1/220 of a second ([Source](_URL_0_)). I could not find a credible study to back this up however.\n\nThis doesn't mean that fighter pilots can see at 220 frames per second, making movies that run at 24 frames per second seem like slide shows. It just means that they can detect a very quick changes in their vision which is very necessary when they are flying so fast in their aircraft.\n\nEDIT: Expanded a bit more on the fighter pilot information",
"To be honest, you really can't compare the two. Doing so would be like comparing the maximum flying speed of a 747 to my ham sandwich... Computer monitors and the human eyes really aren't even in the same category.",
"You might find the [Phi Phenomenon](_URL_0_) and Persistence of Vision interesting.",
"As it is well known, the peripheral vision is very good at detecting the motion. Both the eyes have a slightly different perspective which is combined by the brain which is known as stereoscopic vision. The actual lag between the \"moment\" and when you see is 1/10 of a second. So your brain takes that much amount of time to ingest the data collected from the 2D retina and form an image. Evolutionary mechanisms thus has led the brain to foresee the future by 1/10 of a second. The processing is continuous though. The sharpest vision occurs at the Macular region of retina which is very small.",
"As u/PrionBacon described, the information sent to your brain from your eyes is many discreet packets of information, but all the processing and visualizations of that data takes place in your brain, and it gets weird. There is about a 1/10th of a second lag from the time a light photon hits your eye until your brains processes what you've seen. Imagine trying to escape an animal trying to eat you, or even catch a ball with a 1/10th second delay in your vision. The ball will probably smash into your face and you'll be eaten. So the brains work around is to predict will objects will be based off of past experiences and reacting to that. What we perceive as the present is a few blurry 1/5ths of a second that reach into the future and lag in the past. It isn't a steady stream of information like a movie. This phenomena is how several optical illusions work. \n\n_URL_0_",
"TLDR; Nobody can explain how the eye works simply enough for ELI5. Go to /r/askscience.",
"Just watch this video.\nWhat Is The Resolution Of The Eye?\n_URL_0_",
"I don't see someone posting this link, not sure if it's against the rules but [vsauce](_URL_1_) had made video kind of on this topic, [also another video](_URL_0_)",
"The brain is a very complex organ and we still have a lot to learn about it. But we know that the brain can adjust how your \"frame rate\" is perceived. \n\nHere's a fun example, get close to a mirror and look from pupil to pupil, Do it now! Did you notice that you don't see your eyes move? \n\nNow have a friend do it, or use a camera to record yourself. You see that their/your eyes actually do move. When you move your eyes, your brain suppresses the visual information for a split second to avoid seeing a blurred image. \n\nThis is called a saccade, it ties the ends of the scenes together so your vision is not disrupted in your perception.\n\nUnder times of intense emotion, such as fear or having an epiphany, people describe seeing things and remembering things in a higher clarity. It's sometimes described as seeing things in slow motion. The mechanics is still being looked into, but in cognitive psychology, the occurrence of the phenomenon is undisputed.",
"There's no literal framerate limit to the eye, the speed is determined by how fast you brain can process what we can see, and the amount of light hitting the eyes.\n\nThe beys way to describe it is a buildup of photons, constantly moving and changing in differing amounts and areas, in a noise like effect. It happens so fast that you don't notice the effect in most cases, but you can notice this \"noise\" easily in the dark, when there are less photons hitting your photoreceptors. It looks similar to film grain, or sensor noise.\n\nWe can notice a slow FPS because the change of frames are often so sudden (rather than gradual ie. real life) but we can be tricked into detecting it as movement at a certain threshold. People claim this is at around 15fps or more, or even 24. We can easily see a lot more than that though, with differences between 60fps and 120fps still being obvious.",
"Doesn't the universe have a \"frame rate\" ?",
"A similar question was asked about a universal frame rate. I don't have the link right now. The answer was the speed of light. You can't see things happen faster than light can travel.",
"I think perhaps the best way to think of it is comparing pixels to photoreceptors.\n\nIn a digital image, you have a grid of pixels, and different cameras have different ways of taking in those pixels, but it usually amounts to a mostly-concurrent snapshot at a particular time.\n\nIn the eye, you can think of the pixels being distributed in what's called a Poisson-disc distribution (there's a nice visualization [here](_URL_0_), but you can think of it as \"random, but pretty evenly distributed\"). So this just gives us a different arrangement of pixels, but you can kind of think of them as pixels just the same.\n\nNow, in a camera, the pixels are being read in at pretty much the same time (a snapshot), but in the eye, each \"pixel\" can read at any time it's ready and gets enough light to tell its neurons that it has something. Each individual \"pixel\" has a certain rate at which it can do this, but it only goes at that rate if there's so much light that it's always firing as soon as it's ready (i.e. you're staring into a lightbulb). Otherwise, it'll fire less often, because it may take a little longer for it to get enough light to fire.\n\nSo overall, it's more like a continuous flow, in that each overall image is not what was actually there at that time, but instead a compilation of pixels from the last few milliseconds. But it is a bit like a frame rate in that each pixel does update at a particular time with the light that it's seeing then, and then won't update for another few milliseconds (ignoring what happens during that time).\n\nEdit: of course there's a whole lot more complexity than that, particularly in what happens in the neurons after the photoreceptors fire-- tons of processing that happens all along the way to and within the brain, which others here have explained better than I could.",
"_URL_0_\n\nQuote from the article: \"our brain records its perceptions in discrete “snapshots”, like the frames of a film reel.\"",
"This is a bit of a derail but I've done some testing with a function generator and LED. I've tried starting from low frequency and increasing it, and starting from high frequency and decreasing it. I found my capacity for seeing the blinking was different depending on whether I used my central or peripheral vision. My central vision capped out at around 60 fps, peripheral was a bit higher, around 65 or so.",
"I read somewhere, that your brain processes information, at a rate of 6 frames per second. Anything less than that, and it would only be absorbed subconsciously. This is where subliminal advertising/messaging was tried/banned in the 20th century. \n\nThis does not directly relate to the eye; I just thought it was an interesting related story.",
"Each receptor cell fires at its own rate independently. ",
"neuroscientist here.\n\nmove your hand back and forth in your field of vision, gradually increasing the speed. at some point the motion will stop being continuous/fluid and start being more \"frame\"-like. That's your effective \"frame rate\" for vision.\n\nmechanistically, it's a lot more complicated than that, but that's the simplest answer.",
"B-But I have to say the human eye can only see 30fps to justify my purchase of an Xbox One! A-And mention how m-movies use 24fps, even though movies and video games are w-way different!",
"Retinal neuroscientist here. It all comes down to contrast detection. Sure, the rod or cone recovery rate will influence light responsiveness of the retina, but ultimately the detection of an object against a background or even motion comes down to processing of light-driven signals in the inner retina. So\nto think of vision as a camera is a bit too simplified. Your brain compiles the information received through the optic nerve in a way that \"frame rate\" as we know it is irrelevant, i.e. The blinking example . But our ability to detect changes in contrast and intensity is far more precise than the regeneration speed of rods and cones.",
"The [Flicker Fusion Rate](_URL_0_) of the average human is around 16 hertz, or 16 frames per second. That is the frequency at which a blinking light will look steady to a person. \n\nFor instance, Movies are shown at 24 fps to create the illusion of fluid movement; because the individual frames are on screen too briefly for us to notice them change. If the frame rate falls below 16 then we will be able to notice the individual frames as they change and it will look choppy.\n\nTL;DR: Humans have a \"frame rate\" of about 16 Hz (frames per second)."
]
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"http://vision.arc.nasa.gov/personnel/pavel/publications/TemporalSensitivity.pdf",
"http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm"
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"http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html"
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3iiefp | if a new york city taxi medallion can cost over $700,000, how do people become taxi drivers in nyc? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3iiefp/eli5_if_a_new_york_city_taxi_medallion_can_cost/ | {
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"If a New York City home costs over $700,000, how are working-class people not all homeless in NYC? Similar answer.\n\n1. They can get a loan and pay for it over time.\n2. They can lease it from the person who owns it.",
"Frequently the new entrants lease the medallion. There are [companies](_URL_0_) whose entire business is leasing and making loans secured by taxi medallions to drivers. ",
"By renting. Buying a medallion is like buying your own business instead of working at someone elses. There's an up front cost, but you get to keep more of the profits.",
"They get a loan. It's remarkably easy, because the value is in the medallion, and it is 100% repossessable, and has very little chance of decreasing in value. It's the closest thing to a risk-free loan any bank will ever make."
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27aaz9 | When did people first started using wristwatches and why did they stop using pocketwatches? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27aaz9/when_did_people_first_started_using_wristwatches/ | {
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"_URL_0_ \n\nThis question is answered in this thread, although the top answer is not sourced/cited so further investigation is merited. "
]
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ocud3/why_did_pocket_watches_decline_and_wrist_watches/"
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2jwlzt | Did KGB spies operating in America during the Cold War had instructions to wage guerrilla warfare and assassinate political targets in case the USSR and NATO went to war, as shown in 'The Americans'? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jwlzt/did_kgb_spies_operating_in_america_during_the/ | {
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"Like the infamous Facebook relationship status: it's complicated.\n\nFirst off, you need to understand there were different kind of spies operating under the KGB (civilian intelligence) and the GRU (military intelligence).\n\nThere were locals recruited either for money, ideology, by blackmail or deceit (thinking they were actually working for Sweden, CIA, FBI, etc. Like in the show).\n\nThere were people who grew up in the west, and decided to immigrate to USSR, were recruited and sent back.\n\nAnd there were operatives: they were agent handlers, responsible for communications, there were assassins, saboteurs and others.\n\nThe show \"the Americans\" is a work of fiction, and the type of agents it shows (living as locals, gathering Intel, running agents and assassinating) are impossible. In the real world you need different agents, with different expertise for each of these.\n\nMost if the data on soviet agents is still classified, but from what we do know, local agents (as seen in the show) were only used to gather intelligence. For example, during WWII the soviets had several high ranking spies in Germany, but there are no known acts of sabotage they performed.\n\nAnd in case of sabotage/assassinations usually professionals from USSR were brought in. For example special forces soldiers brought in via submarines or as tourists.\n\nNot much known in Soviet spies specifically in the US and other NATO countries, so I'm also basing my answers on operations in other countries (south america, middle east, etc.)\n\nTL;DR No.\n"
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cb7bb2 | how do fish swallow other fish whole and not get cut up from the inside by their sharp fins? | I saw a video of a grouper swallowing a shark and it made me question why the shark wouldn’t just rip its way out. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cb7bb2/eli5_how_do_fish_swallow_other_fish_whole_and_not/ | {
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"The inside of the stomach is very compacted and there's no flow of oxygenated water into it. As a result, the shark has little to no room to move to try to bite its way out and is dying of hypoxia. Meanwhile, the walls of the stomach are thick and lined with mucus that protect it against sharp fins.",
"Evolution over millions of years (hundreds of millions in the case of fish - sharks have been on the planet longer than trees).\n\nIf fish that ate other fish had their stomachs lacerated and died, then they did not move on to breed and birth the next generation. Fish that had stomachs that could hold up to daily eating of existing prey fish with defensive mechanisms ended up living and spawning the next generation of predator fish.\n\nAs much as this drives evolution in the predator, it also drives evolution in the prey - prey fish with successful defensive mechanisms go on to spawn the next generation of prey fish with even more successful defensive mechanisms.\n\n\nEvolution is a process. But it's neverending either - everything is constantly under the pressure of survival and adaptation. The present is nothing more than a snapshot from the movie that is showing the change from the past to the future."
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xax1m | Why are Europe and Asia considered different continents? What's the definition of continent? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/xax1m/why_are_europe_and_asia_considered_different/ | {
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"[Here is a more than adequate answer](_URL_0_). Pretty funny too!",
"It is a historical artifact born of cultural differences, geographical ignorance, and the impassibility of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains. It comes from the Greeks, who used the Black Sea to divide Europe from Asia, and thought the world looked like [this](_URL_0_).\n\nAs geographic knowledge grew, people tried to expand on the Greek definition, but in many places there is no \"natural\" border and no one completely agrees where it should be. Modern geographers typically treat Eurasia as a single continent.\n\n",
"What about Eurasia and Africa?",
"in most of my geography classes it is referred to as Eurasia ",
"_URL_0_ good explanation",
"Continents as generally held are largely the product of culture. Most biologists, however, use the definition \"large enough to promote speciation\".\n\nSource: Guns Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond)\n\nThe Future of Life (EO Wilson) ",
"People try to justify with things like tectonic plates or other reasons, but the main reason is largely historical and arbitrary, just as the definition of what is a planet is also arbitrary. "
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3ij9yl | if many republicans are anti-abortion, how come they're also against contraceptives? seems counter-intuitive. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ij9yl/eli5if_many_republicans_are_antiabortion_how_come/ | {
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"Both abortion and contraceptives interfere with the precious gift of human life. Add your preferred dose of religious fervour, and that's basically what it boils down to.",
"[Republicans are not against contraceptives.](_URL_0_) The only people who think otherwise are people who believe everything they read on /r/Politics. ",
"Many conservatives believe that some forms of birth control are abortive. Basically because they think they result in the expulsion of a fertilized egg, and that that is a human life. Some conservatives simply view contraceptives as a way to have selfish sex with anyone you want, or whatever."
]
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[],
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"http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/15/why-republicans-are-pushing-for-over-the-counter-birth-control/"
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5pjkig | how did insects survive the ice age? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5pjkig/eli5_how_did_insects_survive_the_ice_age/ | {
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"The ice did not cover the whole planet. There were large regions of decent weather closer to the equator. Insects lived there in the normal manner.",
"The ice ages (plural!) weren't a several hundrey thousand years winter. Seasons did exist and they weren't any shorter or longer than the seasons we know now. The only difference is they were colder on average, which is why glacier ice shields could stay at their maximum reach longer and eventually stayed there permanently. Insects in the northern hemisphere very likely had their normal life cycle during the summer but fell into hibernation during the winter."
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1kw1vx | Was there any trade between the Indus Valley civilization and Sumeria or other Mesopotamian civilizations? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kw1vx/was_there_any_trade_between_the_indus_valley/ | {
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"Absolutely.\n\nThere was direct trade during the later 3rd millennium BC: ships from the IVC docked in Mesopotamian ports; some IVC sailors may have even settled in Sumer and there is a seal uncovered that belonged to a Mesopotamian whose job it was to act as an interpreter of the IVC language. On the other hand, there is less to suggest that people from Mesopotamia reached the Indus, so it is clear that the IVC at least initially conducted the trade between the two civilizations. Mesopotamian ships sailed the length of the Gulf, as far as the western coast of Magan (Oman peninsula), trading directly with Magan and with Dilmun (Bahrain); ships from Magan and Dilmun also docked in Mesopotamian ports. Trade also took place across the Gulf, between Elam and the city-states on the Iranian plateau in the east and Mesopotamia, Dilmun and Magan in the north and west.\nDilmun operated as a middleman between Mesopotamia and the Indus in some of this trade, and after the Ur III state collapsed its role in this grew: in the early 2nd millennium BC both IVC and Mesopotamian ships sailed only to Bahrain, which acted as an entrepot between them. ",
"Yes! [Meluha](_URL_1_) was allegedly a name given by Sumerians to the IVC though I think the debate is still open. \n\n\n[The Immortals of Meluha](_URL_0_) is a recently popular Indian fantasy book"
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"http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meluhha"
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9htp30 | hosting a website and domains | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9htp30/eli5_hosting_a_website_and_domains/ | {
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"I've used go daddy before and I haven't had a problem. They actually offer a $12/year deal with Linux hosting and a free domain. One big problem with the free domain from go daddy is that by default it exposes your registration information(name, address, etc.) unless you pay more. You can use 2 domains to connect to one website but one of the domains would have to be a redirect. ",
"Yes, you can point both domains to your hosting service. \n\nAs to which hosting website, thats gonna depend a lot on what you need. I am assuming here that you don't need any cloud service stuff (i.e. no amazon web services or microsoft azure). Ok, do you need a website builder app like GoDaddy and whats that one Keanu Reeves schills for? Squarespace. Is it a retail website? there are hosters who provide turnkey shops including shopping cart support, order resolution and fulfillment, shipping management, payment facilities etc. Just gonna upload some HTML pages? (what is this, 1995 here?)\n\nIf you don't need anything fancy I'd suggest just going with the cheapest (aka free) webhost you can find. e.g. 000webhost is free and they have a site builder. You can always scale up your hosting as your website picks up traffic. "
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ub5un | If someone was standing on an asteroid in the asteroid belt, would you be able to see other asteroids? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ub5un/if_someone_was_standing_on_an_asteroid_in_the/ | {
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"The average distance between asteroids in the asteroid belt is about 100,000 km. The radium of larger asteroids is about 1km. Using those numbers an asteroid would be 1 arcsecond big (about 300 times smaller than the moon). If you did see anything it wouldn't be more than a faint twinkle.",
"Yes, with a good telescope and an ephemeris. But it won't be anything like the \"asteroid fields\" in a sci-fi movie.\n\nThere are a lot of asteroids out there, but there's also a lot of space. The average separation between large-ish (~1km) asteroids is going to be on the order of millions of kilometers. Asteroid sizes follow a roughly power-law distribution: there's far more small asteroids than large ones, but the smaller ones would be harder to see since they reflect less sunlight."
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4ytg0d | why is it easier to talk to complete strangers about your problems than to people who are close to you? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ytg0d/eli5_why_is_it_easier_to_talk_to_complete/ | {
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"We fear the judgment of people we regard as being close to us. We want to appear strong, capable, and well-adjusted in their eyes, because what they think of us has immediate impact on our social standing. With a stranger, many people feel much more of a disconnect, and are more open because they see less possibility for any negative consequences as a result of being open."
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2rm9t1 | why is the usa so right wing compared to the countries it should seemingly be similar to, like canada and those in western europe? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rm9t1/eli5_why_is_the_usa_so_right_wing_compared_to_the/ | {
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"One reason is because of the Puritan settlers that moved to America. Their tenets align fairly well with what became American Conservatism. \n\nA. Godly people were sober, hardworking, and responsible. English society had been corrupted by foreign influences\nand by disorder and needed to be purified.\nB. Catholicism had undermined the relationship between God and the individual\nC. Election & predestination – God chooses who is saved and who is damned. No one can earn salvation through works.\nYet the saints are responsible for their actions.\nD. The congregation of saints chooses its members, hires and fires its ministers, and recognizes no other religious\nauthority.\nE. Worship should be plain, lack mystery, and be focused on God, No stained glass, instrumental music, or art.\nF. Much value of education\nG. Intolerance – error must be opposed and driven out \n\n_URL_0_",
"An excellent question for /r/AskHistorians, by the way."
]
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"http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/res/article/viewFile/4585/3924"
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8bcfqh | What do we know (if anything) about the religion of pre-Christian Visigoths. | To be more percise, what do we know about the 'pagan' religion of the Tervingi and/or Greuthungi (and other germanic tribes) who would later combine into the Visigoths.
I am, however, not asking about the Ostrogoths who emerged from the Hunnic empire. | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8bcfqh/what_do_we_know_if_anything_about_the_religion_of/ | {
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"Well the fact of the matter is that we don't really know very much about the pre-conversion religious believs of various Germanic societies. The most well described are the Norse of Scandinavia (only written down after conversion though), but they are pretty far removed from the Goths, stories about the Goths' Scandinavian origins not withstanding. \n\nI've written a good bit on Germanic religion and conversion previously, but if you're looking for specific knowledge on the visigoths, I'd recommend you take a look at Peter Heather's work on the *Goths*.\n\nI'm sorry I can't be more useful, but I can link a few of my previous answers and try and field any follow ups you might have.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"
]
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ii1fq/how_did_the_conversion_from_norse_pagan_religion/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7gphg5/why_were_the_goths_able_to_spend_decades_raiding/"
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10zdl7 | Looking for a book on the Mongol sack of Bagdad.
Anyone know of a good one? | Something historically accurate but not textbook-y, if possible.
| AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10zdl7/looking_for_a_book_on_the_mongol_sack_of_bagdad/ | {
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"Sorry, they were all thrown into the Euphrates. "
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3u9yc1 | why can't we make portable ram-devices? | What prevents us from having a special USB-like stick with some extra RAM to access when needed?
I suppose it would exist if it were possible. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3u9yc1/eli5_why_cant_we_make_portable_ramdevices/ | {
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"For RAM to be useful, it has to be fast - if it's not fast, it'll just slow the computer down.\n\nUSB - even USB 3 - just isn't fast enough for that sort of application.",
"Generally speaking the thing that differentiates \"RAM\" from other memory in a computer is the ability of the computer read and write to it very quickly. A USB-port is too slow for this purpose.",
"RAM is connected to the CPU via a high speed bus on the motherboard. \"Virtual memory\" is already thing, and it doesn't compare to actually having more RAM.",
"Windows Vista and up have [Readyboost](_URL_0_) which allows you to use a USB drive as virtual ram if it is compatible. As others have said, the speed is not as good as true ram but in certain instances it may add some benefit.\n\n"
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1twy5j | what is happening at a physical level when someone feels "awkward"? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1twy5j/eli5_what_is_happening_at_a_physical_level_when/ | {
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6ty9xi | Was Hitler and other axis powers angry at the Japanese for attacking America and accelerating them into war? | Just wondering if that upset him that they accelerated an enemy into the mix. When he was most likely uninterested in the United States at the moment. | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ty9xi/was_hitler_and_other_axis_powers_angry_at_the/ | {
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"As a follow-up on this one: did Hitler ever seriously consider not declaring war on the US after the Japanese attack? And, hypothetically, would the US have considered declaring war against Nazi-Germany if they hadn't first?",
"[u/kieslowskifan](_URL_1_) answered a different question but covered Hitler's thinking on declaring war against the US.\n > Although an expansion of the war carried with it new uncertainties, a number of German military planners mistakenly concluded that Japan's entry into the was in the Pacific was largely beneficial to Germany's strategic interests. \n\n_URL_0_"
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43medx | Were prisoners forced to sleep on barbed wire in Ludwigslust/Wöbbelin Concentration Camp? | I was watching the 1985 PBS Frontline documentary "Memory of the Camps," which is a reconstruction of a documentary put together soon after the war using footage and recordings from the liberation of Nazi concentration camps.
In a segment about Ludwigslust/Wöbbelin footage is shown of what looks like bunked cots wrapped and draped in barbed wire, while the narrator (in 1985 using the original text I believe) says that men were forced to *sleep* on barbed wire.
To be clear, I am as far from a Holocaust denier as possible, this just wasn't something I'd ever encountered, and I'm pretty familiar with the horrors of the camps.
On a related matter I suppose, what *is* the perception of this Frontline piece in the minds of historians?
(standard "sorry if this has been asked before" disclaimer) | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43medx/were_prisoners_forced_to_sleep_on_barbed_wire_in/ | {
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"I believe the photo you are referring to is [this one of Monsieur Della Giacomo of Limoges, France lies on a bunk made of barbed-wire and rags in the newly liberated Woebbelin concentration camp.](_URL_0_)\n\nThe camp in Wöbbelin near the town of Ludwigslust was not a camp on its own but rather a sub-camp of Neuengamme, that existed for ten weeks in 1945.\n\nOpening in February of 1945, it was intended as a camp for evacuated prisoners from other camps. When Allied troops started approaching Concentration Camps, the Nazis usually tried to evacuate the prisoners to prevent them from being liberated. About 5000 people were brought to the Wöbbelin camp and 1000 didn't survive until liberation. The problem with Wöbbelin was that Allied troops in form of the 82nd Airborne were advancing to fast for the Nazis to really make this camp work like they had previous camps. Thus Nazi authorities neither finished the camp nor really put any effort in supplying the camp. They pretty much gave it up at some point in April. Therefore the Wöbbelin camp became what scholarship refers to as \"Sterbelager\", i.e. a camp where the Nazis brought prisoners to die of starvation and disease.\n\nThe barbed wire bunks need to be seen in that context. The barbed wire bunks were most likely a result of improvisation. In Wöbbelin, the bunks similar to a lot of the barracks and other camp infrastructure was never finished. The liberating troops report that a lot of the prisoners had to sleep on the floors of the unfinished barracks or under the sky during the night. They also found unfinished bunks (as can be seen [here](_URL_2_)) as well as the barbed wire bunks. It is a reasonable assumption that when the bunks were not finished despite thousands of prisoners flooding the camp, somebody came up with the idea to use barbed wire as a sort of hammock device for the prisoners. As can be seen on the first photo, there is rags and straw tangeled up in the barbed wire thus suggesting that rather than a pure torturing device, these kind of bunks were really intended for people to sleep in.\n\nIt can however be not reconstructed who cam up with the idea since given that the Nazis abandoned the camp and its prisoners in April 1945 to let the prisoners die a slow and agonizing death, it could have been the prisoners themselves who came up with the idea of using these barbed wire hammocks in order to alleviate the overcorwded sleeping on the floor or under the sky.\n\nWhat can be said with certainty is that this use of barbed wire as bunks was not widespread in the camps and most likely the result of the Wöbbelin camp being unfinished towards the end of the war.\n\nSources:\n\n* Photos from the USHMM photo archive.\n\n* Carina Baganz: Wöbbelin: Das letzte Außenlager des KZ Neuengamme als Sterbelager. In: Detlef Garbe, Carmen Lange (Hrsg.): Häftlinge zwischen Vernichtung und Befreiung. Die Auflösung des KZ Neuengamme und seiner Außenlager durch die SS im Frühjahr 1945. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2005, S. 105–116.\n\n* Carina Baganz: Zehn Wochen KZ Wöbbelin. Ein Konzentrationslager in Mecklenburg 1945. Mahn- und Gedenkstätten Wöbbelin, Wöbbelin 2000.\n\n* As a further potential source, check out this [interview with one of the liberators of the camp, Morton Katz](_URL_1_)"
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"http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa9605"
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2c1br2 | Why did WWI result in the fall of four empires (German, Russian, Ottoman & Austro-Hungarian)? | What made this war that much different that it could topple that many empires in one war? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c1br2/why_did_wwi_result_in_the_fall_of_four_empires/ | {
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"Because 3 of those empires were tottering in the first place and had significant problems with minorities in the age of nationalism (every nationality wanted their own state when empires are explicitly based on imposing one state over multiple nationalities). The war was largely the thing which pushed them over the edge. I would go as far as to say the future of at least 2 of those empires (Austria-Hungary and Ottoman) were pretty bleak and likely to be in the danger of collapse even without a war.\n\nIn the Russian Empire for instance only around 45% of the population was actually ethnically Russian, in the Austria-Hungary empire only around 43% of the population was either German or Hungarian. The Ottomans Empire also had large parts of their territories populated by Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Slavs, and other nationalities.\n\nThere was also deep political crisis in those empires, in Russia you had the 1905 revolution and continued resentment towards Tsarism and members of the Tsar's court (i.e Rasputin). In the Ottoman Empire you had fundamental question over how to deal with the nationalities, the loss of territories in the Balkan Wars and Libya to Italy, and the decline of the empire in general leading to the popularity of ultra-nationalist movements like the young Turks. In Austria-Hungary you had similar issue of how to deal with a situation where the German (and Magyar) elite ruled over a (largely Slav) rest of the empire. Basically in at least the Ottoman Empire the process of disintegration (in terms of territorial loss) has -already- started before the war.\n\nWWI, as the first modern total war, placed unbearable strains on the physical, psychological and political structures of those empires. In the end, the various nationalities were enabled by the defeat of those empires in the war to gain (or at least attempt to gain) independence with the support of victorious powers (see treaties of Brest-Litvosky, Severes and Trianon). Those 3 empires collapsed both internally and externally. \n\nNote I excluded Germany because it doesn't fall under quite the same category as the other three, while there was a Polish nationalities issue, it was small compare to the issue in the other 3. The actual level of political institutions and development was also much higher in Germany. The German Empire \"fell\" because the Kaiser (correction here!) forced to abdicate, it was not a collapse situation as with the other 3 empires.\n\nBut that being said, 3 of those 4 empires reconstituted themselves remarkably quickly (Germany with the Weimar Republic and later Third Reich, Ottoman with the founding of the Turkish Republic which fought to overturned much of the Severes treaty, and Russia with the victory of the Bolsheviks in reclaiming most of the ex-Tsarist Empire and founding the Soviet Union).\n\nSource: War of the World by Nail Ferguson\n\n"
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7fl82t | Why isn't the ISS spun for "gravity"? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7fl82t/why_isnt_the_iss_spun_for_gravity/ | {
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"The absence of (apparent) gravity is the main feature of the ISS. Why would you want to ruin that?\n\nThere was a proposed single module that would have rotated to generate low (~1/3 g) appparent gravity for astronauts to sleep in, but that didn't make it to the ISS.",
"Mostly because it wouldn’t work on the ISS. For artificial gravity to be possible, the walkways have to be far from the center of mass. All of the living area on the ISS is right near the middle, so spinning it would just throw everything to the ends of the arms.",
"Frankly because it was probably too expensive and most of the experiments were for operations in microgravity. Now that we're at a point where longevity in space is a more serious concern I could see the next iteration of the ISS having a spun module.",
"In addition to the other answers, one major problem occurs in small rotating habitats.\n\nAssume a 30 metre radius cylinder.\n\nThe gravity scales linerarly with your distance from the centre, so if the spin is regulated so that gravity is 0.6g 30 metres from the centre, it will be 0.58g at 29 metres from the centre.\n\nThis results in walking and jumping inducing dizziness and disorientation. Your head experiences less gravity than your feet, and it is enough to induce motion sickness."
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fi3505 | Why did England yo-yo viciously between Catholicism and Protestantism, whereas most other countries seemed to settle on one or the other? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fi3505/why_did_england_yoyo_viciously_between/ | {
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"The Reformation in England was a much more prolonged, gradual and inconsistent process than it was in most German and Scandinavian countries, mostly because it was orchestrated as top-down policy rather than a genuine grass-roots movement. Though King Henry VIII (r. 1509-47) had broken with Rome over the issue of annulling his marriage to Catherine, he was not a Lutheran (which is what Protestants were called at the time) by any means, and was in his heart still a Catholic. Henry agreed with almost every Catholic doctrine and practice, with the exception of the Pope being the head of the Church. In the wake of Luther’s 95 Theses Henry had written personally an extensive rebuttal to all of his points, which was published around Europe and received much acclaim, including by the Pope, who awarded him the title “Defender of the Faith”. Even after breaking with Rome and being excommunicated Henry has dozens of outspoken Lutherans arrested, imprisoned and executed, many by burning at the stake. \n\nThe most prominent Lutherans during the reign of Henry were all nobles or senior clergy, most notably Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, and Anne Boleyn, who were respectively the king’s prime minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his second wife. These three were in regular contact with German Lutherans and their written works, though very discreetly due to the king’s open hostility to Lutheranism. They were very careful and subtle in promoting Luther’s ideas, and knew which arguments to press and which to not even bother with. Henry was more open to some ideas than others, and because he was a very egotistical and controlling man, he was most open to ideas of strengthening his own authority. Cromwell gradually managed to conflate several Lutheran principles with seamless increases of Henry’s own power, such as removing the Pope as the head of the Church, abolishing the monasteries (giving Henry an enormous boost in wealth) and declaring any Catholics - or “papists” as they were called) to be traitors against the king, not on religious grounds but on political ones. Henry saw these changes not as pro-Protestant but merely as anti-Pope, and as a strengthening of his own power.\n\nThat said, there were definite limits to Henry’s openness to Protestant ideas, and he angrily rejected even the mention of many of them. He was a deeply conflicted man and reportedly confessed his guilt at having broken with Rome and abandoned some of the ways of the Church. But politically he’d already ‘crossed the Rubicon’, as it were, and he was not willing to go back. \n\nThe death of Henry VIII and the ascension of his young son Edward VI was a godsend for Protestants in England. Edward had been raised from birth in a pro-Protestant environment, and had none of the misgivings or hesitations of his father. Since he was too young to rule in his own right, the government was passed to a regency council, which was made up almost entirely of Protestants or Protestant sympathisers, most notably Thomas Cranmer. He led the charge in enforcing Protestantism vigorously throughout England, and also had the first English-language Bibles printed and distributed officially. The six years of Edward VI’s short reign (r. 1547-53) saw a dramatic upsurge in not just Protestant acceptance but also widespread conversions. England had been a predominantly Catholic country when Henry VIII died, but when his son died six years later it was more evenly split in terms of demographics.\n\nThe ascension of Queen Mary I (r. 1553-58) threatened to change all of that. As the daughter of the devoutly Catholic and Spanish-born Catherine of Aragon, Mary was not just a staunch Catholic but had a deep hatred of anything Protestant and anti-Catholic. She’s earned the nickname “Bloody Mary”, and for good reason. Her reign saw the executions of *thousands* of Protestants, both high-and low-born, usually by burning at the stake. She executed Thomas Cranmer, even after he recanted his Protestantism. She went so far in her revenge/persecution that even her equally devout Catholic husband, King Philip II of Spain, urged her to moderate her policies, since he feared they would lead to widespread revolt. She did no such thing, and any possible revolts were only avoided by her early death due to sickness. \n\nMary was succeeded by Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603), daughter of Henry VIII and the devoutly Protestant but deceased Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth immediately overturned all of her half-sister’s anti-Protestant policies, and returned things to how they were during the reign of her half-brother Edward VI, although with a somewhat less hostile attitude to Catholics. Catholicism was still outlawed and punishable by fines or imprisonment (at least for the more outspoken, public Catholics, usually preachers), but they were very rarely if ever executed. Elizabeth’s long reign (45 years) gave ample time for her pro-Protestant policies to take effect and become deeply rooted in English society. By the time that she died and the Tudor dynasty was replaced by the Protestant Scottish Stuart dynasty, England had a large Protestant majority. \n\nKing James I (r. 1603-25) had arguably the greatest contribution to ensuring that Protestantism continued to thrive in England, due to the foiling of the anti-Protestant Gunpowder Plot, his printing of the King James Bible, his neutrality during the Thirty Years War, and the establishment of British (and thus Protestant) colonies in North America. His reign saw the last vestiges of pro-Catholicism on any large-scale disappear. The massive and violent retaliation against the small Catholic minority in response to the failed Gunpowder Plot shows this more clearly than anything else."
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e6n37f | how do prices keep rising? will one day a bottle or water cost $1,000? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e6n37f/eli5_how_do_prices_keep_rising_will_one_day_a/ | {
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"Prices measured in dollars keep rising, but it's not because a bottle of water gets more expensive, it's because a dollar gets cheaper. As more dollars get printed, each individual dollar is worth less. So yes, one day a bottle of water will be $1000, but by then $1000 will a tiny amount of money.",
"Prices keep rising because the government keeps printing money. Our currency and total worth off all money printed is to remain the same, so printing a dollar does not make another dollar, but decreases the value of all dollars by a certain sum. Prices aren't truly rising for most things, the value of our currency is just decreasing, the term is inflation. I mean someday a bottle of water could cost $1,000 but at the same time you'll be making enough money in your salary (employers raise salaries to cope with inflation) that it would be no different to you as a 25 cent bottle of water is now."
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2qipll | why are computer science-related careers so hard to get into when there is such a high demand? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qipll/eli5_why_are_computer_sciencerelated_careers_so/ | {
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"It is an open field and easy to get into. Problem might be your specific location, any requirements that you have with a job, or perhaps any requirements you perchance lack.\n\nDon't want to insult you, but IT guys are in high demand (that much I know to be true) so if you have trouble finding a job introspection might be needed.",
"Try looking for jobs in other areas. Just because they are in high demand doesn't mean they are in high demand in your city ",
"Well my guess is you haven't done an internship?"
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4i06eg | Do Kepler's laws still hold in general relativity? | Newton's inverse square law was shown to be not quite accurate in describing planetary motion. Do some or all of Kepler's three laws of planetary motion hold up against general relativity? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4i06eg/do_keplers_laws_still_hold_in_general_relativity/ | {
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"In General Relativity, Kepler's Laws are demoted to being very accurate approximations. We still use them and use them, but we know that they're not the whole story.\n\nHowever, even in Newtonian mechanics, Kepler's Laws are still technically an approximation. Kepler's Laws assume that all of the mass of the system is in a single central object. In reality, the orbit of the Earth is perturbed by other planets - Jupiter in particular. Ignoring these other objects still gives you a pretty good answer, but it is an approximation, and gives a small error.",
"One of the most famous tests of general relativity is its deviation from Kepler's first law.\n\nMercury doesn't orbit in a perfect ellipse (none of the planets do, but the effect is most pronounced in Mercury). Instead, it's roughly an ellipse that changes the direction it points over time. This changing of the direction of Mercury's ellipse is predicted by general relativity. It was already known before GR that Mercury does this, but GR finally provided a satisfactory explanation.\n\nThis is called \"precession of the perihelion of Mercury\" if you want more background."
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69bksr | why does soaking your muscles in warm water help soothe the ache? | Always played sports and have always wondered this?! Just curious:) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69bksr/eli5_why_does_soaking_your_muscles_in_warm_water/ | {
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"When muscles are achy or sore, this is generally caused by microscopic tears in your muscle fibers due to intense usage. Repairing of these tears is what increases muscle strength. It can also be caused when your immune system reacts to an illness, releasing a chemical into the blood vessels which has a side-effect of making you feel sore. \nYou feel much better when you soak muscles in warm water because the heat increases blood flow in your body; when blood flow increases, more blood comes to the achy parts of your muscles, delivering oxygen and nutrients to repair these micro tears or to clear immune system chemicals. Thus, you start to feel better when you soak in warm water! Running has made me feel the same thing; I had sore muscles for an entire week after running my first half marathon! "
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f95uwe | How does nuclear fusion in the Sun produce the sunlight we see on Earrh? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f95uwe/how_does_nuclear_fusion_in_the_sun_produce_the/ | {
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"Fusion makes the sun very hot. Most of the sun’s spectrum is just the spectrum of a 5778 K black body, with some deviations because the temperature is not totally uniform and there are absorption lines from its composition.",
"The fusion creates a lot of energy. This heats up the sun and the heat travels to the surface where it is at around 6000 K. As mentioned in the previous comment, there is a process called black body emission, which is in simple terms: temperature = average speed of particles, moving electric charge creates electromagnetic waves (if at certain wavelengths, it is visible and we call that light). It just so happens (or we have evolved to do so) that the sun's surface temperature makes it so that it emits mostly visible light. However, everything does emit black body radiation, for humans around 36 degrees Celsius, we emit infrared, and if it gets very hot like a molten metal, it starts to emit red, to orange, and so on."
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cyjygk | why do cigarette packs have disturbing imagery but alcohol bottles don't? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cyjygk/eli5_why_do_cigarette_packs_have_disturbing/ | {
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"Bc cigarette usage is almost certain to be an everyday thing, thus ensuring you will end up with those diseases whereas the majority of drinkers don't do it every day, and illnesses or death are not a guarantee.",
"Various reasons.\n\n1. At its simplest, politicians decided to mandate this on cigarette companies, and not alcohol companies.\n\n2. According to the CDC, alcohol causes about [88,000 deaths a year](_URL_1_) while cigarette smoking [causes 480,000 deaths per year](_URL_0_).\n\n3. While most studies agree the correct amount of alcohol to drink is \"none\", there are definitely countless studies that also cite upsides in drinking in moderation. Whereas there are zero health upsides to cigarette smoke.\n\n4. Alcohol has been a large part of human society since the dawn of agriculture and in the US, far more ingrained in culture than smoking. Which factors into #1.\n\n\nEdit: formatting",
"Waaay more people smoke than drink. (I'm talking frequently, so smokers vs alcoholics) \n\nCigarettes are cheaper. Teenagers are more likely to smoke than to get wasted. \n\nSmoking leads to way more deaths than alcohol, simply because, again, there are way more smokers than alcoholics.",
"TL;DR: Because cigarettes are many times more addictive than Alcohol. Also, since most people dilute alcohol while consuming it, it ends up being a lot less harmful.\n\nAlso, the image of a Lung destroyed by Smoking is far more gruesome than a Liver destroyed by Alcohol.\n\nImagine you are a five year old kid addicted to Lemon Iced Teas. However, one day, someone comes along and rolls up tea leaves and lemon leaves in a piece of paper puts a foam filter at the end of that roll, and tells you that you will get an even better kick if you smoked the Lemon Tea leaves instead of diluting it with water and ice. You try it, and now you can't even think of going back to your Iced tea.\n\nWhat changed, Tea contains a mild Poison called Tanine. When ingested in a diluted form through your food pipe, it goes to your stomach where your digestive system processes it and then releases some chemicals to counteract Poison, thereby waking you up. When you start smoking it, it goes directly to your lungs with a lot of CO^(2) and Tanine instead of Oxygen. This Lethal combination of Carbon Dioxide and Tanine sends your body into a shock, and it over compensates by releasing an even higher amount of antibodies to counteract Tanine, thus increasing your alertness (wake up mode) by 100 times more than your Iced tea used to do.\n\nNow, the Tanine woke you up, but what about the insane amount of CO^(2) you consumed? Your mind is alert now, but you deprived your body of Oxygen, so it tells you to breathe in more air, by making you cough profusely. Now, our social peers step in to tell you that the coughing only happens to beginners and weak kids. So, we learn to subdue the coughing reflex while smoking. \n\nReplace Tanine with Nicotine, and you will realize how people get addicted to Tobacco.\n\nAlcohol on the other hand (and in my uneducated opinion) is as harmful and addictive as Sugar or Fat. The main difference is that most people consume alcohol in a diluted manner, and rarely over-consume it to get into an inebriated state. Alcoholism is more similar to Diabetes and Obesity, with an added side effect of inebriated behaviour.",
"The simple answer is that cigarettes are on average much worse for our health.\n\nCigarettes are very addictive, have well documented harmful effects on the human body (with few benefits), and most importantly can cause significant effects on those nearby through secondhand smoke.\n\nAlcohol on the other hand is less harmful on its own - larger amounts of people enjoy it sensibly and recreationally, and do so in a way that doesn't typically cause long term harm to themselves, or negative consequences to those around them. A drink of wine with a meal, a very poor two in an evening, or even getting a bit drink on a night out is ultimately not a huge issue.\nWhen alcohol does start causing an issue is almost entirely when the people consuming it so it irresponsibly. Those people will admittedly often cause more of as public scene than someone standing with a cigarette, but they are the minority of alcohol drinkers.\nAlcohol can obviously cause big problems such as alcoholism, and had damaged many families and lives, but not so single mindedly as cigarettes, and often alcohol is not the problem, but the result of other issues underneath."
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"https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm"
],
[],
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mrlkt | how squeaky toys work? | THAT SOUND.... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mrlkt/eli5_how_squeaky_toys_work/ | {
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"theres an insert with a small plastic reed in it. when the air blows through the insert, the reed vibrates and makes a squeak.",
"theres an insert with a small plastic reed in it. when the air blows through the insert, the reed vibrates and makes a squeak."
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3s94oq | Did Napoleon speak English (or did Bill and Ted's have a major plot hole)? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3s94oq/did_napoleon_speak_english_or_did_bill_and_teds/ | {
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"Napoleon spoke French and Italian, and then learned English in 1815 and 1816, while in exile at St. Helena. Several scraps from his lessons survive to this day. Since the Napoleon they grabbed in Bill & Ted's was from 1805, you can rest easy. There is no plot hole. "
]
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[]
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18jg9q | Why did the asylum system for mentally incapable people in the US shut down? | And what did they do with all the crazy people when the institutions closed? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18jg9q/why_did_the_asylum_system_for_mentally_incapable/ | {
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"Patient advocacy groups worked with the ACLU. You can no longer forcibly treat the mentally ill without the person having a lawyer. \n\nIt combined with Ronald Reagan cutting funding. First as Governor of California and later as President. \n\nThe crazy folks fend for themselves. The lucky ones have family. The unlucky ones are often homeless or they get arrested.",
"I would like to remind everybody that, as per our sidebar and [our rules](_URL_0_):\n\n > we request that users in r/AskHistorians confine themselves to questions and discussions about events taking place prior to 20 years ago (1993).\n\nThis subreddit is for *history*, not the current day. Please refrain from discussing the *current* state of care for mentally incapable people in the USA (or anywhere else).\n",
"The Community Mental Health Act in 1964 built the foundation for treating the mentally ill in the community instead of institutionalizing them. ",
"One event that led to the end of the institutionalizing the mentally ill is the public outcry over the Willowbrook State School. It was a \"school\" for children with disabilities that was terribly overcrowded. There were a series of hepatitis studies there with very questionable informed consent going on. Many of the parents signed their consent, but their consent was coerced, since there weren't many places a disabled child could go at the time. These children were deliberately infected with hepatitis via \"hepatitis milkshakes\" and were fed stool extracts.\n\nIn 1972, an investigative reporter, Geraldo Rivera did a series on the school, and it caught national attention with a documentary on ABC. Public pressure caught on and parent activist groups started forming and eventually there was a class action suit against the institution.\n\nEspecially since this story centered around children, it was particularly powerful and created enough pressure and public attention to bring about the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980. Eventually the system was deemed inappropriate care and became unpopular."
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5k9hyx | why is there a standard arrangement of the numbers on a game die? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5k9hyx/eli5_why_is_there_a_standard_arrangement_of_the/ | {
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"Some arrangements of numbers keep the extremes from clumping up on one side of the die, which if the die is unbalanced, would mean significantly higher or lower averages if rolled a large number of times. Though with dicemaking techniques available today, most dice are going to be mostly fair for most practical purposes regardless of pip arrangements, so it's nowadays mostly due to tradition and symmetry/aesthetic.",
"On a cubic die, when the sum of opposite sides is seven, 1,2, and 3 share a corner, which looks nice. Changing the arrangement won't affect probabilities.",
"The pips (or dots) on a die are made so that one side and it's opposite side total 7.\n\nThe 1 is opposite the 6, the 2 opposite the 5, and the 3 opposite the 4.\n\nDue to the removal of some of the die to create the pips, placing the specific numbers to specific sides of the die creates the most balance to the entire die thus ensuring the greatest possibility of randomness.",
"_URL_0_\n\nStarting at 5:27, mathematician (and comedian) Matt Parker talks about this property of dice in great detail. He goes through the different reasons of what makes dice fair: each pair of opposite sides all adding to the same number, or all vertices having their adjacent faces adding to the same number, etc.\n\nHe takes out numerous 6-sided dice, 20-sided dice, and 120-sided dice and gives an over-the-top mathematical critique of each of them."
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3x7jge | why must my camera adjust to a single brightness setting in the picture, while my eyes can perceive all the vibrant colours and shades in view at the same time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x7jge/eli5_why_must_my_camera_adjust_to_a_single/ | {
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"Your eyes need to adjust as well... when you are perceiving all of those colours and shades they have already adjusted. (Walk from a dark room into sunlight, or vice-versa... it takes us longer for our eyes to adjust than it does for most cameras.)\n\nWe also do an astounding amount of 'vision' in the brain. Our eyes need to be good edge-detectors, so when it is too bright our pupils contract, our eyelids squint, and our brains start turning down the brightness until features around us can once again be resolved.\n\nPointing a camera at something new makes it start adapting at that moment... you, on the other hand, have been watching the scene long enough to decide to take a picture of it, which also means you've been watching long enough for your eyes to adapt.",
"Your brain does an enormous amount of processing in the background and from memory (you don't need to see many things you've seen in the past for your brain to remember that they are vibrantly colored and just insert the memory into your vision). Optical illusions expose some kinds of processing (many of them work because the brain makes *lots* of assumptions).",
"It's worth noting that a lot of what you \"see\" is filled in. Your eyes, just like the camera, can't perceive good detail in both a very bright area and a very dark area at the same time. But your brain keeps you from realizing this. \n\nYour brain is never actually showing you the current raw input from your eyes. Ever. It is showing you a 3D reconstruction. In parts of the visual field where you don't actually have good color vision, colors are filled in based on recent memory. In your blind spots, your brain just fills in what it knows is there (based on what the eyes saw when they most recently did have coverage of that area). When there's really bright and also really dark areas, your brain will to some extent fill in the areas that you can't currently perceive."
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12l4iw | How did a small country like Austria end up with control over such a large, multi-ethnic empire? And how did they keep it for so long? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12l4iw/how_did_a_small_country_like_austria_end_up_with/ | {
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"Further to that are the reasons and difficulties involved similar in other cases such as for the British Empire?",
"Many empires began from a small start, the Roman Empire, Greek, Japanese and British Empires all began from fairly small nations in comparison to the massive nations of Russia, China and America. \n\nThe size of the nation isn't what matters especially, it's the size and quality of the army you can field, if you have a small but extremely well organized force it allows you to crush much larger but less organized forces, Caeser's first battle in Gaul was against the Helvetii, who fielded roughly 100,000 men to his 6 legions (25-30,000) and he managed to win pretty much outright. Skill and organisation is much more important. \n\nIn terms of the British Empire at any rate their naval power is what gained them an empire, not being able to field a large army.",
"Marriage. The Habsburgs were extremely adept at creating important political alliances through marriages to other powerful states in Europe. These alliances gave Austria quite a bit of leverage over and claim to many states as well as those states' colonial holdings around the world. The dynasty was so pervasive throughout European royal families that any time a ruler died there was usually a Habsburg related heir with some form of legitimate claim to the throne and in many instances was able to accede to power. ",
"One of the more common mistakes today is to think of nations as their current entities, with modern borders and political entities. It's easy to forget that central Europe, from the Eastern regions of France to parts of Poland and the Balkans, from Denmark and the North Sea to Northern Italy, was organized as the Holy Roman Empire as late as the early 19th century, until it was dissolved by Napoleon. This massive political entity was ruled by a single Holy Roman Empire, who was (in theory) elected by all of the princes and dukes of the hundreds and hundreds of territories that made up the Empire. Much of this territory was comprised of territories owned by the Hapsburg dynasty, which over the course of centuries had leveraged their way from small holdings in what's now southern Austria into control over what we now consider Austria, Hungary, parts of southern Germany, and much more besides. Since they controlled so much of the Holy Roman Empire, they essentially controlled who got \"elected\" as the Emperor, which meant that for centuries the Hapsburgs controlled essentially all of central Europe.\n\nWhat's my point with this? I kinda got sidetracked here. From their family seat of power, the Hapsburg family wielded influence over most of Europe for centuries through the political structure of the Holy Roman Empire. Once the Holy Roman Empire dissolved in 1815 (IIRC), they kept the bulk of the lands in the re-organized kingdom of Austria-Hungary. Note that they basically still held a hegemony over the lands of Central Europe until the Austria-Prussian War toward the end of the 19th century, after which Prussia re-organized most of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm I, with the assistance of Bismarck, which was essentially how things remained until World War I.\n\nFor further reading, one of the better sources on the latter part of this is [*Austria, Prussia and the Making of Germany*, by John Breuilly](_URL_0_), which covers the period from 1806 to 1871.",
"The [Austrian Empire](_URL_0_) as an actual single Empire only dates back to 1804. To put that in perspective, the United States is ~~younger~~ older than the Austrian Empire.\n\nWhy is this so? It is important to remember that the idea of nation-states with separate rulers is a modern one. The Peace of Westphalia in the 1600s describes national sovereignty and self-determination, but such ideas took a while to gain root. The \"Austrian Empire\" before 1804 is more properly called the [Hapsburg Empire](_URL_1_), or the Hapsburg domains. The [Hapsburgs](_URL_1_) were a family who dominated the Holy Roman Empire and surrounding lands through marriage and through conquest. They ruled various territories - indeed, for a long time the Spanish Hapsburgs, kings of Spain, were seen as the senior line of the family. The Spanish line split from the Austrian-based Hapsburgs, whose domains would later be consolidated into the Austrian Empire in 1804 as a response to Napoleon's declaration of a French Empire. This new Empire contained all the previous lands ruled by the Hapsburgs, giving it a strong multi-ethnic identity.\n\nAustria today is a nation-state, the result of the Empire's dissolution after WWI (similar to how Turkey was created after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire). Today, states are the norm in geopolitics. However, it wasn't so long ago where royal families played hugely important roles. Today it is laughable to imagine one family ruling various domains, but in the past, that was reality. Imagine if the same person was the head of government of Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Those nations would still technically be separate, but they would all be his domain."
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1bkfv9 | Was Axis success unqualified during the early stages of World War II? (1939-1941) | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bkfv9/was_axis_success_unqualified_during_the_early/ | {
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"Do you mean did they suffer any setbacks?\n\nIf that's the question then yes, they did. I suppose the most obvious is the German failure at the Battle of Britain in 1940. In mid 41 the [*Bismark*](_URL_1_), one of Germany's few powerful surface ships was sunk. During the invasion of Norway they lost the brand new heavy cruiser [*Blucher*](_URL_2_) as well. The Italians also suffered naval setbacks when the British attacked [Taranto](_URL_0_) and caused heavy damage to the Italian fleet. ",
"The Italian invasion of Greece in 1940 was a disastrous failure, and resulted in Greece capturing a good chunk of Italian-held Albania. Hitler sent in forces and ultimately prevailed in 1941. One of the German objectives was to preserve the notion that Axis forces could not be defeated in the field. "
]
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_battle_of_the_battleship_Bismarck",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_cruiser_Bl%C3%BCcher"
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so4oo | Will our generation of listening to music via ear buds much more than older generations did cause us to have ear problems (more so than our parents) down the road? | I would say that on average, the younger generation is listening to music with ear buds/headphones MUCH more than our parents due to the accessibility of mobile music (I listen to music with headphones every day). Will this cause our hearing to degrade much fast than older generations? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/so4oo/will_our_generation_of_listening_to_music_via_ear/ | {
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"Only if the younger generation listens to music at high volumes with ear buds/headphones, so yes :)\n\nIt isn't the ear buds/headphones that cause the problems, it is the volume. 100 dB at the ear is going to cause damage, it doesn't matter if it is being produced at 100 dB right at the ear, or at 120 dB some distance from the ear. The loudness at the ear is what determines if it will cause damage.\n",
"Hi there. Student of game audio here. \n\nThe loudness of listening to music matters, but the length of time with which you listen to it is also very important. As loudness increases, the length of time you can listen to it without having hearing damage decreases.\n\nSo if it takes you five minutes to get to class and you're listening to your music really loud, it might not mean much. This obviously depends on how loud people listen to it. \n\nBut do ear buds increase the damage done? I've had some of my audio teachers say yes and other ones say no, but to be honest I don't see how it should be different. My understanding of the outer ear is that it directs sound and helps to determine where the sound was played. I don't think that portion is necessary to prevent hearing loss.",
"The basic fact is that our generation is *already* displaying more hearing problems, and honestly, it's not the proliferation of earbuds that is doing it. Our generation has an unprecedented level of access to portable listening devices, as well as a massive number of extremely loud concerts and whatnot, and little to no education about how hearing damage occurs. When we're born, humans can generally hear from 20Hz-20,000Hz. As we take hearing damage, the little hair-like devices in our ears are slowly destroyed, and it almost always starts at higher frequencies and works its way down. This is due to long term exposure to constant levels of sound pressure; OSHA has some good tables to look at for that sort of thing. The majority of 20 year olds at this point can barely hear above 16kHz, if they're lucky. I know a great many 20 year olds who can't hear 15Khz. In general, our generation is already going deaf faster then previous generations. The real issue isn't even the access to music, but that we seem to love to crank up the volume all the time.\n\nAnd just for reference, my numbers are pulled from my experience working around a large number of 18-24 year old students who listen to music on a daily basis in a variety of environments; a large part of my education has been focused in audio and acoustics, and I'm sad to say that even in music schools we don't teach kids what they need to know to preserve their hearing.",
"Can ear damage be healed or reversed, assuming you aren't totally deaf?"
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2o0ije | Are there any truly stationary points in the universe? | As I sit here I'm not really stationary, I'm on a planet in a solar system in a galaxy. On top of that, space itself is expanding. Does anything stand still? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2o0ije/are_there_any_truly_stationary_points_in_the/ | {
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"Relativity tells us that your question doesn't really have meaning. What I mean is that in Physics you don't ever ask what something's velocity is, you ask what the velocity is *with respect to something else*. This is what is known as a frame of reference. \n\nSo to answer your question, there are definitely things in the universe that are stationary with respect to other things (they just need to be moving with the same velocity vector) but there isn't anything that is stationary with respect to everything in the universe. "
]
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1vf0iv | When did heavy alcohol consumption start being frowned upon? | I've always wondered at what point did cultures start looking down on heavy consumption? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vf0iv/when_did_heavy_alcohol_consumption_start_being/ | {
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"You would be interested in the documentary *Prohibition* from PBS. It goes into detail on the history of alcohol. It seems from the American perspective that heavy consumption became frowned upon once distilled rather than brewed or fermented beverages became common... Mid 1800s. Prior to that time, beer and wine were quite weak and folks drank lightly all day, even at work, taking breaks to throw back grog. However, once whiskey, vodka, etc. appeared on scene, things began to change. "
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2g37gb | Why don't lizards make any sounds? | Most other reptiles do, snakes (hissing), toads/frogs, crocs/gatos etc. Yet its not common for majority of lizards to make sounds. What is the evolutionary reason behind this lack of auditory responses from them? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2g37gb/why_dont_lizards_make_any_sounds/ | {
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"Essentially, they don't need to. a lot of lizard communication is non-verbal. they wave, push-up, head-bob, nod, line up beside each other, flail a shiny portion of their body (be it a belly or dewlap). All of this species communication is non-verbal. a lot of a lizards life is non-social so they don't need a vast queue of social cues. \n\nthat being said, a lot of lizards can vocalize. when caught, some anoles will squeek. tokay geckos make funny howling sounds ([here's](_URL_0_) a video). geckos are the most vocal group of lizards, many of them make some sort of call. and some chameleons hiss when threatened.\n\n*edit: autocorrect messed up my \"queue-cue\" pun"
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e3ql0t | What's the History of Mental Health Within the Inuit or Native Canadian Populations? | [deleted] | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e3ql0t/whats_the_history_of_mental_health_within_the/ | {
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"I can't speak for North American indigenous peoples - and so there's definitely a lot of space for further answers - but [I have a previous answer about Aboriginal Australians and their history with alcohol which you might find interesting.](_URL_0_)"
]
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[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/93157s/indigenous_australian_communities_currently_have/e3a8b2q/"
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1x9hjf | Would Earth be detectable from the perspective of Alpha Centauri with current exo-planet detection methods? | Assuming a terrestrial planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri A with inhabitants that have identical detection methods to those we currently have. What would they find when they point their equipment at Sol? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1x9hjf/would_earth_be_detectable_from_the_perspective_of/ | {
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"Depends on how you're looking.\n\nEasiest way is the way the Kepler spacecraft uses, looking for dips in a star's light as a planet moves in front of it. I believe looking at Sol from Alpha Centauri, none of the planets move across the disc of the sun, so they wouldn't be detectable by this method.\n\nThe harder way is looking for wobbles in a star's light as a planet's gravity tugs the star back and forth during its orbit. I don't *think* this technique is sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized planets *yet*, but from Alpha Centauri you could probably detect Jupiter. Give it another 5-10 years and the answer might change."
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8atij7 | why do people refer to their "hearts" when talking about emotions? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8atij7/eli5_why_do_people_refer_to_their_hearts_when/ | {
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"Even ancient people knew the blood and the heart were important, and the two were related somehow. Since loosing your blood, or having your heart stops, means you are dead, they thought that the heart was the location of the human essence. For awhile they thought that the heart was also the center of human intellect, but they determined that a blow to the head caused people's thoughts to be confused, and a hard enough blow will remote someone's wits entirely. Given this they developed the thought that the head was the set of intellect, but the heart was where your emotions came from."
]
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79u2x4 | On What level did the Soviet Union have elections? | I've always had a vested interest in Soviet history, yet I always became confused at the subject of Soviet Elections. I found everything from Hardline Anti-Communists stating that there were never any elections until Gorbachev and until then, the USSR was a totalitarian dictatorship on all levels. To extreme Communists stating that the USSR had more democracy and elections than most capitalist nations did.
Assuming the Soviet Union did have elections: on what level did they take place, and when (if ever) did they take place?
*edit: removed an unnecessary then* | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/79u2x4/on_what_level_did_the_soviet_union_have_elections/ | {
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"Expanded from [an earlier answer of mine](_URL_2_), \n\nThe political structure of the USSR was an incredibly complex and filled with contradictions. Although the Marxism celebrated a scientific and rational view of the world, power within the USSR was often nebulous and capricious. For instance, there was no clear mechanism within the Soviet state for succession in the executive leadership, so Kremlinologists and other interested parties would watch the funeral procession to see who would succeed the departed. Much of the way the USSR was run operated contrary to the lines of power the three Soviet constitutions outlined in 1924, [1936](_URL_0_), and [1977](_URL_1_). While the Soviets had many of the trappings of a democratic system, it was far from a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word. \n\nOne of inescapable realities of political life in the USSR was that the Communist Party (CP) was one of the central organs of power. Article 6 of the 1977 constitution formally claimed the CP to be:\n\n > The leading and guiding force of the Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organizations and public organizations, is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The CPSU exists for the people and serves the people.\n\n > The Communist Party, armed with Marxism-Leninism, determines the general perspectives of the development of society and the course of the home and foreign policy of the USSR, directs the great constructive work of the Soviet people, and imparts a planned, systematic and theoretically substantiated character to their struggle for the victory of communism.\n\n > All party organizations shall function within the framework of the Constitution of the USSR. \n\nYet for all of these paeans to the CP, its actual delineated role within Soviet politics was unclear. Article 6 itself was a break from the two prior constitutions that did not specifically claim the CP was the central political lodestone. \n\nThe general phrase developed by political scientists during the Cold War to explain the Soviet system was that the Party ruled, but did not govern. What this means is that the CP formed a sort of parallel power structure that was deeply intertwined with other state entities. CP membership became one of the means of promotion within the system and an important box to tick off for any Soviet citizen aspiring to rise up through the system. However, the CP itself was not formally a requirement for institutions and not all CP members were elites. Particularly as the system evolved in the post-Stalin years, there were other interest blocs that developed within the Soviet state. The chiefs of Gosplan (the agency tasked with central economic planning) may have been CP members, but they were more beholden to their own fiefdoms than the Party bureaucracy. The influence of the CP varied from department to department and how high up one was in the pecking order for certain agencies. In the latter case, the local CP might have been powerful for low-level managers and executives, but its direct power decreased higher up the chain of command. These competing interest blocs often formed alliances in the Party Congress elections to the CP's Central Committee- which was a gateway to the Politburo/Presidium of the CP. These CP elections were not elections *per se*, but rather a process in which the end result was known even before the ballots were cast by the CP's elite delegates. \n\nThis all leads to the question of elections. Soviet elections were very complicated entities, even during the period after Stalin's death. Although it was a one-party state and a highly authoritarian one at that, the Stalin Constitution of 1936 made both provisions for free elections and the Stalinist state staked a good deal of its legitimacy upon high turn-out during elections. The Stalin Constitution remained in force until 1977, when Brezhnev ordered a new constitution which was a document much like its predecessor. \n\nMost Soviet citizens had to vote for delegates to the Supreme Soviet, the major parliamentary body in the USSR. Although both the 1936 and 1977 constitutions imbued the Supreme Soviet with broad, sweeping powers. The Supreme Soviet appointed the members of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, which was nominally the executive branch of the Soviet state. In practice, the Supreme Soviet and its presidium were toothless rubber stamps for the choices of the executive leadership of the CP. In keeping with the nebulous nature of Soviet power, choices for the Presidium were often *fait accompli*s for the Supreme Soviet to approve without much deliberation. \n\nThe various Soviet constitutions allowed candidates from outside the Communist Party to stand for elections to the Supreme Soviet, but they usually had to be nominated or approved by their local CP apparatus. There were detailed guidelines from Moscow about acceptable candidates and the state forbid adversarial or negative electioneering campaigns. More often than not, voters usually had a choice from a single candidate, especially after the 1977 constitution. Elections were called by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet at regular scheduled intervals and took place in districts designated by the state. \n\nThis system led to an aspersion in the West that Soviet elections were \"elections without choice,\" and there is a great deal of truth in this charge. However, this charge can obscure the inordinate degree of attention on Soviet regime lavished upon elections. The Stalin Constitution nominally provided for a secret ballot and a degree of candidates and the state used high electoral turnout to legitimize the grand Soviet experiment. The 1977 constitution also decreed an election's results to be invalid if turn out was low. High turnout was also a means of social control by the state as elections verified that the voter was a legal resident of a particular area. Therefore, local officials were often under intense pressure to guarantee a high political turnout for both propaganda and practical purposes. This was one of the reasons why voter turnout in the USSR typically averaged in the eightieth percentile from 1937 onward and the numbers are probably quite accurate. \n\nWhile many local CP officials fudged the numbers of turnout, this was a dangerous stratagem for the *apparatchik* if caught. Like some political bosses in the West, these local officials preferred to employ various inducements over obvious chicanery to get voters to the polls. From the Second World War onward, Soviet elections increasingly assumed a holiday-like atmosphere to attract voters. Similarly, mobile voting booths were often used to make sure that infirm voters could cast their ballots. The intense pressure from the center on these local officials to deliver the numbers gave the Soviet voter leverage in which abstaining from voting gave the voter a degree of power. Voting against a candidate, such as scratching out the name, was an embarrassment to the local CP officials and detrimental to their careers. The various meetings in the run-up for Soviet elections were often a time when the public could petition the officials for local improvements, repair of infrastructure, and airing other grievances. There was also a pronounced uptick in petitions and other requests to the electoral officials and newspapers during election season and some of these entreaties included the threat that if they were not met by election day, these individuals would boycott the election. By the same token, some Soviet voters would sometimes write petitions on the ballots to the authorities. Some of these preserved ballots have patriotic slogans, but others contained personal requests or denunciations of local officials. \n\nAlthough Soviet elections were not democratic in any formal meaning of the word, they were an anemic channel for political communication between the state and its citizens. Over the long-term, these \"elections without choice,\" did foster an apathy over the Soviet system and its many hypocrisies, but they did also provide a mechanism to cope with the grim reality of a single-party state. Even without any real electoral choice, many Soviet citizens recognized that there was some degree of power in the *act* of voting and bargained with local officials accordingly.\n\n*Sources*\n\nJessen, Ralph, and Hedwig Richter. *Voting for Hitler and Stalin: Elections Under 20th Century Dictatorships*. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2011.\n\nSakwa, Richard. *Soviet Politics in Perspective*. London: Routledge, 1998"
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4ni0sa | Louis XVI and his wife...did any other kings or queens try to help them? | Did any other monarchs try to come to the aid of Louis Xvi and his wife? Or were they just on their own in that mess? And if not...why? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ni0sa/louis_xvi_and_his_wifedid_any_other_kings_or/ | {
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"Yes, they did. Remember, Marie Antoinette's brother was the Holy Roman Emperor and while originally many of the monarchies decided to wait out the Revolution to see what happened, when the rev. government declared war on Austria all bets were off. Austria-Prussian forces made up the First Coalition in the war against France (a war which France would win, which helped to solidify the Republic).\n\nSpecifically, the Duke of Brunswick issued the Brunswick manifesto, which essentially stated that if no harm was done to the Royal Family, the citizens of Paris would not be harmed, but if harm was done Paris would be burned to the ground. While ultimately it did more harm than good to the monarchy, it showed that lengths that the various powers in Europe would go to in order to protect their own."
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1yxeio | if dogs can detect cancer by scent, why aren't there dog-cancer-detection centers everywhere? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yxeio/eli5_if_dogs_can_detect_cancer_by_scent_why_arent/ | {
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"Not FDA approved. Not insurance reimbursable. It's lame. It's very effective for lung cancer especially and should be more widely utilized.",
"One thing that people don't realize, till they have to face it themselves, is that there is no monolithic \"cancer.\" Each cancer has it's own prognosis, it's own mechanism, it's own manifestation, it's own protocol, and it's own causes. All because one thing might/does work for one type of cancer, doesn't mean it'll work for other types of cancer. There's eleven different type of lymphoma, thirty different types of sarcoma, twenty one different types of carcinoma and more. And each type may have a subtype. Some of these are so rare that it'll be next to impossible to get enough samples to use to train an animal is sniff them out, **IF** they can be sniffed out.\n\nThe people that do go to get cancer screenings, are usually people in high risk groups and with hereditary predisposition. Usually the screening are for the type of cancer that they might develop depending on their environment or genetics. Meaning, if you work around a lot of benzine, you will/should get screened for blood cancers. The thing is, most people don't actually go to get screened because it's not worth the time, fear, stress and panic. The only active screening that people do is the mammogram (which studies are showing this should be changed), and a prostate exam. Usually you just get one or the other. While cancer is a horrible disease, you are unlikely to get it. For example, last year there were an estimated 1.6 million new cases of cancer in the US. The population of the US is about 314 million. That equals to less .5% of the population.\n\nThe other thing about cancer, is that it's what I like to call an ambush disease. You never know if you have it, till something manifests itself in such a way that causes concern that it could be cancer. The signs and symptoms of many cancers are common signs and symptoms of other illnesses or other health related problems. For example, you are tired all the time, when you brush your teeth your gums bleed, new freckles are showing up on your body, but no fever or cough. What does that tell you? Well, tired all the time could be any number of things. Your gums bleeding can be from your dental hygiene not being as good as it should be or you aren't doing a good of a job as you think you are, and the freckles? Well, you have been in the sun for a bit playing volleyball with your friends, but you always wore sun screen. Would you go to the doctor for any of those symptoms? If you did, would they do the right blood test, if they choose to do a blood test at all? All of those symptoms are symptoms of leukemia. I know this because I had these signs when I was diagnosed with AML in 2010.\n\nBasically, with cancer you are lucky. Even if you take care to minimize your risk of getting cancer, you are still at risk. You could live your life getting screened every 6 months and pace around the room pulling your hair out wondering when the doctor calls you, which type of lucky you'll be: lucky to get cancer, or lucky to not get cancer. Lucky to get it because of the long odds against you at certain stages in your life; lucky because you are being treated by the knowledge gleaned from those before you, that suffered for you and others so you can have a chance to live; lucky to actually see who your real friends are, who is a member of your real family; lucky to get a whole new perspective on life."
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5b2pre | how do mathematicians prove theorems? | I was speaking with my math teacher the other day, and I asked her if mathematicians prove theorems by using examples. She said that they couldn't because there are an infinite amount of examples, so you can't test them all. So how have mathematicians proven theorems true? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5b2pre/eli5_how_do_mathematicians_prove_theorems/ | {
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"There are several different ways of proving a theorem. One of them, that is one of the easiest to explain (I feel) is the so-called \"proof by contradiction\".\n\nIt works as follows: You take the opposite of the theorem you want to prove, and prove that it cannot be true. It is called prove by contradiction because you show that the opposite of the theorem leads to a contradiction. For example, to prove that the square root of two is an irrational number, you assume that it is a rational number, and that then leads to a contradiction.",
"Let's prove that any even number plus one is an odd number:\n\nAn even number is a number you can divide into two equal parts, each of which is a whole number. \n\nA number is odd if it's not even. \n\nIf you add one to an even number, you have to add it to one of the parts, and you clearly can't add it to both parts without splitting it. So now one of the parts is bigger than the other one, and so they clearly can't be equal. So this number can't be even, because there is no way to divide it into two even parts. \n\nAnd there's the proof, the simplest infinite example I could think of. But it demonstrates the basic idea, you don't have to do a separate proof for each example as long as you give instructions that work on every example you *could* choose. There are an infinite number of even numbers, and I was able to prove something for all of them because I only used steps that are valid no matter which even number was chosen. "
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oxokc | Before modern dental hygiene, did everyone have terrible breath all the time, or do our mouths stay pretty clean when not eating so many refined carbs? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/oxokc/before_modern_dental_hygiene_did_everyone_have/ | {
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"Dental Hygienist here: Refined sugar has more to do with caries (cavities) than bad breath. Interestingly enough, caries used to be a disease of the wealthy because they were the only ones who could afford refined sugars, but now it is seen more in the poor because of poor education and it is cheap. \nPeople probably did have bad breath because of calculus (tartar) buildup on the teeth and on the tongue. [Here] (_URL_0_) is a picture of a jawbone from many hundred years ago with dental calculus and periodontal disease. My guess is breath was affected by diet (think onions and garlic).",
"You might be interested to read about the work of Dr. Weston A. Price. He was a dentist who did extensive research on the relationship between diets and oral hygiene in pre-industrial cultures around the world.",
"The vast majority of bad breath is a result of bacteria colonies on the tongue. It can also come from colonies on other parts of the mouth, an infection, or rotting food stuck between teeth.\n\nPeople in the past probably had bad breath from regular (non-harmful) bacterial colonies about as often as they do today. There was probably a higher incidence of bad breath from infections/rotting teeth because such things went untreated more often than they do now, but not by much.\n\nOur mouths stay *incredibly* clean if not exposed to refined carbs. The introduction of sugar into the industrialized diet was also the introduction of modern dental problems. But that's incidental, since it takes a significant amount of infection to cause bad breath.",
"Define bad breath. Do you mean something that would have stood out over the stench of unwashed humans, sewage in the streets, lack of modern garbage/sanitation services, close proximity to livestock, burning fuels (coal, wood, dung), etc.? Or do you mean like what we have after we eat Funyuns? \n\nThe joke is to point out that I'm not sure your question really makes sense in a larger context. Yes, there would have been things that made breath \"bad\" compared to our standards. There is a pretty good list of the causes of bad breath here: _URL_0_. Many of them would have existed at the time. But, would breath have been \"bad\" by standards of that time? Probably impossible to say. Would our breath be considered \"bad\" compared to hygene in the future? Even today people from different cultures (all with access to modern hygene tools) often think that people from other cultures \"stink\" due to things like diet and cultural preferences. ",
"This is a somewhat related question.\n\nIf I fed a baby a diet of nothing but what pre-agricultural humans ate, would that kid grow up to have amazing teeth? IIRC, tooth mechanics went completely downhill once sugars/carbs became a norm in the diet, and that bad teeth doesn't necessarily have to be completely genetic. \n\nI'm missing something here. ",
"On a sort of related note, when I see documentaries or Nat Geo photos of uncivilized African tribes, they seem to have pretty intact, near perfectly white teeth. Is this diet related?",
"Cultural anthropologist here:\nPeople have been using things to clean their teeth for much of human history. Two things that were prevalent all over the world were cloth and sticks. Tooth cloths and tooth powder have been used in Europe for hundreds of years (possibly longer, but cloth rots and doesn't turn up in digs). \n\nBankes' Herbal, 1525 [English]\n\"Also take the timber thereof [rosemary] and burn it to coals and make powder thereof and put it into a linen cloth and rub thy teeth therewith, and if there be any worms therein, it shall slay them and keep thy teeth from all evils.\"\n\nRosemary does have antibacterial properties so I suppose they were onto something there!",
"Miswak has been used for oral hygiene in Arabic countries since ancient times.\nMany people are unfamiliar with it but its actually a branch that is used as a toothbrush and toothpaste , some studies show that they are more effective than what we use today. But in general I recommend trying it, did it once, quite pleasant. _URL_0_\n",
"I was told by a friend that in India they used Neem twigs to clean their teeth for over a 1000 years:\n\n_URL_0_",
"Before modern dental hygiene was also before modern hygiene - people stank so bad generally that bad breath would not have been noticed.",
"Bit off-topic, but the plaque that forms on teeth is an incredibly resilient biofilm, which is the reason you need abrasives. Modern biotech is trying to actually find out how to remove bio-films as like plaque, similar things are found on boats, metals and also catheters which all pose health or economical problems. \n\nEven though what I am saying here is off-topic, it is well worth looking up biofilms just to see how amazing they are, and how different microorganisims actually help each other to stay alive, and resist external pressures (i.e. antibiotics, toxins and cleaning agents such as that in toothpaste)\n\n",
"Depends on the country/culture.\nIn India, people used neem sticks as brushes (chew an end, bitter juice, the chewed end works like brush bristles)\n_URL_0_\n\nYou can also chew some cloves or cardamom to freshen your breath.\nBefore toothpaste, there was tooth powder, a mix of herbs ground to a powder that you would clean with. Basically, put some powder on your left palm, with the right index finger wetted, dip it into the powder and brush with that finger.\n\n",
"My childhood dentist volunteered in remote Pacific Island communities, and he told me:\n\n1) That toothpaste itself is largely irrelevant. It's really all about the brushing motion.\n\n2) Mouthwash is basically \"snake-oil\" and unnecessary.",
"This is actually a really interesting question and I am answering it as a proxy for my mom (currently a doctor but she got her undergrad and masters in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago and Princeton respectively). Apparently there was a study that looked at the teeth of people in really isolated Swiss villages before refined sugars came along and people had beautiful, straight, white teeth (presumably among the majority of the population, I can't say for sure about every individual). Mainly they were surprised at the complete lack of tooth decay present among this population. Well, the reason the study is interesting is because they came back a few decades later (I am seeing my mom later tonight, I'll get specifics then) and peoples teeth were just as messed up as they are among people in modern society (crooked teeth, gingivitis, tooth decay, etc.) The implication being that before the advent of refined sugars and what we could call the \"modern diet\" the tooth issues we have now really weren't a problem. \n\nDisclaimer: Before anyone (assuming it is read, which I doubt) goes crazy about sources and stuff, allow me to edit this post in an hour or two after I see my mom and she'll give me more details and the source. \n\nTL/DR: Before the modern diet we didn't need modern dental hygiene\n\nEDIT 1: Spelling\n\nEDIT 2: So I talked to my mom and apparently the reason people didn't have to worry about their teeth back then is because of a pseudo-shamanistic practice in which they would remove the teeth at birth and replace them with specially carved limestone chips. Apparently there was an entire currency in the mountains of Switzerland that was centered around these tooth-shaped limestone chips. It is theorized that the High-German language (or Swiss German as its colloquially known) is slurred because only the very richest people could afford well fit limestone chips. Thus, the ill-fitting chips would cause pain when spoken and result in an artificial slurring of words and an \"li\" being placed at the ends of some words (this was because often they would need to push the chips back into the tooth-holes while still speaking--go ahead try placing your tongue in such a manner as to mimic placing your tooth back into your tooth sockets). Eventually the language adapted to this slight problem, thus yielding the Swiss German as it is today.",
"I haven't brushed my teeth in years. I floss very casually (maybe once a month). My teeth look great and I haven't heard any complaints about my breath. My diet is pretty clean...I eat mostly raw vegetables, beans and rice, lightly seasoned meat, raw milk, a little fruit juice, tons of water. I believe what we put into our mouths dictates how we need to care for our teeth. I used to get cavities when I was a kid and in highschool even though I brushed regularly...and I ate candy and drank soda and shit like that. Since cleaning up my diet I haven't had a cavity (I see a dentist once a year or so just to check that shit out, not for a cleaning) and my breath is fine.\n\nI get a little tartar sometimes, mostly in the morning and mostly if I'd been drinking alcohol the night before, but I rinse my mouth with water and I'm good to go.\n\nEDIT: I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to post this here since it isn't exactly science but decided that at the least I've formed a hypothesis and tested it on myself and gotten results, which is pretty sciencey to me."
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1kwc66 | why can airlines get away with delayed flights so often? | It seems that my flight is delayed at least half the time I take an airplane, but I can think of no other business that could survive with this track record. If someone you hired was an hour late every other time you needed them, they would be fired! Is it because there are only a few airline companies, or that air travel is difficult and complex, or some other factor? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kwc66/why_can_airlines_get_away_with_delayed_flights_so/ | {
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"Well certainly air travel is hard, but ask yourself this: Have you stopped flying because it's bothersome?",
" > I can think of no other business that could survive with this track record.\n\nCable installation.\n\n\"Someone will be at your house between 8am and 1pm\" < shows up at 5pm > ",
"what do u mean \"get away\"\n\nyou as a customer have every right to not give money to that airline if they have a bad on-time record. \n\nevery flight delayed or cancelled, airlines lose income money. it's not all profits to them, late or not.",
"If it were easy and cheap for an airline to always be on time, they would be. However, some delays are basically inevitable (weather) and others would be expensive to prevent.\n\nFor example, sometimes flights are delayed because the airplane was late arriving where the next flight leaves from. The airlines could have extra airplanes and crews sitting around everywhere just in case a flight is late arriving -- but that would be expensive. Would you pay 50% more for tickets just to reduce the chances that the flight would be late? Unlikely."
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11v8iq | in football, when players have the ball, why do they try to muscle through the middle of the pack instead of going around? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11v8iq/eli5_in_football_when_players_have_the_ball_why/ | {
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"Because the field is 55yards wide. Why run potentially over 50 yards to gain two or three forward yards instead of allowing your blockers to open a hole and get three yards?",
"Also, in rushing plays like you are describing, the role of the offensive line is to \"make a hole\". The play is executed in less than a second, so if the defensive line thwarts this, then the ball carrier slams into a meat wall like a dufus. He's already committed to the route so there are very few backs that can revise successfully if they are cut off.",
"If the strategy goes well, their team mates on the offensive line will have made them a hole in a very specific place. That is the hole that the ball carrier is trying to run through.\n\nAlso, this kind of play is often run when only a few yards are needed. It isn't expected that the ball carrier is going to make a break for 50 yards or more, the team really just needs him to pick up maybe 5 or 7 yards.\n\nLastly, going around takes time...and that gives the opponents time to get into position. When the runner finally stops going laterally and starts breaking down the field, not only will he not have support (because his offensive line can't keep up), he'll face a lot more defenders.",
"Watch a play where a team attempts a reverse. Most times it is very easy to see that there really is no room to run on the outside, and the running back would lose more yards than he would gain if he tried to run to the outside."
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632c39 | My APUSH teacher claims that historians agree that the USS Maine exploded accidentally, however I have heard there is no historical consensus. What do modern historians actually think happened to the USS Maine? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/632c39/my_apush_teacher_claims_that_historians_agree/ | {
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"/u/The_Alaskan made an excellent post summing up the historical discussion around the sinking of the *Maine* [here](_URL_0_). In it, they summarise the evidence for and against the competing theories. While there is a not inconsiderable amount of evidence that suggests that *Maine* might have been sunk by a mine, I consider it more likely that she was sunk by an internal explosion. Coal bunker fires were repeated and frequent issues with contemporary ships. Similarly, accidental magazine explosions were not infrequent aboard warships, with the RN, French and Japanese navies all experiencing them in the years leading up to WWI. Additionally, there was little evidence of an explosion outside of *Maine*'s hull - no spout of water or dead fish on the surface, both signs of an underwater explosion. ",
"I found a rather good article on the subject [here](_URL_0_), though it is unfortunately paywalled. If you personally work/study at a university or have friends or family who do, they may be able to download it for you.\n\nAs /u/The_Alaskan 's post offers a more technical explanation, here is a bit more of a summarized narrative version. \n\nThere does not seem to be an 'open and shut case' for any one explanation of the USS Maine's destruction, but the evidence largely points to it being an accident. Let's walk through the different possibilities and see why they're more or less likely.\n\n1) Intentional or accidental?\n\nDespite so many contemporary records being open to the public, we have yet to find a single shred of evidence that this was either a black flag operation by the US, part of a Spanish plot to destroy the ship, or an act by Cuban guerrillas fighting for independence who wanted the US to intervene. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (a point I'll make more than once here), but as of this moment we still have no proof, so accusations of it being intentional are entirely speculative.\n\n2) Okay, it was accidental. What kind of accident?\n\nHere is where most of the disagreement comes from. There are two main explanations for what caused the Maine's destruction. The earliest is an underwater mine of some kind detonating the ship's munitions stores. The second, and currently the more accepted one, is that it was likely an internal explosion.\n\n3) Why don't we think it was a mine?\n\nAs Alaskan already points out, four investigations took place. The first two (1898, 1911) disagreed on the details, but agreed as to the principal cause of the explosion; an underwater detonation from some kind of mine. Half a century later, in 1975, Admiral Rickover headed a new investigation which suggested an internal explosion. A final investigation was done at the behest of National Geographic, in 1997, and published in its February 1998 issue, which suggests the issue is still a mystery.\n\nThe article I linked to at the beginning makes a very solid case for it being near impossible for it to have been a mine.\n\nFirst, experts weighing in on the forensic evidence from the wreck found that the damage was consistent with an internal detonation and showed no signs of mine damage. Things that were inconsistent with the 'internal explosion' hypothesis, like some parts of the ship being dented inwards instead of outwards, were caused (in the opinion of the 1976 study and the article's author's own research) by explosion physics.\n\nSpecifically, the thermal reaction pressed out in all directions. As the explosion expanded in all directions, the direction of least resistance ended up being upwards (air, therefore less pressure) as opposed to sideways or downwards (water, hence more pressure). This is all happening really, really quickly, mind you. When all the oxygen gets used up by the explosion, this causes a sudden drop in pressure inside of the ship, while water pressure outside of the ship stayed the same. The water pressure then pushed some parts of the ship (which was simultaneously being ripped apart by the explosion) to bend inwards.\n\nTry this experiment. Get an empty soda can and pour about 1/4th of its space up with water. Heat the can over a stove or some other heat source (be careful, don't play with fire lightly, use safe metal tools to grab and handle this). Now grab a large metal bowl and fill it with cold water. The colder, the better. Once the water in the can is boiling, use metal tools of some kind to grab the can and, quick as you can, flip it onto the bowl with cold water. Specifically, make sure all the hot water stays inside the can as you do this and make sure you flip the can upside down, so that the opening is in contact with the cold water. What happens to the can? It implodes. That's roughly what happened to the ship, but because this was part of a larger process, the 'can' (ship) wasn't perfectly sealed, etc., the can you use will be much more deformed than the ship was.\n\nNow, why else can't a mine work? For one thing, no water plume in the water was seen and only one explosion was heard (the munitions stores).\n\nIn addition, how do you plant the damn thing without getting noticed? A mine that could destroy the Maine (an armored ship which was only 3 years old in 1898) would have been enormous. To get it to the Maine you'd have needed a small ship, which would have drawn attention. The alternative would have been to chain it to the bottom of the bay and wait for the Maine to come in. Something which suggests a huge degree of premeditation, but would be even more difficult. How does a team of soldiers plant an enormous aquatic mine in the middle of a well trafficked harbor without grabbing anyone else's attention or accidentally destroying someone else's ship? The Maine itself was, in addition, actually arriving earlier than expected, so if it was the target, the conspirators would have needed to know exactly where it was going, have needed to plant the enormous mine in a very public area with no one noticing, and have known that the ship was arriving early. \n\nAs you can see, every step you take towards the mine theory requires you to make several more leaps of faith in order for things to make sense. \n\nAll this for a mine which we have no evidence ever existed in a plot for which we have found no evidence.\n\n4) So physical evidence points to there being no mine?\n\nBasically. \n\nWorse, it doesn't make any damn sense for one to be there either.\n\nA mine of that size, hitting at that exact spot, would have (according to the experts cited in the article I linked to) either needed to have been taken there on a smaller ship or chained at exactly the right place and height. That implies a conspiracy.\n\nSo, qui bono? Who benefits?\n\nThe Spanish had no reason to destroy the ship, as they already had their hands full with rebellion in Cuba and other colonies, and were not ready for a global naval war with the Americans. And, again, no paper trail.\n\nThe Cubans could have, theoretically, wanted American help fighting the Spanish, but we have absolutely no evidence they planned this and accusing them implies that in the highly militarized capital of the colony (Havana) a team of crack Cuban explosives experts were able to steal through the night like some kind of elite military infiltration team, plan an enormous mine, and get out without leaving a trace. If the Spanish had even had a whiff of this plot they'd have every reason to have shut it down or publicized it. So, no dice.\n\nThe Americans? #MckinleyDid02/15 conspiracy theories aside, we have 0 evidence that this happened. Most of the objections to the Cubans being behind it also apply. The leaps of scope of the operation required to believe in a conspiracy like this make it unlikely in the extreme.\n\n5) So, what was behind the internal explosion?\n\nEvidence points to the munitions stores being set off. What set them off? One explanation is that the coal furnace (steam powered coal fueled vessel, remember) which was near the munitions stores heated them to the point that they went off. There were barriers between the furnace and the munitions meant to stop this kind of accident, but the same kind of design flaw had claimed similar vessels in the past and is consistent with the evidence we have."
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1t7szg | how oral disease didn't kill everything before proper dental care. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t7szg/eli5_how_oral_disease_didnt_kill_everything/ | {
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"Heres your answer. It did. Primary reason of death was dental related before dental hygene was found.",
"It probably did! People with a genetic tendency for oral disease regularly died thereby keeping the average genetic pool dentally healthy. Only when dental care was discovered, the genetic pool would have diversified to let dental diseases be more common."
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3hpr9p | how are deleted files recovered from "empty" memory storage | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hpr9p/eli5_how_are_deleted_files_recovered_from_empty/ | {
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"Files systems in cards and hard drives use 'pointers' to know where to find stored data. When you just delete files, those pointers are only taken away but most often the data remains.\n\nWhen you format, this is when the file system knows to take those pointers and the data and get rid of it.\n\nIn data recovery it's usually called an 'undelete' when recovering those files."
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3pkmqc | the consequences of breaking a treaty by legalizing weed. | The newly elected canadian government wants to legalize pot. I read some bad journalism about how there may me consequences to breaking a bunch of treaties.
What are the possible consequences? Worst case. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pkmqc/eli5_the_consequences_of_breaking_a_treaty_by/ | {
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"The worst possible consequences are probably that Canada might have difficulty in the future with signing new treaties because other countries might perceive them as being untrustworthy, and unsure whether Canada can be relied on to honor the terms of treaties. \n\nIf legal Canadian pot starts flowing into America, then the American government might get mad, but that's already happening with medicinal marijuana from British Columbia, and the consequences haven't been too severe. Plus America already looks it's begun a slow turn towards legalization as well, but who knows, it could be temporary.\n\nI don't think there will be any serious impacts besides those, certainly nothing as serious as international sanctions. "
]
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[]
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7fudfc | why do your gums and teeth feel weird when you don't get enough sleep? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7fudfc/eli5_why_do_your_gums_and_teeth_feel_weird_when/ | {
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"I've never felt this. Is this really a thing?",
"Sometimes a sleepy brain makes you hallucinate or feel strange. I get an itching/twitchy/cramping sensation in the gums behind my two bottom front teeth sometimes. It's weird.",
"Ur prolly stressed and clenching ur jaw. Try wearing a mouth guard when you sleep and maybe that will help."
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g0s7e0 | cavities, how does it works and how toothpaste prevents it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g0s7e0/eli5_cavities_how_does_it_works_and_how/ | {
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"My understanding is that the sugars you eat accumulate and for a thick paste we call plaque. That plaque builds up and is acidic enough to eat through the enamel on your teeth. As it gradually dissolved the enamel, it forms little pits, pockets, or holes that we call cavities. First it’s not deep enough to cause much problems, but eventually these can expose your tooth’s nerve which causes great pain or even kill the tooth, allowing it to fall out. \n\nBrushing (and flossing) your teeth regularly is more important than using toothpaste, but brushing with toothpaste is best of all. Toothpaste acts as an abrasive to really help break up the sugary goo on your teeth. You don’t have to eat sugar...there is sugar naturally in many foods, and not only sugar can cause plaque. \n\nSo imagine that eating food is like digging your hands in caustic dirt. When you’re done, you need to wash your hands (brush your teeth) to get the acid off, or it’ll wear through your skin (teeth). But I’m not a dentist, just a dad.",
"The mouth is filled with more than 700 different bacterial species. Over time, if undisturbed, this bacterium can form plaque deposits in and around the teeth. When we eat too much sugar certain sugar loving species get out of control and create an environment that causes your tooth enamel to break down. This is why we need to brush the plaque away...toothpaste makes it easier but isn't necessary, some people use baking soda and make it into a paste.",
"Your teeth are made out of calcium phosphates held together by hydroxyl (OH) ions in a specific structure. This is called hydroxyapatite.\n\nThe hydroxyl groups in hydroxyapatite is very susceptible to acid attacks via the food you eat or via the waste products of bacteria in your mouth. Acids dissolve hydroxyapatite easily for this reason, leaving small pores for bacteria to grow on and wear away even more. The pores inherently gain surface area, making it pretty easy to grow. The bacteria in these pores sometimes dig in deeper and deeper, causing cavities.\n\nToothpaste contains fluoride ions. These fluoride ions replace lost OH ions in ionized hydroxyapatite to create fluoroapatite. Fluoroapatite has a higher energy of dissociation compared to hydroxyapatite, meaning that it takes more to break it apart and more resistant at the same pH. Fluoroapatite, in this way, \"remineralizes\" a very small surface layer of your teeth and provides some protection until it is worn off."
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j3s55 | li5 can someone please explain ram, memory, processor, etc? | Basically when I look to buy a computer I understand bigger numbers are better. But I don't understand what those components like ram, memory, and processor actually do. The only one i get is hard drive space. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3s55/li5_can_someone_please_explain_ram_memory/ | {
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"RAM is where things are sitting when they are running - the more RAM you have the better programs work when they are open and running.\n\nMemory (I'm assuming hard drive) - is where programs are installed, the more memory you have the more shit you can install (BTW: the term memory, by itself, is usually assumed to be RAM).\n\nProcessor: This is how fast your computer can figure stuff out. Your processor is in charge of launching a program, getting the important parts stuffed in RAM so they can be grabbed quickly.\n\nSome other useful terms:\n\nGPU: This is a special type of CPU, whose entire focus is drawing things on screen. It's much faster at math than your CPU is. CPUs have to worry about all sorts of other things as well - the GPU is a hardcore mathematician.\n\nModem: This is a fake phone, it makes phone calls for your computer.\n\nNIC: Network Interface Card (also called an Ethernet card) - this is typically used when you have cable/DSL and allows you to join a local network of systems. In your home, this is probably just between your computer and the cable/DSL modem or a router.\n\nRouter: This is like the mailman for your apartment complex. He gets all the traffic and stuffs it in the correct box.\n\nSwitch: This is like your USPS regional distribution center. They help filter the traffic down to a specific region, but they aren't too worried about which exact mailbox it goes into. They just want to get it into the general area and let the mailmen take care of it.",
"This is uber simple: \n\nLets pretend food represents \"work to be done on a computer\" So opening up email, watching naughty videos, etc. \n\nSo first you have something you want to open, a file. This is the raw ingredients are the grocery store. its a bit of the pain to get to, takes some time but its alllll there in the big store. \nSo now you double click on said file. This is like driving those things home to your fridge. Its much closer to where you live and process the raw food items. \nSo now its open but instead of displaying how its really stored in the raw, it needs to be processed. The processor is your stove. \nNow imagine you have multiple stoves and multiple fridges. think of ALL the food you could cook. \n\n",
"The hard drive stores lots of information, but it takes a long time to read. \n \nRAM and memory are the same thing. It stores less information, but can be read much faster than a hard drive, so it is used to store information for running programs. \n \nWhen you run a program, the computer will constantly need to look up information for that it, whether it be photos, music, graphics, etc. The faster the computer can access that information, the faster the computer can react to your actions. Split seconds are noticeable.\n\nThe processor handles the data behind the scenes, and does a ton of simple things like adding and multiplying numbers really fast. The average processor is plenty fast today, so the biggest impact on speed that you will notice is the amount of memory/RAM you have. The numbers you see advertised for processors make no difference.\n \nWhen you try to run more than one program at once, the computer tries to load those programs and all their data (music, graphics, etc) into RAM. If you don't have enough RAM the computer has to store some of that data on the hard disk instead. You could notice the slowness when you switch between programs because the computer needs to stop, make room in RAM by saving some to the hard disk, read the program you want from the hard disk into RAM, and then it can display the content you want. \n \nThe biggest number that matters is RAM. Luckily RAM is pretty cheap.",
"Let's imagine you're working in an office (long shot, I know...)\n\nYou (**the CPU**) are the brains of the operation. You're responsible for taking in information and deciding how to deal with that information. You're bright, with an IQ of 100 (or CPU speed of 1 Gigahertz), and can do your job effectively and quickly because of your specialization in skills needed by your job. You have a coworker who was hired because of having an IQ of 115...on paper they look smarter (and faster), but perhaps this coworker lacks the specialized skills you have, and is therefore no more efficient that you.\n\nYour desk (**the Ram**) represents the temporary workspace where documents, projects, pictures of your family, and anything else you'd like to have 'open' in front of you would exist. The bigger your desk (i.e. the more RAM), generally the more you can do at one time without needing to slow down and reshuffle all the papers and such on your desk. Bill Gates would have a [very tiny desk](_URL_0_) these days.\n\nYour filing cabinet (**the Storage drive** i.e. Harddrive, etc.) represents where you store all of your documents, pictures, record albums, and anything else for long term storage when they are not being used. Today you work on a letter for a colleague, and place the letter in your filing cabinet when you're finished writing for revising or sending later.\n\nYour eyes and vision (**the Graphics Card and Display**) represent how much of and how clearly you can see documents, images, or anything else visually. If you've got clear, healthy vision (i.e. a high resolution display) you may be able to view multiple documents on your desk simultaneously, without needing to pull that single document close into focus.\n\nAlmost as important with selecting a job is being comfortable with how it feels to perform the job. With a new computer, hands on experience with things like the keyboard, trackpad, physical size and build quality can make a big difference up-front and in the long run...",
"Imagine your computer is an office where someone sits at a desk working out the answers to problems. Like solving math equations, looking up the meaning of a word, etc.\n\nProblems are written down on pieces of paper and placed on the computer's desk. RAM, or memory, is the size of the desk. The bigger the desk, the more pieces of paper the computer can see at once.\n\nDisk, or storage, is a filing cabinet down the hall in another room. If the computer runs out of desk space, or has to look up a piece of paper that isn't on its desk, it has to get up, walk down the corridor, and riffle through the filing cabinet. The more storage, the bigger the cabinet, the more paper it can hold. This cabinet can hold paper for short or long periods of time. For example, if a computer runs out of desk space, it can stuff some paper in the cabinet to free up desk space.\n\nProcessors have a couple of different aspects. Processor speed relates to how fast the computer can solve a given problem. A faster processor means it will be able to solve problems faster.\n\nThe processor's cache size determines how much of a problem the computer can keep in its head: it's like trying to remember a phone number. Some people have such a good short-term memory, they only have to look at a number once to dial it. Some people, like me, can only comfortably remember three or four digits at a time.\n\nIf a processor is \"dual core\" or \"quad core\", this means there are actually multiple people working at the desk. Dual core means two, quad core means four. They have to share the same desk and filing cabinet, but can work on different pieces of paper at the same time.\n\n\"HyperThreading\" is a fancy marketing term for having an ambidextrous person who can work on two pieces of paper at once: one for each hand. Only, they don't really... think of it like a really, really hyperactive person switching between two bits of paper so fast it *looks* like they're doing two things at once.\n\nNow, bigger numbers usually mean better, but all these things interact with one another in various ways. For example, you might have a computer that can add numbers together really, really fast; but if it has a tiny desk, it will spend all its time walking back and forth between its desk and the filing cabinet.\n\nIn the end, you want a computer where the cabinet is close enough to keep a steady stream of work flowing on to the desk, a big enough desk to hold it all, and a processor fast enough to solve the problems. (A fast disk, enough RAM to keep everything live without having to swap to disk and a fast enough processor to keep stuff moving.)\n\n**Bonus component**\n\nGPU (Graphics Processing Unit): this is actually *another person* working at another desk. If the computer wants pictures painted, it describes the picture on a piece of paper, then carries the piece of paper over to the GPU's desk. The GPU then paints the picture to a canvas and shows it to other people on the computer's behalf.\n\nIt's easiest to think of a GPU as a computer that specialises in painting pictures; many of the same components exist on a GPU.\n\nSome computers have more than one GPU, in which case you have more than one artist collaborating on the same painting.\n\nSome computers have an \"integrated GPU\". If the phrase \"Intel GMA\" is anywhere in your computer's specification, that's what it has. This is where the GPU, instead of its own office, is locked in the closet with a packet of crayons, so it doesn't do very good work. Thankfully, this is changing and integrated GPUs are being given bigger offices and better paint brushes."
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1isn6j | Why Brazil was an empire in the 1800s? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1isn6j/why_brazil_was_an_empire_in_the_1800s/ | {
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"While your question is very open-ended, I think I can explain both why it was politically an Empire and an empiric power in the world. Brazil, already the economic center of the Portuguese Empire, became it's political center in 1807, when the Royal Court was forced to leave Portugal to escape conflicts with Napoleon's army. When King Joao VI was called back to Portugal in 1821, he left his son, Pedro, as regent King of Brazil. On September 7, 1822, Pedro's *Grito de Ipiranga* declared Brazil an independent nation and the Empire of Brazil was formed, with Pedro I as its ruler. \n\nA rise in liberalism among the Brazilian people had caused tension with Portuguese rulers and support for Pedro to separate himself from his father. Joao, back in Portugal, supported his son's efforts to gain the support of the Brazilian people through what he considered an empty gesture. When he died, Pedro would inherit the Portuguese throne and the Empire would be whole again. Therefore, the independence movement went without conflict. This was a rarity in the New World and allowed Brazil's economic structure to not only stay intact, but to thrive as they transitioned to independence. (Ultimately, the Brazilian Constitution prohibited Pedro from combing the two thrones again and he ended up abdicating both, leading to his son, Pedro II, ruling Brazil, and his daughter, Maria II, ruling Portugal)\n\nBrazil's source of power was its plantation exports. Throughout Brazil's history, it never ranked below 3rd in the world in sugar production, which was its main export until the 1830s. Coffee was brought in from the Caribbean in the 1780s and continuously grew until it overtook sugar as the primary export in the 1830s. The domestic center was supported by a growth in the cow and mule market throughout the century. In addition, the Amazon supplied Brazil with the largest source of natural rubber in the world. This was not a significant export until the invention of the Velocipede in the 1870s, which created a demand for rubber. Soon after, the rise of the automobile would make rubber Brazil's most profitable resource to date. \n\nWith such a large resource base and peaceful independence movement, Brazil was consistently the most successful and stable Latin American country in the 19th century. The Brazilian Empire came to an end in 1889, when a relatively peaceful military coup created the First Republic of Brazil. Brazil's economic success would continue until after World War I, when rubber production in Asia eliminated Brazil's monopoly on the export, but that's a story for another time."
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6doojf | Why did the "zoot suit riots" happen? Who was affected by it? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6doojf/why_did_the_zoot_suit_riots_happen_who_was/ | {
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"I can certainly go into more detail if you like, but I've written about the zoot suit riots previously in response to this question:\n\n[Are there any interesting comparisons to be drawn between the 'Zoot Suit riots' of 1940s USA and the popular reaction to the 'Stilyagi' of 1950s USSR?](_URL_0_)"
]
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5h2xp3/are_there_any_interesting_comparisons_to_be_drawn/day42gv/"
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3kpmnq | how do they predict the life span and failure rates of new products? | For instance say you invent the light bulb, how would the company know the expected life of the unit? They can't just leave it on for years and wait for it to burn out. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kpmnq/eli5_how_do_they_predict_the_life_span_and/ | {
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"Torture testing.\n\nIn the specific case of a light bulb, filament failure typically occurs during the initial surge when the circuit is energized.\n\nThe test would likely be repeatedly turning the bulb on and off until failure. If it fails after 20,000 cycles and bulbs usually get turned on 4 times a day, the manufacturer will rate it for 5,000 days of \"average\" use.\n\nThey'll probably sell it at 3,500 or 4,000 days so that most bulbs in slightly harsh use will still hit the target."
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18s34e | Could someone give me a more in depth look into the use of DNA as a means of digital storage? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18s34e/could_someone_give_me_a_more_in_depth_look_into/ | {
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"DNA is comprised of a series of four sub units: Adenine, Cytosine, Thymine and Guanine (ACTG). DNA is two strands and, while the bases can be in any order, A always pairs with T, C always pairs with G, so one strand is always the negative of the other. If one strand it AACGCCT the other will be TTGCGGA. Since you have 4 sub units, you can arbitrarily decide for example A is 0 (00 binary), C is 1 (01 binary), T is 2 (10 binary), and G is 3 (11 binary) to produce a quaternary code. So if you have the binary sequence 00110110, you could code it as AGCT. The way a cell works is similar but more complex because DNA codes for amino acids. Here is the DNA code used in cells _URL_0_\n\nNow, since we can code any binary sequence into a DNA sequence, we can store any binary sequence. We can also determine the DNA sequence of DNA using sequencing machines which are widely available. This is all there is to using DNA as digital storage.\n\nDespite all the excitement over that news, it is not a practical system for storage, except, perhaps, in spy novels. Mind you, there is always the opportunity to store a message in a life form for discovery in a few million years. Who knows? Maybe there is a message out there already ..."
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v8pg4 | Is it possible for Special Relativity to cause distinct events to occur in different inertial frames of reference? | Using the usual train example: If an event, e.g. a computer turning on, is triggered by the simultaneous impact of photons on 2 plates at the end of [this](_URL_1_) train carriage which is travelling at a relativistic velocity, would the event not happen from an external observer's frame of reference? I believe the light would not hit simultaneously for [them](_URL_0_). So would you get a Schroedinger's cat-type phenomenon or am I misunderstanding something? Thanks for any answers! | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/v8pg4/is_it_possible_for_special_relativity_to_cause/ | {
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"This is a paradox only because the statement \"hits the plates at the same time\" is not a relativistically meaningful statement. Whenever dealing with simultaneity you have to also mention a reference frame. In this case, the most reasonable statement to make is \"the computer turns on if the photons hit the plates at the same time as measured by the computer sitting in the train.\" Or, to be more precise, what actually triggers the computer? A signal would have to propagate back to the computer (or power supply) from each plate when the impact happened. And then, the computer would turn on if the signals reached the power supply at the same time. When dealing with this scenario, no matter the reference frame you measure from, the signals will either reach the power supply at the same time, or they won't. If they do, the computer turns on (in all reference frames) and if they don't, the computer remains off (in all reference frames). "
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5r9ku9 | can the us president be impeached? and if so, under what grounds? | I have watched the TV series 24, and IIRC there was something called the 25th amendment (or something like that, can't remember exactly what it was) that they used to remove the president from office.
In the show, they used majority vote of the cabinet members to decide the outcome of the impeachment. But it seemed that the process of impeachment could be initiated by one cabinet member, if he or she thinks the president has gone bat shit crazy.
Does such a thing actually exist within US law? And if it does, what would the president have to do, for someone to invoke this law/amendment? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5r9ku9/eli5_can_the_us_president_be_impeached_and_if_so/ | {
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"Article II, Section 4 allows for the impeachment of the president. It requires a majority of the house to impeach him, and a 2/3s majority in the Senate to remove him from office. This removal is permanent. \n\nThe 25th amendment allows for the vice president and the cabinet, or the president himself, to declare the president to be unfit for office. This can be temporary or permanent. The only time it has happened were twice during the Bush Adminstration, when Bush needed to go under anesthesia for a colonoscopy. Bush declared himself unfit, went under anesthesia, woke up, then declared himself to be fit again. \n\nEDIT: The reason that this was added to the Constitution is because in 1919 Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke and spent the last two years of his administration as an invalid while his second wife ran the country. "
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qlf8s | I have a chance to ask Stephen Hawking a question next week. What's a question that you'd like Stephen Hawking to answer? | I posted this onto r/askreddit but I honestly didn't like the questions very much. Was told to come to this subreddit (didn't know it existed).
I'll pick and submit the best question. If Stephen Hawking decides to answer the question, I'll post the reply by next week.
Ask away! | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qlf8s/i_have_a_chance_to_ask_stephen_hawking_a_question/ | {
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"Ask him if he believes that cryonic suspension is a feasible way to bridge the gap between the current state of medical technology and the future in which radical life extentension is possible. \n\nHe has stated that he believes that aliens could use cryonic suspension to allow them to travel across the vastness of space but he has never commented publicly about human use of cryonic suspension to my knowledge. This seems strange to me given his own medical challenges. ",
"Ask him what he thinks about the coming technological \"singularity\" and if, as futurists like Ray Kurzweil imagine, the term \"humanity\" is headed for a radical redefinition in the next one-hundred years.",
"Ask him:\n\nHow are we supposed to encourage younger students to pursue advanced degrees in science when the job prospects are so shitty? Only one in ten astrophysics PhDs will be able to get a permanent faculty position - why should they devote so much of their lives to this if they won't even be able to do it in a financially secure way? How do we deal with this?\n\n(Someone [asked a similar question in the Neil deGrasse Tyson AMA](_URL_0_), but it got ignored. I thought it was a really good question, so I stole it.)\n\nEDIT: There's been some confusion. I'm referring to permanent positions **within the field**. Physics/astrophysics PhDs are still very employable in industry, but that is not the reason that most people lay down huge chunks of their lives to get a PhD.",
"Ask him this: suppose your friend is in orbit around a black hole, and you are falling into it. From your friend's point of view, because of time dilation you never actually reach the black hole, and you just continue to be redshifted and approach its event horizon until, eventually, it evaporates from Hawking radiation. However, from your perspective, you pass the event horizon in a finite amount of time, and continue to fall towards the singularity.\nNow, since from your friend's point of view, your local time dilation approaches zero as you approach the event horizon (ie you approach a state of no time passing), from your point of view, your friend's time dilation will approach infinity (it will go infinitely fast). Thus you can watch him orbit the black hole as many times as you please.\nBut from his point of view he orbits the black hole a finite number of times before it evaporates! This is clearly not physically realistic, since you should be in agreement on any physical event up to Lorentz invariance (note the black hole will not evaporate in your reference frame, since you quickly pass the event horizon; you are in the black hole's reference frame, and time is at a normal speed for you)",
"Dont ask him this because I'm 90% sure its been asked and answered before, but how the fuck did he manage to get through life in his current state? How did his wife stay with him through all of that? I've been through so much less than him and still felt (at my weakest) that death would be welcome, but he's managed to power through everything and even managed to be looked up to. What an amazing man.",
"Ask him whether he thinks that the warp drive could be a reality on the next 50 years (this isn't just a random question:\n\nWhen Stephen Hawking guest starred on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode \"Descent\", he was taken on a guided tour of the set. Pausing in front of the warp core set piece, he remarked, \"I'm working on that\".[3]",
"I actually had the same opportunity, but, unfortunately, I was about four or five years old when I met him. I now wish I was older when I met him, and, if given the opportunity, would most likely ask him of his thoughts on the dangers of technology becoming too prominent in our everyday lives. Although this isn't necessarily a science-bound question, it would be intriguing to see his reply.",
"amount of knowledge required to get into in any high-level scientific field and actually move it forward is becoming ever bigger.\n\ndo you think we'll ever hit a limit of our mental capacity, and struggle greatly to move science forward?",
"My comment will probably be lost at this point, but I honestly want to say - Ask him what YOU want to ask. It's your opportunity to talk to him! This is your chance to possibly have one of your greatest questions answered! Don't just shove this opportunity off on reddit!",
"At the end of \"A Brief History in Time,\" Hawking has included a brief--very brief--bio on three prominent scientists: Einstein, Newton, and Galileo. He gives some heartwarming anecdote for Einstein, and then he summarily rips Newton a new one. It is actual comical. I'd love to ask Dr. Hawking how he came to include those brief bios at the end of his book. They don't seem to fit in with anything, and they come out of nowhere."
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fjdml5 | Was Gandhi really racist against whites? | I’ve heard some claims that Gandhi was racist against whites and had instigated a race riot which killed an American named William Dohortey. How true are these allegations? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fjdml5/was_gandhi_really_racist_against_whites/ | {
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"The allegations is the central argument of G.B. Singh's *Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity* (2004). Singh is neither a trained historian nor an authority within the field. In short, Singh argues that Gandhi used 'tactical racism against whites' and that he played a role in the death of William Francis Doherty, who was killed in the Bombay Riot of 1921, and subsequently tried to hush it up. The evidence that Singh calls upon is a sworn statement that Doherty's widow, Annette H. Doherty, made in Los Angeles in 1929 which says:\n\n > This was during the visit of the Prince of Wales to India, when Gandhi was at the height of his popularity as a saint and political leader, and had, through his violent speeches against the British, worked his followers into a frenzy of race hatred. My husband was probably mistaken for a Britisher when he was murdered by Gandhi’s followers.\n\nSingh applies nothing of the source criticism which we would expect out of an undergraduate student in history. He takes Doherty's account at face value, not questioning what her motives could possibly have been nor the fact that it was made eight years after the fact. While Gandhi and Sarojini Naidu, both mentioned in her statement, were present at in Bombay at the time and likely got in touch with Doherty after the death of her husband, there really isn't anything to prove that Gandhi tried to buy her or anyone else's silence. In fact, this is the only real primary source we have about this particular element in the tragic story of William Doherty. That William Doherty died in the riot is confirmed by contemporary newspaper accounts, for example, but that he would have been murdered because of Gandhi's racist rhetoric and that he would have helped covered it up is not supported by any other primary sources. Newspaper accounts, and even statements by men like Lord Northcliffe, do not mention racism, but they do blame the followers of Gandhi for the murder. Lord Northcliffe, for example, states that, \"Apparently the peaceful speeches of Gandhi [...] have the direct effect of stirring up the natives to crime\". The fact that the majority of who died in the riots were not white men, but Indian men is completely overlooked. In fact, as Professor Claude Van Tyne wrote, \"In vain Gandhi had run wildly about the streets urging the rioters to go home. He was powerless when the mob's blood was up.\"\n\nIn fact, the oldest secondary source that have mentioned the case of Doherty (*After Mother India* by Harry H. Field, 1929) is likely where Singh is drawing his information from, since it reproduces Annette H. Doherty's statement in full and takes an equally uncritical stance towards it. In fact, comparing the two makes me think that Singh didn't do more research into the case than what Field had already done in 1929. This is typical of Singh's approach to research, in which he actively interrogates any and all sources that would question his own conclusions while paying lip-service to even the most basic of source criticism for sources that support his own statements. For example, if indeed Gandhi had \"worked his fellows into a frenzy of race hatred\", then what did he supposedly say? Why was the supposed racial aspects of Gandhi's discourse not reported in the contemporary press? Why doesn't Lord Northcliffe, in his 1922 statement about the murder of Doherty, mention anything about racism? Why isn't Mrs. Doherty's own racism interrogated any further? \n\nThere are many contradictions and the fact that no scholar has taken this seriously, unlike Gandhi's early racism in the 1910s, shows how little credibility there is to Singh's argument."
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1jsxba | Why are certain generals like Zukhov, von Moltke the Elder, Lee and Grant considered geniuses? How is the legacy of a general evaluated? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jsxba/why_are_certain_generals_like_zukhov_von_moltke/ | {
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"I'm going to address this just in regards to Zhukov, as its what I feel most qualified to comment on.\n\nThe legacy of Zhukov in the Soviet Union was very much evaluated through the lens of the political climate at the given time. Following the end of the war, Zhukov was pretty much at his absolute pinnacle when he rode through Moscow in the victory parade. According to some, this is when Stalin started to become wary of him, seeing how popular he was and this threatened him, although it is perhaps anecdotal. Regardless, Stalin was threatened by him and Zhukov had a very sudden fall from grace in early 1946 and sent to Odessa, a backwater. In typical Soviet style, accusations came from all sides, everything from how involved he was in military operations to that he lived to lavish a lifestyle. Just before Stalin's death, it seemed that Zhukov was going to be rehabilitated, and regardless, after he died, Zhukov very much was and served for a time as Defense Minister under Khrushchev, only to again suffer a fall from grace in the late '50s, forced into retirement because one again he was seen as a threat. He was *again* rehabilitated somewhat under Brezhnev.\n\nNow, the purpose of this brief biographical sketch is to demonstrate just how much of a roller-coaster Zhukov's life was in the post-war era. Just at the end of the war, he was absolutely lionized as the savior of the Soviet Union, second only to Stalin himself. Zhukov was credited with stalling the attack on Leningrad, repulsing the Germans at Moscow, saving Stalingrad, the victory at Kursk, and of course leading the drive west that ended in Berlin, which is to say, pretty much most of the notable successes of the Red Army in the War. But when he fell from favor, he was practically erased from the history books! Other commanders came out to say that he had been less involved in decisions than previously credited, or else not responsible at all! The official history of the Great Patriotic War was written during one of his \"out periods\" (following his ouster in '57 I believe, but I'm doing this from memory, don't have my books w/ me to double check), so his barely even gets a mention. Reading it would give the impression he was a relatively minor staff officer.\n\nDuring that same period though, he began to write his memoirs in a hope to set the record state, although at the time there was little hope of getting them published. It should of course be noted that are probably just as biased in the other direction. It wasn't until the '60s and his second rehabilitation that publication became an option and they were very well received, which I think speaks to the fact that despite his official erasure from the history books, it didn't erase the memory that the people had of him just after the war. His key role in the victory became more and more accepted - again - after that, and he remains a very popular figure in the post-Soviet era for that role. The large statue of him in Moscow was only put there in 1995, which speaks to this, using him as the emblem for victory over Germany.\n\nOf course the underlying question is whether he deserves the praise at all! I think my sympathies might be ever so slightly apparent on that number, but much of the issue there is that, due to the above highs and lows, there is a LOT of contradiction into just what his legacy was. A number of generals, such as Rokossovsky, claimed that Zhukov was credited for things he should have been (in that case, how involved he was at Kursk), and of course even the 'official' records are mixed due to the Soviet habit of trying to rewrite history, so to speak. If you take the picture of Zhukov in 1945, I think it is utterly self-evident as to why he was considered a genius at the time. He was portrayed as one of the few men Stalin trusted with military matters, his right hand, and the one who had a finger in practically every Soviet victory. This was the Zhukov seen by the West. Being a personable fellow when needed didn't hurt, and the other Allied commanders, such as Ike and Monty, were charmed by him and thought very highly. It also is the image that started to return in the USSR in the late 60s on-wards, although maybe slightly toned down.\n\nAnd of course there is the reputation as a harsh, uncaring commander who didn't care about the lives of his men and just threw them into the grinder that he picked up. To be fair, it isn't *totally* undeserved to say he was willing to trade men for geographic gains, but it is very simplistic to say the least. The biggest root of this is probably Operation Mars, easily his most notable defeat, and the action that best fits the meat-grinder image, and in the pop-history at least, this kind of became the image of what Soviet operations were in general (thanks *Enemy at the Gates*), so people think that Zhukov was a one trick pony. Hardly though. He was an adept tactician, which at the least are attested to in the victories which were uncontestedly his (Khalkhin Gol for example), and his writings show a distaste for the callous sacrificing of men. Its hard to pick the true narrative. Even biographies I've seen (Geoffrey Roberts' otherwise good one) sometimes split the difference and just offer both (or three +).",
"Looking at Lee and Grant (I am less familiar with the others), I think we can begin to understand how difficult this question is to answer. Both Lee and Grant are considered great generals, but for a host of different reasons. Lee was a masterful tactician--he made more with less and was able to win some spectacular victories (see [Chancellorsville](_URL_0_) as an example). Grant on the other hand was a strategist--he understand exactly what Lincoln wanted and how to accomplish it. For example, at a time when many Union generals wanted to punish those rebels, Grant understood them as Americans and that they were not \"others\" but belonged with the Union. Although his focus is on Lincoln, Eliot Cohen talks about how Grant was the perfect general for Lincoln in his book *Supreme Command*.\n\nNow, in addition to all of this, like Georgy_k_Zhukov talks about with regards to Zhukov, politics has a lot to do with it. Lee is championed by the south as the model of the southern gentleman--refined, professional, and polite. He graduated West Point without a single demerit. And if you accept the Lost Cause arguments, Lee was a fantastic general who was doomed by the confederacies underdevelopment (I would say the Lost Cause is more of a political than historical, but that's why it's a good example here). At the same time, Grant is remembered as the general who helped end a war and brought the United States back together. \n\nThe last point, is that both generals are products of the Civil War, which holds a very special and emotional place in the hearts of many Americans. And for that reason, I think it is easier to idolize Civil War generals than American leaders from other wars. When we remember Grant or Lee, we not only remember the general but the war as well. I think it also helps explain why we remember less of the generals from World War I or Vietnam--the wars themselves hold a different place in American memory.",
"Georgy's breakdown of the Zhukov example (which is fantastic) is the best possible example, in that it lays bare an aspect of military history that it is normally almost impossible to dissect.\n\nNamely, that nowhere is history written by the victors more than in the description of the generals who won those victories.\n\nUp until extremely recently in human history, there has -never- been a general for whom hagiography and biography have been meaningfully distinct. The man who won the battle is, almost without exception, the man who will have the would-be historian executed if they don't sing his praises well enough. And even now, the victorious (or even not-entirely-defeated- lookin' at you, recent graduates of Afghanistan) general can trust on his return from the war to be lauded as a hero regardless of, y'know. How well they actually did their job.\n\nZhukov is interesting because we can look at a general's legacy being manufactured, torn down, and remanufactured in real time, and through it understand that the thing that separates a military genius from a commonplace military mind is just how useful treating them as a genius is to their political handlers.\n\nJulius Caesar was a military genius in the estimation of one Julius Caesar. It was extremely politically advantageous for him to market himself as such.\n\nMilitary history is the most susceptible of all branches of history to Great Man Theory. This is largely because its chief characters all had a whole hell of a lot tied up both personally and politically in saying \"the Great Man exists, and you're lookin' at him.\"",
"When it comes to Zhukov, and the Second World War in general, there are and will be many competing versions for all countries involved. The actions and legacies of Patton, Rommel, Montgomery, Zhukov, etc., will constantly be evaluated and reevaluated. Zhukov is considered a 'genius' because of the propaganda that was created around his image and abilities, the same applies to the other commanders mentioned above (none more so than Rommel). WWII was a conflict entrenched in propaganda and it seeped through to the grassroots level. 'Genius' commanders worked for both sides since they gave one side the ability to laud their own and the other to find an excuse for why they lost (although the Germans counted on other factors just as much, like the weather and world conspiracies, numbers of enemy troops, tanks, planes, artillery, etc.). \n\nThe image of Zhukov today is a byproduct of a lack of literature on the war written within the Soviet Union and outside of it until the death of Stalin. The only thing anyone could read about the war were pamphlets or minor works published by/about Stalin and his role in the war. But Zhukov became a household name throughout the war and his participation in the victory parade so that when his name came back into the limelight after Stalin's death it was easily recognized and avowed. And if you look at Zhukov's actions and victories, they speak for themselves. \n\n* He was the commanding officer at Khalkhin Gol against the Japanese in 1939 where the Red Army was victorious and gave the Japanese another reason to forgo major future actions against the Soviet Union.\n\n* He participated in war games before the beginning of the German invasion and won as both the Germans and the Soviets, thus gaining his position on the eve of the war.\n\n* He helped with the defense of Leningrad (although that's been debated by the argument that the Germans by that point in time wanted to encircle the city anyway, not take it).\n\n* He orchestrated the counterattack around Moscow in the winter of 1941 and 1942 and, unfortunately often overlooked, he wanted to concentrate on destroying Army Group Center solely while Stalin thought the Germans were about to collapse and ordered offensives from Murmansk to the Black Sea, along the entire front, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties and little to no gains for the Red Army.\n\n* He helped with the defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, although that was greatly the result of his working with Vasilevsky, and his actions during Operation Mars in the north are still disputed. There is enough evidence to suspect that the actions around Rzhev were made to help keep German troops from reinforcing Army Group B around Stalingrad though, so unfortunately this was, similar to what happened in 1941, part of Zhukov's 'ruthless' ability to sacrifice tens of thousands in order to save tens of millions.\n\n* He was Stavka representative for the majority of the rest of the war helping fronts with their operations, be it around Kursk and the follow up operations, or Bagration, up until the defeat at Berlin, before which he was given command of the 1st Belorussian Front (which upset Rokossovsky, who thought he was 'demoted' to the 2nd Belorussian front because he was Polish). His minor debacle outside Berlin at the Seelow Heights is usually highlighted, but the casualties of the Berlin operation in general were quite low compared to casualties the Red Army sustained in other operations.\n\nAll in all Zhukov deserves a lot of credit for his actions but there's plenty of room for accusations. Unfortunately, he was involved in a genocidal campaign initiated by the Germans and did his best from 1941 on to defeat an enemy surrendering to was out of the question. He also operated under constant supervision, either from commissars or Stalin, and was able to stand up to at least the latter and prove his worth through German defeats. He could be crude, rude, heartless, and there are numerous examples of him demoting officers for inane reasons. As well, there is the idea that where there is Zhukov there are the Stavka reserves, meaning that where he would show up so would all the reserves available to the Red Army, which other commanders had to go without. While there is some truth to that, there is still a great deal that's missing in our understanding of the Eastern Front. I doubt Zhukov will ever be considered a minor personality or figure but his actions will be better contextualized once historians outside of Russia are allowed access to the ministry of defense's archives.",
"This is good question, which I will attempt to answer, but I'd like to apply some context first. It is important to realize the delineation between hero and genius from a military studies view. There are many great military heroes who were not really geniuses, and vice-versa. There were also some who were both. To be considered a great military thinker I would argue that either your deeds or actions must contribute to military theory. Napoleon is, of course, the prototypical example of both: one of histories ablest commanders as well as the topic which dominated military scholarship for 100 years. In many ways the legacy of a general is defined as a combination of what they achieved in their campaigns and how they changed warfare itself. Finally, YMMV for all of this, \"Greatest Generals\" isn't really an academic argument so there are many opinions floating around.\n\nThe civil war is a great example of this delineation: Grant and Lee are the most idolized as great leaders, however military theoreticians identify Sherman as the great thinker of the war. Grant and Lee demonstrated mastery of the current practices, as well as many admirable leadership traits, earning them much acclaim. Sherman, with his march to the sea, displayed an amount of military innovation that became a model for future commanders. Incidentally, the march to the sea is likely one of the reasons Sherman's legacy is not as fondly remembered in the US. \n\nSimilarly with the European Theater of the Second World War. In this case Patton and Rommel are often brought up as being the supreme commanders however they were certainly less important from a military studies view than many other generals. Von Mainstein, Omar Bradley, and perhaps Heinz Guderian are thought of as being the really innovative commanders (sorry, I'm less well familiar with Soviet generalship, so I won't go into detail there). Guderian, of course, was one of the main founders of Blitzkrieg, Mainstein and Bradley were supremely gifted at the organization of men and material on an operation level. Of course, I am certainly neglecting an amazing majority of great military thinkers here (so much so that I hesitated even writing this paragraph), but hopefully you get the idea. ",
"So no ones said anything about Moltke, and while I'm not a master on Prussian history, from what I've read, the reason Moltke was so respected was because he was a master of choosing the battlefield and positioning his armies. His grand tactic was actually pretty simple, cutting your army into three divisions, and attacking from three sides, \"the cauldron\" however, you have to take into account he only fought in like three wars, the Prussian-Denmark war, which was obviously one sided, the Prussian-Austrian war, which was the best example of his work (look up the battle of sadowa (königgrätz) ) and then the Franco-Prussian war, which had the majority of the French army sitting in Algeria and Moltke fighting mainly reserve troops. ",
"In regards to your question I'll talk about Lee and Grant specifically, as it is with those two men that I feel I know the most about to adequately answer the question.\n\nRight off the bat the Confederate States (the South) were disadvantaged during the American Civil War for several reasons; the first being that their population was not as large as the North's. This meant they would have a smaller pool of men to pull from to fill the ranks, which in turn meant that they would likely be outnumbered in most engagements fought that involved formal key field armies (like the Armies of Northern Virginia, the Shenandoah, Tennessee, etc.). Second, the South was unable to draw upon the range, scope, and amount of resources that the North could; the Federal Navy's blockades of nearly all Confederate ports, coupled with a lack of international recognition from key economic powers (chiefly France and the United Kingdom) meant that the Confederacy would have to rely on its own economic capabilities. Combine these two points and your prospects for winning a drawn-out war are not good.\n\nNow throw Lee into the mix. Lee was an experienced officer - as most general officers of the war were, on both sides - having fought in the Mexican-American war over a decade prior. Lee had to work with - as previously stated - smaller numbers of men, a small supply of reinforcements, and fewer factories to produce the ammunition and guns that his army needed. When he started pumping out victories for the Confederacy - the first notable, though it is not called a 'victory' by some, being the Seven Days Battles - and shortly after the smashing Confederate victory at Second Bull Run, some began to consider him the Confederacy's best strategic mind. His ability to assess when and how to fight, along with his attempts to utilize his subordinate commanders (chiefly Jackson, Ewell, Longstreet, and Stuart) to maximum efficiency made the Army of Northern Virginia a very formidable force, even when outnumbered severely (like the battles at Antietam and the later huge success at Chancellorsville). Lee was able to consistently defeat the Army of the Potomac for over two years (even though, technically, it was the Army of Northeastern Virginia early in the war) by maneuvering how and when the Union generals did not expect it; they expected him to move cautiously and avoid offensive actions due to his comparatively poor prospects. Perhaps his greatest shock came at Chancellorsville, just before the infamous battle of Gettysburg, where Lee, facing odds of far over 2-to-1, decided to split his command, and defeated the Union forces in detail. Even after the defeat at Gettysburg and during the slow Union push through Virginia to Richmond in the last two years, he was able to maintain the cohesiveness of his army and even managed to deal against his adversary a stinging blow at Cold Harbor (a Union charge on fortified Confederate position producing a high estimate of 7,000 casualties for the North). Lee knew how to handle his army at nearly all points; the only thing that ended up besting him were the actions of Grant, detailed below, and the ability of the North to carry out a war against a far less industrialized South.\n\nNow, on to Grant. Grant had produced for the North the pyrrhic victory at Shiloh in 1862 and, just before that, the falls of both Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. He then went on to secure the Confederate fort at Vicksburg, effectively splitting the Confederacy in half. From there, after reeling from the defeat at Chickamauga in August of 1863, he rallied and defeated the Confederates at Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain within 2 days in November of that year. These victories combined made him perhaps the most successful Union commander of the war to that point, and after the repeated failures of the commanders of the Army of the Potomac, it becomes obvious why Lincoln wanted Grant to succeed to command (also because Lincoln wanted Grant to hammer out a great victory so that he could secure re-election and finish the war).\n\nWhat makes Grant different from his predecessors in the East was that he utilized the resources at his disposal to the greatest effect he could. General McClellan had outnumbered Lee on a ratio of nearly 2-to-1 at Antietam and failed to secure a true victory because he refused to commit his reserve troops. Burnside had been overzealous in his attacks against the fortified Confederate positions at Fredericksburg, killing thousands in return for almost nothing. Grant, however, had at his disposal the industrial capability and numerical superiority of the United States, and he intended on using it to end the war.\n\nWhereas previous Union defeats had resulted in a withdrawal back to the region around Washington D.C. to prepare for battle once again, Grant kept pushing Lee south. After inconclusive results at the battle of the Wilderness - the first major engagement of Grant's so-called \"Overland Campaign\" - Grant refused to withdraw north, and instead marched further south, his supply lines sending fresh guns, ammunition, and reinforcements to bolster his army. His enemy, Lee, could not fall back on such a luxury - Confederate manpower reserves were running low and the Confederate economy was failing. Not only this, but actions by the Federal Army in the West and South - particularly the destroying of raillines, plantations, and other key resources for the Confederate war effort -did not help. Grant continued pressing Lee further south, keeping him on the defensive. Even though Grant's actions cost thousands of lives for the Union, it prevented Lee from recouping and launching yet another offensive against the North. The Army of Northern Virginia did not have any points at which it could recover from the losses it had sustained, to resupply and reinforce. Coupled with Sherman's highly successful and much-publicized March to the Sea, Lincoln won the election comfortably and there was a new-found vigor to end the war, which already seemed to be drawing to a close. Grant continued using the North's industrial capabilities to full effect, building massive mortars and railroad guns to participate in the siege of Petersburg, which all but devastated the Army of Northern Virginia. Even through the ridiculous casualty figures on both sides, the North's superior numbers and capabilities, as well as Grant's refusal to quit his offensive actions, eventually won the day. Grant knew how to handle his resources extremely well, and after the advances from the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor (the three key battles during his Overland campaign) it was only a matter of time until the war was over. It should also be noted that, as the Army of the Potomac was quite large (often the largest field army in the conflict at any one time), it required an immense amount of logistical expertise to carry out the transporting of ammunition, weapons, horses, and men, great distances from supply depots and camps in home states all the way to the frontline, to be integrated into the massive hammer of the Union's war effort that was the Army of the Potomac.\n\nThis came out to be a lot longer than I initially intended it to be. I'm not sure if I even partially answered the question to your liking, but I tried my best. I could write further endless paragraphs on more modern generals like Manstein, Rommel, Bradley, and Zhukov, or I could go a bit further back to men like Washington and Frederick the Great... but I'll spare you the boredom. :P\n\nEDIT: To try to answer your question a bit more accurately...\n\n\"How is the legacy of a general evaluated?\"\n\nI think it has to do more with their ability to deal with the strategic situation and with the resources available to them, more than the amount of victories they achieve. George Washington's record as commanding officer of the Continental Army was far from without blemishes; he suffered an embarrassing defeat at the largest battle of the American Revolution, the Battle of Long Island, along with other large battles at Brandywine, Germantown, and Fort Washington. Despite this, and other defeats before and after, he kept the Continental Army intact, had it trained using the regimen of the Royal Prussian Army, and kept it alive throughout the war; his priority was to keep the army an effective fighting force rather than to win as many battles as possible. He would have much rather taken a defeat than a pyrrhic victory.\n\nLee understood the limits he had to operate under and, along with his officers and his entire army, did what they could, given the circumstances. When a general has theoretically unlimited resources at his disposal, it is somewhat hard to beat them unless they are horribly inept. Grant, however, knew how to organize his army and he knew how to execute the plan to defeat Lee and capture Richmond. "
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11jkbd | the relationship between northern ireland, england, and the republic of ireland. | What is the current relationship like? Are there tensions between Ireland and N. Ireland? Do either consider themselves the "true Ireland"? How are they both governed? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11jkbd/eli5_the_relationship_between_northern_ireland/ | {
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"In 1997 the Good Friday agreement was signed which declared that Ireland,which is the official name of the Republic would no longer call for or claim Northern Ireland as apart of its territory. In turn the UK would allow for Northern Ireland to become part of Ireland if the People, by majority voted for it as so. With this terrorists or extreme branches, mostly went into cease fire and peace. \n\n\nThere are however some extremists within Northern Ireland. Within the North there are two major views being Republican and Unionist/Loyalist. Republicans wish to joining the Republic of Ireland where as Unionists wish to remain with the UK. While there have not been any major troubles from there extremes of either side since 1997, there are incidents every so often however involving shootings, one of the most notable being the shooting of two British soldiers two years ago. \n\nThe relationship between the UK and Ireland is very good however, having both a strong Cultural and Economic connections. This being both the people and government at large. A Irish person may \"joke\" with a British person over certain topics, but for the most part it is only fun.\n\nIrish and a Political Student here btw. This is the simplest I could put it :)"
]
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[]
] | |
tdz20 | How long can sperm remain viable after a man's death? Could a woman potentially get pregnant from a dead man if she wanted to? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tdz20/how_long_can_sperm_remain_viable_after_a_mans/ | {
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"It depends on pH, temperature, presence of air and other factors.\n\nWhere the sperm is inside a woman \"A pregnancy resulting from sperm life of eight days has been documented\". Where sperm is outside a body, \"In a non-harmful environment outside the body, such as in a sterile glass container the number of motile sperm decreases with approximately 5-10% per hour.\"\n\n- _URL_0_\n\nDepending on these factors I'd assume the viability of sperm inside a dead man would be somewhere in-between being outside the body and inside a women, so hours to days. ",
"I'm guessing with the brain dead he would not be able to get an erection so if surgically removed it would have to be frozen quickly. Once sperm is exposed to the lower temps \"outside the body\" they only have a few seconds of survival. I'm not sure on the time but to answer the second part [yes it is possible](_URL_0_). "
]
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semen_quality#Outside_body"
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"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5147933/Mother-harvests-dead-sons-sperm-for-grandchild.html"
]
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4ddfre | why are there no national referendums in the united states like there are in other countries? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ddfre/eli5_why_are_there_no_national_referendums_in_the/ | {
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"The US constitution simply does not have any procedures in place or allowance for a national referendum, so there isn't one. There have been amendments proposed to do just this, usually with a specific case in mind, but they have never gotten anywhere.\n\nThis makes tremendous sense that the framers of the constitution specifically (intentionally or not) did not include a national referendum or any national votes into the constitution and laws. At the time, the US was still viewed as a collection of states who were sorta independent little countries, but agreed to have connections for the better of them all, but they were not really a unified country as today (this did not really happen until the Civil War). Having a national vote is a bit contrary to this, even the presidential election process was state based, not national.",
"The US does not have a process for it in the Constitution. The reason for this is that we are a federation of semi sovereign states. We are more like the UK than we are like France. As such we are not a direct democracy and vote on things via our representatives as a State, not as individual citizens. ",
"Also a reason for not having referendums in the constitution is that at the time it was written the process would have been too complicated on such a large scale. Nowadays with telecommunication in mind it would be very possible. ",
"There are a lot of good points here. Indeed, there are a lot of concrete reasons for this but the lack of national referendums is also based on founding fathers's ideology. Essentially, the founding fathers wanted the people to have power on decision makers, not the decisions themselves. They believed that this way guaranteed the best possible decisions because they didn't think that the average people were intelligent enough. They believed that the voters would vote the brightest minds to make the best possible decisions. That's a reason there's no procedures in place in the US constitution for a national referendum. ",
"Speaking for the \"other countries\", in Croatia we have a law that enables referendum, but it is hardly ever held, partly due to number of signatures (10 % of registered voters) needed for the initiation of procedure. Only meaningful referendum that we had was about independence in 1991, after that referendums were pretty much a joke (one for the accession to the EU, other to ban some gay rights). There was even one about the labour legislation, but even though there was enough signatures it was never held.\n\nI think that only in Switzerland referendums have a real weight.",
"We are a representative republic, some of our states have landmass and populations equal to entire countries. Texas for example, if it was counted as a country, would have the 12th highest GDP in the world. We do have referendums on a state wide basis however. Unfortunately our federal government is entirely too intrusive to allow states referendums to actually change anything radically, and given another 100 years or so, the EU will represent this same type of force in Europe.",
"There are no federal elections in the United States, other than the Electoral College. Everything else is state level only --- we literally don't have the infrastructure for a national election, since every state has different voting processes and procedures, which would likely be deemed unacceptable under due process, since different voting methods have different errors in counting rates.",
"\"Why are there no European-Wide Referendums?\"\n\nThat's a much better comparative question. And in it lies the answer. We already have a representative government dictating single-solutions over a massive, diverse population. \n\nHaving 151 million people dictating what all 300 million do? Not a recipe for happiness.",
"Sour-grapes answer: Because the people don't tell the government what we want, the government tells the people what they *should* be wanting.",
"Referendums are simply inconsistent with rest of the federal system, which is based off a representative democracy. Referendums, propositions and direct initiatives take place at the state and local level, however. Nevertheless, such practices still are crititicized as \"sloppy democracy\", a good example would be the direct initative in Schuette v. BAMN. "
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14dwz0 | Biologically, how and why is a hymen formed? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14dwz0/biologically_how_and_why_is_a_hymen_formed/ | {
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"I believe the accepted theory is that it is an embryological vestige\n\nedit: source: _URL_0_",
"[This picture](_URL_0_) should be of some help as it shows the development of the vagina and uterus. Basically it was a part of the epithelial lining of the urogenital sinus which allowed the separation of the primitive urethra from the developing vagina/uterus. At some point during perinatal life it normally develops a small opening allowing for menstrual flow and penetration in later life.\n\nPicture taken from Langman's Medical Embryology, 9th ed.",
"It's also worth noting that not all girls have a hymen; that they can naturally dissolve themselves early on; or break on their own accord through physically rigorous exercise or through adolescent masturbation. ",
"Can someone comment on the following PDF by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education?\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBasically it says that it is a myth that a woman’s vaginal opening is covered by a membrane that ruptures with vaginal sex (as _URL_1_ put it).\n\n1. If this is indeed a myth then how come people have believed this for a long time? (Although I can understand that this could have been used for social reasons to deter girls from sexual activity)\n\n2. If the notion of a hymen being mostly untrue how does this affect sexual abuse cases? Do laws in most countries determine female virginity as the presence of the hymen?\n\n",
"So I read through a lot of comments and had another question. Do other mammals have hymens or just humans? If so, why?",
"I am a 31 year old woman and I don't remember seeing anything like the pictures. I'm very curious, if there indeed is some still there what would it look like and whereabouts in there would I find it?"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://books.google.com/books?id=kqcYyk7zlHYC&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35&dq=hymen+embryological+vistige&source=bl&ots=zHn2llsAp-&sig=EZ5_SsY5PewxQDnixG0tz1lZnAU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jcbAUKeON4nq8wSm-4GACg&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=hymen%20embryological%20vistige&f=false"
],... | ||
5dyqmz | how much water is actually wasted when we shower? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5dyqmz/eli5_how_much_water_is_actually_wasted_when_we/ | {
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"Water is not wasted. It is not removed from the water cycle. Water goes from your shower, into the sewer system, to the sewage treatment plant where it is treated and then sent back to the city to water grass in grey water systems where it evaporates, or it is sent to holding ponds where it evaporates. ",
"Every 5 minutes of showering (with average water pressure and temperature) will use about 20 gallons of water, compared to the 40 gallons for the average bath. \nIf your city has a decent enough water treatment facility, no water is \"wasted\", for reasons noted by other users. ",
"A shower is actually a very efficient way to clean yourself, so if you needed to get clean, arguably none of the water is wasted.\n\nHowever, you could get just as clean with half or even 1/3 as much water (by turning it off intermittently, and by using a washcloth or sponge instead of a continuous flow). So compared to the optimum, an ordinary shower still uses about 50 litres more than necessary."
]
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17jlc2 | how does navigation know what roads are the quickest route to your destination? | I know it pulls data from maps but how does it know which roads it should take that would be quickest? Often a straight line from origin to destination looks faster on a map but may have many lights so navigation recommends a faster route on a highway. How does it know speeds, accidents, etc? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17jlc2/eli5_how_does_navigation_know_what_roads_are_the/ | {
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"It cross references the distance that needs to be traveled with speed limits. The more advanced navigation systems use real time traffic data from highway monitoring stations. Many roads have sensors to detect how many cars are passing per minute and what speed they are going, this information tells the navigation system whether there is heavy traffic or to expect delays."
]
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[]
] | |
16nrot | java programing language was originally billed as "extremely safe". why isn't it? | [This question is slightly more specific than another recent question about Java.]
I remember that when the Java programming language was first introduced, it was billed as exceedingly safe.
(As I recall, this was because Java apps/applets would run in the "Java virtual machine." I see that Wikipedia says "The remote code runs in a restricted sandbox, which is designed to protect the user from misbehaving or malicious code.")
However, Java is apparently turning out to be "not adequately safe".
What accounts for this gap between the original model of Java being "designed for safety" and the current real-world security problems that it's experiencing?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16nrot/eli5_java_programing_language_was_originally/ | {
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"Java is fairly safe. A programmer cannot simply write a program to take over a computer, as they can with C or Pascal, or other compiled languages. Exploits to break out of the Java sandbox exist, similar to exploits used to break out of VMs and other sandbox programs."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
9agdan | when you grow your muscles, do you also grow more skin or does your skin just stretch? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9agdan/eli5_when_you_grow_your_muscles_do_you_also_grow/ | {
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"Typically a bodybuilder, tears his muscles during work out, and additional middle is made as the muscle heals. During this process capillaries the blood vessels that feed the muscles are also made. The veins how ever do stretch though and overtime then grow.\n\nSkin will grow but rapid muscle or fat growth with stretch the skin.\n\nMany pregnant women bear the results of rapid growth. Stretch marks."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
8uqwcr | Why didn't the Roe v Wade decision that there is a right to privacy lead to many other non-abortion laws being overturned? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8uqwcr/why_didnt_the_roe_v_wade_decision_that_there_is_a/ | {
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"Not sure I am clear on your question — are you asking why other laws impacting personal privacy (non-abortion-related) were not automatically invalidated by the Roe v Wade decision? Or are you asking why the arguments made and conclusions reached in Roe have not been used as a basis to subsequently invalidate laws impacting personal privacy?",
"Roe v. Wade didn't decide that there was a right to privacy, but instead built on prior cases finding that the Constitution protected certain private matters from government regulation, including, most famously, Griswold v. Connecticut, which held that the government couldn't prohibit married couples from using contraception. It's since been applied to overturn other non-abortion laws, such as the ban on sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas. If you read the decision, available [here](_URL_0_), you will understand it much better. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/410/113.html"
]
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1ljtu7 | the uefa champions league... the format, structure, and anything else i need to know. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ljtu7/eli5_the_uefa_champions_league_the_format/ | {
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"I'll try this one.\nChampions League brings the top teams from around Europe together.\nDepending on the UEFA co-efficient [here](_URL_0_) decides how many places in the competition a country gets.\n\nFor example, England gets 4 places in the Champions League. But somewhere like Hungary gets less.\n\nIn England the top 3 teams get automatically put through to the group stage, with the 4th having to go through qualifiers. Co-efficients is also relevant to whether a team has to go through qualifying.\n\nOnce the qualifying has been done, the winning teams, and the teams already put through get seeded between 1 and 4 in relation to how good they are. I.e Man Utd would be seeded 1, someone like Anderlecht would be 4. Groups are drawn, there can't be 2 of 1 nation in a group, so Barcelona and Real couldn't face each other in the group stages, and in every group there would be someone seeded 1, 2, 3 and 4. A team seeded 1 also can't be in a group with another team seeded 1.\n\nThere are 8 groups of 4 teams, each play each other in their group home and away. This years groups can be found [here](_URL_1_)\n\nThe 2 teams with the highest points from the group get put through to the knockout rounds. Anyone can play anyone that advanced now regardless of nation. This is the round of 16. There are home and away legs for this stage.\n\nThe 8 teams advanced from the last round play now in the Quarter Finals, home and away games.\n\nThen the last 4 play in the Semi Final. These are generally the best teams. Last year was Barcelona vs Bayern and Borussia Dortmund vs Real Madrid. Also played twice, home and away.\n\nThen the final, and whoever wins gets the Champions League trophy. It's played at a Neutral venue. The Champions League Final is probably biggest game in club football. Whoever wins gets automatic re-entry to next years tournament. \n\n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
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"http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/aug/29/champions-league-groups-2013-14"
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3ejjdq | what do we benefit from keep near extinction animals around? should we just let them go extinct? (not a popular opinion i know, more of a description in comments) | So don't get me wrong I love Pandas and don't want to see animals go extinct myself, but in the sense of evolution and progression shouldn't we let animals that are going extinct go extinct.
Now barring a few condition like bees, where their extinction would have a direct impact on our survival I can totally understand preserving them, but Rhinos and the like that have no direct impact on us. Throughout history millions of species have gone extinct with or without our help, and I know many people would argue that they are going extinct directly due to how we as humans are changing and affecting the planet. But wouldn't that just be another deciding factor in whether or not that species has what it takes to survive.
The planet and its condition will change regardless of our impact, and although these changes would have happen more slowly without our interactions this argument is invalid because fact is conditions are changing because of us, and will forever be altered because of us.
I apologize if my grammar is all jacked up. I've been living in China for 4 years. Thanks!
Edit: Thanks guys you've given me some great information to ponder over. I hadn't even thought about that fact that we still don't understand just how much of an impact some of the species may have on the ecosystem. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ejjdq/eli5_what_do_we_benefit_from_keep_near_extinction/ | {
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"There are two basic arguments. First, the moral one. We are morally obligated to protect animals that we had a hand in taking to the brink of extinction.\n\nSecond, the utilitarian one. We can possibly learn something from ecosystems with intact species that could help us later. If we alter the ecosystem to much it could come back to hurt us later in ways that we don't expect.\n\nHere's a good thread that goes over this topic in more detail: _URL_0_"
]
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[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1ts9zl/i_believe_humans_have_no_obligation_to_save/"
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17v4jz | When did the US military switch from State units to the format it is in today? | I have noticed that in the civil war the regiments would always be state by state. I know the national guard still operates like this but the rest of the US military does not. When did this change? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17v4jz/when_did_the_us_military_switch_from_state_units/ | {
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"[Militia Act of 1903](_URL_0_).\n\nAfter proving themselves to be rather poor soldiers in the Spanish-American war, the Act essentially made the militias a dual entity, both militia and national reserve force. It made them accountable to the Department of War (Defense) in their standards and practices as well as equipment and training. It also allowed them to be utilized by the states for militia purposes but allowed for superseding of power by the Federal Government. This prevented abuse of the militia as a \"private army.\"\n\n",
"Up until the run up to American involvement in the First World War, state guard units still often had only a state designation. To use an example, the famous fighting 69th New York Infantry was redesignated as the 165th Infantry when the 27th Division (nee 6th Division) was mobilized for the war.\n\nThe same process was carried out through out the National Guard. The purpose of this process was the homogenious the units according to active army tables of organization and equipment. Many state units that carried unique state designations were small and not fleshed out like a federal active duty regiment. So what you may find is two or three smaller battalion sized \"regiments\" consolidated into a new, and renumbered infantry regiment that covers a larger geographic area of the state. In turn each one of the battalions inside the regiment would typically carry on the history and traditions of the now defunct regiment. \n\nTo a lesser extent you can still easily identify National Guard combat arms division and regiments by their numerical designation. When this massive consolidation was taking part the Army set aside divisions numbered 26-74 for the National Guard, and Regiments in the 100 and 200 series for them also. \n",
"Even during the Civil War, the \"31st Pennsylvania Infantry\" and so forth were Volunteer formations. The regular, professional, army existed, and it wasn't organized by state. It was just very small, and I believe most of it was deployed in the west providing frontier security, so you usually never hear about it when the main theaters of the war are being discussed."
]
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48bc3y | how is it that all cell providers claim to have the fastest nationwide network? is there a 4way tie for first place? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48bc3y/eli5how_is_it_that_all_cell_providers_claim_to/ | {
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"Just take a look at all the fine print at the bottom of the screen whenever a cell company makes a claim about anything. They can redefine 'fastest' or 'best' to mean whatever they like. Fastest...in this specific area? During this specific time? Best as in... highest customer survey rating or highest uptime? Etc etc..",
"In my part of the world, some networks or parts of networks are shared between numerous carriers - if that network happened to be fastest one around, they could all say they were using the fastest network. Is it possible something similar is happening where you are, or at least in some areas?"
]
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[],
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1r8fth | What does knife sharpening at a molecular level? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1r8fth/what_does_knife_sharpening_at_a_molecular_level/ | {
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"Sharpening is basically scraping off material until it resembles the shape you want (in this case, a thin edge).\n\nTo start sharpening, a large grit is used, which translates to very deep \"trenches\" and irregularities in the resulting material, these are refined with finer grits to even these trenches (scratches) out. Doing this progressively leads to a smoother finish which approximates the shape you want (again, a low angle straight edge).\n\n"
]
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wdyw3 | What is the most Distant Star that We can See with the naked eye? | Are most of the stars we see in the Milky Way galaxy? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wdyw3/what_is_the_most_distant_star_that_we_can_see/ | {
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"Any star you can see with your naked eye is in the Milky Way. A person with good eyesight can see stars down to about mag 6.5 under great seeing conditions. The furthest object from earth that can be seen with the naked eye is the Andromeda Galaxy which is 2.5 million light years away. \n\nAs for a specific star, well that's really tricky because there are factors like observing point and even the fact that the farther away a star is the harder it is to pinpoint its distance. One really far away star that can be seen with your naked eye is Deneb. ",
"_URL_0_\n\nEta Carinae is the most distant star we can see with the naked eye, and is about 8,000 light years away according to Wikipedia.\n\nAlso, everything you can see (again, naked eye) in the night sky is in our own galaxy (sans Andromeda)",
"[RW Cephei](_URL_1_) should be visible to the naked eye under perfect conditions, it has an apparent magnitude of 6.52 is ~11,500 light years away.\n\nHowever, if it were not obscured by dust the [Pistol star](_URL_2_) would be visible at magnitude 4 and it's located ~25,000 light years away.\n\nAs for stars that are easily visible, [Eta Carinae](_URL_0_) is a 4th magnitude star located ~8000 light years away.",
"[Rho Cassiopeiae](_URL_1_) is 12,000 lightyears away away, and it varies between mag 4.1 and 6.2.\n\nThe trouble we have with seeing distant stars is that the disk of the milky way is choked with dust, and the milky way is only about 1000 lightyears thick. So any stars that might be visible which are more than a few thousand lightyears away are obscured by dust.\n\nThe [Peony star](_URL_0_) is 26,100 lightyears away, and would be visible if it were not for the dust."
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WR_102ka",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rho_Cassiopeiae"
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9e4wj9 | what role does gaba have with regards to things like anxiety and depression, and what effect do benzodiazepines have with regards to gaba? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9e4wj9/eli5_what_role_does_gaba_have_with_regards_to/ | {
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"There are two things to discuss here. GABA as a chemical in the brain and GABA as a supplement some people eat, and [this great WebMD article goes into detail](_URL_0_ ).\n\nGABA as a chemical in the brain, at low levels, may lead to: Anxiety or mood disorders, Epilepsy, Chronic pain.\n\nGABA supplements in your stomach, well there isn't much evidence they do any of these things. The body has lots of anti-poisoning systems that minimize the prospect for something you eat changing chemical balances in the brain.\n",
"GABA is the principal neurotransmitter responsible of tuning your brain activity down, which makes is effective at reducing anxiety and such in high levels.\nBenzos are a category of molecules that « helps » GABA at doing what it does, basically by making GABA latch more easily onto it’s receptor which leads to amplified effects for the same amount of GABA."
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"https://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/gaba-uses-and-risks"
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257u8w | When stars are formed in the universe, why is there a limit to its size? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/257u8w/when_stars_are_formed_in_the_universe_why_is/ | {
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"Because of thermal and radiation pressure. When a gas cloud collapses into a protostar, considerable energy is released-- first from the sheer gravitational energy of all that falling gas, and then once the star turns on from the energy released by fusion. This pressure will push gas away, which limits the rate at which a star can grow. See the [Eddington Limit](_URL_0_) for more-- because it limits luminosity, it therefore limits the rate of gas infall, since a protostar's luminosity is produced by the energy of infalling gas."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_luminosity"
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wxcgx | why do some programs require a specific version(s) of windows or mac os, but some don't? | Some programs might require Windows 7, others 7/Vista, and others 7/Vista/XP. What causes these programs to require specific versions, and why do some seem to not? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wxcgx/why_do_some_programs_require_a_specific_versions/ | {
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"Newer versions of operating systems can do more things; that's a large part of why new versions are made. Programs written to rely on these new things won't work with old versions.",
"Why do some programs only work with *older* operating systems. A company that I work with has to use XP because of some software/server program they use. They even had to use IE7 up until a couple weeks ago because their website was so old",
"There are typically two reasons for this:\n\n**Programmers make assumptions**\n\nFor example, in the Windows 95/98/ME days, any program could modify any file anywhere, so many Windows programs wrote their settings to c:\\program files\\app name\\settings.ini or something similar. When Windows NT/2K/XP/etc. came out, programs were only allowed to write to places their users had permissions to write to - and c:\\program files\\ is not one of them. As a result, many programs stopped working.\n\nThis can be circumvented by running the program as admin, but that has two issues; first, it's less secure. If there's a bug in the program, it can make any changes it wants to your system. Secondly, in a lot of environments (e.g. offices, schools, large enterprises, libraries) users don't have the ability to run as administrator, meaning they can't use these programs, they'll crash randomly, they won't save their settings, etc.\n\n**OSes change**\n\nWindows goes to a lot of trouble to keep things working whenever possible, but bugs still get fixed that app developers assume are ok. On Mac OS, Apple is almost militant about getting rid of old code in favour of new code. If Apple adds a better way of doing things in 10.6, then the old way will often be 'deprecated' (meaning that developers are told not to use this code because it will be removed) in 10.7, and it will be removed entirely in 10.8.\n\nThis can cause problems in one of two ways; first, old apps that don't get updated will continue to run on 10.6 and 10.7, because the old ways of doing things still exist, but will not run on 10.8. New apps that are written from scratch (the proper way) in 10.7 will continue to work in 10.8 and onward, but will not run in 10.6.\n\n**Notes**\n\nGood developers are able to mitigate these issues by detecting which version of the OS is running and using the old or new ways depending on which is available, but this can be a significant amount of development work, and can introduce subtle bugs. Also, there is often a very clear signal 'which way the wind is blowing', and developers can update their apps long before there's an issue (if they have the developer time).\n\nBad developers are especially prone to these issues. Most problems can be solved by writing code the way that Windows is designed to work, using the correct built-in functions instead of writing your own, asking Windows where to put documents instead of picking an arbitrary location, and so on. Bad developers are lazy, and instead of writing four lines of code to figure out where the documents directory is, will just use the app directory instead. They'll write their own functions because they're too lazy to look up the documentation to see if there is already a function to do what they're trying to do, and when they write it themselves they'll miss certain cases (e.g. what if the system language is in Hebrew? What if the timezone is different? What if the Windows directory isn't in c:\\windows? They assume everything will always be the same as what they have and when things change in subtle ways, problems happen."
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8nkh9e | how come when we find large planets we go straight to their moons to search for life, is there something about larger planets that prevent life? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8nkh9e/eli5_how_come_when_we_find_large_planets_we_go/ | {
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"I'm not familiar with this search pattern at all. We're usually lucky to see even *extremely huge* planets in different star systems, let alone any moons at all.\n\nIf you mean gas giants here in our own solar system, their conditions are markedly different from what we are familiar with life developing in, while some of their moons have encouraging signs like liquid water. ",
"Moons were at one point just large Asteroids or other planets that crashed in others until they eventually came into orbit of a planet."
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5kohsr | how do zip files compress information and file sizes while still containing all the information? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kohsr/eli5_how_do_zip_files_compress_information_and/ | {
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"And if I could add to this question: why, if we can easily do this to our information and save space, is the zip file not our main file type?",
"Compression takes time so we don't use it all the time. It probably isn't used as much as it should be, but whatever.\n\nSo think of it this way. If I want to compress a text document I could look at all the words and see which are most common. I could then create a language where the most common words were the shortest. If I write the document in my new language the document would be smaller and is just need to have a dictionary to translate back to the original.\n\nThis is what happens in compression, first an algorithm finds repeating series of data, then it looks at what data is most common, them it creates a dictionary to translate the most common data to shorter strings, then it just writes all this out to a file. \n\nMost files have a lot of redundancy in them so they commonly compress well.",
"Sometimes there are repeated characters, \n like several spaces in the beginning of this line.\nThey can be replaced with single space (1 byte) and another byte saying that space must be repeated 5 times. \n\nCommon words can be replaced with abbreviations or codes. E.g. \"abbreviation\" is word #123. \n\nWe do not use only zip b/c zipping and unzipping takes time. Try to zip a large file, or a folder with many files. \n\nLook at your desk - you could probably store all the stuff on it in a much smaller box. But it would be a huge pain to get every thing you need out of that box, and put it back once you are done with it. Box is the zipped file, your desk is unzipped. ",
"I believe that it works this way (i'm only 90% sure, though):\n\nData is represented in a computer at his most basic level with zeros and ones. Knowing this, compressors don't work at that machine level, but they do compress data simply saving the amount of units of the same type that an archive holds and (probably) their positions. For example:\n\naaabccccddffaa = > a3bc4d2f2a2\n\nNot the best answer, but tried my best.\n\nSource: my teacher. I study software engeneering.\n\nBonus Fun Fact: There is an actual malicious file called Zip Bomb, used to render a system or program useless or created in order to make them run slow. You can \"manufacture\" a zip file telling it's a extremely big amount of zeros, and freeze any system trying to decompress it (memory blockage). Modern antivirus can detect them.\n\nBonus Fun Fact Source: _URL_0_",
"Image if you had a long paragraph and then try to find all the repeated word or phrases. For each repeated word or phrase, you replace the word or phrase with a lookup. Then you only need to write the repeated word or phrase once and from then on every spot you would write the shorter lookup. This is how files are zipped. \n\n\n\nExample\n\n1 - word or phrase\n\n2 - repeated \n\n3 - lookup\n\n4 - you\n\n5 - then\n\n6 - write\n\n7 - and\n\n8 - the\n\nImage if 4 had a long paragraph 7 5 try to find all 8 2 1s. For each 2 1, 4 replace 8 1 with a 3. Then 4 only need to 6 8 2 1 once 7 from 5 on every spot 4 would 6 8 shorter 3. This is how files are zipped.",
"Imagine this is the content of your file:\n\nAAAAABBBBBBB\n\nCCCCCCCCCCCD\n\nFile compression works by looking for patterns in the file. It uses mathematical formulas to ensure the duplicate data is removed, but also that the duplicate data can be restored properly when uncompressed.\n\nA simple pattern compression on the above file can be represented as:\n\nA5B7\n\nC11D\n\nwhere the number after the file content indicates the number of times the pattern should be repeated.\n\nThis example also shows why text data can be compressed very easily - there's a lot of repeated characters in any major piece of text. However some files (mainly media files, movies etc) contain lots of non-repeating data, so they don't compress that well.\n\n",
"TL;DR They give special instructions to get rid of repititions in the data\n\nFrom my limited knowledge, the main way a file is zipped is by getting rid of repetitions in the data for the file.\n\nSo say you have a string like [100101001011]\n\nWell, you notice a pattern and decide to compress that data into something simpler like [2 {10010}11].\n\nWhen that data is read out it just knows to repeat that {10010} twice and add 11 at the end.\n\nNow you would have to keep it in binary so 2 would be 10 so you're final piece of data is [ < 10 > {10010}11]\n\nNow I'm using special symbols to show where I'm grouping things, but there are probably special characters to indicate special instructions like that.\n\nTo answer the other question about why we don't just use this system for storing all data.\n\nIf I were to guess, it would probably have to do with something along the lines of it being more difficult or more work to read these new special instructions. Your computer probably likes all of the normal characters as it just happily runs along taking in and spitting out all of the easy characters you give it, but when you come along and say \"So after you do this, you're gonna go back over there, and in the middle of that, put an extra one on here... etc.\". Essentially, you're making the simplest form into something more complicated.\n\nThis also follows for why we use binary. Why don't we just convert all of the computer's binary into decimal to do calculations, the convert back into binary to do something with the output? \n\nBinary is the building block of computet code, and once you begin giving special instructions for how to read the binary, you're building something more complicated.\n\nHonestly though I'm more into physics and math, so you'll probably want an answer from someone who actually knows something about CS, or just Google it I guess.\n\nHope I helped though.",
"A normal file, text or anything else, contains a lot of data. So, it is expected that there will be a lot of repetition, called Data Redundancy. Now if we can take all this data that is exactly the same and encode them using just one keyword and tell the location where to insert this keyword, using something called a Dictionary.\nThe second compression technique is employed by taking the most used data to be represented by least number of bits. Suppose that a data x is repeated 500 times, data y is repeated 200 times and data z is repeated 50 times. Normally, if we need to represent these we would use 2 bits for each. So our file would contain a total of 1500 bits. But now if we encode data x by 1 bit (say 0) and data y by 2 bits (say 10) and data z by 2 bits (say 11), then our file size will be 1000 bits.\n\nTL;DR: Data Redundancy and using less bits for most common data are two major compressing techniques.",
"Here's a really simple explanation. If I type this out: \n\n > XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX\n\nthen it takes up a couple lines of space. But if I type this out:\n\n > The letter \"X\" one hundred times\n\nThen it conveys the exact same information, but in a way that takes up way less space.",
"Find information that looks the same, instead of writing it down twice you just make a note that it's the same as the one before.",
"A lot of the data computers regularly deal with is not random, but has various more or less obvious patterns in it. If you know what patterns to expect (say, by already seeing some of the data, or by knowing what sort of data it is), then you can use that knowledge to convert large patterns into smaller symbols and then add a decoding instruction to the file to convert the smaller symbols back into the larger patterns, and if the patterns occur frequently enough, the space you save by converting them into smaller symbols outweighs the size of the decoding instruction.\n\nHere's an example: Imagine that you took a TXT file of one of Shakespeare's plays, analyzed it, and found that the letter 'z' appears 2000 times and the two-letter sequence 'th' appears 5000 times. In that case, you could switch all the original 'z' for 'th', and all the original 'th' for 'z', and put a note at the beginning of the file saying 'before reading this, replace all the 'z' with 'th' and vice versa'. By replacing the occurrences of 'z' with 'th' you increase the size by 2000 letters, but by replacing the occurrences of 'th' with 'z' you *decrease* the size by 5000 letters, and because the note is only 65 letters long (counting spaces and punctuation), you end up with a TXT file that is smaller than the original by 2935 letters but can still be precisely reconstructed into the original by following the instructions in the note. You've taken advantage of the fact that 'th' occurs especially frequently (and 'z' especially *in*frequently by comparison) to produce a file that ultimately says the same thing (assuming the note is followed correctly by whoever reads it) but has fewer letters in it.\n\nThe actual techniques used by modern data compression software are more advanced than this, but the basic idea, that of finding patterns and encoding them using smaller amounts of information, is the same.\n\nNote that *not all* types of data have patterns that you can take advantage of in this way. In particular, data that has *already* been compressed using a technique like this tends to have fewer patterns in it than the original version.\n\n(This is a copy+paste of a [previous post](_URL_0_) I wrote on the subject, so I apologize if it doesn't seem written precisely to address your question. If you have further questions about these techniques or their mathematical limitations, or any clarification of the above, ask away.)",
"what most ppl explain here is RLE, run-length-encoding, like if something is repeated X times, you only write it twice and add a number of repetition, later simply decompress by reading a repetition byte whenever you encounter a repeated character. \n\ntheres also huffman encoding. like currently one character takes up 8bit / 1 byte because thats the atomic size of storable data. that means you have an alphabet of 256 characters, known as ASCII f.e.. Now if you compress text f.e., you wont need all of those, also some occur more often than others (like \"e\" f.e.), so instead giving each character the same length, they get a variable length, depending on their occurence, where alot of occurences mean a short length and vice versa. this means a character could be 1-n bits long. now how to read such data? well there is a binary tree, called the huffman tree, where each node has only max. 2 leaves, and those can either be end nodes or subnodes with again max. 2 leaves. the end nodes are where each character is placed, and you simply read bits 1/0 and walk the tree from top to bottom. that allows you to place often used character more on top (shorter binary path) and less used ones on the bottom (longer binary path), resulting in a binary stream of variable sized characters, thus saving space. \nofc if you have f.e. noisy data like images,sound, video, etc. then its unlikely that you can reduce the space with that or the RLE. for those data, lossful compression is used, but I guess that would go over the bounds of the question...\n\ngreetz WV",
"*For this explanation to make sense, it's important that you know what bits and bytes are, and how a computer uses them to store information. This is a topic of its own, and you can find ELI5 threads that explain it.*\n\nA simple algorithm is counting how many there are of each byte in a set of data. Remember that a byte consists of 8 bits. You then replace the most common byte with a single bit, 1. The second most common one is replaced by two bits, 01. The third most is replaced by 001, etc.\n\nIn the end, you end up with a lookup table, and a bit pattern.\n\nThe string \"AAABBC\" looks like this in binary (in bits, with added spaces for easier reading):\n\n 01000001 01000001 01000001 01000010 01000010 01000011\n A A A B B C \n\nBut if we replace every occurrence of the most common pattern, \"01000001\" with just 1, etc, we end up with something that looks like this (still with added spaces):\n\n 1 1 1 01 01 001\n A A A B B C\nSince a byte is 8 bits long, and we have 10 bits here, our result would be two bytes:\n\n 11101010 01000000\n AAAB B C (Padding)\n\nWe have effectively compressed 6 bytes down to 2.\n\n---\n\n**Edit, and some possibly interesting points:**\n\nIt's important to remember that to be able to unzip a file, you must keep track of which replacements you've made. Somehow, you have to remember that 1 corresponds to 01000001. In this particular algorithm, you can declare a dictionary by first listing how many items are in the list, then all the items in the list itself, and finally the zipped string.\n\nIn the case above, this would result in the following:\n\n Length A B C AAAB B C Padding \n 00000011 01000001 01000010 01000011 11101010 01000000\n (The length being 3.)\n\nThis means that out of our original string, which was 6 bytes long, we've now zipped it down to 2 bytes, but we also added 4 bytes of data to know what the zipped portion means.. :)\n\nWhat does this mean? Well, it means that it's not always useful to zip data. Very small amounts of data, or data that is very diverse, could end up being no smaller, or sometimes even bigger than the unzipped version.\n\nThe algorithm still works, though. We could pack a few more A's into this, and still keep the size at 6 bytes, for example.\n\n AAAAAABBC\n\nwould turn into\n\n Length A B C AAAAAAB B C Padding \n 00000011 01000001 01000010 01000011 11111101 01001000\n\nwhich is still only 6 bytes, but we've packed 9 bytes into it. We could add another 3 A's, and it would still be only 6 bytes:\n\n AAAAAABBCAAA\n\nwould turn into\n\n Length A B C AAAAAAB B C AAA\n 00000011 01000001 01000010 01000011 11111101 01001111\n\n---\n\n**Another quick edit:**\n\nI should mention here that this algorithm is a slight variation of something called Huffman's algorithm. Huffman is used in combiantion with LZ77 in zip files.\n\n---\n\n**Thanks for the gold, kind redditor \\^\\^**",
"Think if you had 30,000 instances of the letter A. \n \nIn a computer that would translate roughly to 30kB. \n \nWhen a zip file compresses, it would basically say in its file \"30000A\" which is 6 bytes. When it goes to decompress, it just takes that information and writes your file. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the general idea.",
"For those interested in what a zipped file looks like, I copied /u/TreeForge's explanation from [here](_URL_3_) and saved it as a normal text file, `unzipped.txt`.\n\nI then opened that text file in a [hex editor](_URL_0_), and it looks like [this](_URL_1_); 639 bytes of readable text (the black characters are called line feed, a form of [newline](_URL_4_) character that denotes the end of a line of text).\n\nI then zipped that file and also opened it in a hex editor, and it now looks [vastly different](_URL_2_). You'll notice that it's quite a lot shorter (410 bytes instead of 639 bytes), and the only readable text is the name of the original file that was zipped, i.e. `unzipped.txt`.",
"Imagine you're reading the lyrics to your favorite song. The first time you have the whole chorus written out, but after that you just have \"CHORUS\" because it takes less space than writing it out all over again. ",
"To illustrate in the most simple way... \n\nSay I want you to memorize this string of numbers: 1111222233333\n\nHow would you do it? You'd probably remember it as four 1s, four 2s, and five 3s.\n\nHow might you write it down? Well one way you might try is 414253\n\nAs you can see no information is lost, and the string did get shorter. \n\nThat's the gist of zip. The real algorithm finds more complicated repetitions and store them in more clever ways. But the central theme is it exploits repetitions of information and realize that you do not have to store those repeats verbatim. ",
"This is possible due to sets of data (example: a sentence) containing elements (example: words) that tend to repeat more often than other words.\n\nThe so called 'information entropy' is the key here - this is basically the measurement of diversity of a dataset - if our 10 word sentence would contain 7 same words and 3 different ones, that means the entropy is quite low in that sentence. If it contained 10 unique words, the entropy is maximum - the dataset couldn't be any more diverse.\n\nWhen the entropy is lower than maximum (and it usually is, like certain words or letters being much more often used than others in a language), that means you could replace the more common elements with shorter values and leaving the longest values for the least common elements.\n\nSay that we have a sentence where each word is represented as a byte of memory, containing 8 bits. We could take the most often used word like 'the' and use only half of the bits to denote it which would shorten the whole thing, even though we'd then need new longer values to denote some rare words. We could then take this resulting string of bits and again split it into chunks of the same size and see if some chunks appear more often than others, meaning we could optimize it better.\n\nOnce you are able to encode such a sentence in a way that the resulting dataset is fully diverse with no elements repeating themselves (maximum entropy), that means you cannot shorten it further and you've reached the theoretical limit of compression.\n\nIt is not possible to compress further than this theoretical limit without losing data, like the guys from the tv show Silicon Valley did (if I recall correctly).",
"ZIP compression has been explained very good here. I'd like to add JPG compression, which more or less works the same way. pixel information that occurs more than once gets only saved once plus an information on how often and where it is used. lets say you have 2 photos with the same resolution: one a very complex picture with many details, and one just a blue sky. as a bitmap they are the same size. if you convert it to JPG the complex picture will stay more or less the same size (might be even a bit bigger), but the sky photo has so many repetitve blue pixels that it will be very small after conversion.\n\nso, exactly like with ZIP compression, the \"compressable amount\" heavily depends on the content of the file itself.",
"Masters in computer science here.\n\nThere are two ways to store information, directly and indirectly. Say I want to store the number 10000000000. I could write 10000000000, which is storing it directly. Or I could write \"a 1 followed by 10 zeroes\", which is storing it indirectly in the form of directions to build the number. Note that when I say number, behind the scenes all files on a computer are numbers so I can be talking txt, bmp, or any other file type.\n\nIf the number is very random then storing it indirectly will be a similar size to storing it directly. However, many things we store are not random. For example, a picture may have many pixels of the sky, all a very similar color. In those cases storing the number indirectly can save a lot of space.\n\nTo store something indirectly, we have to create directions to build the number. This is called \"compressing\". To retrieve something stored indirectly, we have to follow the directions to build the number. This is called \"decompressing\". Both compressing and decompressing take time, which is the downside of storing information in a compressed form.\n\nOne last thing: my favorite college lecture of all time was about what is random. Random turns out to be a *very* hard thing to define. One way to define randomness, called Kolmogorov complexity, is to use how compressible the data is. If it does not lose size when compressing then it is very random, otherwise it is not very random.",
"Stealing this answer from [this thread](_URL_0_)\n\nCredit to /u/sje46 \n\n---\n\n**Non-Compressed**\n\nThat Sam-I-Am! \nThat Sam-I-Am! \nI do not like that Sam-I-Am! \nDo you like green eggs and ham? \nI do not like them, Sam-I-Am! \nI do not like green eggs and ham! \nWould you like them here or there? \nI would not like them here or there. \nI would not like them anywhere. \nI do not like green eggs and ham. \nI do not like them, Sam-I-Am. \n\nTotal Characters = 322\n---------------------\n**Compressed**\n\n1=hat \n2=Sam-I-Am \n3=I do not like \n4=green eggs and ham \n5=you like \n6=here or there \n7=I would not like them \nT1 2! \nT1 2! \n3 t1 2! \nDo 5 4? \n3 4! \nWould 5 them 6? \n7 6. \n7 anywhere. \n3 4. \n3 them, 2. \n\nTotal Characters = 186. \n----------- \n\nCompression rate = 58%. Would almost certainly get much better as you go throughout the story.\n\nEDIT: Total characters for compressed version was actually 186, not 210. Sorry about that. Also, thanks for the BestOf!\n\n---",
"Most of these explanations are not eli5. \n\nZip files compress information in the same way you do in conversation every day, they're just more efficient at it. For example, when I refer to them in this sentence, notice I'm not repeating the words \"zip files\" over and over again, that'd be too long. Instead I replace their full name with \"them\" or \"they\" because of the context you know what I'm talking about. File compression works in much the same way. With context you can express much more complicated ideas with fewer bits of information. It's just in file compression, that context is something that's more meaningful to the computer than to you. Never the less, it allows the computer to store information in a much smaller footprint.",
"Besides the actual algorithms an interesting point is that compression algorithms can compress some data only because they actually increase the size of some other data.\n\nIf you fill a file with uniformly distributed random garbage and zip it chances are the resulting zip file is larger than the original file.\n\nThe compression algorithm has some kind of a priori knowledge of the structure of the data it is supposed to compress. In the case of text files there are various things to use:\n\n * they actually only use a limited subset of the available symbols. Say bytes can have 256 different values but most text only consists of letters and some punctuation which is around 64 symbols. So you can go from a uniform length encoding (8 bit per symbol) to a variable length encoding that assigns shorter bit sequences to more common symbols. An example of this is [Huffman coding](_URL_0_). If the data is the uniform garbage mentioned above all symbols will appear with the same frequency. Except now you also have to store this \"translation table\" between the uniform and variable length encoding (or at least have to indicate somehow that the table is not there due to there being no compression possible with this method).\n * they contain the same sequence of symbols multiple times (words being used multiple times etc.). So instead of repeating the word (or sequence of symbols in general) you just reference the position of the previous occurrence of the word in the hope that the reference is shorter. This is called [dictionary coding](_URL_1_) and is the primary method of compression that zip uses. Again if the data is random garbage that is essentially free of useable recurring sequences you can't do any referencing but you still have to somehow indicate the difference between references and actual data which ends up adding to your data in the end.\n\nIf you zip things like raw audio or image files (wav, bmp etc.) you will notice that the compression is much worse than for text. The lossless and lossy compression algorithms for these kinds of data tend to be different because the algorithm needs \"different a priori knowledge\".",
"It's like a Box of lego vs a fully constructed lego castle. \n\nOn the one hand you have all the pieces ordered in the box and an instruction on how to assemble them. It's much smaller and easier to handle/transport. But it isn't yet functional, you can't play with it yet. \n\nTo transform it into the functional state you need to follow the instruction and have all the pieces. If you do, you get a much more spacious lego castle, but you can totally play with it now. \n\nIf you want to transport it again, you can deconstruct it again and save space. As long as the instructions and all the pieces are there. \n\nThis is the basic idea but you might argue \"wait, you don't actually make the volume of the castle smaller. Filesize after compression IS getting smaller though\" \nTrue. The keyword here is redundance. \n\nSay, you have 200 identical grey legos in your Box. You need them to make the castle walls. Now, your computer doesnt need to pack all 200 of those pieces. Just pack one, and include an instruction on how many of this one piece you need. Boom, 199 less pieces in the Box. \n\nCompression is a BIG topic and there is much more to this \n ",
"There are some very good answers here! To add a little on the theoretical background:\n\nThis ties into what's known as Information Theory.\n\nInformation Theory was studied at lot in its early days so governments could figure out the best way to encrypt signals in WWII, and also to know how much information you could send through a cable when the cable picked up \"noise\" (random, uncontrollable change in the cable's signal).\n\nTo answer any of these questions they had to define what information is and how to calculate how much information is in a message. They decided to calculate it based on how complex the signal is - how many different symbols (like letters) are in the signal. The idea is that if the message is always the same letter, then the receiver knows what the signal will be. If the signal changes, then you only need to know when it changes and what it changes to.\n\nThis can be tied back farther to the even more theoretical notion of \"complexity\". In the case of Kolmogorov Complexity (different kinds of complexity have different definitions), a signal's complexity is the length of the smallest computer program that can recreate the signal. If your signal is a bunch of words then this has to do with the content of the message, but imagine if your signal is a mathematical sequence like a sine wave or the Fibonacci sequence - then you can simply send the equation and the receiver knows all the information about the signal from a very short message (compared to sending a long string of numbers that represents the values of the sine wave or Fibonacci sequence).\n\nCompression uses the basic idea that not all the bytes used to store a normal file are necessary to contain all the information - that there's some \"wasted\" storage in standard files. There are a few different ways to calculate which bytes you can get rid of or how to restructure the data without losing information, but there are also ways that will lose a little information (saving a photo as JPEG does this - it simplifies the image using an algorithm to save storage space at the expense of discarding some \"information\" - i.e. details - in the photo)",
"Plenty of people have covered the basics, so let me just recommend a topic: [Arithmetic coding](_URL_2_). It isn't used in zips, but it is used in some more advanced compression formats (e.g. lzma, technically it uses [Range encoding](_URL_0_), which is virtually identical) \n\nIt's one of those brilliant ideas that takes a little work to wrap your head around at first, but once you get it, it seems so obvious you want to travel back in time and slap yourself for not knowing it. In a sentence, it boils down to \"what if each possible digit in a numerical base didn't take up the same space\". So e.g. in binary, instead of allocating half of your space to 0 and half to 1, you know there are going to be a lot more 0s, so you allocate 90% to 0 and 10% to 1.\n\n\"But when it comes to computers, you can't really handle any numbers between 0 and 1\" you may say. The solution is essentially [fixed-point arithmetic](_URL_1_). Start with a big range, normally 0 to the biggest value your variable can take (2^(32) - 1), but let's say 0 to 1000 for illustrative purposes. If your first number is 0, keep the first 90% of that range -- it becomes 0 to 900. If it's 1, keep the last 10% -- it becomes 901 to 1000. To encode the second number, repeat the process, e.g. for 00 you'd go 0-1000 - > 0-900 - > 0-810. If you run out of precision, you can renormalize (\"make the range bigger again\"). Once you're done, pick a number within the range you have left, and that's your compressed string.\n\nTo decode, you take that number and do the algorithm backwards. So if the number is 600, you know the first bit is 0 (because it's in the range 0-900), then you know the second bit is 0 (because it's in the range 0-810), etc.",
"Zip uses a compression algorithm called DEFLATE, which is really just 2 other algorithms packaged together, LZ77, and Huffman.\n\nLZ77 basically records runs of the same or similar data, and Huffman assigns the most common bytes shorter bitstrings.",
"This is how it was explained to me way back in the Dos 6 days. Take a sheet of paper, rip it into little squares and stack them on top of each other in an order. On the top piece of paper write the order so you know how to put them all back into a full sheet again.",
"I wanted to reply because the top explanations are very different from ZIP and do not capture what makes ZIP special. One top explanation is RLE (run length encoding) and teaches how to replace strings like \"RRRRRGGGBB\" with \"5R3G2B\" (5 Rs, 3 Gs, and 2Bs). RLE is simple, but is not ZIP, and unlike ZIP, cannot effectively compress strings like RGBRGBRGBRGB... Another top explanation is dictionary-based compression, where long bit patterns are replaced with much smaller offsets into a dictionary. Then the dictionary and the smaller offsets are stored together, ready to be decompressed by looking up each offset in the dictionary they were stored with. This is also not ZIP and I think does not explain what makes ZIP really magical and elegant. ZIP is special because like dictionary compression it performs an effective substitution-based compression, and so is more effective than RLE, but unlike dictionary compression, it does not have to store the dictionary alongside the compressed output, making it much more efficient than dictionary compression in the end (the dictionary is quite large).\n\nZIP uses a sliding window. It scans over the uncompressed data from start to finish with a fixed-sized window and prints out the compressed data to a separate output file. So it might make more sense to say ZIP encodes rather than compresses the original input file, as the input file is left untouched while ZIP is running, and instead a new encoded (compressed) output file is constructed alongside the original uncompressed file. What ZIP will do is try to replace each string in the uncompressed input file by printing a much smaller offset to the compressed output file. Each time ZIP does this we say it is \"replacing\" the string from the input file. The key idea in ZIP is to replace the string just beyond the sliding window with a pointer to a matching string found within the sliding window, and then move the sliding window forward to encompass the string we just replaced, and kick out a string from the sliding window to keep the window a fixed size:\n\n uncompressed input, with window ending at '|', valid strings to point at are 0, 1, 2, and 3:\n |(3)RBGR(2)RRR(1)R(0)BBB|RBGRBBBRRRGBG...\n\n compressed output, with window ending at '|', strings replaced with pointers into window:\n |RBGRRRRRBBB|302GBG...\n\n move window in input forward now...\n RBGRRRRRBB|(3)B(2)RBGR(1)BBB(0)RRR|GBG...\n\n move window in compressed output forward now...\n RBGRRRRRBBB|302|GBG...\n\nIf a string cannot be matched up with a string within the window, that string is not replaced, but instead becomes a valid string to point at within the sliding window, hopefully helping to compress later strings. This also means that when starting compression, the window is empty, and it cannot replace strings with smaller pointers as there are no valid strings to point at yet. ZIP has to \"get started\". Once it encodes some data however, it has built up enough contents for its sliding window of valid pointers and is able to achieve good compression from then on.\n\nThe most elegant thing about ZIP is during decompression, the contents of the sliding window where the values of the valid pointers are stored is always decompressed first, so subsequent pointers can always be decompressed. This is very roughly like surfing, where the decompression of data is like the wave, and the end of the sliding window, where we are replacing compressed pointers with their original pointer values is like the surf board. We complete decompression when the surf board reaches the shore. Since the 'dictionary' (the wave front) is built dynamically during decompression, there is no need to store it with the compressed output.",
"Let me demonstrate:\n\nFUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!\n\n-- > \n\nFU(10)CK!(7)\n\nThe second one is smaller, but contains all the same information. It's just that the repetitive and empty bits have been expressed in fewer letters.\n\nImagine doing a search and replace on the text of War & Peace to change every instance of the word \"intelligence\" to \"X98\" and every instance of the word \"something\" to \"X71.\" The book definitely has fewer letters now. But you'd need to remember what words those codes stand for to change everything back and make the book readable again. \n\nThat list of codes is the compression method. Maybe you even saved enough letters through your the entire book that you could tack on the \"key\" to all the codes in the book itself and still save space. \n\nWhat if you could come up with a computer program that would invent as many codes as it needed to save as much space as possible, and then always tack on the code \"key\" at the end, so anyone could decode it? Then you'd have something like a Zip compression method software.",
"basically they look for repeating sequences of data and replace them with a smaller value that represents them. \n\nSimilar to if you had an essay on US presidents and every time you found the word \"president\" in the essay you erased it and wrote \"p\". The essay is now smaller but everyone who is informed before that \"p\" means president will have no trouble reading it.",
"Compression algorithms looks for patterns. These can be groups of letters, phrases or repeated bytes. Text can be compressed quite well, there are only roughly 64 characters (upper/lower case+punctuation) that are used, while a byte can hold up to 256 characters (you can store 4 letters in only 3 bytes this way). There are also common letter/word combinations, q is almost always followed by u and 'the' for example. Truly random data cannot be compressed as there aren't any patterns. That's why it is better to compress first, then encrypt. Trying to compress an already-encrypted file would not work very well as encrypted data looks random.\n",
"It depends upon what you're trying to compress.\n\nVideo compresses by using a reference frame then a set of instructions for the following X number of frames which details which pixels get changed and what they're changed to (since they're just numerically mapped color squares) in each of the following frames.\n\nThis is because in video, in two consecutive frames, very little has changed. Therefore the most efficient method to compress is simply to use frame 1 and then a section of code which tells you which pixels in frame 2 to alter.\n\nIf too many pixels change, just include it as a new frame.\n\n\nAlso, one other note about data compression. The bits are usually mixed up in a preset way (part of the compression algo, then reversed in the decompression algo). This lowers error rates because random bits can be corrected for but errors tend to occur in groups. So if you lose a random bit here and there, it can be corrected for with error correction coding (ECC), but if you have groups of bits lost, said groups of bits can't be fixed.\n\nSo you mix up the bits and groups of lost bits end up becoming random once the data string goes through the decompression. Those random bits get fixed with ECC and the entire thing works.\n\nIt's just one of the steps used in gaining higher data compression rates.\n\nRealistically, data compression uses multiple techniques combined to achieve high compression rates.",
"If I tell you the number 111111 you wouldn't remember it as 111111 you would remember it as 6 ones. That's essentially how compression works. It finds patterns. The same as if it told you 1234543 you would remember 1-5 ascending then back down to 3.",
"Let's answer with an analogy. In the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the phrase \"so it goes\" appears 106 times. That adds up to 1060 characters (including spaces.) If you replace every occurrence of this phrase with a placeholder code, say \"42\", you just saved 848 characters of space. \n\nYou can recreate the original by reversing the replacement. Do this for a bunch of common phrases and you can reduce the storage size by quite a bit. \n\nZip works on a binary level, but the concept is the same. ",
"Here's a non-technical explanation I was once given:\n\n\"The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.\"\n\nTake each instance of \"ain\" and replace it with \"X\":\n\n\"The rX in SpX falls mXly on the plX.\"\n\nYou've shortened the sentence while preserving all of the information. ",
"For a true explanation for a five year old:\n\nImagine you had to write some 0's and 1's on a piece of paper. You have to write this:\n\n 00011110011111111100000000\n\nBut then instead of writing this, you could make it easier for yourself by compressing it a bit by writing it like this:\n\n 3x0 4x1 2x0 9x1 8x0\n\nIt's clear that this fills less space to write on the paper, and you haven't lost any information. To get back you simply need to write the number of 0's and 1's as the sequence specifies.\n\nNaturally, this is not how it really works and is a very, very simplified explanation but it does explain how information can be compressed without losing information.",
"Take the following data:\n\n ABABABABABABABABAB\n\nThat's just `AB` 9 times. Compression algorithms find patterns like that and reduce them down to something like\n\n 9AB\n\nwhich, during decompression, signals to the program something to the effect of _repeat the next sequence N times_. In reality, there are _many_ patterns (not just repetition, but things like bit packing and other voodoo) that compression algorithms can figure out.\n\nThe meaning of the data is the same, it's just expressed differently. This is all fairly standard information theory.\n\n---\n\nThe golden rule in information theory is that data must have some non-randomness to it in order to be compressed. **Truly random data cannot be compressed** (and if you try, you will most likely _inflate_ the overall size).",
"Here is an amazing primer on information theory, information entropy and eventually compression.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nYou should watch the entire series, it really breaks everything down and makes it easy to understand, and it gives you a framework of answering questions like \"why can't I just keep running winzip on this file over and over infinitely, compressing it more and more each time.\"",
"Data compression actually has two methods, lossy and lossless. Let's talk about lossless first.\n\nLossless is a kind of compression that keeps the same data once uncompressed. Imagine properly packing things into a box so you can take them back out with no damage.\n\nIn terms of data, it is a little different. Data tends to have repeated patterns. Compression means instead of spelling everything out, you build an abbreviation system (Federal Bureau of Investigation = > FBI) to use less characters to say something. More advanced mechanisms are more serious about abbreviating everything possible, further reducing the file size. ZIP, RAR, and 7z are some popular generic lossless file compressions. FLAC is used for audio, while PNG is used for pictures.\n\nNotably, since you will get exactly the same thing after compression and uncompression, there is no quality setting for these files.\n\nFor lossy compression, you focus on cramming everything into a box as small as possible, then step on the box and cinch it down even further with a really strong rope. This will damage the items, but they can still be used.\n\nIn terms of data, in addition to abbreviations, you also ignore some finer details like a groove in a leaf of a tree with thousands of leaves. It's more like \"nobody cares about that\" kind of data compression. You are bound to lose some image quality, but the size reduction can prove economical for generic daily use photos and amateur photography.\n\nText, documents, and programs (exe) are usually not compressed like this, as any one bit different than the normal and it has severe problems. Images and music are usually compressed lossy, such as jpg and mp3 files. It doesn't contain all the information -- just what you would notice.\n\nWhen you set the quality slider during a JPG export, you basically say how much detail you want to keep in the file. The programs responsible for compressions will comply and produce a proper comprsssion you need. ",
"Here is a great explanation: _URL_0_ on that subject that cleared everything up for me. I couldn't understand it either to be honest, but now I do :) Hope it helps!"
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7tmb6r | Eisenhower went from being promoted to Colonel to being a four star General in less than 2 years and was Supreme Allied Commander less 3.5 years after becoming a Colonel. Was this speed in promotion normal? If not, how did he achieve it so fast compared to other general officers? | Eisenhower was promoted to Colonel on March 11, 1941. In less than two years he was a four star general, being promoted on February 11, 1943.
He was brought back down to Major General but became a five star general and Supreme Allied Commander on December 20, 1944 some 3.5 years after being promoted to Colonel.
That seems ridiculously fast...
_URL_0_ | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7tmb6r/eisenhower_went_from_being_promoted_to_colonel_to/ | {
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"So I should point out some key concepts to understand military rank in the United States.\n\nFirst, we must understand the the military of the US has been organized in different components even within each branch. The modern US Army, for instance, is made up of the Regular Army (standing military, aka active duty professional troops), Army Reserve, and the National Guard.\n\nIt was under the National Defense Act of 1920 that [the Army was reorganized](_URL_3_) so that the the Army would be composed of the Regular Army, National Guard, and Organized Reserve component. The Regular Army had a distinct role in peacetime:\n\n > Each of the three Army components was to be so regulated in peacetime that it could contribute its appropriate share of troops in a war emergency. \n\n > The act acknowledged and authorized the historical practice of the United States: a standing peacetime Army too small to be expanded to meet the needs of a large war and reliance on a new force of citizen-soldiers when large-scale mobilizations were necessary. In contrast to earlier practice, training the National Guard and Organized Reserves became a major peacetime task of the Regular Army. To fulfill that mission Congress authorized a maximum Regular Army officer strength of 17,726 officers, more than three times the prewar number.\n\nThus, if you look at your link, Eisenhower held the rank of Major from August 26, 1924 until July 1st, 1936 when he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. His next rank is Colonel on March 11, 1941... in the Army of the United States.\n\nWhat is the \"Army of the United States?\" Well, it is a \"fourth\" component of the Army, activated in times of war or crises (during the WWI period, it was called National Army) when manpower was needed (i.e. conscription). As a side note, the Army of the United States ceased when the draft was ended in the Vietnam-era.\n\nThus the first officers in the Army of the United States came from the Regular Army. They would retain their 'permanent ranks' in the Regular Army while holding 'temporary ranks' in the Army of the United States. All enlistments/conscription during war would enter the Army of the United States\n\nThis system was designed so that peacetime forces would administer/oversee the rapid expansion of a wartime military. After all, if you go from 400,000 troops to 10 million, you need experienced administrators, trainers, and leadership to make the massive increase in organization, growth in facilities/infrastructure, etc. even work. It may take years or even decades to master tactics and military leadership can't be easily obtained off the street, hence these experienced individuals were needed in the massively expanded military.\n\nThus, Eisenhower was made a Colonel in the Army of the United States, and from there rapidly rose in rank. This was again, both a sign of his leadership abilities, and also an acknowledgement that you needed more leadership as the military expanded rapidly. The growth of the US military to a peak of ten million with nearly 100 divisions and thousands of warships meant you needed more generals and admirals than during peace.\n\nHence why you see his Regular Army rank goes up during the war to a 2-star general, while he was a 4-star general in the Army of the United States. When the war ended and the Army of the United States was disbanded, his rank reverted to the 4-star General rank of the Regular Army. His 5-star rank was made permanent by Act of Congress in Public Law 79-333 [here](_URL_6_), and thus he assumed that rank after the war in the Regular Army.\n\nOne other aspect: in case you didn't catch it, but Congress actually directs how many officers are available to be generals/admirals at any time.\n\nUS [Title 10](_URL_5_) governs all aspects of the military, to even include [who can be in command of an aircraft carrier](_URL_0_).\n\nThe laws in fact govern [the max number of generals/admirals](_URL_2_):\n\n > The number of general officers on active duty in the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps, and the number of flag officers on active duty in the Navy, may not exceed the number specified for the armed force concerned as follows:\n\n > (1) For the Army, 231.\n\n > (2) For the Navy, 162.\n\n > (3) For the Air Force, 198.\n\n > (4) For the Marine Corps, 62.\n\nTitle 10 even governs how many [4 star generals/admirals](_URL_4_):\n\n > (1) in the Army, if that appointment would result in more than—\n\n > (A) 7 officers in the grade of general;\n\n > (B) 46 officers in a grade above the grade of major general; or\n\n > (C) 90 officers in the grade of major general;\n\n > (2) in the Air Force, if that appointment would result in more than—\n\n > (A) 9 officers in the grade of general;\n\n > (B) 44 officers in a grade above the grade of major general; or\n\n > (C) 73 officers in the grade of major general;\n\n > (3) in the Navy, if that appointment would result in more than—\n\n > (A) 6 officers in the grade of admiral;\n\n > (B) 33 officers in a grade above the grade of rear admiral; or\n\n > (C) 50 officers in the grade of rear admiral;\n\n > (4) in the Marine Corps, if that appointment would result in more than—\n\n > (A) 2 officers in the grade of general;\n\n > (B) 17 officers in a grade above the grade of major general; or\n\n > (C) 22 officers in the grade of major general.\n\nThere are notable exceptions: joint duty, like being commander of CENTCOM, will be a four star and thus branches can exceed caps when they have individuals from their ranks promoted to joint jobs. For instance, [currently the US Navy](_URL_1_) has 9 four-star Admirals. The \"statutory\" 6 are:\n\n* Chief of Naval Operations - ADM Richardson\n* Vice Chief of Naval Operations - ADM Moran\n* Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion - ADM Caldwell\n* Commander, U.S. Fleet Forces Command - ADM Davidson\n* Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet - ADM Swift\n* Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe - ADM Foggo\n\nThe other 3 are in joint jobs:\n\n* Commander, U.S. Pacific Command - ADM Harris\n* Commander, U.S. Southern Command - ADM Tidd\n* Commander, US Cyber Command/Director, National Security Agency - ADM Rogers\n \nThus, at the general/admiral level, you are actually promoted *into* your job. For instance, the Chief of Staff of the Army is always a 4-star general. One can skip having a 3-star job and go straight to that position and assume the rank of 4-star. Once you leave that job, your rank reverts to your previous rank... unless you go into another 4-star job or retire.\n\nSo in the case of Eisenhower, he assumed rank quickly because he took on the roles and responsibilities of what a 4-star was to be in charge of as the Army of the United States expanded rapidly. His permanent rank, in the Regular Army, rose more slowly. And his 5-star rank was made permanent after the war by an Act of Congress.\n\nedit: typos and clarification",
"/u/technique_only gave a great, comprehensive answer, but I wanted to add one thing about Eisenhower and his meteoric rise with respect to why he merited promotion to such a senior rank and billet in the first place:\n\nEisenhower can, in some respects, be seen as an example of failing upwards. This is not to say that Eisenhower was a failure as a commander, by any means... but you have to remember that he spent most of his peacetime career as a staff officer, and had no combat experience and only a few months of real command experience when the U.S. entered WWII. A big part of Eisenhower's career success is owed to the fact that he had ingratiated himself to the right people during his staff assignments: Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, and even John Pershing all considered Eisenhower a friend and a trusted junior officer. In addition to the exceptional competence, alacrity, and work ethic he exhibited with regards to his peacetime duties; Army officers, much like voters in 1952, did very much \"like Ike\". \n\nEisenhower's inexperience and relative ineptitude as a tactician and battlefield commander, on the other hand, directly resulted in a massive number of Allied deaths in what should have been slam dunk victories against a beleaguered German army in North Africa during Operation Torch, and likewise during invasions in Sicily and Italy... basically, everything before Operation Overlord was a fucking shitshow.\n\nSo then why did Eisenhower keep getting promoted over better tacticians like George Patton (a personal friend who had been senior to Eisenhower for decades) and Bernard Montgomery (who was already a battle-hardened Marshall by the time the U.S. arrived in Europe)?\n\nThe short answer is that he had a gift for the unique and unprecedented political demands of a coalition commander of that scale, whose duties involved smoothing relations between not only competing Generals from other nations, but also headstrong world leaders embroiled in a perpetual dick measuring contest. No other military officer on the planet could have mollified FDR and Churchill with regards to the looming question of Charles de Gaulle's role in both the Allied war effort and post-war Europe, for example. While his lack of command experience left him ill-prepared for waging war, his unique experiences weaving in and out of the War Department and the White House, at the right hand of legendary commanders and world leaders alike, left him uniquely well equipped to hold together the most massive coalition army in human history.\n\nThus, expediting Eisenhower through the ranks despite his failures was dual purpose: The rarified position of Supreme Allied Commander not only allowed Eisenhower to put his political acumen to good use, but it allowed more skilled battlefield commanders, like Patton, J. Lawton Collins, and Matthew Ridgeway, to direct troops on the ground.\n\nEisenhower's rise was unusually fast, even by WWII standards. Jean Edward Smith details his career trajectory really nicely in \"Eisenhower: In War and Peace\"."
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adf6yi | How and when did Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection gain scientific consensus? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/adf6yi/how_and_when_did_darwins_theory_of_evolution_by/ | {
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"Late, brief answer: it was controversial through his lifetime and for several decades after his death was considered probably not correct by many scientists. They did not doubt evolution (he was given credit for convincing them of that), they doubted that natural selection and gradualism could account for it. There were deep rifts in the community of biologists between those who took a more statistical approach, those who believed in non-gradual mutations, and those who were \"neo-Darwinians.\" Tensions were further increased by the \"re-discovery\" of Mendelian heredity, which did not seem to mesh with Darwin's work very well. \n\nThe \"consensus\" emerged only with the development of the _modern evolutionary synthesis_ in the 1920s-1930s. This essentially involved the merging of evolutionary theory with new insights from population genetics, and showed how all of the previous ideas (Mendelism, gradualism, statistical biology, mutation, natural selection) could all be made to work together in a very elegant Darwinian framework. At that point Darwinian natural selection as the motive force of evolution became essentially consensus for biologists. Again, this is not the same thing as saying that _evolution_ was not a consensus; this became a consensus among biologists essentially after Darwin (the \"next generation\" of scientists did not doubt it, on the whole). It is a question specifically about the _mechanism_.\n\nFor more information and detail, especially about the much-neglected \"Eclipse of Darwinism,\" that followed prior to the modern synthesis, see Bowler, _Evolution: The History of an Idea_. "
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dibcsm | Supporters of the Blue and Green teams at the Hippodrome of Constantinople were infamous for committing violent crimes and starting riots, but why Blue and Green rather than Red and White? At Rome, the Red and White teams were older, so surely could have developed a bigger reputation? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dibcsm/supporters_of_the_blue_and_green_teams_at_the/ | {
"a_id": [
"f48cmzo"
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"text": [
"The classic account of this is Alan Cameron, *Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium* (Oxford, 1976) - some more recent work has been done on ancient sports but I don’t think anything has surpassed Cameron’s work on the chariot racing factions. \n\nBasically...we don’t really know! Historians have speculated that maybe the different colours came from different neighbourhoods of Constantinople, or maybe they were related to the different doctrinal interpretation of Christ's humanity/divinity. Cameron rejected those explanations and argued that the sources simply never tell us why the Blues and Greens were more popular. \n\n > “Why and how Reds and Whites were weaker than their rivals is altogether obscure, but it is a fact which must be accepted...the sudden and violent notoriety that came to the Blues and Greens in the fifth century has nothing to do with the ascendancy the same Blues and Greens exercised over Reds and Whites. Their greater popularity and power is a phenomenon as old as the Empire itself, of social significance only in so far as it may be inevitable that a highly competitive sort will divide a compact population into two rather than four primary loyalties” (Cameron, 72-73)\n\nIt's not even certain that the Reds and Whites were older, as is commonly believed. The 2nd-century Christian author Tertullian is the only one who says that the Reds and Whites dated back to the time of Romulus, but his account is surely full of legend. No one was actually sure when the different colours were founded, or who founded them or why. They probably all dated back to the republican period, or even the monarchy, if not literally as far back as Romulus. (This is contrasted with the history of gladiatorial contests, which did have a specific, well-known origin.)\n\nThe Blues and Greens were always politically more active and relevant, going back to the early Roman Empire:\n\n > “Whenever we hear of the factional reference of an emperor, from as early as the Julio-Claudians it is always either for the Blues (Vitellus, Caracalla) or the Greens (Gaius, Nero, Domitian, Verus, Commodus, Elagabalus)...Reds and Whites are scarcely named in the literary sources. It is otherwise with the non-literary sources, the inscriptions and curse tablets, where there is frequent reference to the Reds and Whites…Each of the four factors had its charioteers, grooms, doctors, and the like, but the fans tended to divide into just two parties: Blues and Greens.” (54-56)\n\nThe emperors did not always divide into Blues and Greens; Anastasius was a fan of the Reds, for example. \n\nBy the 6th century, clearly the Blues and Greens were the biggest and wealthiest factions and they were responsible for the rioting in 565 (the Nika riots), and representatives of the Blues and Greens were even incorporated into coronations and other imperial ceremonies. But all four factions are attested for as long as the chariot races lasted in Constantinople, which was at least up to the 12th century."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
3lrxon | Why do antiseptics soothe sore throats? | From what I know sore throats are caused by viruses.
Many suggest gargling with Listerine or a mild saline solution to soothe the pain of a sore throat.
Both are antiseptic. However, why would this work? Viruses aren't alive and can't be "killed" by either. I guess they could be deactivated. What's the real mechanism behind why gargling with antiseptics helps soothe sore throats? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3lrxon/why_do_antiseptics_soothe_sore_throats/ | {
"a_id": [
"cv97hah"
],
"score": [
7
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"text": [
"Hypertonic saline (gargling with salt water) would draw interstitial fluids out of the tissue, and with them circulating inflammatory substances such as bradykinin. By removing built up fluid and reducing inflammatory substances (that sensitize pain receptors) pain should be reduced. \n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
1veu3t | Would the night sky be noticeable different at different parts of the galaxy? | I understand that the constellations will differ, but I'm thinking about density of stars and brightness of those stars at night. For instance, if we were at the edge of the galaxy would one half of the sky be dark, while the other half is light? If we were closer to the core, would the night sky be ablaze with stars in every direction? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1veu3t/would_the_night_sky_be_noticeable_different_at/ | {
"a_id": [
"cerlq5i"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Yes absolutely. The centre of the Milky Way is tremendously bright for the reasons you've already identified, and if you were floating about in a spaceship on one of the outer arms you'd see one side of the sky a lot more twinkly than the other."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
25jbxd | how come 'awful' generally means bad, not 'full of awe'? | Like 'awesome' | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25jbxd/eli5_how_come_awful_generally_means_bad_not_full/ | {
"a_id": [
"chhq2qz",
"chhr41x"
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text": [
"The same can be said for 'terrible' and 'terrific'. English is a cruel hearted bitch.\n",
"_URL_0_\n\nFound that it should answer your question "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6802/awesome-vs-awful"
]
] | |
4lu793 | why are cosmetic surgeries such as skin lightening and breast implants frowned upon unlike braces? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lu793/eli5_why_are_cosmetic_surgeries_such_as_skin/ | {
"a_id": [
"d3q6elh",
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"score": [
7,
2,
2
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"text": [
"First of all, this is very subjective. I think amongst people I know, botox would be \"frowned upon\" just as much as breast implants - both of them are unnecessary surgery for purely cosmetic reasons.\n\nBraces, though, are often required for medical reasons, to prevent difficulties with teeth getting in each others' way or even causing gum issues. Here in the UK, the NHS provides free or highly subsidised dental treatment when it's medically necessary, and many, many people have braces fitted under this scheme. The NHS will not provide cosmetic dental work though - anyone wanting cosmetic dental work will have to pay to have it done.\n\nAs for skin bleaching, I think the big issue with it is that it somehow implies that having dark skin is a bad thing - and this is an idea which many campaigners have been working hard for decades to overcome, and which is generally seen as not being acceptable in the western world.",
"Everyone agrees that straight teeth is better than crooked teeth.\n\nNot everyone agrees that light skin is better than dark skin, big boobs are better than small boobs, tight skin is better than wrinkles. So when someone does one of those surgeries, it's like they're saying \"fuck people with wrinkles, wrinkles suck\" and people generally do not appreciate feeling offended and marginalised like that.\n\nSay everyone who looks like you suddenly went to get surgery to look less like you. You'd feel pretty stink about it.",
"Because unlike skin lightening or breast implants, braces can improve someone's health. Also as /u/LondonPilot pointed out, skin lightening implies that there's something wrong with having dark skin.\n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] | ||
23tkcx | national debt and the financial state of a country | I don't understand how national debt works. How can a country such as the US continue to spend, loan and borrow money when their debt clearly exceeds what they'll ever be able to pay off? Does high national debt mean that a country is in bad shape financially? Why or why not? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23tkcx/eli5_national_debt_and_the_financial_state_of_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"ch0gtva",
"ch0h24x",
"ch0jvlf"
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"score": [
10,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Debt is and isn't a bad thing. Think of it like owning a credit card. If you use the card here and there for things that you need but don't necessarily have the cash on hand for, the credit card is a great tool. You pay it off every month or in a few months during a hard time, but that debt gives you the flexibility to make decisions without relying on capital that you have right now.\n\nOn the other hand, if you use that card for all your purchases and you put money on it that you can't afford, eventually the interest kicks in and you have to cut back on things you need in order to pay it off. \n\nRight now, the US is fully capable of paying off its national debt and will be able to fund it for quite some time. There is however a tipping point where a high debt significantly cuts into a nation's ability to do other things. The current debt service in this year's budget is about 6%. However, if a country continues to borrow beyond its receipts, they have to commit a larger portion of the budget to pay it back. In other words, the US would have to make cuts to programs like Medicare, Social Security, defense, etc in order to pay back the debt. Either that or raise taxes. Both are options that aren't great, so the best idea is to just make sure it doesn't get to that point.\n\nMost of the debt becomes debt because the government issues bonds. The bonds are bought by the public or other nations at face value with a maturity date in the future where they will be worth X more dollars. When maturity comes due, the treasury owes the bondholder that money, so that is how it is financed.\n\nThe other option on paying back debt is a somewhat nuclear option that some countries have had no choice but to embrace: inflation. In essence, say you owe $10000 on your credit card you can't afford. You call the credit card company and say you have $100 dollars in your hand you can use to pay it off. Then you tell them that the $100 you have magically turned into $500. Obviously, you can't do that because you don't print your own currency, but the US does and can simply print more currency, effectively devaluing it to a point where the debt becomes more manageable. This is usually an awful idea though because it has severe ramifications on the economy. Even though the government can pay back its debt, everyone's dollar is now worth less, prices rise, unemployment rises and lots of other really terrible things occur.\n\nHope that helped.",
"High national debt may or may not be indicative of a country's health. Essentially, there are two main ways to use debt. You can borrow money in order to fund future investments to get more money in the future, or you can borrow money for consumer goods and services, which is a short-term boost in a country's output but doesn't provide lasting growth. \n\nWhile you shouldn't compare a country's financial situation with a citizen's; imagine this scenario. You're purchasing a new $15,000 car and you have $20,000 saved up. The responsible thing to do is to finance the car (using debt) to pay the $15,000 over time as opposed to up front. While you'll be paying more in physical dollars, you now have the ability to use the $15,000 (minus down payment, first payment, etc.) to make you more money.\n\nWhile a country's government could use its own money to finance investments, it is a better move to use foreign money to finance the investments and use domestic money for domestic uses.\n\nAs far as how a country like the US can continue to borrow money, it all boils down to a nation's credit rating. Because the US is (currently) in good economic standing, the default risk that the US will never pay back its debt is low. It's assumed that the US will continue to be in good economic standing indefinitely, or until some event offers evidence to the contrary. If evidence like that arose, then the nation's credit rating will subsequently drop.",
"If you're trying to educate yourself, add these to the pot and stir it:\n\n* The **deficit** is this year's budget shortfall. Congress authorizes the spending of money on this project or that, but doesn't actually have the money to spend, so it must be borrowed. \n* The **debt** is the sum of the deficits -- the total amount of borrowed money that has to be paid back.\n\nGovernments borrow money by selling bonds. When they come due, we borrow new money to pay off the old debts. Fortunately, this is not difficult, because governments can usually borrow money at really low interest rates.\n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
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