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3stfg4 | why does baking soda and water remove scratches from plastic? | A while back ago I had a Timex watch and it was scratched beyond belief. I had no idea how to fix it but in that time I was obsessed with baking soda and it's multiple uses. Surprisingly it worked well but was curious why? (I assume it fills in the cracks?) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3stfg4/eli5_why_does_baking_soda_and_water_remove/ | {
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"Baking soda is lightly abrasive.\n\nIt may have polished out the scratches or just taken the edges off to make them less noticeable."
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4ddpqc | what is a choke hold? | I always thought it was a fake wrestling move, but it turns out its real. How and why does it work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ddpqc/eli5_what_is_a_choke_hold/ | {
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"Respiratory and vascular chokeholds restrict blood flow to the brain, depriving it of oxygen. In turn, somebody being \"choked out\" loses consciousness. If the brain is deprived of oxygen for prolonged periods, serious brain damage can occur.\n\nChokeholds are used in a variety of martial arts. Either as a self-defence mechanism, or used in competitive sports to win a match.",
"It depends on the type of choke.\n\nThe most common/recognizable is the \"rear naked choke\" (named because the choke-er is behind the choke-ee, and \"naked\" because it can be done without having to grab clothing).\n\nYou cut off blood flow to the brain causing unconsciousness."
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paw9j | syria, and why russia and china wont condemn assad's regime. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/paw9j/eli5_syria_and_why_russia_and_china_wont_condemn/ | {
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"Countries like America and France condemn the Assad regime for mistreating its own people. Some people believe that when governments are mistreating their own people, ie. shooting, torturing, imprisoning them, that other countries have a responsibility to act militarily to stop them. This doctrine is called humanitarian intervention and 'responsibility to protect.'\n\nRussia and China both, broadly speaking, oppose these principles. They say that there are problems with the idea of humanitarian intervention. For one, who decides when to intervene? Most of the countries of the world have abuses of some kind occurring in them. Clearly a country that wanted to intervene couldn't invade all human rights violators, so no matter what they're going to be selective in their choice of invasions. Is that selection legitimate or arbitrary? It has the potential to be arbitrary, and there's no standard to make that judgment. America indefinitely detains people; should other countries 'intervene' to stop that? For instance: N. Korea is at least as bad as Assad's crackdown has been. No one is trying to intervene there. The other thing to keep in mind is that interventions have the potential to go very badly. As bad as Assad's crackdown as been he's still only killed a tiny fraction of the number who died 2005-2006 in Iraq. Maybe in 5 years we'll regret Libya; what if a civil war starts or someone worse gets power? \n\nThe other answer is that Russia and China both are concerned that in the future someone could use that argument to justify attacking them. There is a particular risk of this because both Russia and China tend to do things considered human rights abuses. "
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18w41s | who created the economic 'norm' where we work for five days and only get two off? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18w41s/eli5_who_created_the_economic_norm_where_we_work/ | {
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"This wasn't the norm until well into the 20th century, and still isn't in many parts of the world. Resting on *one* day of the week is fairly common and is probably related to the Bible. Adding another day off was a move to improve working conditions for factory workers; I believe (but am not certain) that it was promoted by labor unions in the USA. "
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4fnkz0 | what does it means that united health pulls out of obamacare? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fnkz0/eli5_what_does_it_means_that_united_health_pulls/ | {
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"They aren't exiting from the ACA, they are exiting from the \"Exchanges\" within the ACA. The exchanges are not profitable and heavily regulated by the government making it difficult to earn a profit. The government wants to show affordable rates that for most companies are not sustainable, so United is electing to not offer plans in the exchanges and only sell to businesses offering employer sponsored healthcare.\n\nThe ACA set up a marketplace for healthcare providers to offer plans to individuals seeking private insurance, this is what is referred to as the Exchange. However, the regulations and the market itself was set up very poorly and companies are having difficulties not losing a ton of money offering plans within the Exchange. The problem with United dropping out of most states is that they were the largest company in the exchanges and if they couldn't profit or make it sustainable other companies may back out as well. Less competition will cause prices to increase. As prices increase less people will sign up. As less people sign up the prices will increase... as the prices increase less people will sign up... etc, this is called the death spiral. It was predicted by conservatives at the start of the ACA. This doesn't mean we are definitely hitting the death spiral, but it is a step backwards for sure.",
"They will only provide health insurance plans through employer plans and the like, and not individual plans through the ObamaCare exchanges.",
"United Health is an insurance company. They must make a profit to stay in business. Their quoted premiums were not enough to cover the cost the health care provided under their policies.\n\nSo the company will no longer lose money on these policies. Those insured will have to find other companies whose premiums are likely to be higher.\n\nBut the company is still offering health insurance policies. They are still in business. They needed more subscribers than they got and their costs were too high.\n\n",
"United needs to maintain certain profit margins. The exchanges don't meet their goals for profit margins, thus making it not worth their time to do business there. That's the gist of it.\n\nMore importantly, it goes to show that United was either undercharging for insurance to create an excuse not to operate on the exchanges, or that their overhead is unnecessarily high given things like MediCare work on much tighter budgets just fine.",
"All the people saying it's because of profits are *technically* correct, but it's not like United Health is losing money. [They earned $6.8 billion in profits in 2015.](_URL_0_) Yep, that's down a little bit from 2014, but that's still a very healthy figure. The issue is that people are greedy fucks who want more, more. more. They shareholders aren't satisfied with $6.8 billion in profits, they want more, and they want that amount to grow every single year at a rate larger than inflation. \n\nSo if you want the REAL answer, it's that the shareholders are greedy and aren't happy with *only* making $6.8 billion in one year.",
"It means this particular chain of stores is closing some of its locations in some of the health insurance shopping malls in America.\n\nPeople who bought the pack of discount coupons this chain of stores sells in these shopping malls will need to either go back to the shopping mall in their designated area and buy a pack of discount coupons from a different store, or go to this coupon sellers flagship store and buy a pack that costs more than the packs it sold in the shopping malls.\n\nPeople who were too poor to shop at the mall for a pack of discount coupons will need to contact their shopping helper agency, called Medicaid, and ask them what to do.\n\nOld people who bought a pack of discount coupons called \"Advantage\" don't have to do anything. Their discount coupon pack will still be good for the stores that accept UHC-brand \"Advantage\" coupons.",
"From the article linked above: \n\n\"I would still be surprised if other major insurers followed United's lead. United was in some sense in a category all its own\"\n\nDoes anyone know why this is? What sets United apart from other insurers who have stayed?\n\n\"Aetna and Anthem are undergoing a U.S. Department of Justice review of what would be an historic consolidation in the health insurance industry. Aetna has proposed buying rival Humana Inc, while Anthem has agreed to buy Cigna Corp.\"\n\nI didn't know this. Are we moving toward a system where there will only be a small handful of insurance companies for everyone, and if so, what does that mean for the insured?",
"I'm a Director of Operations at a health care company that offers exchange plans. United was the government's golden child, proof the system worked. But the risk adjustment amounts were too low to be profitable. So a year or so ago United started threatening to leave in a bid to politically force risk adjustment rates to rise. The government called their bluff. This won't be what causes other plans to leave - they're businesses so as long as there is profit they'll stay. But know that most of us aren't making a profit and those that are are only doing so because we've been lucky enough to not have any really sick people in the plan. The last company I worked at had to close its plan due to having over a hundred HIV infected. Costs were through the roof, hence closure.",
"Why not just stop all this pussyfooting and switch to single payer healthcare?",
"Hi, im a customer service rep for a big health insurance company and i used to work for a department set up for people who enroll through the federal market place for health insurance coverage in the state of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and West Virginia. \n\nIf you get insurance through your employer, they're your administrator.\n\nIf you get insurance through the Federal market place, they are your administrator.\n\nThis means they set the guidelines (sort of) as to what the plans can offer and what they do offer. \n\nThere are bronze, silver, gold, and platinum and there's an inverse correlation from monthly payments and how much the plan covers.\n\nWith this being said, the Federal market place is fucking terrible to deal with.\nCall 1800-318-2596 for the Federal market place and just talk to them for a while. You'll begin to see that they higher unskilled Unprofessional and unenthusiastic employees. People who are no help what so ever...\n\n if you pick a plan from the market place you may be eligible for what's called the \"advanced premium tax credit [aptc] which lowers your monthly premium. If you chose a silver level plan, you may also be eligible for a cost sharing reduction. This can make your cheap plan equal to a platinum level plan. To put this in perspective, I have seen people who have a monthly payment of $1.00 and a $200 deductible.\n\nWhat happens is, the Federal Government is supposed to pay for your health care with this APTC at the end of the year, and they send it to the health insurance company. \n\nSometimes they don't get paid, and sometimes the plan gets less than what they originally anticipated. This may be what caused United Healthcare to stop accepting policies through the market place. \n\nSometimes what happens is the market place can't verify if you're a united States citizen or they can't verify your tax information so what do they do? They remove your subsidy entirely and that leaves you with a bill over $1000 per month. If you can't pay this, then you're dropped.\n\nThis hurts everybody because it makes the premium payments go up and the benefits come down. "
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2sq1w3 | why are so many roads paralleled by ditches? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sq1w3/eli5_why_are_so_many_roads_paralleled_by_ditches/ | {
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"Because perpendicular ditches have shown to be too bumpy.\n\nIn all seriousness though, it's for a lot of water run-off and stopping cars/providing security. In the city, there are storm drains and sewer grates that the water can run into during a storm, and curbs and posts to stop cars and show \"this is where the city property is, and this is where the private/business property is\".\n\nOut in rural areas though, there aren't sewers, so instead there are ditches where the water runs off into during a storm and the snow gets pushed into after being plowed. As well as stopping cars that go off the road, stopping them from driving into house or fields, and showing where the field ends and the government property begins in case the field isn't marked with a fence or anything."
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63w92q | why does a 4 legged table wobble whereas a 3 legged does not? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63w92q/eli5why_does_a_4_legged_table_wobble_whereas_a_3/ | {
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"Since any 3 points define a plane, it's guaranteed that the bottoms of any 3 legs can touch the floor at the same time. This cannot be said of any 4 legs.",
"A three legged table is a tripod; very stable. If someone were to try to balance it on two of its legs, they would find it tries to lean to one side (since most of the weight is to one side of those two legs); it \"falls\" until the third leg touches the ground. Adding a fourth leg is a bit trickier; it has to be exactly long enough to touch the ground with the \"tripod\" of the other three already supporting the table. Otherwise, the table will tend to alternate between the two most stable tripods: both with the two longer legs, and each with one of the shorter legs. It will, thus, wobble."
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9tca2y | why are watches worn on the non-dominant hand? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tca2y/eli5_why_are_watches_worn_on_the_nondominant_hand/ | {
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"I have always assumed it was so you can perform an action in your main hand and look at the watch at the same time.\n\nI wear mine on my dominant when I wear it. ",
"I wore mine on my dominant side for years and got sick of people asking what's wrong with me. I told people I liked having my watch where I was already looking while writing, but who does that anymore? Now it doesn't matter as much so I switched just to shut people up. ",
"You use your dominant hand more and that means there is more opportunity for the watch to bang into stuff. Any watch also slightly reduces mobility and clearance which would be more annoying if on the dominant hand. Finally since you are using the dominant hand to do thing it is more likely that when you want to reference your watch it is on an occupied hand, complicating matters.",
"I wear mine on the dominant side to cover scars, and I've never heard of having to wear it on your off hand.\n\nThat said, it might make it less prone to damage if you wear it on your non-dominant hand (less likely to bump it into things), and maybe slightly reduce fatigue if it's heavy. ",
"I always thought you wore watches on the non-dominant hand so that your dominant hand can do the clasp when putting it on or taking it off",
"My theory ....Try holding a drink in your dominant hand and have your watch on the same dominant wrist, Then get someone to ask you what time is it \n\n\n You will now have wet pants\n\n\nIn your none dominant hand, \n no problem with wet pants anymore\n\n\nedit\n\nAdditionally those that like to wear the watch face on the inside of your wrist if its your dominant hand you will wet the time askers pants with your drink instead ",
"It would be hard to wind. Back in the day of mechanical watches, you would need to wind up the spring in the watch. Now in modern times that is not needed but you still would use your dominant hand to set it. ",
"Lefty here: started off wearing watches on non-dom right hand. Just 'felt' better.\n\nThen later on changed, what with need to adjust the time and/or day indicator in having to take the darn thing off my wrist to do so. \n\nThis because watches have the stem dials, ('crown' as called), positioned for right handers just to avoid having to take the watch off. Try in on your right wrist and thus need to use your left hand to adjust the time, you'll see what I mean.\n\nUs 10%'er lefties learn to cope in so many ways, and now the watch feels just as natural on the left-dom hand. Ha, yet still feels more natural, though, when tightening/loosening reverse threaded bolts & nuts, which are quite rare!",
"I wear mine on my non dominant hand. I also have the face on the underside of my wrist. Seems easier to access the time imo.",
"Watches aren't just something you look at. You use them too - push buttons, spin dials, and even touch screens on modern watches. Most people wear it on their left hand so they can operate it with their dominant right hand. It's also easier to put on and latch a buckle by using your dominant hand. Men's wristwatches become popular just before WWI. A man could still refer to the time while holding a tool or weapon.",
"This is a carryover from the days when watches were wound by hand. You would have to turn the crown on the watch to wind the spring. Sure you could take it off if worn on your non-dominant hand, but it was much more convenient to wind it while still wearing it, and it's much easier to do the winding action (fine motor skills) with the dominant hand, so it would be worn on the non-dominant.\n\nJust to be clear, I completely made that up. And to give you a look behind the scenes, I started writing something out as a joke, and then thought that there could be some truth to the winding convenience and reasoned my way through a balderdash explanation. Here is my original thought:\n\n > This is a carryover from the days when automatic watches gained popularity. These are the mechanically-wound watches that used an oscillating weight (rotor) to wind the mainspring (spiral torsion) in watches. The earliest watches did not have a way to limit or regulate the maximum tension, so overwinding was a problem that could lead to a watch running fast, or breaking. The dominant hand is typically used for masturbating, so watches would have to be removed to avoid the risk of over-winding or breaking the mainspring. For convenience, people just moved the watch to the non-dominant (non-wanking) hand.",
"So you can perform actions with your dominant hand while checking the time. As my dad put it, “so you don’t spill beer all over yourself when you try to take a sip and check the time at the same time”"
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50ghq8 | how can enemy ai in video games have difficulty settings. | How is it possible for enemy AI to be programmed to miss on an easy difficulty but still have pin point accuracy on harder difficulties. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/50ghq8/eli5_how_can_enemy_ai_in_video_games_have/ | {
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"Simply by adding a random chance of missing. Easy difficulty? Each shot has a 75% of missing. Medium? 50%. Hard? Only 25%. These are of course random numbers I just made up, but I hope you get my point.\n\nThere are of course other possible changes. More hit points, more damage, better tactics. ",
"I read a quote back in the early days, when bots for multiplayer were just starting to become a thing (i.e. unreal, quake 3, etc.). Not sure who said it and what game they were developing, but the quote goes a bit like this:\n\n\"simulating a perfect player is easy. simulating a realistic player that makes mistakes is the difficult part.\"\n\nit's solved by giving the AI a chance to miss. the more realistic the AI, the more sophisticated the algorithm to calculate that chance. e.g. a simple AI would just have a fixed chance, while a better one would take movement of its target into account. they could also implement a reaction time, i.e. artificially increase the time it takes for a bot to react to what's going on.\n\n*edit* fixed typo.",
"There are several ways in which enemy AI can have a higher or lower difficulty setting:\n\n1. Aim lag - This is noticeable in the game Counter Strike: Global Offensive, where bots on higher difficulty will have much more accurate tracking compared with bots on lower difficulty (ie. They will be able to keep their crosshair trained much closer to the player).\n\nExample: _URL_0_\n\n2. Accuracy percentage - More difficult bots in other games will not have worse crosshair placement, and instead will have a higher percentage chance of each bullet hitting the target.\n\n3. Accuracy lock on time - In some games, the rate at which the bots' accuracy improves is increased - This is similar to the first point, where if you stand still in front of a bot, as time goes on, the bots accuracy will increase until every bullet hits. A higher rate of lock on will mean a more difficult bot, as they will fire with 100% accuracy much quicker.\n\n4. Slightly different to the question, but still worth noting, bot positioning - In CS:GO (as shown in the video), bots have nav meshes in many games which gives them instructions on how to navigate the map. A more difficult bot might have a more efficient nav mesh in another game, where they will take cover in better spots, and navigate the map more easily whilst taking a route that will provide a greater advantage against the player.\n\n5. Damage and health - The most obvious one, in many games, devs simply go with the easy option and increase damage and health (as well as armour) for the bots. This one is self explanatory as to why the bots would get harder.\n\nHope this helped :)"
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5plrp1 | nonprofits (such as harvard) can and do make profits, but they cannot give them to owners or shareholders. then, what incentive do these owners or shareholders have for starting/owning it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5plrp1/eli5_nonprofits_such_as_harvard_can_and_do_make/ | {
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"Non profits can't give any profits to their owners or shareholders, because they don't have any. They have a Board of Directors tasked with making decisions, but that's it.",
"Nonprofits are mission-driven -- they're created for a reason, whether that reason is \"providing high quality higher education\" or \"supporting cancer patients\" or \"training service dogs for work with veterans\" or \"collecting and maintaining a blood supply for use in healthcare\". So that's the incentive, to achieve the mission, whatever it may be. ",
"Nonprofits exist to provide some kind of service or advocate for something. The people who fund them generally approve of this service and/or advocacy and thus provide money for it to continue.\n\nFor some entities like Harvard or other Ivy League schools being a major donor grants significant social status.",
"They want to promote or advocate for something, and they want to do so without paying taxes.\n\nTo use a topical example, let's say I have a fracking company. Fracking has a bad reputation, so I start a non-profit to promote it as a cleaner and safer form of energy. I can take a deduction for the money I donate to it, and it can operate without paying taxes, which makes it cheaper than just having my company buy ads directly. And since it isn't part of my company, I might get other fracking companies to donate as well, because it helps them too.\n"
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4hb30q | how does cooking food change the texture and flavor of food? (i.e. meats become firm, vegetables become soft) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hb30q/eli5_how_does_cooking_food_change_the_texture_and/ | {
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"The heat of cooking denatures proteins, such as a cooked egg transforming from a gel like liquid to a semi-solid. Breaks down cell walls and makes vegetables softer and easier to eat. Gelatinizes starches such as in gravies, and pastas. The heat may caramelize sugars such as the browning of breads, cooking of onions. Concentrate the flavors by reducing water content. \n\nSee also _URL_0_",
"It depends on the thing you are cooking, how much moisture is involved, how long you cook it, and how hot it gets. \n\nHeat generally breaks more complex molecules down into simpler ones. For instance converting the tough sinewy structures in a piece of meat, into soft gelatin and collagen. This is what makes slow cooked BBQ so soft. It takes time for this to happen though and applying more heat doesn't speed it up very much. \n\nIf you apply a higher heat for a shorter time, it cooks the proteins, blood, plasma, and muscle fibers which stiffens them up. This is why searing meat makes it tough on the outside. It also removes moisture which also leads to toughness. If you were to keep cooking the meat though, eventually it would start to soften up again and you'd end up with something like BBQ or slow cooked meat like pulled pork VS a pork chop. \n\nWith vegetables the same occurs but there aren't muscle fibers. Instead you have cellulose fibers, starches, and sugars. As you cook the vegetable, many of the sugars are seared becoming carmelized which helps brown the vegetable like an onion. The carmelization also makes it softer as the stiff fibers of the vegetable are broken down by the heat. If you keep cooking it without adding water or trapping the steam in, then it will start to dry out and get hard again. \n\nIf you really sear the vegetables you carbonize it making it black and burned, but this also forms a skin that can help trap interior moisture leading to a jucier vegetable. Think putting corn on the cob in a broiler or a BBQ smoker. It might be crispy on the outside and look a little burned, but all the sugars and starches carmelize and it gets sweeter and juicier. "
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6wg4e2 | was cum and actual word in the english language or has it been derived from something "coming" out? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6wg4e2/eli5_was_cum_and_actual_word_in_the_english/ | {
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"It may have first developed in 1440 as a reference to the product of the roasting of some grains during the malting process, which would produce a malt that rises to the top and sometimes can shoot off. This was called \"the Come\" and so the orgasm of a male might have been euphemistically referred to as \"to come\". \"Cum\" then was a slang term developed referring to \"come\".",
"[This source](_URL_0_) says it could derive from an English term \"come off\" which was slang for male orgasm. ",
"It's the Latin word for \"with\", and is [used in indicating a thing with two roles, functions, or natures, or a thing that has changed from one to another](_URL_0_).",
"In the sense you mean it, it was \"come\" until relatively recently: the spelling \"cum\" was popularized by porn magazines, probably in the 1970s.\n\nThe earliest record we have of this is dated 1650, and describes a premature ejaculation. It's a line in a song: \"Then off he came and blusht for shame soe soon that he had endit.\"\n\nIt was always a verb (meaning \"to experience orgasm\") until the beginning of the 20th century, when it also started to be used as a noun.\n\nInterestingly, in German, the verb \"kommen\" means \"to come\" in both senses; and I'm pretty sure I've seen \"I'm coming/cumming\" translated into French as \"J'arrive\" -- \"I am arriving\". I have no idea whether this is coincidence, or those languages borrowed the phrase from English and translated it literally (which would make it a type of phrase called a \"calque\")."
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3tb5l9 | how/why congress only works 111 days. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tb5l9/eli5_howwhy_congress_only_works_111_days/ | {
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"They are *in session* 111 days. There's a difference. The rest of the time they are expected to be available to their constituents back in their district or doing other duties.",
"Most of the real work is done in committees. It is also done by dedicated staff who work with many others.\n\nA Congressperson who attends committee meetings and moves about for constituents can be criticized by challengers who say they missed important votes. Many votes are non partisan. Voting is not crucial for passage.\n\nSome Congresspersons will accept proposed legislation written by lobbyists to introduce as their own. They will block legislation written to help people because the lobbyists urged them to do so. Or they may bargain in a tit for tat deal with others to get important legislation passed for their district by voting for legislation requested by other congresspeople."
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f126eg | how do stem cells repair parts of the body? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f126eg/eli5_how_do_stem_cells_repair_parts_of_the_body/ | {
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"Stem cells are \"Generic\" cells that haven't specialized into other body parts. In some injuries, your body can tap into a limited, finite supply of stem cells to replace missing cells. They travel to the location of the damage, specialize, and plug the hole. Some stem cells also partially specialize, narrowing the types of cells that they can become but allowing them to work more quickly or be recruited more easily.\n\nThis is one of the catches for stem cell treatments. You have to ensure that the body can recruit them and signals them to become the right thing.\n\nYour body's finite supply is also an issue. You can't use just anybody's stem cells. Get the wrong ones and your body will kill them, thinking that they're invader. Only your own stem cells are guaranteed to work, and most of your stem cells die when you get your umbilical cord cut as a baby. Odds are, unless you had some collected as a baby and frozen, you have next to no embryonic stem cells left and most of the cells you do have have already partially specialized.",
"Stem cells are a kind of a \"blank\" cells. If you place them on a liver, they will transform to a liver cells. If you place them on your skin, they'll transform into skin.\n\nIt's a bit like a chameleon who will change colour to anything it touches, difference is stem cells will stay that way.\n\nNo go brush your teeth and go to sleep because its too late for a five year old",
"The stem cells in our body are very organ specific\n\nStem cells for skin can only become new skin cells, stem cells for white blood cells and red blood cells can only become that, stem cells for our stomach can only become the stomach cells\n\nWe no longer have stem cells that can become anything in the body. We can only get more from embryos or from \"reverse\" programming cells we have into stem cells states, both of which are not that easy to do large scale"
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7fi10j | why are you asked to cover your card pin number when the other 16 digits of your card is also needed to access it | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7fi10j/eli5why_are_you_asked_to_cover_your_card_pin/ | {
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"The PIN number is intended to be a secondary form of authentication. \n\nIn the event that the 16 digits, name, and expiration date are compromised (by say, a magnetic stripe skimmer or the card being physically stolen), the PIN will not be compromised by the same method. Likewise, a camera might be able to get a PIN, but getting the card number, name, and expiration date will be harder that way.",
"If someone grabs your card, they need the PIN to access your account.\n\nThat grabbing could be electronic, as with card skimmers, or person grabbing it from your hand or pocket. Covering the keypad protects from prying eyes, person or camera.\n\nIf they really wanted to protect us, they’d make the numbers on the pad change places, or use a one-time number, like two-factor auth systems. \n\nMy bank offers card-less access with a one-time use number, but it still requires my PIN to assure I’m the one using it. They also make it easy to change my PIN, so I can use both as kind of a one-time combination if I’m in a questionable place."
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d7yphk | how does honey make money? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d7yphk/eli5_how_does_honey_make_money/ | {
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"From their own website!\n\n > Honey works with merchant partners to provide a set of functionality that primarily improves conversion rate at checkout. As a result, Honey drives increased sales to their merchants and in exchange their partners pay Honey commission through affiliate networks. By providing users with the confidence to check out knowing they are getting a fair deal Honey solves one of the biggest problems for merchants: shopping cart abandonment.",
"While your example of Honey actually does make money, as a more general answer there are plenty of start-ups that don't actually make money. A common strategy is to offer a completely free service with no ads and just burn through the initial investment money while growing as large a userbase as possible, then later on add in ways to monetize or just hope to get purchased by a larger company.",
"**Please read this entire message**\n\n---\n\nYour submission has been removed for the following reason(s):\n\n* Questions about a business or a group's motivation are not allowed on ELI5. These are usually either straightforward, or known only to the organisations involved, leading to speculation (Rule 2). \n\n\n\n\n---\nIf you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](_URL_1_) first. If you still feel the removal should be reviewed, please [message the moderators.](_URL_0_?)"
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9iuji3 | why does the frequency of peeing increase during our presence in swimming pools? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9iuji3/eli5_why_does_the_frequency_of_peeing_increase/ | {
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"Water makes us want to pee. Thats why having at bath or a shower or hearing a dripping tap make you more likely to want to pee. I can only assume it's so that running water will flush away the waste and keep your environment clean.",
"I don’t know that it does, but if that statistic is true...\n\nWater weighs a lot. When submerged, all that weight is pressing against your body, which in turn presses against your bladder. ",
"\"I've heard\" but never confirmed, that the atmospheric pressure in water is obviously considerably higher than in the air. The increase in pressure causes your blood pressure to rise. Your body tries to offset the increased pressure by trying to reduce the volume and starts removing excess water causing urination.",
"There's a lot of wild guessing here with no references, as per usual.\n\nCold diuresis - When you enter a pool, more often than not the water will be cooler than your internal temperature. Your body detects this change in temperature and in order to protect from hypothermia it constricts your blood vessels and diverts some of the blood from your skin inward. This keeps your internal organs warm and reduces the rate of heat loss.\n\nNow your kidneys have no way of knowing this is happening, all they can tell is that the amount of blood flowing to them has increased. One of their jobs is to maintain the proper pressure in your circulatory system so they solve this problem of increased blood flow by getting rid of the extra volume the only way they now how. Peeing\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"
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1ojyny | how come in certain areas of the country (us) basements/cellars are very common and in other parts they're unheard of? | I know that in places like Florida the soil is too wet to build a basement and the water table is too high, but what about places like California, Texas, and some other South Eastern States? I've heard basements are very rare there. Here in the North East almost every house has a basement. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ojyny/eli5_how_come_in_certain_areas_of_the_country_us/ | {
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"Like previous post, water tables are a big factor. However, not mentioned was frost levels. Northern houses have to have their concrete foundations buried many feet in the ground (roughly 12 feet). Reason being that northern ground/soil \"shifts\" due to the seasonal weather changes. If the foundation wasn't deep enough than the house would actually shift over time. So a lot of houses end up with basements out of the necessity of having the foundation dug deep into the ground."
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evbwm7 | what is an ern in eeg erp research? | Looking for a straightforward answer for help working in my lab. I'm an RA and we are being tasked with analyzing ERN's (error related negatives) in our EEG research.
Currently reading the Oxford Handbook but some straightforward answer would be nice as I dive into this dense text.
EDIT: fixed miswording of what ERN stands for | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/evbwm7/eli5_what_is_an_ern_in_eeg_erp_research/ | {
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6oxdlj | who decided to make all barns red and what is the purpose of all barns being red? drove down farm roads of indiana the other day and every single barn was red and it spawned this question for me | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6oxdlj/eli5_who_decided_to_make_all_barns_red_and_what/ | {
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"Nobody cares about the color of the barn. Just as long as it is painted. And with a big barn to cover the farmers order the cheapest paint they can get. The color of the paint comes from various different pigments that is added. So the price of paint is dependent on the price of the pigment. The cheapest pigment is iron oxide as it is found everywhere in the dirt. Iron oxide give a nice red color.",
"Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n\n1. [ELI5: Why are barns usually red? ](_URL_3_)\n1. [ELI5: Why are so many barns painted red? ](_URL_1_)\n1. [ELI5: Why are barns always painted red? ](_URL_0_)\n1. [ELI5: Why are the majority of barns red? ](_URL_2_)\n1. [ELI5: Why is red such a common color for barns? ](_URL_4_)\n1. [Why are barns painted red? ](_URL_5_)\n1. [ELI5: Why is the universal color for barns red? ](_URL_6_)\n",
"Red paint was the cheapest. Why? Because of our friend nuclear fusion! \n\n_URL_0_",
"Looks like every question I ever will have will be answered by Reddit. Thanks!"
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5xxjxh | what it means to be knighted or have the title of 'sir' or 'dame' in modern society? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xxjxh/eli5_what_it_means_to_be_knighted_or_have_the/ | {
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"You've probably heard of things like the Medal of Honor or the Presidential Medal of Freedom. These are medals awarded by the government to recognize people who have made some sort of major contribution to their field or society.\n\nOther countries like the United Kingdom and Canada have medals and decorations but also orders. Being inducted into an order is like receiving a medal. Orders are often a bit more complicated than just getting a medal because they may have extra rules such as a limit to number of living people in the order at one time. But like a medal the purpose in the end is to recognize and award someone.\n\nMany existing orders grew from military orders. A member of an order of knighthood was a minor noble with military responsibilities. Being knighted meant you were inducted into one of these orders. They were called \"sir\" because they were nobles. Over the centuries these orders of knighthood lost their military use and became solely honourific."
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6r7bgi | is it really unhealthy to eat human meat as a human? if so, why? | I don't know how to ask this question without sounding like a prospective cannibal. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6r7bgi/eli5_is_it_really_unhealthy_to_eat_human_meat_as/ | {
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"Yes. This is how prion diseases spread. A cannibal eats a victim with the disease, those malformed proteins now infect the cannibal.",
"It's not \"unhealthy\" in the way that a high-sugar diet or smoking is unhealthy through inherent cumulative effects.\n\nIt is mostly *dangerous* due to the risk of consuming prions, which are mal-formed protiens that notoriously can wreak havoc on your nervous system.\n\nIf you consume human flesh that does not contain any dangerous prions, it's no more or less healty than any other animal meat. You don't know if it contains those dangerous prions though.",
"Think of it this way. Different types of animals get different types of diseases. There are some parasites that are going to be better suited for surviving in certain types of animals. If you eat a fish that's infected with some fish disease, the bacteria you get from it are probably going to be better suited for surviving in a fish body than a human body. Not all the bacteria, but some of them. Fish are pretty different from people. But if you eat human meat then *all* of the bacteria in it are going to be really well suited for living in humans. Thats where they were living before anyway. So it would make sense for you to be more likely to get sick from eating human meat compared to other meats.\n\n\nOf course, as others have mentioned, prions are the much more dangerous prospect. Not something we're good at curing."
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dgqlj2 | what is it like to see things when suffering from schizophrenia? | Do you see only humans or other animals as well? Are these experiences clear as day? And how much does medication help? I recently saw the movie 'A Beautiful Mind' and am really curious to know more about what it's like to see a figment of your own imagination. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dgqlj2/eli5_what_is_it_like_to_see_things_when_suffering/ | {
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"Many people see many different things. One of the tricky things is true visual hallucinations vs. substance induced damage. I worked with a few people who saw bugs, lines, and other simple things. However it was never clear if it was due to a neurological issue or schizophrenia. Drug damage, especially methamphetamine, causes a lot of people to see shadows out of the corner of their eye. \nExperiences range but like all hallucinations are stronger and weaker at different times. \n\nMedication has traditionally be better at treating symptoms like hallucinations than delusions (false beliefs, like believing you are a famous person).\n\nI would argue that his symptoms in a Beautiful Mind are very atypical. Many who have as serious symptoms as he does also deal with a lot of cognitive interference, resulting in simple tasks like showering becoming challenging. Not all, of course, but in addition to hallucinations, many people suffer from disorganization where they can’t make logical sense of things. For example, spoke with a gentlemen today who knew tooth paste goes in his mouth, so tried to eat it.",
"There are some TED talks by people living with schizophrenia that are very informative and offer a first hand perspective (easy to find through google)",
"Here is a [schizophrenia simulation](_URL_0_) so you can get an idea of what it's like.\n\n* Hallucinations vary from person to person and culture to culture. In some cultures, the voices are meaner. In others, they are friendlier. The visual (seeing things) and auditory (hearing things) hallucinations seem very clear and real to the people who have them.\n\n* No one knows exactly what is happening, but the most common hypothesis is that your brain is hearing your inner thoughts as coming from someone else, instead of recognizing it as coming from you. If you try to tickle yourself, you can't because you know it's your own hand. But some people with schizophrenia can tickle themselves because it feels like someone else is doing it.\n\n* Schizophrenia also involves a great deal of paranoia. Untreated schizophrenics think that people are out to get them, their TVs are cameras watching them, their family and doctors are conspiring against them, etc. But once they get medication they need, they are a lot better and start to think more clearly.\n\n* Medication can eliminate all the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. That means extra things that aren't there. For example, if you are hearing voices or seeing things, the medication can stop that from happening. The problem is that they don't eliminate the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. For example, if you are feeling apathetic or disorganized because of your schizophrenia, the medication won't make you feel more motivated or organized.\n\n* Schizophrenia is extremely debilitating. It's one of the worst diseases you can have, in my opinion. But it's treatable with medication and therapy. 25% of people recover, 25% need medication for life, 25% need medication and need to live with their parents or someone, and 25% need lifelong care, possibly at a psychiatric hospital. The earlier someone is diagnosed and treated, the more likely they are to recover.\n\n* Lots of people can live with schizophrenia and have productive lives. They can be doctors, lawyers, Nobel Prize winners, etc. But it's tougher than for most people.\n\n* The saddest thing about schizophrenia is that it's often bright people in the prime of their life (early-20s) who get it. They are great one year, and then a year or two later, they aren't. They often go through a real low before they are diagnosed where everyone just thinks they are bad people, instead of recognizing they have a disease.",
"Just for your information, John Nash did not experience visual hallucinations. He, and many other schizophrenics, dealt mainly with auditory hallucinations. \n\nFrom my experience: the only voices my father heard were those he was familiar with. His former landlord, his wife and kids. Rarely, someone with only a tangential relationship, like my friends.",
"A coworker with this condition desribed her drive home each evening: A crow would land on the hood of her moving car, and peck at the windshield. She knew it wasn't there, but it shows up every day."
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us2ct | why some sound systems use negative numbers in their volume displays. | No one that I've asked so far has any clue, but that's really not saying anything at all.
Pre-emptive edit: I get that it has something to do with decibels, my personal one goes from -70 dB to somewhere around -20, but specifics would be very nice to come across.
Edit: A good number of good answers, thanks all! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/us2ct/eli5_why_some_sound_systems_use_negative_numbers/ | {
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"Well, there are two basic ways to represent the power output of an A/V amp. You can show the power output in dB, from some low value, up to the maximum that the amp can put out. Or you can do it backwards, and display from the maximum that the amp can put out (calling that 0 dB \"down\") down to whatever value it is currently at, in negative decibels. \n \nNote that I said that you are representing the *power* output, not the *volume*. It can be a bit confusing, since you can use decibels to represent either one. But decibels of volume depends on some variables, such as the impedance and efficiency of your speakers that the amp doesn't necessarily \"know\". Also, the perceived volume can depend very much on the sound that is being output. So it is more accurate (and honest) to display dB of power. \n \nSince a decibel is a logarithmic ratio, there is no \"0 power\" value. But there is a \"0 dB down from max\" value, and that's what is displayed. Could they reverse it and show the minimum volume as \"0 dB\" and the maximum as \"70dB up\"? Yes, but then it would look like a volume measurement, and it wouldn't be technically true. It could also be a marketing thing....-40dB looks more technical than some arbitrary number. \n \nI don't understand why your amp would only go up to -20dB. Is that just as high as you've pushed it? Or does a circuit breaker kick?\n \n",
"Think of 0db as the \"max\" for digital audio. Any sound that exceeds that mark is \"clipped\" which is distortion caused by the squashing of sound as to not exceed that max. The volume of all audio is measured relative to that max.",
"We refer to 0db as \"unity\". It means that we are avoiding clipping. Your goal when you mix live is to keep all your sliders at unity so it's easier to scale people appropriately.\n\nGoing from 0db to 10db is not the same volume change as going from 10db to 20db. It's a logarithmic scale, not a linear one.\n\nSince 0db is where we are trying to balance things out at, and you want that to represent peak volume with no clipping, then most of your scaling needed will be lower than that. Hence all the negative numbers dominating most of the scale.\n\nWhen we say 0db on a slider we don't mean the sound is 0db. We mean that the slider is OFFSETTING the volume by 0db.\n\nVery rarely do you want to push past unity (0db) into positive offsets, as this will create clipping, and you NEVER want that, unless you are talking guitar tones, in which case you will do so at the amp, never at the board. You could damage your power amps or speakers if you mess around too much with clipping at the board.",
"From Wikipedia:\n\n\"The decibel (dB) is a logarithmic unit that indicates the ratio of a physical quantity (usually power or intensity) relative to a specified or implied reference level. \"\n\nSo unlike volts or centimeters, which are absolute values, decibels are always expressing one value relative to another.\n\nThere are some values that are commonly referenced such as 1 volt \"dBV\" or the quietest sound a human can here \"dB (SPL)\"\nWhat ever value we are referencing is 0dB and increases relative to the reference are expressed as positive values and decreases are negative values.\n\nAmplifiers often reference their maximum gain (it's gain and not output as the output level depends on the input level).\nThe maximum is 0dB and if you turn down the volume knob, you get smaller values e.g. -26dB.\nThe display would show how much less than maximum gain is being delivered.\n\ndB is meaningless without knowing what the reference is. On an amplifier whose gain knobs Max out at zero it is implied that the gain markings are reference to maximum gain but if the maximum value is -20dB then it's not really clear.\n\nLots of numbers used by home hi-fi kit is not precise (eg maximum power output) and is a marketing gimmick.\n\ndB is useful on professional equipment when setting up gain structure. This is setting each element of the signal chain to an optimum level that doesn't exceed its capabilities and is not so low that hiss and noise is a problem. If the overall output level is OK but noise is a problem then removing, say, 6dB on one piece of kit and adding 6dB somewhere else will result in the same overall level.\n\n",
"[Obligatory Spinal Tap reference](_URL_0_)",
"Decibels is a logarithm.\n\ndB = 10 log( Intensity / reference Intensity)\n\nYou get 0 dB when the present Intensity (ie, the power going through the speakers) is equal to the reference Intensity.\n\nYou get negative dB when the Intensity is less than the reference Intensity, and positive dB when the current Intensity is more than the reference.\n\nGenerally the reference Intensity is set to the minimum threshold for human hearing, but it's fairly arbitrary. As some other posters have said, you could just as easily set the reference Intensity to \"the maximum power that the speakers can go to and still sound good\".",
"Assuming a system has been calibrated to reference level audio output, your volume knob (-x or +x db) indicates power output in decibels relative to that reference level. (Edit: Reference level is \"0db setting\" with 75db of sound with fullband pink noise. That means roughly 115db peaks of output if the system can handle it...most can't)\n\nMost systems are not calibrated well, so the number is usually a meaningless, reference-less reference.",
"I'm not an expert, but from what I know it is because there is no \"constant\" way of measuring volume. This is because sound splashes around through the air and bounces off of or gets sucked into things, which is to say that playing a song through a speaker in one room and then again in another will make the sound different in some way. Since sound is so weird there have been many different ways of measuring loudness, some examples are dBspl, dBu, or dBV. A decibel is not a static amount of anything, but a ratio based off of another factor, dBspl for example means the level compared to [sound pressure level](_URL_0_), dBV means the level compared to 1 volt of electricity, and so on. \n\nSorry this answer is sparse and incomplete, but for a LY15 answer [this](_URL_1_) might be helpful to you. ",
"dB measures a *difference* in something, not a universal volume level. That's why most sound systems start at 0 as the maximum power, and then measure down from there.",
"What you're referring to is dBFS or decibel \"full scale\" where the maximum value (0) is the level at which distortion occurs. All other sound levels are measured against this, because, as I'm sure you know by now, measures of dB need a reference value. \n\n\"0\" is usually predetermined by the manufacturer, and it varies depending on the system's limitations. \n\nFor whatever reason, every definition of dBFS I've seen only talks about Analog/Digital convertors, but I'm pretty sure I've seen it measured on analog-only systems. Whatever the case, \"0\" is the max, and everything's measured below that.",
"Late to the party here.\n\nIn home theater negative db are shown in relative mode. These values are only meaningful on a calibrated system. You can't tell anything about unity or clipping from the volume level on a home receiver unless you measure every component your self.\n\nThe volume shown will be the current offset from 'reference' at the seating position. The typical reference volume is 85db for vocal content. Positive and negative values are possible on most receivers. Mine for example goes up to positive 20db, which would mean normal speech would be at 105db at the seating position (way too loud)."
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4mc3ke | is y a vowel or not? and what the hell is a consonant and a vowel anyway? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mc3ke/eli5_is_y_a_vowel_or_not_and_what_the_hell_is_a/ | {
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"The thing is, \"vowel\" and \"consonant\" have *two* meanings.\n\nWhen linguists talk about vowels, they mean *sounds*. So \"ah\" and \"oo\" are vowels. Under this definition, the sound \"y\" as in \"yes\" is a consonant, or, more precisely, a [semivowel](_URL_0_). \nVowels are then sounds made with the parts of the mouth (lips, tongue, teeth, etc) kept apart from each other, and consonants are sounds made with two or more parts of the mouth held together.\n\nWhen a teacher talks about vowels (which is what everyone learns at school) they mean the other meaning, which is \"a letter used to represent a vowel\". The letter \"A\" is a vowel because it represents the vowel sounds in words like \"bay\", \"bat\" and \"bark\", and the letter \"U\" is a vowel because it represents the vowel sounds in \"cut\", \"cute\" and \"curt\".\n\nUnder the teacher's definition, \"y\" **is both a vowel and a consonant** as it represents vowel sounds (as in \"rhythm\", \"sky\" and \"martyr\") and also consonant sounds (as in \"yes\"). It is this definition that people who aren't linguists (that is, most people) mean when they say \"vowel\", and since \"y\" is both a vowel and consonant by this definition, the answer to \"Is 'y' a vowel?\" is \"Yes.\" (The more truthful answer is \"Yes, and it's also a consonant.\")\n\nTL;DR: It depends what you mean by \"vowel\", but in everyday terms, yes, \"y\" is a vowel.\n\nEDIT: clarification",
"Ah... well, this is going to be tricky.\n\nSo let me start by saying that \"Y\" is neither a vowel nor a consonant: it is a *letter*.\n\nLetters are neither vowels not consonants: they are squiggles on paper. Vowels and consonants are *sounds*, not squiggles. Those squiggles can *represent* sounds, but what sounds they represent is quite arbitary.\n\nFor example, in the Welsh writing system, the letter \"W\" represents a vowel sound, a bit like the \"U\" in the English word \"pull\". That's how Welsh can have words like \"cwm\" (which means \"valley\"): it looks unpronounceable, until you realize that \"W\" represents that vowel sound: \"cwm\" is pronounced \"koom\".\n\nIn English, the letter \"Y\" can represent at least three different sounds. There's the sound it represents in the word \"happy\", which is a simple vowel sound. Then there's the sound it represents in the word \"sky\", which is a diphthong -- basically, a sound that starts off as one vowel, but merges into another vowel (basically, \"aah-ee\").\n\nBut you're asking about the sound it represents in words like \"yes\". What is it?\n\nWell, it's often treated as a consonant: we say, for example, \"a year\" and not \"an year\". We also say \"a union\", but that's because \"union\" starts with that \"Y\" sound -- it's there, but we just don't write it.\n\nDoes that mean the sound is a consonant? After all, we're not stopping the airflow.\n\nOn the other hand, we are definitely *altering* it -- /u/ACrusaderA and /u/BartlebyX might want to know that vowels and consonants alike are pronounced by *altering* the airflow in some way, by changing the positions of the tongue, teeth and lips. A better definition of a consonant is that it either completely stops the airflow, or restricts it so much that it causes turbulance in the airflow; the important thing is that the articulators come into contact (e.g., you put your lips together, or you put your tongue against your teeth). The \"Y\" sound doesn't do that -- it's vowel-like in that respect at least.\n\nBut also, consonants appear in certain positions in English syllables. In English, a syllable consists of a vowel that can have a consonant before it, or a consonant after it, or a consonant either side -- that is, V, CV, VC or CVC. The V can be a diphthong, but can't be two separate vowels -- only one vowel sound per syllable is the rule.\n\nThe word \"yes\" is clearly a single syllable, and it follows the pattern CVC. So... consonant after all?\n\nWell, sort of. Because as we said before, it has vowel-like qualities. It is in fact a particular type of consonant called an *approximant*. An approximant is a consonant pronounced by restricting the airflow, but not completely. English has quite a few of these, although we don't usually have special letters for them: for example, in most English dialects, the \"L\" in \"world\" is pronounced as an approximant -- it's quite a different sound from the \"L\" in \"large\" (it's sometimes called a \"dark L\"). Other approximants include the sounds represented by \"R\" and \"W\".\n\n\"W\" and \"Y\" are, in turn, a subset of approximants: they are, slightly confusingly, called \"semivowels\", although they can also be called \"semiconsonants\" or \"glides\". These are sounds that are articulated very much like vowels, but are used like consonants.\n\nThe sound \"Y\" represents in \"yes\" is called a \"voiced palatal approximant\": it's \"voiced\" because you use your vocal cords when pronouncing it; it's \"palatal\" because you move your tongue towards the roof of your mouth; and it's an \"approximant\" because your tongue doesn't actually touch the roof of your mouth. This term, by the way -- \"voiced palatal approximant\" -- means it's being described as a consonant. The nearest (real) vowel sound is the \"i\" sound in \"sit\", and that's a \"near-close near-front unrounded vowel\".\n\n**TL;DR:** It's an approximant: a vowel-like sound that's used as a consonant. Technically, this is considered a type of consonant, but you can also call it a semivowel and say that both sides of the argument are partly right.",
"Do they not teach this in school any more?",
"think in terms of the smallest possible unit of sound. It is takes one unit, it's a vowel, if it takes more than one, it's a consonant. Molière wrote a play about that, explaining that a \"consonne\" is a sound \"qu'on sonne\" (that you sound out) because it's not a simple unit.\n\nExample, when you say \"M\" you say two units of sounds: one that resembles \"ey\" and one that feels like \"mmm\".\n\nThat's the difference between a vowel and a consonant.\n\nNow to answer your question about Y. It's called a semi-vowel since it can sound both ways depending on the word. Sometimes is sounds like 'i' (the 'i' of \"tip\") as in \"party\", sometimes like 'ai' as in \"why\".",
"The internet is telling me y is a vowel. Kiss my ass Bernie. [caption](_URL_0_)",
"Bringing another language's perspective here (Portuguese, Brazilian).\n\nWe learn at school that there are 5 vowels.\n\na - pronounced (Ah)\ne - pronounced (Eh)\ni - pronounced (ee)\no - pronounced (oh)\nu - pronounced (oo)\n\nThe letter Y is called ipsilon, starts with an i which is a vowel, but y in itself is a consonant. It was removed from our alphabet along with the letters W and K, and later returned when internet and technology started getting more advanced.\n\nThis explanation is about 10 years old now, so if anyone here is a portuguese teacher on linguist, please feel free to correct me.",
"Why isn't H a vowel though? ",
"Vowels are sounds that are produced by your vocal cords and modified by the shape of your mouth and orientation of your tongue. They are sounds in which the voice is allowed to make a continuous noise. That's why you can hold a vowel sound for a long time when you are singing.\n\nConsonants are sounds that are produced by blocking the flow of air through your throat in some manner. There has to be some air flow to be stopped by your tongue interacting with other parts of your mouth. That's why you can't hold a consonant sound for a long time, because they don't produce voice, they stop it in some way or another. \n\nIn the word \"yolo,\" the letter \"y\" is a consonant because it stops the flow of air before the vowel \"o.\" You can't hold that sound in yolo; it doesn't work. In the word \"swaggy,\" the letter \"y\" is a vowel because it makes the \"ee\" vowel sound. You can hold out the end of swaggyyyyyyyyyyyy as long as you like.",
"Im English and think its a terrible language. It doesnt make sense to me. People learn it and go with it but my brain always screams at me for writing things that make little sense (in a spelling way). Perfect examples. \n\n* The bandage was wound around the wound. \n* The farm was used to produce produce. \n* The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse. \n* We must polish the Polish furniture. \n* He could lead if he would get the lead out. \n* The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert. \n* Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present. \n* At the Army base, a bass was painted on the head of a bass drum. \n* When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes. \n* I did not object to the object. \n* The insurance was invalid for the invalid. \n* There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row. \n* They were too close to the door to close it. \n* The buck does funny things when the does are present. \n* A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line. \n* To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow. \n* The wind was too strong to wind the sail. \n* After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number. \n* Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear. \n* I had to subject the subject to a series of tests. \n* How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend? \n* I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt. \n\nOr a peom that shows the fucked up nature of english \n\nWe’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes;\nbut the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.\nOne fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,\nyet the plural of moose should never be meese.\nYou may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice;\nyet the plural of house is houses, not hice.\nIf the plural of man is always called men,\nwhy shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?\nIf I spoke of my foot and show you my feet,\nand I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?\nIf one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,\nwhy shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?\nThen one may be that, and three would be those,\nyet hat in the plural would never be hose,\nand the plural of cat is cats, not cose.\nWe speak of a brother and also of brethren,\nbut though we say mother, we never say methren.\nThen the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,\nbut imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.",
"Former teacher here. This is how I would teach my students (with some mouth exercises to demonstrate these points).\n\nA vowel is a letter sound that you make with an OPEN MOUTH. Your mouth opens wide to make the sound. It is an open mouth sound (a like apple. ā like hate).\n\nA consonant is a CLOSED MOUTH SOUND. Your mouth barely opens if it opens at all. Does not open when you make an \"m\" sound and barely opens for \"th\" or \"l\"\n\nY is not really that special. It is a consonant when there is a vowel before or after it (may, day, play) and acts as a vowel when there isn't (my, try, fly) because every syllable needs a vowel sound (unless you speak Welsh).\n\nEdit: typing on iPhone with phat fingers"
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69lvop | could solar wind be somehow utilized for space craft propulsion? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69lvop/eli5could_solar_wind_be_somehow_utilized_for/ | {
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"The principle is used in a solar sail which uses radiation pressure to push a spacecraft - _URL_0_"
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7ldrvd | if absorption of vitamin supplements is better on an empty stomach, why do the directions always say to take with food? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ldrvd/eli5_if_absorption_of_vitamin_supplements_is/ | {
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"because some of them may make you nauseous and you will throw them back up.\n\nSource: took vitamins on empty stomach.",
"It doesnt work better, just faster. They say to take it with meals because taking pills on an empty stomach can cause nausea and other unpleasant but not dangerous side effects. ",
"Quite a few vitamins absorb better with other organic compounds found in food such as fats. ",
"Certain prescription medications are absorbed better on an empty stomach due to the medication bonding with other compounds and becoming less effective. \n\nFor instance, common antibiotics like Ciprofloxacin, Levaquin, or Doxycycline should not be taken with multivitamins or dairy due to an interaction with calcium that causes the antibiotic to barely be effective.\n\nThyroid medications should always be taken on an empty stomach and at least an hour before any other medications or food. \n\nWith multivitamins, it's better to avoid the nausea and eat since the absorption rate is minimally effected by food. "
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3k1bbi | why is papua new guinea one of the most uncharted regions in the world? | I mean it's attached to indonesia which is completely charted.. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3k1bbi/eli5_why_is_papua_new_guinea_one_of_the_most/ | {
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"Papua New Guinea is only heavily populated around its coast. It has [massive mountains](_URL_0_) along most of its interior. It has 4 of the top 5 highest peaks on its island, and even has permanent snow caps on some of its highest mountains despite being almost literally on the equator. \n\nFurthermore its coast is VERY heavy jungle. Which combined with mountains makes literally impassable jungle slopes. If you'd be interesting in reading more see [Jungle Patrol](_URL_1_) which is a WW2 documentary about fighting in Papua New Guinea. It talks lot about the islands impossible terrain. "
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4xidfo | how do they distribute newspapers so fast and efficiently? | As I was travelling home on a coach I saw the Head Office of a major newspaper company in the UK. It made me wonder:
How is it possible for journalists to put together a newspaper with recent stories, print thousands of copies and distribute them across the country overnight; and do all this every single day? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xidfo/eli5_how_do_they_distribute_newspapers_so_fast/ | {
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"In the US, the big national newspapers are printed all over the country, not just in their city of origin. NY Times, US Today, etc send their files electronically to local shops to be printed much closer to the point of distribution. ",
"Good question I wonder that myself, I work in a paper factory but on a Saturday we polywrap the Sunday Times. \n\nWe can wait for the football to finish at 8:30pm-9pm and then get the papers around 11pm.\n\nI think the vast majority of the paper is already printed and gets sent out (1st editions) and the ones after are either the same or updated editions with the latest news. \n\nThey don't take that long to print, they are gigantic printers and can do 10s of thousands an hour and there are not a lot of news papers anymore either (Only 2.5 million Sun papers out there in the UK)\n\nEDIT: For the Sun TV mag we have inserts coming from different area's and you can tell that they are from different places by how they are parallelized and bundled, some are easy some are a pain in the ass....our supervisor can then email those companies and ask for them to change their process to accommodate our preferences.",
"Once the newspaper is ready for print, several things happen. The paper is printed, packaged and loaded onto trucks. The trucks drive the packages to large consumers (shopping malls, some hotels, airports and railway stations and other delivery points where there is a large amount sold each day) and to all the pickup points where the paperboy fetches his packages.\n The delivery from the last pickup point to your front door is done by one delivery man (or woman, no reason to be picky here) who gets paid to either walk, bicycle or drive around and deliver the newspapers.\n\nI used to do walking and driving districts more than a decade ago, while I was a student. The general idea is that the paper delivery happens around 3 in the morning, and the customer expect to have their newspaper at the very latest at 6. That means that I have about three hours to deliver the newspapers. It goes without saying that the amount of newspapers differs a lot depending on the type of district. Rural distribution by car can be as little as 100 subscribers, while car distribution in a villa suburb can be up at about 700 subscribers. A walking district, stairways and elevators taken into account, can be everywhere between 150 and 400 subscribers. It all depends on what you can actually manage and be done with in time.\n\nThe distribution company is obviously a costly beast for the newspaper with a lot of vehicle and a lot of paid staff, so it goes without saying that they try to make money by doing more of the very same thing. That means that if you go to a local newspaper distribution company and ask them if they are willing to distribute your advertising flyer for your new shopping mall, they will. The same goes for a newspaper from a neighboring city, the national financial papers, the weeklies, the technological news, the larger unions weekly papers, comics and a lot of other specialized subject papers that get delivered as a morning paper.\n\nWe had, when I did this, a palette of 58 or so news papers from all over the country, but it was always the two locals, the two from the capital, the two competing financial, the tech industry paper and the weekly tabloid aimed at housewives that were there in every district, but all of the rest of them were offered as a morning paper for subscribers and would have been delivered by the distribution company that was owned by one of the local news papers.\n\nIf you want to deliver your local paper in another city, you have to find a business arrangement with a distribution company and once that is done you will have to consider if you want to print it locally (with news instead of olds) or if you would rather print it yourself in the early evening before and send it by truck all over the country and have the customers there constantly complain that they get told of things they saw on tv the evening before. The paper I worked for had a printing facility as well, printing all of the papers they delivered, no matter if it was local or national."
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6tdtzq | what does japan use the federal/national age of consent for, if at all? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6tdtzq/eli5what_does_japan_use_the_federalnational_age/ | {
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"When you see things like this, it's generally because the national law was passed at a time when not all the prefectures had their own laws. Since there's no general mechanism to make useless laws disappear, somebody would have to make a conscious effort to repeal the old law."
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1s59g6 | what are the little rock things that form near our eyes in the morning ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s59g6/eli5what_are_the_little_rock_things_that_form/ | {
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"Throughout the day you get tiny bits of dust on your eyes. Your eyes produce mucus which is used to remove these bits of dust by coating them in layers. They get washed out of your eyes by your tears and deposited in the corners of your eyes to dry out."
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1fsm9p | why do all states in the us agree on legal drinking age while disagreeing on other laws (ie: marijuana, prostitution, etc) | I noticed that the legal drinking age in the US is 21, but it's not a federal law, it's a state law that's across the board. However, some states allow marijuana for medical purposes, some for recreational. On top of that, some states you can go to a brothel and purchase sex while most you can't. Same with gambling. So I just don't understand why some states don't have 18 or maybe 16 as the drinking law like most counties do. You would think at least one or two states would have different age limits on drinking.
EDIT: Typo fixes and clarification. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fsm9p/eli5_why_do_all_states_in_the_us_agree_on_legal/ | {
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"I'm certainly not an expert, but I do know that my state (Louisiana) was one of, if not the last, to have an 18yo legal drinking age. The federal government threatened to pull federal funding if it was not raised to 21. Needless to say, we obliged. So I guess the simple answer, as it is with most things, is money. ",
"In 1984, the US Government passed a law, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which attached federal highway funding for states to a requirement that states set their minimum drinking age to 21 years old. If states refused to set that limit, they would lose up to 10% of their highway maintenance funding from the government. The legislation was proposed by the recently deceased Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, and lobbied for by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. ",
"In the early 80s, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) pressured Congress to do something about raising the drinking age. The Federal Government declared they would withhold highways funds from states if they didn't raise the drinking age, and eventually all 50 states complied. It's a federally recognized standard in effect, if not intent. \n\nTo answer your other questions, things have varying degrees of legality at both the Federal and state level. So while marijuana is illegal at the federal level, some states have voted or legislated to decriminalize, legalize, or allow for medicinal use. Sometimes you heard about dispensaries in states like California getting busted, this happens because federal agents (DEA, FBI, etc.) conduct the raids instead of local or state level agencies (state police, local cops, etc.). "
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34wcff | why are the wingtips on southwest's plane bent up? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34wcff/eli5_why_are_the_wingtips_on_southwests_plane/ | {
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"They're called Winglets, and they're designed to reduce the amount of swirling air (vorticies) that are produced as the plane flies. It takes energy to make a vortex and that energy has to come from the plane (it causes drag). If you take it away, you have a more efficient plane. ",
"They are called winglets. \n\nWhen the wing moves through the air, the air pressure below the wing is greater than the pressure above the wing, because the angle of the wing into the wind (\"angle of attack\") presses air down to produce lift (, and the curvature of the upper portion of the wing makes the air along the top travel a longer distance, making the air on top of the wing lower pressure.) \n\nAir always wants to equalize its pressure, and it therefore moves from high pressure to lower pressure areas to even out. Near the edge of a swept wing, air travels in a vertical pattern from below the wing, around the wingtip and up towards the lower pressure. This creates massive turbulence, called vortexes or wake turbulence. Allowing this turbulent airflow is not helping with creating lift for the wing, and is unproductive. The bigger the vortex, the bigger the drag. \n\nSo the winglet stretches the wingtip until it is tiny. This makes the vortex, or vertical wingtip bleed, smaller. By going up, it does not extend the wingspan. "
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46zwjj | why do our voices sound more 'nasally' when we are congested? | I understand our sinuses become more constricted when congested, but how does this cause a more nasally sounding voice? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46zwjj/eli5why_do_our_voices_sound_more_nasally_when_we/ | {
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"Part of the mechanics of talking involves breathing. The normal sound of your voice involves talking and breathing through nose and mouth. When you're congested, the nasal airways are blocked and the movement of air that contributes to your normal voice is changed. So, you sound like the telephone operator.",
"The sound of our voice is somewhat based on the acoustic qualities of your airways, including nose, mouth, and throat. When these become inflamed and/or blocked by congestion, the sound of your voice has less resonance and it sounds different.\n\nHope this helps! Peace!",
"It actually causes you to sound *denasal*. When your nose is blocked, it's impossible to make nasal sounds (m, n, etc) so when you try to make those sounds, it causes a distinct *denasal* sound that people mistakenly call nasal."
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3orqi4 | how do clouds hold rain and hailstone? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3orqi4/eli5_how_do_clouds_hold_rain_and_hailstone/ | {
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"A cloud is water vapor, plain and simple. It's a puff of mist that floats in the air, and nothing more. No other particles besides little droplets of water held up by wind and heat.\n\nRain forms and falls from a cloud when these droplets clump together, usually converging on a speck of dust, and then become too heavy to be held in the air any longer.\n\nHail is only a little different, but it's kind of like snow, freezing into snowflakes before it hits the ground. What makes hail different is that warm air currents can push it back up, where multiple snowflakes can gather together into a ball. Once it's finally heavy enough to fall through the air current without getting pushed back up, it plummets like a stone and hits the ground as a ball of ice.\n\n*Edit: a word*"
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46a7p2 | why did humans develop to have a dominant side when ambidexterity would obviously be far more advantageous? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46a7p2/eli5_why_did_humans_develop_to_have_a_dominant/ | {
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"Just because something is more advantageous doesn't mean we will 'develop' it. \n\nIt's the opposite that is true: if something is horribly disadvantageous, those with that trait/characteristic would be weeded out via natural selection.\n\n"
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2lxcr5 | why does a background need to be green for you to be able to put effects on it in film editing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lxcr5/eli5_why_does_a_background_need_to_be_green_for/ | {
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"It doesn't. They can pick any color, but they pick that shade of green because it's uncommon and it's easy to avoid. Basically, they just take all instances of that color and overlay another image/video on top of it. It's called chroma keying.",
"I assume you are talking about chroma keying?\n\nThe background does not need to be green.\n\n\"Green screens\" are using an arbitrary color that software keys off of and replaces. Blue screens are also commonly used. You just want to make sure you use a color that isn't popping up in the foreground you want to keep.",
"It doesn't. What they do is use software to change all the areas of one particular color in a film with an image or video of their choosing. The particular green you are referring to happens to be a color that is easily picked up by most cameras, so they choose it because it is easy. If you notice, *no one ever wears green* when they are in front of a green screen. That is because the editing would also cover over whatever green thing they were wearing.\n\nSome films, like the Star Wars prequels, use a blue screen. It was easier for them to swap out the blue color for whatever reason."
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57xrly | how do we confirm the authenticity of wikileaks' releases? | For example, how do we know the emails are from the people Wikileaks claims they are from and not just a sophisticated forgery? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/57xrly/eli5_how_do_we_confirm_the_authenticity_of/ | {
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"Firstly, Wikileaks themselves puts tremendous effort into authenticating materials. They can't be perfect. So...the put it out there and it's up to us all to confirm or refute the material. \n\nIn this regard it is exactly almost all other information - it's either true or it's not and we've got to figure it out.",
"I suppose it's simply not verifiable, in the sense you're suggesting. The government's never going to come out and say, \"oh look, those documents match what's on our servers.\" \n\nHowever, the sheer volume of content is somewhat self-authenticating. I'd have a hard time believing some one or some group fabricated *thousands* of documents, with all the pertinent details (names, date stamps, etc) and conversations. There's not enough time or money to make a lie like that worth generating, let alone actually make sense.",
"Emails in particular are fairly easy to prove came from a specific location, due to the header and trailer information contained within the email metadata. It's like you hear about how photos taken with Smartphones can be broken down and the location of the photograph found because it embedded the GPS data in the photo data. \n\nWhile its possible to 'hack' this data, its fairly easy to tell when its been hacked.\n\nBasically if Wikileaks had a single falsified email published, I'm sure the media would have been able to prove it and torn them apart for it by now.",
"The problem you are trying to solve is known as a \"Man in the Middle\" attack, and it is a fundamental problem of computer security. \n\nIn order to communicate securely, person A needs to be able to validate person B's identity, AND that the content of the message have not been altered, given only the contents of the message itself.\n\nHttp traffic and E-mail are both particularly vulnerable due to some architecture decisions made when the technologies were still in their infancy. Essentially, both use the same structure: to send a message from you to B, your computer passes the message to another computer (your wireless router?), which passes it to another computer (your ISP?), which passes it to another computer ... each of them asking their local network for somebody who is \"closer\" to B than the current computer. \n\nThe man-in-the-middle could control any point along the way, and, without controls, could read and even change the content of the message. (Unlike, say, evidence in a criminal case, there is no chain of custody involved.) \n\nFor http, we've solved that with TLS, in which a server provides an identity certificate. The other party can validate the certificate with a trusted certificate authority. The two parties then agree upon an encryption protocol, and change to encrypted traffic, which the \"man in the middle\" cannot access without the decryption keys. Learn more: _URL_1_ \n\nFor e-mail, a similar process, PKI, is used. However, you need to generate your \"public key\" and register it with the certificate authority, as does your recipient. So: when user A wants to send an e-mail to user B and only user B, A must encrypt the message once with her private key, and then a second time with B's public key. B the decrypts them in the reverse order, first with B's private key, and then with A's public key. In this way, only B can read A's message, and B knows that only A could have encrypted it. Learn more: _URL_0_\n\nThe Wikileaks materials do not have any form of signature or encryption for us to validate identities. Further, they have come through at least one untrustworthy source, possibly more than one. Therefore, we cannot confirm their authenticity.\n\nAs others have said, we can infer some level of authenticity via external corroborating evidence, failure to repudiate by involved parties, volume, or even personal connection - but at the end of the day, there is no guarantee that every single character of every involved e-mail occurred exactly the way the leak contains them, **nor** that a critical piece of information has not been suppressed within them.\n\nFor example, if I have an e-mail present which reads \"I do not love her\", you have no way of telling whether that e-mail originally read \"I do not love her\", or if it originally said \"I do love her\" and has been added to, originally read \"I do not tell her I love her enough\" and has been cut, or was immediately followed by a repudiation, \"Oops! I meant to say 'I do love her,' stupid autocorrect!\""
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"http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/20803/how-does-ssl-tls-work"
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4mp54c | how does overwatering kill a plant? why can they "drown"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mp54c/eli5how_does_overwatering_kill_a_plant_why_can/ | {
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"Roots need oxygen, which they get from the tiny amount of air in the soil. When you overwater a plant, you drown the roots. ",
"Roots need oxygen. If you soak the soil to where there are no little gaps that air can permeate, the roots will die.",
"There are a couple of reasons for it. Firstly, if you've ever looked at soil its not a solid, you can dig through it because none of the pieces of dirt are stuck to each other very strongly. Air from the atmosphere can therefore permeate through the soil usually and plants use Oxygen from this air between soil particles to grow and perform the functions of life. However, when there's a lot of water the roots of the plant cannot get this Oxygen and therefore they can't survive.\n\n\nAnother big thing is the idea of Osmosis. This is basically when you have water on two sides of a sheet (cell membrane) and water can pass through the sheet but other things can't. So when you have a lot of water in the soil what'll happen is that the water moves to the side with the most dissolved stuff in the water. Usually this is the plant root. So what happens is that a lot of water flows into the plant cells and basically makes them bigger because there is more water inside them. And if that happens too much that can damage the plant cell, if it happens to enough cells the roots end up dying.\n\n\nHowever, what I said before is not always true. It's not always ONLY water that moves across the cell membrane, it's nutrients too. But because there is a lot of water outside the plant the nutrients diffuse out of the plant. So the plant is deprived of necessary materials it needs to survive\n\n\ntl;dr don't overwater your plants",
"Aside from already mentioned here, fungus and root rot affect an over watered plants roots.",
"In addition to what others have mentioned, overwatering often results in the soil staying damp continuously. There are fungi in most soils that will start to eat through the roots if they are weakened by staying too wet. This condition is called root rot, and it's a common cause of death for potted plants."
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2tpdd7 | why is the wrestling community so outraged over the recent wwe event? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tpdd7/eli5_why_is_the_wrestling_community_so_outraged/ | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nBasically, the fans are angry that the writers for WWE are clueless as to how to tell the current 'story' (if you can call it that, I stopped following WWE after middle school and at least I'm glad the audience knows everything is scripted). Fan favorites being eliminated, etc.",
"Basically, WWE Creative and Vince are trying to shove a guy down our throats and we arent having it. The guy in question is Roman Reigns.\n\nRoman Reigns has the 'look' of a pro-wrestler and he's related to Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, thats why he's getting 'pushed', which is a term meaning getting on the fast track to success. This fellow has been wrestling for only a few years so he's very green. He has little charisma and connection with the crowd, and his 'promos' (talking segments) leave much to be desired.\n\nContrast that with Daniel Bryan, who has been in the pro-wrestling scene for many, many years starting in the indies. His experience means that he consistently brings out good matches and can improvise. He organically got HIMSELF 'over' (a term meaning gaining popularity) through his in ring work and charisma. He doesnt have the look though, so he gets overlooked.\n\nNow, we fans appreciate a good story, thats what wrestling is about. Improv performance art. D-Bry recently got back into wrestling after some surgeries, so he was our underdog. Instead of Creative providing us a story, having D-Bry fight for a long while before getting eliminated in dramatic fashion for example, they just brushed him off as an afterthought. Thats insulting.\n\nAlong with D-Bry literally ALL of the fans favorite wrestlers, guys who organically got themselves over, who were decent in the ring, etcetera, were picked off one by one so that Roman Reigns could be hailed as the Top Guy. We were told 'This is the guy you will like and who you will root for, like it or not. WWE knows best.'\n\nWe pro-wrestling fans know that the entertainment is scripted. Bullshit like what happened at the Royal Rumble match just shines an ugly light on just HOW scripted the show is, if you can understand that. Good wrestling shows draw you in like a good movie. You know the movie isnt genuine, but you can become invested in it and care for the characters."
]
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/2topox/post_royal_rumble_discussion_12515/co0xxj5"
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3a0lh3 | how can greece draw up such a debt and then not pay it back? how will it effect the european/world economy if they leave the euro? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3a0lh3/eli5_how_can_greece_draw_up_such_a_debt_and_then/ | {
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"Well, since no one else replied yet, I will attempt to answer to the best of my limited abilities. \nBack when the Euro got started, Greece technically shouldn't have been allowed to join. There were certain criteria that had to be met and it turns out they fudged their books to make it look like they did. \nTo be fair, Germany itself often doesn't meet the requirements, the difference is that Germany is the fourth largest economy in the world and doing fairly well. \nNow as I understand it, before using the Euro as their currency, Greece had a tougher time getting loans. Their loans would be higher in interest and they would get less in general. After adopting the Euro their interest rates went down and the amount they could borrow went up. This was because the Eurozone countries shared a Monetary policy, which is used to control interest rates. \nHowever, the Eurozone countries do not share a Fiscal policy, which determines how they borrow and spend money. \nWith the lower interest rates and larger amounts they could borrow, Greece ended up borrowing a lot of money that they used in part to create and support social programs, but also to increase their economy, which seems to have [worked](_URL_1_) (note that they seem to have tripled their GDP between Euro introduction and the financial crisis of 2008). \nWhat Greece was in part doing was borrowing money to pay back old loans. (This part I am not 100% sure about) This worked until the financial crisis caused them to not be able to borrow as much money, thus not being able to pay back their previous loans. \nThis is how they managed to rack up a large debt and why they couldn't pay it back, there weren't loans available to do so. I am sure an economist or just some guy on reddit will rectify my mistakes. \n \nAs for the effects on the world economy? I have no idea and can only speculate. \nFor perspective: The European Union has a GDP of about 18 million million dollars and the GDP of Greece is about 240 thousand million dollars. So even if there is a return to pre-Euro levels of about 100 thousand million dollars, on the global scale that is not a huge amount. It seems to me that the Euro will probably rise in value once this Greek situation is resolved, which is actually negative for the economy, since it makes their goods less competitive on the world stage. \n \nEdit: [Aw shucks you guys](_URL_0_)",
"It will have an effect on the world economy, but only trivially so - most outside economies have already adjusted for the fact they are likely to default. Ultimately though, what could they do? No one is going to go to war with Greece to get their money back. It will just become *much* more expensive for them to borrow in future.",
"When someone saves, receiving more in income than they're making in expenditure, another has necessarily *dissaved* - ie, done the opposite.\n\nWhen a *country* saves euros, ie takes in more than it spends (a current account surplus), another has necessarily done the opposite.\n\nWhen everyone tries to save at once, eg due to a financial crisis changing people's savings desires, those with the greatest control over their incomes will succeed over those with less. At an individual level this means those with secure incomes will succeed, the poor will lose their jobs/source of incomes entirely. At a country level, this means those with the strongest export sectors (the most \"competitive\") will succeed at the expense of the weakest.\n\nSo that's the rundown of why when every country tries to save at once deficits blow out in the \"least competitive\" countries. It's a necessary con of sharing a currency - if you're not the most competitive (and someone has to not be!) you risk blowing out your budget.\n\nAnd, simple truth of it, Greece drew the short straw there. Along with, to a lesser extent, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland.. all countries that haven't shown any growth/capita for the past decade+. They're not the most competitive, and the measures they are taking to try and keep their budgets from blowing out are killing opportunities for jobs and growth.\n\nThere's only two good ways out of this that I know of. One, is the USA approach. Fiscal transfers between states. In the US, progressive taxation and spending measures see to it that money from the most competitive states is transferred to the least, allowing both to remain viable in the same monetary union.\n\nThe second, is separate floating currencies. This works in two ways : firstly, countries are not inclined to save huge amounts of your currency. Eg, Australia/Canada/New Zealand, all countries with low debt (denominated in their respective currencies) because nobody's buying it all up. Secondly.. countries don't run out of their own currency even if someone does try to save a huge amount of it. Eg, USA - China has saved over a trillion USD but it doesn't matter because the US government just runs deficits to offset that demand leakage. You can't bankrupt a country by saving the currency it issues effectively, but you can bankrupt a country by saving the currency it *uses*, but does not issue, a'la Greece (/Spain/Ireland/Italy/Argentina/etc).\n\nSo there you have it. How the Eurozone is fatally flawed, why Greece is broke, and why free floating currency issuing countries have not succumbed the same way.",
"Greece has run out of money to pay back its creditors. They are hoping the European Central Bank (with Germany as the main player) will facilitate a funding program that will bridge loan payments from the IMF to the ECB. \n\nGreece elected an anti-austerity government and there is likely no chance of them taking any deal that requires loan payments over paying internal obligations like their pensions.\n\nOnce Greece misses a loan payment, they have officially defaulted on their loans and will have to declare bankruptcy.\n\nThis is where things get interesting. A forced default will push Greece out of the Euro. Since Greece would have to return to the drachma, there will be a \"run on the banks\" whereas most depositors will attempt to get out as many euros as possible because the drachma will see devaluation from the bankruptcy and likely high levels of inflation (think Germany pre world war 2)\n\nIf this happens Greece will exit the Euro zone and there's no telling the effects once that happens. It could be the strand that unweieves the whole sweater (esp. with England talking of exit).",
"It will attack the fundamental stability of the EU, because countries will realize that there is no real consequence to bailing when things get tough.",
"No country can repay their debts. It is a debt based system. In the central bank system, most countries are just paying their interest, not even touching on paying their loans. It's a flawed system and it's flawed on purpose. "
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ctt6y8 | how does land ownership work in extremely poor nations? | In the developed world there are property records, titles, boundary maps, listed roads, etc
How would this work in say, the remote areas of the Congo?
Is the land that a small hut in a village sits on part of any officially documented property deed? Or is the whole area simply listed as property of a certain tribe and they allow the tribe to manage the land as they see fit? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ctt6y8/eli5_how_does_land_ownership_work_in_extremely/ | {
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"Depends on the specific place, but in some areas yes it is communally owned. In practise that can lead to issues, for instance if you have traditional leaders (Like a village chief) they might officially own the whole village. Some businesses like mining companies etc can take advantage of this by buying the whole area from one guy and then forcing the rest out. Other places you don't have proper documentation at all, so it's very risky buying property because there is no easy way to tell if the seller actually owns it."
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274hkj | the bible and its crafting over the years. do we have original copies? | Im more interested in where it originated. Who wrote the originals. DO we know this? **Not looking for anything 'religious' im looking more for information on the book itself.** | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/274hkj/eli5the_bible_and_its_crafting_over_the_years_do/ | {
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"No, the actual original text is long gone",
"There isn't **one** Bible. There's thousands of versions and translations, with some bits removed, some added, things changed. Often these things contradict each other.\n\nThat's one reason it's so silly when someone uses \"the Bible\" as proof for anything - which bible?",
"The Bible is not one document. It's a series of books, speeches and stories written by many authors (and spanning three languages). That said, no, we don't have originals of any of the individual scriptures.",
"We don't have any original copies of anything. Copies of copies of copies yes, but nothing original.\n\nThe Bible also isn't one book, but a whole collection of documents of all kinds: legal texts, allegories, sermons, poems, battle statistics (mostly not very reliable), letters, you name it.\n\nAnd they come from many different periods of time. The oldest part of the Bible is usually reckoned to be a poem called the Song of Deborah, which is the fifth chapter in the Book of Judges, near the beginning of the Old Testament: it probably goes back to the 12th century BC, making it well over three thousand years old. [EDIT: Corrected an embarrassing mathematical error.] The Gospel of John was probably written a little time before 100 AD, and is probably about the most recent book. This means that the Bible was written and compiled over a period spanning about 1,300 years. It wasn't collected into one book until much later, taking about 400 or 500 years to reach its present form (or something like it).\n\nExactly who wrote the originals is, in most cases, a mystery. Some of Paul's letters are probably genuinely from Paul of Tarsus -- or if not him personally, at least one of his students writing on his authority. Paul's letter to the Galatians is the one most scholars agree is actually by Paul himself.\n\nBut it's really difficult to say much about pretty nearly all of the Bible. One thing is certain: most of the books that claim to have been written by some named person almost certainly weren't.\n\nTo give you an example, one of the theories of how the first five books of the Old Testament -- Genesis through to Deuteronomy -- were compiled is often called the \"JEPD hypothesis\" (more usually the \"Documentary hypothesis\"). It suggests, broadly speaking, that there were at least four writers involved, or perhaps writers from four schools of thought. These are:\n\n* J for \"Yahwist\" (it's a \"J\" because this hypothesis was thought up by a German, and the German \"J\" is used where we would use a \"Y\"). J is probably the earliest of the writers, and he uses the divine name for God, \"Yahweh\" -- usually written in modern Bibles as \"the LORD\" -- before it became taboo;\n* E for \"Elohist\", because he uses the name \"Elohim\" to refer to God;\n* P for \"Priestly code\", because the texts he wrote tend to be poetic or religious in nature, as if used for ceremonial purposes, and he appears to have written his bits relatively late, probably after the Israelites were sent into exile;\n* D for \"Deuteronomist\", a hard-line conservative who was interested in laying down the law and is probably responsible for most of the Book of Deuteronomy.\n\nFor hundreds years, probably, all these different scriptures written by different people circulated, before somebody known to theologians as \"the Redactor\" put them all together, adding a few little phrases connecting the different bits up, and maybe a couple of clarifying notes here and there as well.\n\nThis explains, for instance, the difference between Genesis chapter 1, written by P and apparently adapted from a Babylonian creation myth, and Genesis chapter 2, written by J and apparently the original Hebrew myth.\n\nAnd that's just one theory. There are others.\n\nSo... we really don't know.",
"No, we don't have original copies, but we have many ancient copies that show many variations between them. By comparing different copies, scholars have figured out that the books evolved over a long period of time, with many mistakes in copying, and with stories being added from time to time. The Bible has a very complicated history. Bart D. Ehrman has written extensively on it.\n\n_URL_0_",
"There is no \"original copy.\" The Bible is made of stories passed down from generations to teach certain messages. There are very old compilations of these stories (like the Dead Sea Scrolls), but the \"originals\" were verbal stories told thousands of years ago.\n "
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amnnl0 | what is the origin of the dutch language? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/amnnl0/eli5_what_is_the_origin_of_the_dutch_language/ | {
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" > but how did people structure the language in the first place\n\nWith a few modern exceptions like [Esperanto](_URL_0_), languages are not intentionally structured. They evolve naturally over time without anyone deciding the rules.\n\nMost of the languages of Europe are from the Indo-European language family. They all descend from an ancestor language known as \"**Proto-Indo-European**\" (PIE) that existed 6,000 years ago. PIE must have evolved from some even earlier language, but that was so long ago, we simply have no evidence of what it looked/sounded like.\n\nThe Indo-European language family is then further broken up into several sub-families or **branches**, such as the Hellenic, Italic, Celtic, and *Germanic*, which is the one that's important to us. Modern languages such as English, German, Icelandic, Dutch, Frisian, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are all from the Germanic language family. All these languages descended from a language known as Proto-Germanic, that existed roughly 2,500 years ago in Scandinavia. Over time it branched and evolved into those languages I listed above (and a few others).\n\nOld Dutch first split off from the *Frankish* language around the year 400 AD. This is the beginning of what can be properly called the Dutch language. The Frankish language was the language of the people we now know as the French. But it went extinct and the people we now know as the French began speaking Latin, although with some Frankish influences and loanwords. Latin eventually evolved into the many languages we know as \"Romance languages\": Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, etc. "
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3ed5iu | why are there no big loopholes in the legality of prostitution in the us? | I'm not entirely sure about what counts as prostitution and what doesn't. I've always thought that when someone is arrested for prostitution or hiring a prostitute, they could simply argue that the exchange of sex and money were two separate events (IE: Claim that the two involved decided to have sex, and the money given to the prostitute was a favor not connected to sex).
It seems like the type of thing that can't really be proven to be a false claim, as it's totally possible that could actually happen. But why don't people ever seem to argue this? What legal terms make it so this (or similar methods of dodging punishment for prostitution) are not widely used? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ed5iu/eli5_why_are_there_no_big_loopholes_in_the/ | {
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" > I've always thought that when someone is arrested for prostitution or hiring a prostitute, they could simply argue that the exchange of sex and money were two separate events\n\nThey can claim this, but the judge will see right through that flimsy excuse. The prosecutor doesn't have to prove empirically that someone broke the law, just prove it \"beyond a reasonable doubt\".\n\nOtherwise, every crook could make up an unlikely story. \"I thought that this was MY Porsche that somehow found it's way to the dealership lot. And someone erased my mileage. And wiped my prints. And plastered dealership stickers all over it. And I forgot my keys. And I was in too much of a hurry to wait to explain to the manager, so I had to drive it away in the middle of the night. And I lost the title in a freak lightning strike.\"\n\nHaving said that, the laws can vary from place to place so that may contribute to the confusion.\n",
"Well Escorts are the big loophole. You pay for each other's time, and everything else is between two consenting adults. "
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8i3i6d | why does your body (hands) shake when you have low blood sugar? wouldn't that use it up faster? | Shaking when you have low blood sugar seems counterintuitive to conserving what little blood sugar you have left. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8i3i6d/eli5_why_does_your_body_hands_shake_when_you_have/ | {
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"Shaking is used incorrectly for the behavior you are describing. It is more accurate to call the motions unsteady. \n\nYou tend to shake while exerting a muscle or holding two muscles in a balance like when holding an arm straight out. It takes a great deal of control and consistency in muscular outputs to smoothly ramp up muscular contractions or hold them steady in one position.\n\nAs you get low blood sugar you lose glucose to muscles and their energy on hand drops and their recuperative speeds decline causing decrease in coordination and control. This lessened control manifests as unsteady motions, thus we get the shakes."
]
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4tjj5o | why is it a rolling stone gathers no moss, but my always on fan gathers so much dust? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4tjj5o/eli5_why_is_it_a_rolling_stone_gathers_no_moss/ | {
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"Well, first, dust and moss are two different things. Second, since it's an electrical appliance, it's more susceptible to dust, even when it's moving air.",
"I'm no scientist, but, dust doesn't really \"grow\". It's just tiny pieces of stuff floating in the air. The moving fan blade just hits the dust and over time it builds up. Your hand would be totally covered in dust also if you waved it around the room for a few weeks without washing it or touching anything else. "
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29zyps | what exactly is wrong with the current mpaa movie ratings? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29zyps/eli5_what_exactly_is_wrong_with_the_current_mpaa/ | {
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"There is a movie called This Movie is Not Yet Rated that addresses this. The main issue is that the rating is subjectively determined by an anonymous group of reviewers, and if they give a movie an NC-17 rating (based on what they personally find offensive) it can make a movie basically unmarketable, so producers have to change the movie to fit their whims.",
"Part of the problem is the unfair application of the ratings. The MPAA is much more lenient with big studio films, leaning more toward PG-13 than R. However, with independent films, they're much stricter. They also tend to rate sexuality and nudity much more restrictively than violence and almost any gay theme at all, even if there's nothing more than holding hands, tends to get branded with an R.\n\nFinally, while the NC-17 rating was designed to allow filmmakers to explore adult subjects, it's the kiss of death as far as marketing a film because advertisers won't promote it.\n\nOn top of all that, and ironically, the enforcement system is entirely voluntary. A theatre owner could let a seven year-old into an NC-17 film and suffer zero real consequences."
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1pxsv2 | how does a country / nation / state become independent? | Why are countries like South Sudan and Timor-Leste able to declare independence and get international recognition, while others (such as Kosovo and Palestine) are only partially recognised and others still (such as Azawad or the Bangsamoro Republik) fail to get any recognition, despite declaring independence? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pxsv2/eli5_how_does_a_country_nation_state_become/ | {
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"Other nations recognize it as being such, and don't interfere with its autonomy."
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[]
] | |
4sh23g | why is it easier to see a white undershirt through a white shirt than it is to see a gray undershirt through a white shirt? | It seems like it should be the other way around, but [that clearly isn't the case](_URL_0_). | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4sh23g/eli5_why_is_it_easier_to_see_a_white_undershirt/ | {
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"Light passes more easily through the finer, higher-quality threads of a lightly colored dress shirt than the less-refined, opaque threads of an undershirt\n\nGrey is a closer match to the color of your skin so a lot of the light is absorbed in the shirt in a way that's similar to how it's absorbed by your skin.\n\n(Looked into it before I went bra shopping ... Same concept, I suppose)\n\nedit : actual explanation",
"White stands out more against the skin color. That's why white bras show through t-shirts more than tan and other colors. \n\nSource: certified bra fitter. "
]
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"http://i.imgur.com/DxKxKSb.png"
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[],
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6sn78e | why do things still blur in and out of focus when one of my eyes is closed? | I thought that was a function of having two eyes working together. Why isn't everything at roughly the same depth with just and one eye? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6sn78e/eli5_why_do_things_still_blur_in_and_out_of_focus/ | {
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"Focus is mostly controlled by the shape of the lens in your eye. I think that you're thinking of depth perception which is primarily determined by having two views of the same object.",
"Because things are still closer or farther away from your eye.\n\nA lens has something called a [focal length](_URL_1_). Things that are that distance away will be in focus. Things that are closer or farther than that distance will be blurry. The lens in your eye is cool in that it can change shape, and so change focal length, but when you're focusing on something close to you, things far away will still be blurry, and vice versa.\n\nThe thing about two eyes working together is called [parallax](_URL_0_), and it's completely unrelated to focal length."
]
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax",
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e7zs5h | how do faucets not explode from the water pressure? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e7zs5h/eli5_how_do_faucets_not_explode_from_the_water/ | {
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"Once you close a faucet, that's the pressure it will remain. Your water system has a certain pressure that is maintained. Closing the faucet doesn't make the pressure continue to build up to infinity.\n\nThink of your blood pressure. The pressure is generated by your heart pumping and your vessels squeezing. You could temporarily decrease the pressure by giving yourself a big cut and bleeding. Once you stop the bleeding, your pressure doesn't just rise to infinity.",
"Fluid pressure in a closed system like the pipes between the water supply and your closed faucet is not cumulative. That is to say it doesn't build up and become greater over time.\n\nThe water supply pump can only push out the water to a certain pressure level that it's capable of. Once the pipe is packed full of enough water, the pump just doesn't have enough power to put more water into the pipe. At that point the system reaches an equilibrium and the water stops going into the pipe. Then the whole system just sits there with no water going into the pipe and the pressure stays constant at that level until you open the faucet. \n\nThe water supply and the faucet valve are designed so that the faucet valve can withstand this constant, un-changing pressure level pretty much forever."
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5l9hdq | is there anything special about earths position when a new year starts | I know that when the earth rotates around the sun a year has passed. Is there anything special about the earths position at the start of a new year? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5l9hdq/eli5_is_there_anything_special_about_earths/ | {
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"No, it's fairly arbitrary. \n\nIt's close to (about 11 days later than) the position where the earth's axial tilt points away from the sun (from a northern perspective). This is the winter solstice. The 'new year' was most likely decided upon due to being mid winter in the northern hemisphere, so this is not coincidental. But there is nothing special about the actual day. "
]
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[]
] | |
2jwm2x | why does a cell phone call go straight to voicemail if you call within a minute of their last call? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jwm2x/eli5_why_does_a_cell_phone_call_go_straight_to/ | {
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"I have never noticed this phenomenon, and I often get calls within a few seconds of each other.\n\nPerhaps they are using a really shitty phone or network?"
]
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[]
] | ||
5m5t12 | why do animals hit on road always end up in the shoulder (of the road)? | When driving I always see birds and animals in the shoulder of the road, but do they always get hit there.. which is odd because you shouldn't drive there. If not, do people actually move the squirrels and birds to the shoulder of the road? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5m5t12/eli5why_do_animals_hit_on_road_always_end_up_in/ | {
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"they are often running when they are hit. so they have momentum going across the street. so when you are running from left to right, and then you are being hit from the bottom (if you're looking from a birds eye perspective), so will move diagonally from bottom left to top right, correct?\n\nso animals get hit, they thrust forward, but also in the direction they were running in, resulting in them often lying on the shoulder of the road or next to the road."
]
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5v2j0t | where do all the massive amounts of bones and skulls come from in major catacombs such as the ones in france and why did people use these catacombs instead of conventional graves? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5v2j0t/eli5_where_do_all_the_massive_amounts_of_bones/ | {
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"They didnt get put in the catacombs right at death. They'd get buried first, but graveyard space was limited and when people were buried, it wasn't for forever. After a few years, those people were dug up and their bones were put into the catacombs for long term storage. So when you see the massive numbers of skulls and bones, that came after this was done for decades or even centuries. "
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6gfuia | how is nitrogen able to suffocate people in large amounts? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6gfuia/eli5how_is_nitrogen_able_to_suffocate_people_in/ | {
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"It displaces oxygen and doesn't trigger any signs of suffocation that people normally associate with it. Pure nitrogen will still allow co2 to leave the blood but there will be no oxygen available. Eventually you would pass out and die from lack of oxygen and no idea that it was happening. ",
"If you fill a room with nitrogen, you will displace any oxygen. So you'll be breathing \"air\" but instead of the usual 70%nitrogen 20% 'ish' oxygen 10% other stuff, it'll be like 95% nitrogen and you suffocate",
"The atmosphere is about 21% oxygen, you need about 15% (more specifically, a partial pressure of 0.15 atm) in order to extract oxygen from the air.\n\nIf enough of the oxygen is replaced with any inert gas, nitrogen, helium, argon, etc., so that there is less than 15% oxygen present, you will asphyxiate.\n\n"
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3egvc8 | how was kepler 452b spotted with a telescope when it's 1400 lightyears away and travelling would take +-20million years? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3egvc8/eli5_how_was_kepler_452b_spotted_with_a_telescope/ | {
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"It passed in front of its star. That dimmed the light from the star a tiny bit. By measuring how long it took to pass in front of the star, we know how fast (angular velocity) it was going. By measuring how much it dimmed the star, we know how big it is relative to its star. Those two parameters are combined to know its size and distance from the star.",
"If the question is how we can see it at all when it's 1,400 light years away? We're seeing the light from 1,400 years ago. All we know is that around the time that Pope Boniface IV died a planet passed in front of the star it orbits. We also only see a tiny fraction of the light that left the star, so the Kepler satellite is kept very cold far away from Earth and uses sensors designed for this one type of measurement looking at stars like our Sun.\n\nIf the question is how we see planets around any other stars. [r/WRSaunders](_URL_0_) answered that. We watch the star for a long time, and if we see it change intensity with a regular pattern, we can use the pattern to measure the size and orbit (but never what it's made of).",
"Traveling there in a spaceship would take +-20 million years, but it only takes light a mere 1400 years to travel from there to here (hence, \"1400 light-years away\"). Kepler 452b has been around for longer than that; we're seeing it (or rather, its shadow) as it was 1400 years ago.",
"Imagine a completely empty, completely dark space. Now imagine a point of light, and from the point in every direction little \"bullets\" of light start flying. In fact, these little \"bullets\" of light are so small, you cannot see them without a powerful lens. \n \nMuch like a bullet flying through the air, these little \"bullets\" of light are travelling through space. They are going very, very, fast, but they still take time to travel over long distances. One measurement we use is the light year. This is the distance that light will travel in one year. So when we say something was discovered 1,400 light years away. What that means is that from the moment that star started burning, it took 1,400 years before it became visible to us. It also means we are seeing what happened 1,400 years ago. \n \nNow the way that scientists detect these planets. There is a tool called a [light meter](_URL_0_). Basically you point it at something that is producing light, like a lightbulb and it tells you just how bright it is. Scientists use this tool on telescopes to look at stars. They study the brightness of the star, and the color of the light. And if you are watching at the right time, you will see a period where the light from the star gets dimmer. This can be something like a planet moving in front of the star. Just like when someone walks in front of a lamp in your house. \n \nYou know how after it rains, you can see a rainbow? That is because what we see as white light, is actually made up of ALL the colors of the rainbow! When it rains, the water in the air \"bends\" the light apart, so it doesn't look like white light anymore. The interesting thing that scientists found out about this is that when the light was split apart, it was missing pieces of the rainbow! It looked like [this](_URL_1_). That is our sun's rainbow when you split the colors apart. See the missing pieces?\n \nSo where did the missing pieces go? Well as our little light \"bullets\" are travelling all the way through space, they start to hit things. Dirt, gases, and sometimes, it just happens to travel through the atmosphere of a planet, as that planet is moving in front of it's sun. When these light bullets hit a piece of space dust, whatever they bumped into will steal a little bit of the energy from it. It steals chunks of the light bullet's \"rainbow\". Scientists have studied this, and they know what each element will absorb. Each one is so unique, it is like a fingerprint! \n \nSo when a scientist has a telescope pointed at a far away star, and they happen to see it at a time when the light gets dimmer, they can look and see what chunks of the rainbow are \"missing\". look at that, They and compare it to what it should be normally missing. Whatever is new, say oxygen and some carbon, must have come from the object that made the star dimmer. So we can begin to get an idea of what elements it is made up of, and in what quantities. If the light looks close to what earth looks like, we consider it a good possibility there is life there. Since we have so much life on our planet."
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bkna3p | why are there sometimes people with 6 fingers, but never people with 3 arms? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bkna3p/eli5_why_are_there_sometimes_people_with_6/ | {
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"There have been people with 3 arms, it just happens that often the third arm would not be usable enough and it will be removed whereas sixth finger is more likely to be a non-issue.",
"IIRC, finger formation in the embryo is controlled by a genetic mechanism that basically includes a counter — it counts down the right number of fingers and then stops.\n\nSo are toes, and interestingly enough, nipples (which is how some animals, and a very rare human, can have more than 1 pair).\n\nBy contrast, arm formation has no such repeat mechanism.",
"It's because during the fetal development hands are like palms with no fingers (we all come from fishes) and molecule gradient creates a differentiation into several fingers which can easily go wrong since it relies on a small amount of genes so it can \"easily\" end up dividing into 6 or 4 fingers instead of 5, whereas arms function differently it is \"coded\" much deeper and depends on a huge amount of genetic factors so it requires a lot more to create a third arm ! But it is still possible, but extremely rare \n\n\nEDIT: The chemical process of dividing fingers is a bit more complex than what I said of course but you get the idea"
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1x14uj | how come i can put credit cards next to my magnetic money clip but not hotel room cards. | I have a wallet with a magnetic money clip. I keep all my credit and debit cards in this wallet but as soon as I put a hotel room card even in the same pocket as the wallet it immediately doesn't work. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x14uj/eli5how_come_i_can_put_credit_cards_next_to_my/ | {
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"High coercivity vs. low coercivity.\n\nYou're never going to need to re-write the information on the magnetic stripe of your credit card, so its stripe has high coercivity. That means it took a lot of energy to produce, but will take a lot of energy to erase.\n\nHotel keys need to be re-written almost daily, so their stripes have low coercivity. That means you don't need too much energy to re-write the information on the stripe, but it's easily erased.\n\nMagnets can still erase credit cards. Rub a refrigerator magnet on it for an hour or so."
]
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5t0qst | why do we randomly stutter or horribly mispronounce words we know even thought we have no actual speech impediment? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5t0qst/eli5_why_do_we_randomly_stutter_or_horribly/ | {
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"Our brains are hardwired in a way where each cell (neuron) is connected to many other cells. It's like a computer where one wire connects to other ports and wires to create a while computer. Once in a while, a neuron will fire when we are speaking but will go down a little different path which our brains are not used to. This will cause some lag just like a computer program that was not used in a while. This can ultimately lead to a stutter. To my knowledge, this occurs randomly and unpredictably. ",
"I was also wondering, don't know if allowed, what it is when you're talking but then your airway seizes up and you can't finish the word? It happens when you're trying not to cry most frequently. its like a spasm in your throat or something. never understood what it was",
"Have you ever seen a sign on the wall of a shop that says something like:\n\n* Good\n* Fast\n* Cheap\n\n**Pick Two**\n\nThat's essentially what's going on with our brains. A human brain uses up about 20% of the food we eat everyday, which is a lot for something that doesn't have to move us around or pump blood or anything 'strenuous' like that - but they could use a lot more. A computer that could do what our brains do would be enormous and would use thousands or millions of kWh of electricity. So, our brains are actually pretty efficient or \"cheap\" for what they do, which includes things like figuring out the right things to say and how to pronounce each word whenever we have to talk.\n\nSo, if they're \"cheap\" that means that they can't be as good and fast as we'd like. They're going to make mistakes sometimes. It's better to get the words right 99% of the time and be pretty fast and efficient, then it is to get the words right 100% of the time and be huge and use way more calories all the time.\n\n**Edit** - For a non ELI5 way to think of it we can [think of our brains as lossy compression of things we've learned](_URL_0_). Instead of perfectly mapping inputs to outputs we map the responses on top of each other where possible, which results in a network. This saves a ton of space and energy, but it means that often our responses are \"good enough\" instead of being exactly what we might've wanted.",
"if you are about to day something that may be considered inappropriate, or may have unwanted consequences, your brain unconsciously generates inhibitions that can block the train of speech/thought.\nin a social situation where you are not supposed to talk, this inhibition makes you \"unable\" to speak.\nmaybe actual speech impediments can develop from this",
"I was wondering the same thing when I was talking to my brother in-law about camera equipment and gear (he wants to buy my sister a camera for her birthday). Photography is a nice hobby of mine which I am passionate about. When I was telling him all about it, I was getting out of breath and was stumbling with my words a lot. I had to stop talking and take a few deep breaths in the middle of the conversation to recollect myself and catch my breath. I think I was just too excited to talk, and wasn't thinking about breathing and exactly how I was going to word something. I had too many thoughts in my head at once and wanted to say it all.",
"Often when this happens to me it's because I'm unclear on the exact word I want to use and my brain creates a bastardized combination of my options.",
"Have you ever been tested for dyslexia?",
"In times of stress, like if you're anxiously trying to explain something or think of a word, your limbic system (those areas of the brain that process fear and emotions, like the amygdala and thalamus) becomes more active. When this happens, you start relying less on your conscious \"executive\" functions and more on your unconscious, reactive \"fight or flight\" functions. As a result, complex tasks (like recalling the a concept, putting a word or phrase together to represent that concept, and coordinating the complicated muscle movements of the mouth/larynx to express that word or concept) can easily become jumbled.\n\nI know you said \"randomly\", but it doesn't take much to set off this anxiety (even just momentarily forgetting a word), particularly if you have any sort of anxiety issues (which seem pretty common in this day and age).",
"Whoa, so many stellar replies!\n\nFrom a language processing and production perspective, there are many places within a speech act where things could go awry. A key thing to keep in mind is that people who stutter have an aspect or combination of contributing factors which can put a production \"off-course.\" This could be due to the complexity of the language task, stress-level of the speaker, etc. \n\nEssentially, **we all stutter** (or experience dysfluencies). People who we identify as those who stutter do so more regularly due to genetic make-up, language ability, gender, a whole host of risk factors of the speech production hierarchy. \n\nOf note: (We don't really say speech impediment or stutterer in the field of speech-language pathology; past threads I've read have delved into the rationale for that.)\n\n",
"You can control it to a certain extent if you can control your breathing.\nCross your arms in front of you and notice how you breathe into your chest, stretch your arms to the sides and notice how you breathe down into your belly.\nWhen you stutter or mispronounce your words it's because you get excited, nervous or wound up in some other way, you're almost always breathing with your chest.\nThis is your body's emergency breathing system, and using it also produces cortisol, the stress-hormone causing you to loose full perspective on what you want to say and be more focused on 'getting the sentence out' (often because people think the listeners will lose attention if they talk normally) leading to [frontal lobe shut-down](_URL_0_) essentially shutting down your capacity to think broadly.\n\nOur brain talks to our nervous system but our nervous system also talks back, if you can force yourself to breathe right you won't fumble words that way. Also, people will perceive you as more confident if you do this.",
"Our brains are always trying to be as efficient as they can. The popular show Brain Games, or the book \"Thinking Fast and Slow\" are perfect examples of our efficiency. \n\n\nTake this amazing example presented in the book above;\n\n\n[Click here to view](_URL_0_)\n\n\nWhat did you read? What did you think? If you're like most people, you read ABC, Anne approached to the bank (as in to deposit her money), and 12 13 14.\n\n\nYou could have easily just read A13C, Anne approached the bank (as in the bank of a river), and 1B3. If you look again, the \"B\" and \"13\" are **exactly** the same\n\n\n\nThe same mistake happens with words, we always make assumptions and take shortcuts to make our own life and survival much more efficient. Like, for example the the way you probably just skipped over the second \"the\" in this sentence. \n\n\nOur pyschological quirks are manipulated quite often in advertising.\n\nEdit: 123 changed to 12 13 14. My brain was being efficient. ",
"\"...even THOUGHT we have no...\"\n\nWas this done on purpose??? Haha",
"I've had a speech impediment my whole life and people tell me that after spending time with me they say they stutter more.",
"First cause is anxiety with tachipsychia. You think the words faster than you can pronounce them. \nAnother common cause is medications (antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, benzodiazepines) and withdrawal from them and other drugs.\nThere could also be a brain lesion involving Broca's area.\nSo, if you are not anxious or use medications or drugs, better check with a neurologist. ",
"Because we're not perfect. \n\nA speech impediment means you're less perfect than average, where it creates an issue in your communication. But everyone makes mistakes, whether it's with speaking, walking, typing, whatever. Professional athletes are very coordinated, but they sometimes trip over their own feet. Even your heart--which literally has one job--messes up a few times a day. We're simply not perfect. If you're tired or stressed or rushed or distracted, you're more likely to make errors, but they can happen anytime. The act of speaking is actually a very complicated coordination between a number of muscles, even discounting the \"thinking\" part of it, and yet in many ways it's nearly effortless. It's really amazing that we don't make more errors.",
"Is that you, Sean Spicer?",
"I had a friend when I was growing up that had a small stutter and I used to mimic it because I was a moron. Then eventually he grew out of it after a couple of years and I sort of had one. Thank-fully I eventually lost it as-well.",
"I stutter/muddle my words due to anxiety, low self confidence and a whole bunch of pre developed brain bong smoking.",
" > even thought we have no actual speech impediment. \n\nKinda like that? ",
"what if you have random periods in you life were the stutters just comes and goes, in my case i can be perfectly fine for a few months and all of a sudden i starts to stutter when i talk for about a month or two",
"It's because in our head we are already passed that word your pronouncing and have already finished the scentence in your mind just your voice can't keep up ",
"Same reason you misspelled \"though\" even though you know how to spell it. The brain has a low going on and makes mistakes."
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4kbc6q | how and why did the chinese develop their writing system? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kbc6q/eli5_how_and_why_did_the_chinese_develop_their/ | {
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"Great question! Like the Egyptians, Chinese writing has its roots as a hieroglyphic language. As one of the oldest written languages in the world, Chinese characters have a history of about 4,000 years. The Chinese writing system has undergone many stages in its evolution of forms:\n\n1. Oracle Bone Inscription (甲骨文):\nThe Oracle Bone Inscription was carved on tortoise shell and ox bones during the late Shang Dynasty (1711-1066 BC). This is why they are called 甲骨文 (Jiaguwen), literally \"shell-bone writing.\" Most scholars believe that the Oracle Bone Inscription constitutes the earliest systematic array of Chinese characters.\n\n2. Bronze Inscription (金文):\nThe Bronze Inscription represents another archaic style of characters. They were cast on bronzeware during the late Shang Dynasty and throughout the Zhou Dynasty (1066-256 BC). Because bronze was the most popular metal in that period, they are called 金文 (Jīnwén) in Chinese, literally \"metal writing.\"\n\n3. Seal Script (篆书):\nThe seal script was a style of Chinese characters used in the late Zhou Dynasty and Qin Dynasty (722-221 BC). Compared to their predecessors, the seal characters are simpler in structure with a characteristic of curving strokes. This style is still used in seal cutting nowadays. This is what its Chinese name 篆书 (Zhuànshū) implies.\n\n4. Official Script (隶书):\nOfficial script was a style of Chinese characters used during the Qin and Han dynasties (206 BC-220 AD). Although the seal characters were simpler in structure, writing their curving strokes was still time-consuming. Thus, a simpler script was developed and was in use among the people to keep afloat of the sea of documents. This was how it acquired its Chinese name 隶书 (Lìshū), which literally meant \"clerk's script.\" The change from the seal script to official script marks the greatest improvement of Chinese character structure.\n\n5. Regular Script (楷书):\nRegular script was a direct development of official script, which had already reformed the Chinese characters. Regular script went a step farther to standardize and regularize the Chinese characters. This is the literal meaning of its Chinese name 楷书 (Kăishū). The regular script has been in continuous use for more than 1800 years since the late Han Dynasty. All the characters in printing materials nowadays are in regular script.\n\n6. Running Script (行书) and Cursive Script (草书)\nThere are two handwritten forms of regular script: Running Script (行书 Xíngshū) and Cursive Script (草书 Căoshū). As its Chinese name 行书 (“running characters”) implies, the strokes in a running hand character are connected. However, the whole character is still very legible. On the other hand, cursive script tends to link separate strokes into one wherever it is possible, thus often making the script illegible as its Chinese name 草书 (“careless characters”) indicates. Cursive script has become a calligraphic art, rather than a means of transmitting information. \n\n[This](_URL_0_) is a good image demonstrating the Chinese character evolution and its roots as a hieroglyphic language)"
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2rga8s | why do fast food meals include fries and soft drinks? | Also when did it become a thing for meals to include fries and soft drinks? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rga8s/eli5_why_do_fast_food_meals_include_fries_and/ | {
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"In a lot of Europe a \"proper\" meal consists of meat and vegetables and starch. Meat, potatoes, carrots, cabbage. Maybe wash that down with beer or wine.\n\nChicken nuggets or a burger or whatever are the meat, fries are the starch. Vegetables... well who needs vegetables. Pickles are vegetables, right?\n\nAll that salty food might make a person thirsty. Wash that down with a beer. Oh hang on a minute, can't have that, because puritanical values. Prohibition! Best make that a soft drink.\n\n",
"Those things are included because it's a very cheap way to pad their profits. The markups on those things are *HUGE*, and as long as they have you there and can offer you the illusion of increased value... well, they will sell you fries and a beverage for only $0.79 more.",
"because people love fries and soft drinks. they are also easy to prepare and have a huge profit margin.",
"Started in the 80's - 90's. Before that you went to a fast-food place and ordered a burger and a drink. If you had cash, you might order fries or onion rings.\n\nRestaurants noticed that Fries and Onion rings - the biggest to when it came to profit margin - didn't sell much. In 1991, McDonalds introduced the Value Meal. By knocking $.10 - $.50 off of the total price, they got customers buying those profitable fries. Bigger tickets, little more cost, bigger profits."
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fsulmc | how do porn studios/ movie companies have such a variety of homes and locations to film at? | Is there a whole trade of companies renting out houses or companies renting out whole where houses to be used in porn/movies. Also sorry for posting this it’s 4 in the morning where I live and I could not sleep for around 20 hours. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fsulmc/eli5_how_do_porn_studios_movie_companies_have/ | {
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"I used to work in posh hotels. We found ourselves the unwitting set of a couple of porn films.\nI assume a lot of them are air BnBs now",
"Yes -- there are companies and people that rent out homes and such for filming. For feature films, they also have locations scouts on the movie team who will hunt out locations as well, including homes. For porn movies, at least in LA, there are a bunch of houses that are generally rented out just to use for porn shooting and there are plenty of rentals and other things available to rent as needed by the company. But yes, renting out your home for porn in LA is an actual thing.\n\nAlso, of course for features films, the inside of the house you see is likely a set, not a real house. Its pretty difficult to shoot a movie in a house compared to a sound stage in many cases. They also may realistically build a house (or parts of it) for a set as well.",
"I work on run of the mill film sets, and they can make a large variety of room sets just by moving around the furniture and changing out a wall. The walls can be on wheels. But these days, aribnbs, and other rentals can help. There are websites you can sign up on to put your house up for rent for films crews :)",
"I would have thought that some of them look like the inside of a warehouse with a set design( they have windows but you can't see through them) and some of the locations( especially those high up in the Californian hills look like they have been used muiltple times.."
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7x11iv | why is florida, which is closer to the equator, sometimes really cold in spring and fall yet places like arizona are still in the 90-100’s. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7x11iv/eli5_why_is_florida_which_is_closer_to_the/ | {
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"The local climate depends on the locale. To be serious Arizona is in the middle of the continent and has a low rainfall. Florida is a peninsula surrounded by ocean on both sides. It can rain every day in the afternoon in Florida which you would never know when looking at advertisements for Florida vacations.\n\nThere are regular regional weather patterns such as the monsoon in Asia. The ocean takes a long time to warm up in the Spring so it keeps Florida's temperature down. Arizona is dry and far from the ocean. It will heat up quickly. You are seeing high temperatures being advertised. The nights are still chilly.",
"Florida is by an ocean. Arizona is a desert.\n\nThe question is vague, because both are large states. When you say Arizona, you mean the Phoenix area. Because Flagstaff is in the mountains and regularly gets snow.\n\nMiami has, in general, warmer winters than Phoenix. How much warmer? The average low in Miami is equal to the average high in Phoenix in the month of January. Granted, that's still 65 degrees, but it's still true. "
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3lw8mr | what type of data do companies usually "sell", to whom and what's so bad about it? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lw8mr/eli5_what_type_of_data_do_companies_usually_sell/ | {
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"Name, Email, interests, phone number, maybe even purchase history but the first four at the very least. I speculate its mostly for relevance for ads. If they know what type of products you buy they can better target their ads that theoretically have a higher chance at success. \n\nIts a privacy issue plain and simple. That is just what they would do with the most basic information. ",
"Companies may sell information about your location, your contact details, your personal messages, your interests, who you talk to, and everything they can gather on the people you talk to. Usually for personal advertising. They can compare your data with other people's data to find trends that will determine what you're you're most likely going to be interested in. Not too pleasant. Sold to ad agencies.",
"One reason that it's bad is because your data has a higher chance of being compromised if it exists in more than one place."
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27043e | why is 2,147,483,647 the highest 32-bit integer? why so specific? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27043e/eli5_why_is_2147483647_the_highest_32bit_integer/ | {
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"Because that's the decimal representation of the binary number 1111111111111111111111111111111. That's 31 1's. The final, 32nd digit is used to indicate negative numbers.",
"Start with 2^(32) then divide by two cuz we allow negative numbers and then subtract an extra 1, because we allow 0 ",
"It's kinda like how 99 is *so specifically* the highest two-digit decimal number. Only, since it's a binary number converted into decimal, you can't see the pattern.",
"In computers, you need to be able to uniquely represent any number as a binary value. To do this, each bit is assigned a unique power of 2 and every subsequent bit is to the power of 2 less than that. To convert that binary number into a integer (meaning a signed integer), you just sum up all the powers of 2 that have the binary value of 1.\n\nIt might be easier to visualize and 8 bit example of this:\n\nBit Number\tInteger Value\n\n0 -128 (-2 ^ 7)\n\n1 64 (2 ^ 6)\n\n2 32 (2 ^ 5)\n\n3 16 (2 ^ 4)\n\n4 8 (2 ^ 3)\n\n5 4 (2 ^ 2)\n\n6 2 (2 ^ 1)\n\n7 1 (2 ^ 0)\n\nThis means an 8 bit number will allow us to represent all numbers between -128 (10000000) and 127 (01111111). A binary value of 11111111 would represent an -1 integer value. A 32 bit number works exactly the same, except since you have 32 bits, you can have your power of 2 a lot greater. So it ends up that a zero and 31 ones will convert to 2,147,483,647. If it were all ones, it would equal -1.\n\nIf you had an unsigned integer, your bit at position 0 wouldn't be negative. So in the 8 bit example, it would be 128 instead of -128. This would mean that you could represent all number between 0 (00000000) and 255 (11111111).\n\nAlso, this business of the final bit being the sign bit is ridiculous. People that use computers for any serious business don't use Macs.\n",
"32 bit means 32 digits in binary.\n\nSo in the same way that 999,999 is the highest 6 decimal digit number, 1111,1111,1111,1111,1111,1111,1111,1111 is the highest 32 bit number. In decimal, that's 2,147,483,647."
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2ws0yl | in car engines, what's the relationship between number of cylinders and liters to horsepower and torque? why do they vary so much? also is this related to turbocharged and supercharged engines? what's the difference? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ws0yl/eli5_in_car_engines_whats_the_relationship/ | {
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"Latching on to ask in an ELI5 how Turbo and Supercharging works, because I don't understand the explanations found on wikipedia and google search results. \n\nedit: thanks for all the explanations. not sure why you guys are being downvoted. :(",
"Ok... I'm going to attempt to do this without turning into a freakin' wiki article. I'm only sticking with gasoline based engines, not diesel.\n\nGenerally speaking (with the notable exception of Formula 1 race-car engines), more cylinders == more displacement (liters, cubic centimeters, cubic inches) and more power (both torque and horsepower).\n\nThey can vary so much based on weight of the rotating assembly (the crankshaft, the pistons, rods, etc.) and how much friction is caused by the rotation of these components against each other (usually reduced by oil and a sacrificial bearing component, typically a form of brass). An additional variable is how the fuel is sprayed into the cylinder, but for this purpose I won't touch that section of it. There are COUNTLESS variables that can be changed to increase/decrease horsepower of an engine.\n\nAnother variable is valve lift and duration. Longer duration allows for a larger fuel/air mixture into the cylinder, and excavation of exhaust gases out of the cylinder. There's a certain point where this becomes unsustainable. Note that the evacuation of the exhaust gasses create a vacuum inside the cylinder that can exert slight sucking action on the incoming fuel/air mixture.\n\nTurbocharging == using exhaust gases to spin up a propeller in the intake system to basically cram more air into the combustion chamber. The computer/carburetor will be setup in such a way to prevent the fuel/air mixture from going lean. Lean will cause premature detonation and increased cylinder temperatures, potentially causing catastrophic damages. Turbocharging is kinda like 'free additional power', at the expense of additional fuel costs and a lag time for the exhaust gasses spin up the intake side of the turbo charger. \n\nSupercharging == using engine power to spin up a propeller in the intake system to basically cram more air into the combustion chamber. Same thing happens here with the computer/carburetor. Not 'as free power' as turbo charger, as it uses engine crank power to spin up a propeller. Additional cost of fuel still applies.\n\nIn short -- more fuel/air mixture stuffed into the combustion chamber == more power, up until the point where the engine becomes 'flooded', thereby preventing the explosion inside the combustion chambers. \n\n",
"The power an engine can provide is a function of how much petrol and air mix you can fit in a cylinder and burn cleanly. this is traded off against losses caused by friction and other things. \n\nAll other things being equal you could therefore double the capacity and double the power, but larger cylinders are difficult to fill and control the burn. It is therefore better to have twice as many cylinders once you get past a certain point, but the trade off of having more bearings and moving parts starts costing in terms of friction. \n\nOther ways to boost the power involve getting more air into the engine, this can be done in a number of different ways, firstly in a NA engine, the only thing you have to work with is the weight of the gasses and the smoothness of the channels. Standard tuning of a \"port and polish\" uses Bigger valves to increase the open area and polishing the inside of the head. \n\nWhen the exhaust opens the gas rushes out, but the weight of it means that when the engine runs out of exhaust, a vaccume is pulled in the cylinder, opening the inlet valve at this point means that the inlet charge is pulled into the engine this is called overlap. Unfortunately this works best at specific rpms (and is very bad for emissions at low rpms), changing the overlap and the valve opening on the fly is done by vvc and vvt technologies. \n\nTurbo and superchargers do the same thing, they compress the intake charge so it rushes into the cylinder when the valves open. The difference between them is that a turbo uses the exhaust gas to power it and a supercharger is driven by the crankshaft. ",
"I'd also be interested in reading an ELI5 on the fundamental difference that causes a current model Chevy V6 to be rated for similar horsepower to a Chevy V8 from the 1960s.",
"Background: Power Cylinder engineer (everything that goes \"boom\" inside the engine) at a diesel engine company.\n\nDisclaimer: this is a very complex question, but I will try my best to answer without drifting too far down the rabbit hole.\n\nTL;DR: There is no true relationship between number of cylinders, displacement (liters) and torque (horsepower) other than this: as number of cylinders increases, more displacement is allowed which will typically lead to more torque.\n\nLonger answer:\n\nFirst, let's define torque. Torque is a force multiplied by a distance. It acts on the axis running parallel to the length of the engine - typically the front/back axis on a vehicle unless it is a 4 cylinder in which case it runs from the left to right. The crankshaft has what we call \"throws\" which is the length in the equation above. The force comes from the explosion that happens when heat, oxygen and fuel are combined in the cylinder. This explosion drives the piston downward and transfers the energy into the crankshaft through a connecting rod. The force also carries the other pistons back upward to repeat the process. \n\nDisplacement (liters) effects the torque in a large part. The more fresh air you can get into a cylinder, the more efficient and powerful and explosion will be. This is because all fires love oxygen. To take a bit of a detour and answer a below question: this is how turbo- and superchargers work - the \"shove\" more air and pack it into the cylinders more densely leading to more available oxygen for the fire.\n\nHorsepower is related to torque by the equation (P)ower = (T)orque x RPM / 5252. This means that power is completely dependant on the torque, which is dependent on (among many many other factors) the displacement of the engine. Of course there are always limiting factors like exhaust, emissions regulations, efficiency, etc.\n\nFor the follow-up question below regarding super- and turbochargers:\n\nTurbochargers are separated into two parts - a turbine and compressor. The turbine receives hot exhaust from the engine which in turn spins it at extremely high speeds - somewhere around 200,000 RPM. This then drives a shaft which \"sucks\" air and \"shoves\" it down into the cylinder. This (relatively) cool air is then densely packed into the cylinder allowing for more available oxygen for the explosion. The mechanism of using the exhaust to power the charger typically leads to a lag between when you mash down the accelerator to when you feel the turbo's effect.\n\nA supercharger works on a direct drive system. It essentially does the same thing, but it works on your engine's RPM to suck and shove air into the engine.\n\nI hope I explained that in a succinct, understandable way. If not, please ask more questions.\n\nTiny Edit: when I say that more displacement leads to more torque, it's in a sense that typically, a 6 cylinder with 4.0L has more power potential than one with 3.8L. Displacement is almost always a function of packaging constraints, however. ",
"An engine is, as simply put as possible, an air pump. Air goes in, fuel is added, then a spark explodes the mixture, and and the resulting byproduct is pushed out into the exhaust. Where the explosion happens is the cylinder. It's a metal tube with seals on the top (head/valves) and bottom (piston/rings). The amount of volume in that cylinder, times the number of cylinders, is the displacement, usually measured in liters. If you have four cylinders, and the volume in each is .5L, you have a 2L motor (.5x4). If you had eight cylinders, that would be a 4L motor (.5x8). \n\nWhy not just have one cylinder that displaces 2L or 4L or whatever? There are practical size and weight limits to the moving parts. Having a one cylinder motor that displaces a bunch of area means you'll have a piston the size of a small trash can and weighs a lot and can't move very fast without putting a ton of stress on the rest of the motor. So, when a car manufacturer wants to make a high displacement motor (which they would do because they want it to make a lot of power, more explosions or bigger explosions in a bigger cylinder means more power), they can add cylinders. It can still spin fast because the parts are kept small. \n\nIn older F1 cars, they were actually very small, they would have 3.5L ten cylinder engines, which you can compare to a Dodge Viper, which is a street car with ten cylinders, and it displaces 8L, more than twice as much. Why? Those small parts can move faster with less stress. The F1 car can safely rotate to around 20,000 RPM, whereas the Viper can safely rotate to around 6,000 RPM. Why do this? Because RPM times torque equals power. Torque is basically how much force the engine produces *per explosion*. The Viper produce more force *per explosion*, but the F1 car produces many more explosions in a given time, and that means that the F1 car actually produce more HP than the Viper, and over a wider range of engine speeds since it revs so high.\n\nLong story short, to make more power, you can add liters (displacement) by either making each cylinder bigger, or you can add cylinders. More displacement equals more power, all things being equal, which for the sake of this argument let's assume is possible.\n\nBut, there's a way to \"fake\" displacement: compressors. You can pressurize air using a fancy wheel and force feed that into the engine, so that it takes in as much air as a larger engine. Superchargers and turbochargers work a bit differently (see my other response in this topic), but at their heart they both force air into the engine by compressor. One is spun by the engine (supercharger), the other is spun by the hot exhaust gasses (turbocharger). By doing this, you can have the fuel economy of a small engine when you're not flooring it, and the power of a big engine when you are.",
"Hi /u/joch256. I try to answer all of your questions but I am going to work backwards if that's okay.\n\nfirst: [This site](_URL_0_) explains how engines work. Its a great learning tool.\n\n\nsecond: turbochargers and supercharges.\n\nBoth turbochargers and superchargers provide the same function to the an internal combustion engine. Both pump more air into the engine. The added air allows the engine to burn more fuel thus making the engine more powerful. The difference is how they obtain the energy needed to pump the air into the engine. \n\nA **turbocharger** is powered by the engines exhausts. The exhaust drives a turbine blade. This blade turns a shaft that turns a compressor blade. This compressor blade generates suction that compresses air into the engine. This process creates back-pressure on the engine. Back pressure causes a decrease in output power from the engine. To compensate for back pressure an engine needs to consume more fuel. \n\n\nA **superchargers** is powered by the engine. Usually a supercharger is powered by a belt, gear, shaft, or chain connected to the engine's crankshaft{the shaft that transmits power to the wheels}. The belt, gear, shaft, or chain drives a compression blade. This compressor blade generates suction that compresses air into the engine. Superchargers put a mechanical load on the engine. The engine needs to consume more fuel to compensate for the mechanical load. \n\n\nSo whats the difference?\n**turbochargers** are more efficient then **superchargers** in terms of fuel consumption to net power gain. However **turbochargers** are less responsive to the engines needs then a **supercharger**. When you place your foot on the gas the engine needs to work more in order to increase your speed. This means the engine needs more air because there is more fuel being consumed. A **supercharger** can provide the extra air almost immediately because it is powered by the crankshaft. A **turbocharge** lags behind because it is driven by the exhaust. So a **turbocharger** briefly can't provide the engine with the air it needs during these increases in speed. There is a way around these weaknesses and that's called **twin-charging**. This is where both a **turbocharger** and **supercharger** is installed in an engine. During an increase in speed the **supercharger** will be used until there is enough exhaust produced for the **turbocharger** to take over. \n\n\nThird: Now that that's over lets talk about **Torque**(T) and **Horsepower**(HP). They are actually related through **revolutions per minute** (RPM). The formula is \n\n\nT = (HP x 5252) / RPM\n\n\nSo what is **Torque**? Well the answer is pretty simple. **Torque** is the amount of force(F) on a point multiplied by the distance(d) between the force and the point. The formula is:\n\n\nT = F x d\n\n\n**Torque** in car engines is the amount of rotational energy the pistons(cylinders) put on the crankshaft. You can read more about torque [here.](_URL_1_).\n\n**horsepower** is the English systems unit for power(Work done divided by the time it takes to do the work). They relate with the formula above.\n\nAs for # of cylinders. More cylinders allows the engine to turn the crankshaft faster then less cylinders. Liters is the volumes of all of the cylinders in the engine. So lets say we have 2 engines: a 4-cylinder 3.0 liter and a 6-cylinder 2.8 liter engine. Engine 1 has less cylinders but each cylinder is larger then the cylinders in the second engine. Both length of each cylinder and number of cylinders determines the torque on the crankshaft. The torque determines the horsepower.\n\n\nIf there are anymore questions you have I will gladly answer them.",
"Good Grief! Some folks forget this is EL5. It all relates to how much fuel-air mixture can be pushed through an engine. Everything else is details. More fuel-air mixture being burned ~ more power.",
"Some answers here are quite complex. The ELI5 is it all boils down to the amount of air you can cram in an engine. More air means you can add more fuel which means more power. For a simple example: If you have 4x500ml cylinders, you can get 2l of air. If you have 8x500ml cylinders you can get 4l of air. More air = more fuel that can be burnt = more power. The bigger the cylinder and/or the more cylinders you have, the more power you have access to. \n\nTurbos and superchargers just compress the air on its way into the system allowing more air in the same amount of space and as such allow more fuel to be burnt. The difference between a supercharger and turbocharger is how they are driven.\n\nA supercharger is belt driven by the crank shaft (the shaft that all the pistons are attached to that drives your gearbox and as such your wheels), so is good for low end power as it is compressing air from the moment the engine turns over and provides a very linear power curve as engine rpm is directly proportional to supercharger rpm. \n\nTurbochargers are driven by the exhaust gas from your engine, so you need a certain level of revs to get exhaust volume to the impeller to start compression. That's why turbos have 'lag', which is the delay between when the revs start increasing and when boost starts increasing. "
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bf4jyb | how do fuses blow? can it be from disuse? | I'm curious and stupid. I bought a Sega CD recently, and it has a blown fuse. How could something like this happen? Because it hasn't been used in a few decades? Or did someone plug in the wrong power adapter? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bf4jyb/eli5_how_do_fuses_blow_can_it_be_from_disuse/ | {
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"Fuses blow because the amount of electricity coming in was higher than the fuse rating. Could have been a wrong adapter. Could also have been a power surge. Lightening strike or problem with the grid could do that.\n\nIn theory, age could cause a fuse to decay but the time span required for the metal in the fuse to decay to that point is likely longer than the age of the machine.",
"A fuse blow because of to high current that heat it up or it can happen from physical force so it might have happen if it was dropped or handled uncafrully without any other damages to the device. If it just the fuse that have died you can just replace it with another with the same rating and it will work.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere are electrical components that age a lot more and can fail in a way that result in a short or other problem. The most common is capacitors that contain liquids that can and do leak. A quick search resulted in this article [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) with pictures of the board where you can see discoloration because of leaking capacitors. There is also packs of new capacitors for the Sega CD [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) so it is relative common problem.\n\nSo it might be a good idea to if the fuse fail when you replace it to open it and look on the board for leaks. To replace them you need to know how to solder and there might be a idea to let someone else do the replacement.",
"You might have a short in the game system. Clean it out and look for loose bits of metal and [tin or zinc whiskers](_URL_0_)."
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31z92p | how come i understand stuff better after not doing it for a while | So throughout my life I've noticed I've had a weird way of learning things.
I start off having no idea what the fuck is going on then I mess around a little bit and then I pretty much stop trying and go on and do something else. I eventually end up coming back to it a few months or years later and suddenly understand how to do things quite well and its always confused me. Any thoughts?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31z92p/eli5_how_come_i_understand_stuff_better_after_not/ | {
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"Not a neurologist here, but I had read certain articles way back that explain our learning process. It was sort of like: we learn a certain thing while we are conscious, but this certain thing we learned is only stored as short term memory while we are conscious. The brain processes this information during sleep to move it into the long term memory so that the knowledge is fully acquired, however, to do so, we must first fully comprehend the information, otherwise it is forgotten.\n\nSo, in effect your brain has probably sorted out the information that you had understood from that time you tried to learn it, which builds a basis to more easily apply these information onto the parts you did not understand at that point.\n\n\nAgain, not a neurologist here, so I stand to be corrected, but that's my take on the topic anyhow.",
"Latent learning describes a passive, unreinforced, process by which we can pick up new information without realizing it at the time. Later, when the context is appropriate, that newly learned information can be acted upon. Google \"latent learning\". ",
"I can attest. I learn the same way. Initially I may do something, like let's say rooting my phone. I spend 4 hours doing it, and it frustrates me and I give up. A week later, I go back to it, and am able to hammer it out in an hour despite having no real knowledge change. \n\nMy guess: At first, everything is new, and overwhelming. If you take a break, it allows stuff to process and not seem new all at once. "
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22vc5x | how do we automatically limp when injured? | What's going on in the brain to make us start walking differently, without consciously doing so? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22vc5x/eli5_how_do_we_automatically_limp_when_injured/ | {
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"It is not the brain, it is the limb. Your leg is no longer working properly and/or it is giving pain signals with each step. As such it is either slower/has less range of movement than the other limb thus causing a limp or you try to avoid pain from it by putting less weight on it thus causing a limp. ",
"you are consciously doing it though. You feel the pain and you recoil from it. You may get used to it but you are making a conscious effort to do it because its not how you normally walk. Of course the purpose being to not further damage parts of your body.",
"It is definitely conscious thought that makes you limp."
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7jb1qo | how do you judge the quality of chef knives? | There are so many brands and handles, how do you know what’s good quality and what’s just a gimmick. Are there certain things i should look for? Or a certain brand i should research? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7jb1qo/eli5_how_do_you_judge_the_quality_of_chef_knives/ | {
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"Things you should care about:\n \nThe quality of the steel. Obviously the knife is made of the stuff and its what decides who well the knife holds an edge. You want a high quality steel.\n\nThe Tang. Basically how the knife attaches to the handle. A full tang is perfered but you can get away with a 1/2 or 3/4 and should be fine if you don't abuse your knives.\n\nThe handle feel should feel nice in your hand that's totally up to you.\n\nThe weight of the knife. You want some heft but not so much you cant control it.",
"It really depends on what you're planning to use them for.\n\nIf you don't mind dropping a penny, Wüsthof makes just about the best price:quality knife for home or professional use. They feature high-quality steel, full tang (how deep the knife goes into the handle), beveled edges if that's your thing, etc, etc. \n\nMostly, what you're looking for in a knife is material quality. A high-quality chef's knife will do 90% of the work in your home kitchen outside of butchering your own meat. Other than that, a single paring knife and a single cleaver will do the rest. Don't worry about buying a whole package full of different knives, they're really just there to \"wow\" you into thinking you're getting a better product. Regarding the handle; you want something that is comfortable in your hand. That's it. End of story.\n\nOnce you've got the knife you like, pick up a whetstone or a sharpening dowel and learn how to use it. It'll increase the longevity of your knives a hundred times. I've been using the same Wüsthof chef's knife for over ten years now, every day, every meal. "
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ayooed | why are normal pencils erasable but coloured pencils aren't? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ayooed/elif_why_are_normal_pencils_erasable_but_coloured/ | {
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"Basically it is because they are based on wax/oil rather than graphite, and erasers will just 'slide' over the mark rather than pick it up.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFrom Wikipedia:\n\n*\"Unlike graphite and charcoal pencils, colored pencils’ cores are wax- or oil-based and contain varying proportions of pigments, additives, and binding agents\"*",
"Vinyl erasers are made to also erase color pencils, there are even electronic erasers now. So it’s not that they can’t, you just need a certain kind ",
"To add to this question\n\nWhat is the purpose of the erasers that have two different ends?\n\nWhen I was a kid everybody thought it was to erase ink",
"As an Animator, I use Col Erase Pencils. Coloured pencils that are designed to be erased. Hence the name, Colour erase ~ Col Erase for short.\n\nThey are commonly the pencil of choice for rough drawings in traditional animation. "
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2a3n87 | what exactly is a social justice "warrior" and why are they bad? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a3n87/eli5_what_exactly_is_a_social_justice_warrior_and/ | {
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"Reddit defines a Social Justice Warrior as someone who goes on Tumblr and posts about how unjust the world is. Not a bad thing on the surface but SJWs are usually complaining about how privileged everyone else is or whine about their imagined slights. \n\n/r/TumblrInAction has some good examples. Some of these people are either mentally unstable or just so out of touch with society that they turn to a community of similarly unsocial people on Tumblr and they just feed off eachother.",
"The term can be applied to two types of people. 1) People who have poor understanding of an issue or problem, but join, via the Internet, a cause in order to gain popularity within that issue's cyber community. To do so, they frequently pile onto an issue, often with inflammatory language or tactics that \"their\" cause likes but others don't. (Example: A SJW Vegan would find a picture of a cheeseburger on a recipe website and then post dozens of comments to that picture about how meat is murder, and cheese manufacturers are evil, and the innocent dead cows are on your conscience, etc. They aren't necessarily vegan themselves, but their spamming this particular content gains favor in the online vegan community.) They are bad only in the sense that they annoy other users with their frequent postings. 2) The other type of SJW are people who, in the name of social justice, use violent or destructive tactics to further their cause. So, like, the people who would murder a zookeeper and then let the monkeys go free to protest the caging of wild animals. They are dangerous because they often don's consider the full ramifications of their actions. Like, setting monkeys free might sound like a good idea, but it's not. At all."
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88ovre | how does mineral oil not destroy the pc parts? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/88ovre/eli5_how_does_mineral_oil_not_destroy_the_pc_parts/ | {
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"Mineral oil is non-conductive, so there is no damage to the components. Water, on the other hand, is conducive, so it would totally wreck the system by creating shorts everywhere. "
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3wcb01 | why are we vulnerable to the the suns harmful uv rays, why haven't we evolved natural defences? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wcb01/eli5_why_are_we_vulnerable_to_the_the_suns/ | {
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"Evolutionary pressures mainly come into play if they affect humans before or during the peak of reproduction. Since skin cancers from UV rays are acquired over time, they usually appear after the peak reproductive years, so it doesn't affect reproduction. Thus, any traits that offer protections from UV rays don't offer any evolutionary advantage over humans that lack such traits. ",
"Well, it is not true that we have no defences. [Melanin in our skin defends us from UV radiation] (_URL_0_). Which is why in general you will find that people living in the regions of the world with the most direct sunlight also have darker skin. The protection is not perfect, but it is there. There is a difference in skin cancer rates, for example, between people with dark skin and the rates for people with pale skin.\n\nThe problem is that melanin might have a protective role, it also, due to that protective role, lessens the skin's ability to absorb certain sun light that is used to produce vitamin D. Not such a big problem in regions with more than enough sun, but a much bigger problem in regions with less skin. Which is why people in those regions have generally paler skin. ",
"We do have defenses, it's just that they aren't geared for the long-term. Evolution doesn't care if you live to be 35 or 100, as long as you reproduce. We're just numbers to the cold bitch that is evolution and mother nature. "
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zzvls | how are rocks formed | Yeah. So how are rocks formed :p | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zzvls/elif_how_are_rocks_formed/ | {
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"When lava comes out of a volcano and cools off, it creates rock and that's called igneous rock (granite, obsidian, pumice). \n\n\nWhen igneous rock has been ground down and combined with with other material and water (like at the bottom of a lake or river), it sticks together and dries to make sedimentary rock (Shale, Sandstone, conglomerate, gypsum, limestone). \n\n\nWhen igneous or sedimentary rock is put under A LOT of pressure (like a mountain sits on top of it), it changes and becomes metamorphic rock (schist, gneiss). "
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6wonh1 | if the universe is always expanding, does that mean more atoms are being created to fill the space? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6wonh1/eli5_if_the_universe_is_always_expanding_does/ | {
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"Not exactly. It's the space between galaxies that's increasing. The matter and energy in our universe is believed to be finite. Scientists have a theory of dark energy that \"fills the space\" of an expanding universe. \n\nEdit: sorry, it's dark energy, not dark matter that is responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe. The universe is like raw cookie dough expanding in the oven, you don't add more stuff to it, but it expands. The amount of cookie stays constant. ",
"No. All the matter that has ever existed or will exist was set at the moment of the Big Bang. The expansion is greatest where there is no matter (no local gravity). It is also less an \"expansion\" of space than a \"stretching\" of space. Think of a sheet of rubber being pulled at the edges in all directions. \n\n[From an article from Cornell University:](_URL_0_)\n\n\"The difference between \"expanding\" and \"stretching\", for me at least, is that an \"expanding universe\" conjures up an image where there is a bunch of galaxies floating through space, all of which started at some center point and are now moving away from that point at very fast speeds. Therefore, the collection of galaxies (which we call the \"universe\") is expanding, and it is certainly fair to ask what it is expanding into. The current theories of the universe, however, tell us that this is not the picture we should have in mind at all. Instead, the galaxies are in some sense stationary - they do not move through space the way that a ball moves through the air. The galaxies simply sit there. However, as time goes on, the space between the galaxies \"stretches\", sort of like what happens when you take a sheet of rubber and pull at it on both ends. Although the galaxies haven't moved through space at all, they get farther away from each other as time goes on because the space in between them has been stretched.\"\n\nSo no atoms are displacing empty space in order to \"push things apart\" rather it seems to be a property of empty space itself. There are theories on what causes this (dark matter, dark energy, vacuum energy) but we really don't fully understand it yet. It just is."
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1lz2yu | why every time the usa has a war or conflict, its always on foreign soil and not domestic | Keeping the Civil, revolutionary, and french indian war aside, why is it that wars for the usa are always foreign? think like WW1 WW2 operation iraqi freedom etc. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lz2yu/eli5_why_every_time_the_usa_has_a_war_or_conflict/ | {
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"Because the USA has two borders in North America, neither with a country with the will or power to take them on militarily. Short of having another civil war, how is the USA supposed to have a war on its own soil? Non-civil wars are by definition 'foreign'. "
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4qo0on | how do super famous rappers and producers make money off of free mixtapes? | For instance, Future and DJ Esco just dropped "Esco Terrestrial" for free on datpiff... How could such huge names in the modern music industry afford to waste their time by making a mixtape that will essentially earn them zero direct profit from sales? Is there some kind of ROI I'm not seeing here? Couldn't they be utilizing this time on an album they plan to sell? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4qo0on/eli5_how_do_super_famous_rappers_and_producers/ | {
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"They don't make money off of the actually release of the mixtape tracks. However if the song becomes popular they will get request to perform live."
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341mvj | are these statistics of crime/poverty in the black community skewed somehow? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/341mvj/eli5_are_these_statistics_of_crimepoverty_in_the/ | {
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"The statistics are accurate, but the conclusions people like to draw from them are not. For one, poverty correlates with crime everywhere in the world, and the relationship is likely causative. If the poverty were removed, crime rates would also drop. In addition, drug crimes in the US are overprosecuted, leading to inflated crime rates. Poverty can be, at least in part, attributed to a long history of systemic oppression, and hasn't gotten better because of the aforementioned drug prosecution problem.",
"The problem with statistics is that, devoid of context, they can be worse than useless. Even if these numbers are true, they don't necessarily point to a why or a how, they simply tell you 'x does y amount of z.'\n\nThe reasons for why a certain statistic is what it is can be wide-ranging, and so the number itself may be of limited value. For instance, why does group X commit a disproportionate amount of theft compared to group Y? Is it because group X has a predisposition to theft? Is it because group Y denies group X basic needs and group X needs to resort to theft for survival?\n\nIn short, statistics are a useful tool, but they are far from a complete picture, and are often employed by groups in ways devoid of, or improperly utilizing context, in order to further agendas. ",
"ELI5 is for explanations to concepts, not yes/no questions, so this post has been removed. That doesn't mean it's bad, it just belongs in another subreddit, like /r/Askreddit, /r/nostupidquestions, /r/answers, /r/asksocialscience, or maybe a statistics subreddit of some kind. "
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2lhitm | when someone's constipated for several days but keeps eating normal meals, where does all that food go? how com the intestines don't burst after a while? | the volume of food matter I eeat over several days always seems larger to me than the volume of my abdomen. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lhitm/eli5_when_someones_constipated_for_several_days/ | {
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"A large amount of most foods is water, and a lot of the rest is carbohydrates (which, when burned, produce carbon dioxide and water). You pee out the water and breathe out the carbon dioxide, so the volume of feces is considerably smaller than the volume of food.",
"If you really are constipated (as opposed to just not moving your bowels), then you will quite likely be in excruciating pain, and you really won't feel like eating anything.\n\nSource : My daughter had constipation.",
"Plus, the colon and lower large intestine are quite elastic. They can stretch to contain quite a large amount of fecal matter if necessary. It's rare that healthy tissue inside the digestive tract bursts just because of a buildup of pressure."
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fiptfu | what makes a cough dry? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fiptfu/eli5_what_makes_a_cough_dry/ | {
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"You feel the need to cough but doing hack up any gunk. Can feel like the need to clear your throat or a tickle in your throat/lungs.",
"Dry means that you're only pushing \"dry\" air out of your lungs and through your throat. That makes for a distinct sound, and hurts your throat because of the lack of fluids and the fast moving air. When there's phlegm hanging around in your throat, it gets pushed up by the air when you cough, making a different noise. It also means your throat gets hurt less fton coughing.",
"This is a common complaint among those who suffer from acid reflux, or GERD. It is caused by a build-up of acid in your throat. Doesn't particularly hurt but is terribly irritating and makes your voice sound rough and raspy.",
"Dry coughs lack mucus and are the result of tissue inflammation. Basically your lungs are swelling, but not producing much mucus (also called sputum when it's from the lungs). Other types of infections tend to trigger your nose or lungs to make a lot of mucus, which will come out when you cough or sneeze.",
"I was recently prescribed a secondary high blood pressure medicine, Lisinopril, which is one of the ACE inhibitors and started having a dry hacking cough, especially at night, that was so bad I couldn’t sleep so I went to urgent care and then to my doctor and was prescribed cough medicines then an RX for GERD but none of those stopped my coughing. I realized that when OTC Delsym nor RX Tussionex cough syrups didn’t work that it had to be something else. I looked up dry hacking cough on Google and saw where 20% of people who take ACE inhibitors get a dry hacking cough so I mentioned it to my doctor and he apologized for not catching it. This was after about a month of coughing every night and sometimes coughing fits during the day. My doctor gave me a different type of blood pressure medicine and I noticed my coughing started up again so I stopped taking that RX and coughed for about another 3 weeks.",
"I’ve had a bad cough for over a week now but it’s definitely a wet cough and normal for me around this time of year. No fever or any other symptoms but I wonder if the current wet cough would make me more at risk were I to catch Coronavirus"
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2r2lx5 | why do gas/burp sometimes really hurt my chest? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2r2lx5/eli5why_do_gasburp_sometimes_really_hurt_my_chest/ | {
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"There is literal gas in your system trying to escape, it pushes up on things that don't like to be pushed on, like your diaphragm. When the gas exits, it can leave you with pretty much a muscle spasm. It usually goes away soon after, try taking a few deep breaths to loosen up the muscles. If you're still feeling pain, I highly recommend seeing a doctor, it could be a sign of something more serious"
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2spi36 | why are liberal arts majors considered worthless? | I have always been puzzled by this. As far as I'm concerned, if you have a degree you're well off | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2spi36/eli5_why_are_liberal_arts_majors_considered/ | {
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"If you have a degree, you're well off because you paid for that education and will now use it to get a good job that pays far more money than an uneducated role.\n\n\"Liberal arts\" has no obvious career path after graduating, and the stereotype is that anyone completing such a degree will be out of work or doing a completely unqualified job such as pumping gas or checkout bagboy.",
"A lot of university education trains people to be professionals, like medicine, law etc. The skills developed during the degree are directly relevant to future career of the student.\n\nLiberal arts majors develop skills that are not directly relevant to the work that they do in most cases. There isn't a lot of demand for professional historians, philosophers etc. \n\nSo because there is no direct relevance to future careers, liberal arts degrees are considered to be worth less than professional degrees. ",
" > As far as I'm concerned, if you have a degree you're well off\n\nThat's a bad assumption to make\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > You can spend a long, long time arguing about precisely how bad freshly minted grads have it these days and why. But for now, let's stick to broad strokes. In its recent chartbook on youth joblessness, the Economic Policy Institute reported that roughly 8.5 percent of college graduates between the ages of 21 and 24 were unemployed. That figure is based on a 12-month average between April 2013 and March 2014, so it’s not a perfect snapshot of the here and now. Still, it tells us that the post-collegiate job market, just like the rest of the labor market, certainly isn’t nearly back to normal. (For comparison, the unemployment rate for all college grads over the age of 25 is 3.3 percent, which is also still higher than normal.) More worrisomely, the EPI finds that a total of 16.8 percent of new grads are “underemployed,” meaning they’re either jobless and hunting for work; working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job; or want a job, have looked within the past year, but have now given up on searching.",
"It's a Reddit circlejerk, not an absolute fact of life.\n\nReddit, because it started as a tech/computer/IT/programming news site started with a userbase of people with STEM educations. As the site grew, it attracted people with those sorts of interests & educations.\n\nWhen you have a large group with a common trait, they're going to claim that thing is superior to what \"other\" people do.\n\nIt's little easier to back up in the case of STEM degrees in college because many of them directly translate to high paying jobs. Especially considering the high cost of college these days, going $100k into debt for a degree that doesn't guarantee you a high paying career can appear to be a poor financial choice.\n\nThat still doesn't mean they're worthless."
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56hm6d | how does the navy prevent boat damage during hurricanes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56hm6d/eli5_how_does_the_navy_prevent_boat_damage_during/ | {
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"They go out to sea or to another port not in the path of the storm if they can. If they are caught in port or at the dock there is not much they can do and they will often sink, or take heavy damage. ",
"The same way anyone does. Try to find a place relatively safe from a hurricane ('hurricane holes' i think they're called.) set anchor, loosely so it doesnt get ripped off, and hope for the best.\n\nBut navy ships usually have lots of stuff in them, which makes them relatively safe in a hurricane at sea. its the empty ships that are the most prone to disaster.\n\nIt's not a good situation, but its an easily predictable situation, so most ships can take a pretty good beating. in the end though, there's not much more you can do.",
"Big storms like Matthew give plenty of warning. Typically those ships that are able will conduct an emergency underway and go out to sea until the storm passes. Those that can't will attempt to seal up their ship and ride it out.",
"Most, if they can, will \"sortie\" which is a fancy way of saying get underway and out of the path of the storm until it passes. Many will load up with food and medical supplies and head towards storm damaged areas. Some are, like others said, stuck at the pier and have to take the beating. The ones stuck in port will remove their brow (the thing used to get from the ship to the pier and back) and then add additional mooring lines or even steel cables and ride out the storm.\n\nSource: I am 24 plus years AD Navy stationed at the worlds largest US Navy base in Norfolk, VA. We kicked a carrier and USNS Comfort (hospital ship) out to sea in the last few days and they are headed to Haiti and other areas for humianitarian assistance).\n\nEdited: Used the wrong word describing a body of water...should have used \"sea\".",
"Speaking as a person surrounded by navy bases and shipyards, if a major storm is coming the carriers go out to sea where they can't bang into anything. Smaller vessels get pulled into drydock or moved to an installation further up river away from the bay/ocean.",
"Like /u/navfam46 said most Navy ships will get underway in the event a hurricane threatens a particular port. This is true with bigger vessels, however, smaller vessels such as PCs and MCMs will try to do a hurricane moor if at all possible. Smaller ships tend to not be of much help or use in a disaster so they are sent to a designated mooring away from harbor where sunk-in concrete blocks with ties in them are laid. Divers will assist in attaching hurricane line(think 1\" diameter and synthetic material) to the blocks and they are moored 2-3 abreast with a skeleton crew to monitor any damage that may befall them."
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3z4z9i | why the older or more famous older actor of a cast is often appearing last in the credits and with a and in front of the name. example : blablabla and robert deniro | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z4z9i/eli5_why_the_older_or_more_famous_older_actor_of/ | {
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"Calls more attention to it as a special cast member.\n\n\"Look, viewers! Sure we got all these other people. But we scored ROBERT DENIRO!\" \n\nThey often do it in recurring series where that actor will be showing up in future shows because it both attracts fans of that actor and adds legitimacy to the show because it attracted such a big name. ",
"As opposed to what, the beginning of the credits? If they aren't the main cast, they appear after them, and the best place after first is last, like Thor which is \"Chris Hemsworth...and Sir Anthony Hopkins\".",
"It's all to do with SAG rules around billing credit. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n"
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1l6rbc | [meta] thanks for the feedback - here's what we're doing! | Two weeks ago we [posted a thread](_URL_0_) asking the ELI5 community for help to shape the future of the subreddit.
Firstly thanks to all those that participated in the discussion! It's clear to see that a lot of people are passionate about keeping ELI5 a high quality subreddit, and rest assured that we read every single comment in the post!
Many comments made suggestions for things that we currently practice, such as this one:
> You should discourage questions that have been answered multiple times.
> A wiki with the common ones would probably help, but I don't think it would be wrong to delete if someone hasn't even performed a search before asking.
> ^^[(source)](_URL_0_cbnbaqc)
We do delete questions that are among the most frequently asked ones, especially if we've seen them recently and we catch them while they are relatively new. **It is the responsibility of the subscribers as well to report these to us.**
As for the wiki suggestion, we received that many times both in the suggestion thread and in the past.
A long time ago, before reddit had a native wiki, we had the Five Year Old's Guide to the Galaxy, which was basically a rarely updated self post with links to some common explanations. The reasons we removed it were many. It promoted certain explanations over others, it could cause controversy (who should be allowed to edit? who says what explanation goes in? what *topics* go in?), and it would grow way too fast. There's also Simple Wikipedia and our searchbar. ELI5 is an archived wiki. We have a search bar. **If someone isn't going to take the time to search for a topic in the sidebar, they certainly won't check a wiki/FAQ.**
***
Many comments also said what they'd like to see with regards to the community:
> I think the current guidelines are great, people just have to follow them.
> I feel people aren't reading the guidelines and making posts like "ELI5: Quantum Physics". The enforcement is good but it's nothing the mods can really change, it's that those few posters have to give some effort into following guidelines.
> ^^[(source)](_URL_0_cbn932l?context=1)
This is true. There were some slightly less thoughtful "suggestions" that were basically glorified ways of telling us to stay up later at night to patrol ELI5. We aren't going to do that. If there are ways you all would recommend making it even easier to report content to us or have it removed, please let us know.
***
> I think it should be required to search wikipedia and google before submitting a question to ELI5
> ^^[(source)](_URL_0_cbnpjyt)
How should we go about requiring this? In the sidebar, it says that mods may remove a question if OP fails to indicate that a search yielded no results. How seriously should we take this?
***
> Do you message the mods after reporting? Every time I've reported something and then messaged the mods with link to it and an explanation (reason for reporting), I've gotten quick replies, either to the effect of "I've removed it" or "It can stay, because A, B, and C."
> ^^[(source)](_URL_0_cbnhssf)
yesyesyesyes.
***
***
**What we've done:**
After some length discussion (seriously.. our discussion was almost as long as the original feedback thread!), we've brought in two major changes to how we'll be moderating the sub:
1. A new set of [**Subreddit Rules.**](_URL_2_) - It was clear that the major theme of all the feedback we recieved was to "enforce things more", so we've come up with a black and white set of rules to follow and moderate by.
2. Our new sidebar - We've distilled the old one into two sentences and five bullet points. It's slightly less comprehensive, but we're hoping that delivering a quick clear concise message will help keep things on track.
And finally...
We're slowly but surely eradicating the word "answer" from our vocabulary, and we're really trying to push (and enforce - see rule 3) explanations over answers in the comments.
**What can you do?**
Keep helping us out! A lot of you are reporting posts that aren't suited to ELI5 - this is great! But please please please send us a message (the big red "Report a submission/comment" button to the right) as well with a hyperlink to what you've reported and a reason for reporting. This makes our job 99% easier, and you'll see the results so much quicker.
Once again, thanks to all the people that have got involved with us to improve ELI5!
~ The ELI5 Mod Team | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l6rbc/meta_thanks_for_the_feedback_heres_what_were_doing/ | {
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"It would be nice if rule 1 automatically occurred when someone hit the submit button - it just did a search based on the title and then asks the poster if they'd like to submit anyway. Then they'd have to make a conscious decision to ignore the other 30 times it's been asked.\n\nA guy can dream, can't he?\n\nGood job though Mods. Keep up the good work.",
"As you guys may have noticed, we do a lot of asking you to report stuff. Since some of you may not know what actually happens when you report a thread or message the mods (I didn't), here's how it works and why it's helpful.\n\nWhen you report a post, it shows up in something called the \"mod queue,\" which is basically a list of reported posts that shows up in the same bar with all the subreddits. It looks like [this](_URL_0_). It gives us a link to the post, the comment itself if it was a comment, and a bunch of buttons that we can use to quickly remove or approve the post right from there.\n\nIt doesn't tell us who reported the post so you're totally anonymous, and it's very easy to report posts; there should be a little \"report\" button underneath every post you see.\n\nSo, if you report a post, it's very easy for us to find it and track down the problem, which is a huge help. We can't possibly see everything, and we usually respond to reports reasonably quickly because there's a lot of us.\n\nYou can also message the moderators (there's a button above the MODERATORS box and a big red REPORT A SUBMISSION button in the sidebar). If you click that, you send a message to all of us that shows up in something called \"modmail,\" which works pretty much the same as the regular PM system only all of the mods can see it. We respond to modmail reports very quickly.",
"So let me just get this straight: When someone asks for hundredth time, ELI5 [Boltzmann Brains](_URL_1_), [3D Printing](_URL_4_), [Why do accents disappear when singing](_URL_0_), [What's going on in Syria](_URL_5_), or [Why is prostitution illegal but porn legal](_URL_2_), we can report it? And if the topic is still newish, it will be deleted?\n\nSounds good to me.\n\nEDIT: And of course, [Schrodinger's Cat](_URL_3_).",
" > We do delete questions that are among the most frequently asked ones, especially if we've seen them recently and we catch them while they are relatively new. It is the responsibility of the subscribers as well to report these to us.\n\nFor me personally, it depends on the question. If you have the hundredth time of asking \"what is going on in Syria?\", in my opinion it doesn't warrant removing. This is merely because that it's an ever changing topic with developments every day.\n\nIf you see \"What happens when I delete a file from my computer\"...*that* needs removing, and it needs removing the moment that someone sees it. It will *never* (at least, not likely to) change, and is one of the most asked questions. Even if it was asked months ago, the answer can found by searching.",
"If any of the rules are broken does that warrant being reported and then deleted by the mods. For example if I see a breach of rule 7 (all the time) then will the post be deleted?",
"If you all have any other feasible, reddit-compatible ideas for how we can promote and enforce these guidelines, please let us know! Complaining about a problem is so much more effective when you have a solution.",
" > If someone isn't going to take the time to search for a topic in the sidebar, they certainly won't check a wiki/FAQ.\n\nI think that is false.\n\nReddit searches are somewhat clumsy, and it's hard to find the \"right\" link - or even know if there is one. An organized wiki, prominently linked on the sidebar, would *absolutely* get a lot of people who aren't trying searches or aren't finding what's there, now."
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rbbtu | why do people hear that "ocean sound" when putting a shell to their ear? | Occasionally tried this when I was little, but never really thought about why this happens. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rbbtu/eli5_why_do_people_hear_that_ocean_sound_when/ | {
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"It's because of air bouncing around. \n\nThink about how you can hear the wind because it moves things around and even if there's nothing to move, you can hear it whistling past buildings or thumping into walls. Well, even a tiny breeze makes noise but usually it's so quiet we can't hear it or don't notice. That's where the shell comes in. The shape of the shell magnifies the sound of a tiny breeze to the point where it's loud enough to hear. So when you put your ear to a shell, you're not hearing the ocean, you're hearing tiny breezes moving in the shell. ",
"so it's either blood or the wind...hmmm. anyone want to verify either?",
"I guess everyone's gotten too lazy to Google...\n\n[link](_URL_0_)"
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3om7r3 | what is a "1099" job? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3om7r3/eli5_what_is_a_1099_job/ | {
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"1099 means you are technically a self-employed independent contractor or a freelancer, not an employee of the company. At the end of your contract they have no obligation to continue to employ you. You have to do your own taxes, and you are not entitled to benefits through the company.\n\nThere are many corporations that run this way for many of their employees. Usually, freelancers have a higher wage at the cost of employment stability and benefits.",
"It means you're a contractor, with the responsibility on you to pay your entire Social Security and Medicare tax liability (~15%), withhold your own income tax contributions, pay for the entirety of your healthcare, etc. Basically, you get paid $X an hour but you get zero benefits and you have to pay both the employer and employee contributions of certain taxes.\n\nMany people will tell you that you need to earn about 30% more at a 1099 job than a W-4 job to break even. In my opinion, that really only takes care of the tax liability (if that). Taking benefits into account, I'd say you'd want to earn at least 50% more in a 1099 job just to break even.",
"Also, you're not going to have any taxes withheld from what you receive, so you need to make sure you have some money set aside to pay taxes. If you make enough through 1099 work, you may also need to file Schedule C / SE forms for self employment and profits.",
"In the US, a 1099 means that you're not a legal employee rather the legal structure is that you are a contractor or you are/have your own business and employ yourself. You'll generally be responsible to pay for all of the following:\n\n* paying self employment tax (roughly double the employee social security taxes)\n* quarterly estimated tax payments rather than withholding\n* any benefits (insurance--medical, dental, vision, life) and any other employer paid or subsidized employee benefits. \n* you will be able to write off business expenses associated with your business on your taxes. \n\nThere are also usually different rules about employment terms and legal rules for contractors vs employees (like overtime) you'll want to be clear on for your jurisdiction. ",
"It basically means the company is not hiring you as an employee. Instead you will be self-employed and the company is merely contracting your services.\n\nThe major difference is that the company would not provide any employment benefits that you would normally receive if you were hired as an employee. For example, it would be entirely your responsibility to find (and pay for) your own health/dental care insurance. Taxes also become a little more complicated for you (e.g. the company will not be withholding taxes or paying into social security, Medicare, etc. on your behalf... you will have to handle all that on your own when you're filing your taxes).\n\nSomething important to note is that the company may be abusing the 1099 classification to hire employees as independent contractors to avoid paying benefits etc. This is illegal and you should report it if you feel it's happening.\n\nBasically if you work in the company office or the company otherwise tells you what you have to do, when you have to work, where you have to work, what clients you have to work with etc. then there is a good chance the job should be classified as a regular employee job and not a 1099 contractor position."
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5ltz5a | how are dances choreographed? | Whenever I see dances I always wonder how choreographers come up with the end product. What's the writing process like? Do they just go with the feel of the music? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ltz5a/eli5_how_are_dances_choreographed/ | {
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"They record it or they repeat it many times until they memorize it.\nWhen I was a choreographer I would create moves by dancing to a song and when I made one I liked i just built up on that, and then repeat until memorized.\n\nIt was like writing and memorizing a poem, but instead of words there were different moves at different intervals (beats). It wasn't hard to memorize it, it was harder to create it cause it takes a lot of thinking and dancing until you are satisfied enough."
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1a1d8s | why do we find comfort in eating, well, comfort food? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1a1d8s/eli5_why_do_we_find_comfort_in_eating_well/ | {
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"I believe it's connected to the endorphin release when you eat food, particularly high-sugar/fat content food. Endorphins make you happy, roughly speaking. The body is geared to reward behaviour that leads to consumption of sugary/fatty foods because pre-civilisation humans needed as much of those two things as they could get.",
"It's also connected to the food you used to enjoy as a child and what you got used to eat as a child. Your confort food is that food or one with similar tastes or textures."
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1qf8wl | if there are reports of concentration/death camps in north korea, why doesn't anybody do anything about them? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qf8wl/eli5_if_there_are_reports_of_concentrationdeath/ | {
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"Everyone mentioning China is mistaken, China doesn't really consider itself an ally of NK in the same way that we traditionally think of allies. China often criticizes the actions of North Korea, it just sort of supports NK geopolitically as a buffer from Korea.\n\nThe reason no-one intervenes in North Korea is very practical. North Korea has a huge amount of WWII-era artillery, which conveniently has an effective range of about the NK border-Seoul. This artillery is placed all along the border, all aimed at Seoul, at all times. \n\nAny military action against NK would essentially wipe Seoul off the map and completely destroy SK, which is enormously centralized",
"Anybody who invades is now responsible for dealing with the aftermath. You have to rebuild an entire countries buildings and infrastructure from the ground up, deal with a huge humanitarian crises, rebuild the economy, and at some point deal with hotly contested issue of Korean reunification. At a certain point, from an individual nations perspective, it simply isn't worth the risk. If all that goes well you have one more trading partner and if it doesn't you now suddenly find yourself in likely one of the worst crises in the 21st century. Its frankly easier to just contain the North Koreans and offer them some good deals if they reform their ways. \n\n\n\n",
"North Korea has the bomb. The rules that go with dealing with a non-nuclear power are a lot different from how you deal with a nuclear power. The shit we've gotten away with against Lybia, Iraq, and Iran? We wouldn't have tried it if they'd successfully tested a nuclear weapon. Shit, half the reason why we've bombed those countries is to **stop them** from **building** a bomb!\n\nYou can't invade any more. They might use the tactical nukes against your troops. In fact most military options are off the table. Seoul is a mere 50 km from the northern edge of the DMZ. That's possibly in range of nuclear-tipped tube artillery.\n\nPlus, while China may not be the biggest fans of NK, they're not enamored with the idea of a united democratic Korea either, so you're likely to piss them off if you use any military options.\n\nOn top of that, NK is the most unstable government on Earth. They're already willing to starve half their citizenry to death rather than liberalize. What would they do when faced with the demise of their regime? They've got the largest standing army in the world: 9 million troops. Who cares if they're poorly trained and equipped? There are 9 million of them! If we committed our entire army to the region we'd still be outnumbered 4:1.\n\nSo once you eliminate military options, you're left with sanctions. We're pretty much imposing every sanction imaginable on them right now. That cupboard's pretty bare."
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333jz3 | why hasn't algae fuel caught on yet? | For those of you don't know, Algae Fuel is just that: Oil made from algae. It works just like gas or diesel when refined, meaning it doesn't require engine modifications, unlike ethanol. Natural gas, propane and ethanol all seem to very popular, so why isn't Algae fuel? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/333jz3/eli5_why_hasnt_algae_fuel_caught_on_yet/ | {
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"If what you're saying is accurate, then it likely just boils down to money. If someone stands to lose money, then they will spend millions lobbying against it.",
"scale and funding. just because you can produce a liter doesn't mean there won't be competition when you scale up to billions of gallons. can it compete with dino oil? where are you going to get funding to build your $100million refinery?\n\nthere's commercial entities making and selling it. but it's not like it's $1/gallon. it's still expensive to make. and profit margin means that it isn't super cheap compared to dino oil.",
"Interesting bit from the wiki:\n\n > The United States Department of Energy estimates that if algae fuel replaced all the petroleum fuel in the United States, it would require 15,000 square miles (39,000 km2), which is only 0.42% of the U.S. map, or about half of the land area of Maine. This is less than 1⁄7 the area of corn harvested in the United States in 2000.\n\n\nEssentially, it seems it's coming down to commercial viability. Looks like operating costs are still too high for widespread adoption.",
"Those who are talking about money and profit are on the right track. I have a cousin who is a chemical engineer at a company that makes genetically modified algae that produces ethanol. From what he has told me about his job, it involves developing techniques to do certain processes very inexpensively (such as sterilizing a very large quantity of sea water). It also involves working on land that get lots of sun and doesn't have much value. His company may be in jeopardy – and he may be looking for a new job – due to the drop in oil prices in the last few months. I guess investors are looking at the likelihood of making any sort of money in the near future and getting cold feet.\n\nDeveloping technologies have difficulty because a ton of money needs to go into R & D, and if you develop something that works and isn't extremely complicated, then you are vulnerable to being undersold by copycats who didn't spend the money in R & D.\n\nThe oil barons are still making a killing with fossil fuels, since digging up an existing energy source is probably a lot cheaper than developing a new energy source you have to keep growing (especially with as little accountability as they are being held for the consequences of how they extract). I personally think that if oil companies had to extract oil with the care that is needed to prevent environmental disasters, then the process would be expensive enough that alternatives would start to look a lot more attractive from a purely fiscal perspective."
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7nbn7h | since one year equals one revolution around the sun, shouldn’t we all celebrate new years at the same time regardless of what timezone you are in? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7nbn7h/eli5since_one_year_equals_one_revolution_around/ | {
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" > Since One Year Equals One Revolution Around The Sun, Shouldn’t We All Celebrate New Years At The Same Time Regardless Of What Timezone You Are In?\n\nNo, because a year *doesn't* equal a revolution around the sun, it equals a specific number of days. That the length of our year is calibrated to as closely match our revolutions around the sun in order to keep the seasons from wandering isn't relevant to the definition of when a year starts for a specific location in the world.",
"You're overthinking this and trying to be pedantic about what the holiday celebrates.\n\nIt's celebrating the calendar rolling over. Calendars are based on local time & every other celebration we have is based on local time, why would New Years be different?\n\nYou'd have to pick somebody's timezone to base the counting on & any selection is completely arbitrary. People want it to happen at a time for them that allows them to celebrate properly. Nobody wants to be stuck with a \"New Years\" celebration that makes them get up at 6a."
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42zexc | why is it impressive that google can now win at the game of go? | After [Google's announcement of AlphaGo](_URL_0_) and reading some accompanying articles, I'm wondering why this is such a focus? What makes Go important for machine learning? Why are humans so much better (historically) at winning something that is complex, where it seems like AI would have been much better all along at making complex decisions? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42zexc/eli5why_is_it_impressive_that_google_can_now_win/ | {
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"For decades, GO has been the go to example of a game that computers suck at. I remember discussing it in CS classes when talking about chess playing computers. \n\nWhile I don't remember the rules of the game, its supposed to be a game that is simple for the human mind, but mathematically extremely complex and difficult to turn into computer code, given the rules and strategy of the game.\n\nThe fact that Google has built an AI that can play is a pretty big step in the direction of machine learning, which is itself a step in the direction of actual AI systems.",
"Computers are really good at searching through a bunch of options really fast, but they have their limits. In games like chess, there are only a handful of possible moves, so the computer can test all possibilities up to a certain number of steps ahead then calculate which move is best. In games like Go, for every possible move, there are almost just as many possible moves after that one. As the article points out, the order of magnitude of possibilities grows insanely large very quickly. So even a computer checking one million moves every second couldn't search very far ahead within a reasonable time.\n\nPeople, on the other hand, are very good at patterns and generalizations. Those well versed in the game recognize these patterns and can quickly estimate the outcome of a particular move without actually calculating every one.",
"(Edit: after making my comment, which was based on knowing the previous history of Go AI and reading Google's announcement, I got a copy of the published paper. The abstract makes AlphaGo sound more like a very, very powerful Monte Carlo program, and if that's the best description it makes a lot of what I've said below irrelevant. I won't know exactly what role the neural network/machine learning approach has in AlphaGo until I read the whole paper.)\n\nForty years ago, AI fans imagined that with the rapid growth in processing power, computers could eventually be instructed to brute-force any intellectual task that humans were capable of. That turned out to be impossible (too many possibilities to brute-force). Next AI fans thought that, at the very least, you could teach computers to follow all the same rules that humans follow. That turned out to be much more complex than anyone had imagined, because applying these rules sensibly involves a huge amount of tacit information humans don't think about much.\n\nFor a long time it looked like the next best thing might be \"Monte Carlo methods\" - i.e., the computer plays out hundreds of thousands of games randomly, having both sides play idiotically simple moves. Then you assume the more of the idiot-games black wins, the better black's position is in reality. This worked surprisingly well, but it petered out against top amateurs. The problem was that, from the point of view of a strong player, it doesn't matter whether 9,999 out of 10,000 possible games would end in a loss, if all of the moves along the winning branch can be forced.\n\nUsing a neural network was something that was suggested a while ago, but never emerged as the top approach. The reasons this is exciting:\n\n1. It's a really hard problem that people have been working on for a long time\n\n2. Every small-ish, seemingly trivial AI triumph, like Tic-Tac-Toe or chess, is seen as a step on the road to \"strong AI\", AI techniques that can functionally do anything humans do. For a long time AI researchers weren't having much luck on go; later, it looked like *if* they solved go, they wouldn't be using techniques that shed much light on how humans are able to play go. But now, Google claims it has solved the problem *and* has solved it with a technique that could be similar to how humans learn to play Go.\n\n3. It's also exciting because most AI researchers start at the bottom with a weak program trying a new idea and make slow progress, whereas Google kept this quiet until they were ready to smash the competition.\n\nJust a note: Fan Hui is a pro, but... if you know tennis, he's a \"club pro\", not the kind of pro who would compete at Wimbledon. He was made a professional a long time ago, but then moved to France, where his main professional Go activities are teaching lessons to amateurs. He is certainly one of the strongest players in Europe, but I wouldn't compare him to other top professionals. Google has offered $1 million to Lee Sedol for an exhibition match. Lee Sedol was best in the world, like, fifteen years ago. If AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol 5-0, it could well be better than any human, but to really clinch the title it would have to beat one of the recent world champions...",
"In a game of chess you have a max of 20 move options in the first move. Your opponent also have a max of 20 moves. So their are 400 different combinations of 1st move for both players. for the 2nd move let's assume both players have an average of 20 moves. 20 x 20 is 400 again. 400 X 400 = 1600 possibilities for 2nd move for both players. Obviously the amount of combinations grow.\n\nIn Go you have 316 different moves, and your opponent has 315. 316 * 315 = 99,540. The 2nd turn is 314 * 313 = 98,282. So if you take 99,540 * 98,282 = 9,782,990,280. From a pure data point there is far way more options for Go. \n\nComputers have been able to figure out chess just by brutal data crunching. You can't do that with Go.",
"Oh dear lord you gotta be frigging kidding me, is this for real?!\n\nOh dear lord, I knew this day was coming some day, but they're really challenging Lee Sedol? I'm... Oh my god, this is amazing news!!\n\nGo is basically The Next Big Game for artificial intelligence. And the fun thing is, I'm not sure if after this one, there are any games left for computers to play. Go is essentially a very deep strategy/pattern recognition game where you learn to detect patterns and develop very intricate sense of balance between two forces. Computers have been really helpless against humans in this particular game, simple tree search which bested Chess champions would not do a thing against any decent go player. It called for something smarter than brute force, but nobody could do really anything. Closest algorithmic solution was \"Monte Carlo\", which used very clever method of simulating human intuition by using computer brute force, but even Monte Carlo methods stopped being effective at strong amateur player level. Professionals would easily beat any such computers, and that scenario didn't seem to be changing anytime soon.\n\nAnd now all of a sudden we're here. This came as a complete surprise to me, I had no idea. Lee Sedol is a bit of a fading star in a go world, but in the past 15 years, he's been dominant force and many years he's been considered the best human player on the planet. It's close to Garry Kasparov feeling to this game, but if Lee Sedol loses, I think there will still be 1 more match with someone even stronger. I'm not really sure who it could be though, but I think go world will know that whoever emerges as the next dominant player, will have the last chance to defend human strength on go board before computers take completely over.\n\nBut that's only if Lee Sedol loses. That man is impressive beyond words, I don't know what to expect of the match, other than that it will be epic.",
"Historically, chess-playing computers made at least some use of [minimax](_URL_0_). This relies on \"running through\" some portion of the possible outcomes N turns later.\n\nChess has, at any given point, relatively few moves, so it's possible to play at a human level using this approach plus some optimizations -- the computer can \"see\" many turns ahead.\n\nThat was not viable for Go, because there was a large \"branching factor\" -- at any given point, there were *many* possible moves, so the number of potential board positions to examine became very large before a computer using this algorithm could compete with strong human Go players.\n\nHumans who play chess (and Go) rely not on brute-force looking down the road, but extracting (somehow) the \"important\" bits of the current board and only caring about those, ignoring irrelevant bits.\n\nMost of the problem of artificial intelligence is trying to figure out how to, in a general way, identify what is \"important\" to reaching a goal and what is not efficiently. One way (probably not necessarily the only way) of building a Go computer would be to create algorithms that can do this -- identifying what is \"important\" and making use of just that information.\n\nWhile I think that this Google announcement is interesting, every AI research effort tries to sell its work as being a \"big step\" towards general AI, and I'm a lot more cynical.\n\nI *am* happy to see research funded towards AI, though.",
"Random tidbit, in TRON:Legacy, the game that Quorra (a program/AI) complains she can't usually beat Flynn (a user/human) at is go.",
"[Chess has ~10^120 possible games](_URL_0_). \n\n[Go has 10^700 possible games](_URL_1_). \n\nMeanwhile, the universe has ~10^80 atoms.\n\n\nThere are simply a lot more potential moves of Go than there are in Chess. Moves that become intuitive for a Go player are not as easy to code. To look forward 3 moves is a lot harder in Go because of the huge number of possibilities of placements, meanwhile chess only has a few set moves that can happen.",
"Go and Chess are examples of games where it pretty simple to learn the rules, but the number of potential states of the board is so large that it is impossible for a computer to calculate all of them. The simplest way to program a computer to play a game like go is to have the computer check every possible combination that fits within the rules and choose the one that provides the best outcome, however, because there are so many possible states of the board, a computer could calculate for centuries and still never calculate every possible state of the board.\n\nHumans are really good at pattern recognitions and ignoring situations that are bad choices. For example, a master Go player, with all his experience, knows a lot of things to look for that can greatly narrow down what constitutes a good move from a bad move. Programming a computer to do this is hard, very hard. So hard that it enters the field of machine learning, where the goal is to program a computer to teach itself how to do this. This is still a young and complex field. Google's achievement is a milestone because Go is very hard to teach a computer to play well, but Google has apparently found a way to do it.\n\nThe technique Google has used to program Go can be redesigned to work in other applications. Such as autonomous vehicles, weather simulations, and logistics.",
"THe problem is that, for every move, you have many options, and the benefits of a certain move is not evident until many moves later. So, this means that the numbers of moves the computer has to trudge through is immense. If I remember correctly, there are 10^700 possible games of Go, and that's a large number. Very large.\n\nA human, on the other hand, can play intuitively, and doesn't have to do that.\n\nI saw Bill Gates say, after Deep Blue had beaten Kasparov, when asked if he was impressed, and he answered (quoted from memory): \"I'm not impressed that Deep Blue won, I'm impressed that humans have managed to beat computers for so long. The computer can go through billions of possiblities in a second, and thus should be able to beat a human easily. A human on the other hand, can with a quick glance at the board reduce the numer of meaningful moves to a handful. That's impressive.\".",
"Another way of explaining:\nFor chess its \"easy\" with today hardware to take an analytical approach into beating a human opponent. All you basically need to do is _calculate_ what is the best next move, also calculating all the possible outcomes is not that hard. (for al the chess geeks, yes I know that chess playing computers are more elaborate at this, and do use some ML approach too)\n\nHowever with go, not now, and not in any foreseeable future (quantum computers might change that) will computers be able to approach the game just analytically, as there are too many different possible configurations.\n\nAnd this is what brings us to why is go so important at machine learning, AI etc... computers are good at simple mathematical formulas and algorithms, they are actually way better at solving problems analytically than us humans, we are just too slow and inaccurate. However they lack something, and at this point in time humans are way way better at it. This is make a accurate estimation with very little data. We some time call it a gut feeling a rule of thumb etc.. But basically humans (and other living beings too) are INCREDIBLE at this. We can predict an outcome with stunning accuracy, given very little actual data... (I could go into more details why we are able to do it, but already now I going way out of scope). So if we are able to bring computers \"closer\" in this regard, we not only will be able to do some amazing computation, but also is paramount in making \"computers\" faster. And here we come to Go, which is a game, with simple rules, and easy to score (or very nice \"Features\" for evaluating performance) however to be good at (together with a vast amount of knowledge), you need to \"predict\" what will happen next, every move, for alot of moves in advance, with very very limited amount of data (compared to all possible combinations that exist). So yeah Go is a great way to test your ML or AI concepts and beating a human is big step. (Scary part: there are not many things/steps left, all the skeptics that say \"computer will never be able to be better than humans at x\", X's are disappearing, don't think we are that far from the true non living super intelligence... couple of decades:P)"
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3d1meo | why is there a large number of comedians who are also depressed? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d1meo/eli5_why_is_there_a_large_number_of_comedians_who/ | {
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"Great quote from the comic \"Watchmen\" about this\n\n > Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown, Pagliacci, is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor, I am Pagliacci.”\n\nIn short, people spend their entire lives being the butt end of a joke. Whether they are making fun of themselves for making fun of other people, they are constantly making often serious matters into comical ones. Eventually, no one takes them seriously when they actually mean it, leading them to be depressed. They may think \"sure I have a great sense of humor, but I also have dreams and brilliant ideas I want to share.\" If no one took you seriously in your life, do you think it would begin to take a toll on your worldview?",
"Humor is a very common defense mechanism against depression. You can think of depression as involuntary sadness, while laughter is involuntary joy. Makes sense to balance one with the other. \n\nAlso, it's been said many times that depression can be a byproduct of intelligence - being over aware of the darker side of life. Comics tend to be very good observers, and with this observation they see more of humanity's foibles. So their good humor is both the cause of and a reaction to their depression.\n\nThat said, I'm not sure its true that comics are more likely to be depressed, more likely they just seem that way because their job is to take depressing topics and make fun of them. That, in my opinion, is the primary appeal of comedy."
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5ucr30 | how did a phone connect to another phone overseas pre-1950's? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ucr30/eli5_how_did_a_phone_connect_to_another_phone/ | {
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"Major cities had a \"long distance switchboard\" which had access to overseas telecom lines (typically cables running under the ocean). You had to call the operator and ask for \"long distance\" and then talk the the \"long distance operator\" and tell them what country you wanted to call. They made the connection through very primitive means, sometimes literally by plugging a wire into a socket.",
"Underwater cables\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's still done for internet\n\n_URL_2_ \n\nThis is what a modern submarine fiber optic cable looks like\n\n_URL_3_\n\nedit: \n\nanother cable map :\n\n_URL_1_",
"The first international phone line was between key west and cuba. It's something like 90 miles. There's a tourist attraction there. ",
"I've been to this museum. The first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was connected here in 1866. \n_URL_0_",
"So during world war 2, it would have been possible to just call from the USA to a random phone in nazi Germany? Or did the trans Atlantic cables get severed during the war?",
"Transantlantic cables baby. We still use them today in fact. When a whale bumps into them it's a problem but they're able to repair them pretty fast.",
"So, are these cables sitting on the bottom of the ocean? Or do they kinda float? Isn't the bottom of the ocean under so much pressure that the cables would collapse?",
"The same way we do today, cables in the Ocean.\n\nRegardless of public perception, your phone calls are not going to space over long distances. Especially cell phones.\n\nCell phones go to the nearest tower, that's it, and then back to earth through cables.\n\nphone - > in the air to nearest tower - > cables - > nearest tower to person you are calling - > phone.\n\nNot once did it go to space or hit a satellite. ",
"Everyone is talking about the cables, but a major difference between how information was transmitted in the 1950s and today is back then they used circuit switches and today we use packet switching. So in the 50s when you called someone, you got a dedicated end-to-end electrical circuit which meant that no one could use the line, or any part of the circuit, until it was opened. In the 60s, scientists developed packet switching, which broke data into tiny packets that could be sent across the line much faster and independently of each other. Fiber optic cables were dropped to make this process even faster.",
"The first transatlantic telephone cable, [TAT-1](_URL_0_), wasn't built until 1955. Before that, there were transatlantic telegraph cables, but they couldn't really carry a voice call. Before 1956, transatlantic telephone conversations were carried by radio on the HF bands. The HF bands (3-30Mhz) are a chunk of the radio frequency spectrum that can bounce off of the ionosphere, taking the signals much further than line of sight. ",
"Related: if you're ever in the area, I'd definitely recommend the [French Cable Station Museum](_URL_0_), a much-overlooked spot on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. \n\nIt's the site of the first transatlantic cable in the US, and they still have the actual cable coming out of the back of the building. It's really cool, they have tons of old equipment to check out.",
"Telephone technology goes back to the 1860s. It was first patented in the US in 1876. The first telephone exchange was established in Hartford, CT, in 1877. The first exchange between two major US cities- New York and Boston -was in 1883. The first payphone, 1889. Despite all this progress, telephone communications remained limited to the US. Telephonic attempts to span the oceans were brief and experimental, and not all that common for some time. In 1915, one-way voices were shot between Virginia and Paris, France, and ship-to-shore communication to a vessel in the Atlantic ocean happened in 1916. It was not until 1926 that the world's first two-way conversation between the States and Europe took place. This is a special corporate endeavor by Bell Telephone, and not a system available to anyone else. \n\nIn 1927, January 7, the first commercially available system arrived, inaugurated with an international call (the recording of which is in the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry). The day prior to this first \"official\" call, there was an across-the-ocean \"test\" call (also recorded). It was from New York to England, over 3,000 miles, transmitted via radio waves, not wires. In the recording, an unidentified male voice, crystal clear and American, begins with a variation of that time honored telephone question, \"Can you hear me now?\". An unidentified British voice responds affirmatively. They went on to speak of the weather, the distance and travel between NY and San Fransisco, distance from England to India. At one point, a rueful chord is struck when the American speaker says, \"Distance doesn't mean anything any more. We are on the verge of a very high speed world...people will use up their lives in a much shorter time, they won't have to live so long.\" \n\nThe 'official' conversation the following day was much more formal and rehearsed. It is held between W.S. Gifford, President of America's Bell Telephone company and Sir Evelyn P. Murray, head of the British General Post Office. Gifford states: \"Today is the result of many years of research and experimentation. We open a telephonic\npath of speech between New York and London…. That the people of these great cities will be brought within speaking distance to exchange views and facts as if they were face to face…. No one can foresee the ultimate significance of this latest achievement of science and organization. \""
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5xgww9 | why devil's advocate is a negative characteristic? | I am a Software Developer and after one meeting we had where we discussed some potential solutions to a technical problem I was called a devil's advocate. As not being English I had to Google to to understand what it means and from what I saw it has mostly negative description.
Is it undesirable to discuss alternative solutions or try to critically address current assumptions instead of just agreeing with the very first solution purposed?
Or do people just take things personally and don't like when counterarguments are presented?
Trying to learn to improve myself. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xgww9/eli5_why_devils_advocate_is_a_negative/ | {
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"It is not a negative characteristic -- it's an important technique to look for flaws in the group's current thinking.\n\nBut as you say, some \"people just take things personally and don't like when counterarguments are presented.\"",
"It sounds like, for your situation, people just take things personally. Or they are saying you're arguing for the sake of arguing and you're not adding anything constructive to the situation. From my experience, \"Devil's advocate\" is usually something that a person calls their *own* argument, specifically when they don't truly believe in their argument but they think it's worth bringing up anyway. \n",
"You know the personal reactions of your colleagues better than us, so if you think they were angry, I'm sure you're correct. But generally, calling someone that is more of a compliment than an accusation. \n\nBeing a devil's advocate in any professional discussion is usually so necessary that if discussions have taken place for a while (20 minutes or longer), and no one has brought up the opposite side of a possible solution, someone will eventually say, \"I have to play the devil's advocate here: what if this solution doesn't work because of XYZ.\" \n\nGenerally, if someone calls you that, it's a good thing. It leads to a more meaningful and well-thought out plan that has been carefully considered from all angles. ",
"Being a Devil's Advocate should not be considered a negative description. However if people are not aware that someone is trying to approach a problem solving situation by presenting counterarguments, someone may take it as being argumentative. \nSo if you're going to present countering ideas in order to hash out a particular problem, it's good to state ahead of time that you're going to take a \"devil's advocate\" approach to the situation.\n\nBut you are also right... some people just cannot stand it when their thoughts or ideas are challenged, and they take it personally.\n\nIt also depends on the topic. A recent topic in the news was when [Bill Maher](_URL_0_) appeared to defend the relationship between a 35 year old teacher and her 12 year old student. It appeared to me that he was playing devil's advocate in order to provoke a conversation on his show. His guests were clearly perturbed by his suggestion that this sort of relationship was appropriate. It was probably not the best position to take, but it sparked a dialogue.",
"Sometimes, people will try to take oppositional positions purely in order to make an argument happen; they like wrestling with other minds. I'm not going to say that's wrong, but I think it should only be done between consenting people, like the physical kind of wrestling.\n\nHowever, there are definitely people out there who have a strong urge to argue, just so they can dominate another, and these people can often cause a lot of unnecessary strain and trouble. They will often say that they are \"just playing devil's advocate\", in order to justify their behaviour. Perhaps your co-worker thought that this is what you were doing, perhaps they just told themself that in order to avoid looking at your argument. Perhaps that's exactly what you were doing; sometimes it can be hard to see our own motivations.\n\nRegardless, I hope that helps!"
]
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7jxaat | at what scale are things so small that color doesn't apply? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7jxaat/eli5_at_what_scale_are_things_so_small_that_color/ | {
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"When they get smaller than about half the wavelengths of visible light. So about 200 nanometers or less",
"Some materials change color when they get small. This is from crystal interactions becoming too faint to cause color. \n\nFor any material, when it is one half the wavelength of its color it will never have a color. This is because the atom cannot absorb or reflect any light. All wavelengths would pass through the material",
"I think what you aren't getting here, is that things don't have their own colour, the colour is in the different wavelengths of light waves and our eyes decoding them. An object has no colour itself. It's like a mirror, mirror has no colour, it's (near) perfect reflector of whatever else colour light is bouncing of it, and other objects are just different grades of that reflectiveness, from vacuum in space that's pure black cause it has nothing to reflect off, to a green chair whose surface is covered in such a material, that reflects green wavelength the best, and others worse, and to smooth shiny superdense metal surface that reflects all waveleghths like a mirror. So basically you can think of every object as of a mirror of various quality. \n\nNow imagine YOU are a wave and you want to reflect in that mirror. If a mirror is big, you can see yourself in many positions, from different angle, you are reflected alright. But the smaller the mirror gets, the harder it is for you to reflect in it, until it's so small that it doesn't reflect you at all (like a tiny particle not reflecting visible wavelengths as they are too big). And no matter how huge the mirror is, it won't be able to reflect your momma."
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