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2uyqyr | why directors choose to film in particular aspect ratios. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uyqyr/eli5_why_directors_choose_to_film_in_particular/ | {
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"Usually the director of photography (separate job) picks the aspect ratio. There are three in common use today, 'Hollywood flat' (1.85:1), 'continental flat' (1.66:1) and 'scope' (2.35:1). \n\nFlat is considered to be more \"intimate\" -- it makes faces and small details appear larger, and makes everything feel closer to the screen. In close-up, a human face will fill about half the screen. 1.85:1 is the most common shape and 1.66, which is slightly squarer, is used in parts of Europe.\n\nScope is considered to be more \"epic\" -- it lets you put vast landscapes onscreen, and have multiple characters visible at once. You get to see much more of the environment, but in close up, a human face will only fill a third or even a quarter of the screen, drawing focus away from it. Things like Lord of the Rings are perfect examples of when to use scope.\n\nSo the decision comes down to the vibe you're going for and what types of shots you want to make. If you want to feature big battles with lots going on, or to showcase large environments with lots of people talking, you go for scope. If you're instead shooting an intimate romantic drama where you want to film faces and expressions in a smaller environment, flat is the better choice. Flat is the default, and is usually used when there isn't a specific reason to use scope.\n\nBecause the field of view is smaller in flat, it is also easier to direct the audience's attention to exactly what you want them to be looking at. \n\nIn the past, there have been other aspect ratios as well. In the silent era, movies were typically shot 1.33:1, the same shape as an old TV. This was the shape film had long been made in for still photography so people just kept using it for motion pictures. When sound was introduced, 'Academy' ratio (1.37) became standard because adding sound to the film reels changed the shape slightly. Things switched to the 'flat' widescreen formats in the 50s and 60s to compete with TV (for the same reason, this is when colour became standard and not just a novelty used for cartoons and epics like Gone with the Wind). A few camera manufacturers invented odd ratios like 1.50:1, which never really caught on. And 'scope' can refer to a few systems ranging from 2.2:1 to 2.55:1, but usually refers to 2.35 today.\n\nTV is shot today at 1.78:1, which is slightly squarer than Hollywood flat. This shape was chosen because it maximises the usable screen area for someone who watches content in 1.33, 1.37, 1.66, 1.85, and 2.35. With TV, the director/director of photography virtually never get a choice about aspect ratio, because a lot of viewers will switch off if there's any unused space on the screen at all. Exceptions include things like the House of Cards remake, which shoots 2:1, a shape offered by high-end digital cameras called Reds."
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81q6i3 | datamining in videogames | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/81q6i3/eli5_datamining_in_videogames/ | {
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"Sometimes it’s content that’s not finished prior to release. Other times it’s finished and put on the disc for instance but then before the release they realise they can charge more for it so they just leave it inactive until it’s needed. \n\nWith recent games, especially those with large assets it can save time later having the user download them. \n\n",
"They are there because in software development, you try and limit the amount of branches you have. If we have a base game, and I'm off adding in one hero, you're adding in another, and Joe is doing bug fixes, we are probably all going to be modifying the same files for this.\n\nThe answer to having to modify the same files is version control software, such as GitHub. This way, we can each start a branch for our own work to keep it separate. However, as we continue to work on stuff, the more we touch before committing back into the Master branch (the one you publish from), the more likely we are to run into conflicts when we try and merge. To prevent potential chaos down the line, stuff will be merged into the code base early and often (basically at stages where we may not have everything fully implemented and polished, but not breaking anything), but just have options on it to not be accessible yet. This does mean that the raw files will have some data in them that someone can mine, but it really simplifies the development process.",
"\"Datamining\" is just looking through the game's data files to see what's there. Often times, there are plenty of things in the game's data that are either not accessible through normal means, or not accessible yet.\n\nLike when a new patch comes out for an online game, people will look through all the new data files and list all of the new things / changes made."
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bc2m7c | how does gas chromatography-mass spectrometry work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bc2m7c/eli5_how_does_gas_chromatographymass_spectrometry/ | {
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"In two phases. \n\nFirst phase: \nA mixture of compounds is injected into a “column” of an inert gas (Helium usually) that separates the compounds by their affinity to the column (how much they interact). \nSecond phase: \nAfter compounds are isolated by the column they are given a charge and shot into a magnetic field. The charged particle is essentially a current. Currents produce a magnetic field around the moving charges. That field interacts with the magnetic field they’re moving through to produce a centripetal force. That force causes a circular motion (like a ball on a string being swung in a circle) and based on the radius of the circle the mass of the compound can be determined. \n\nThis technique allows you to determine the mass of the compounds in a mixture. Other information about structure can also be garnered by a practiced eye—but the main function is to find the masses of compounds in a mixture."
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err2ht | why do humans become so "stiff" as they get older? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/err2ht/eli5_why_do_humans_become_so_stiff_as_they_get/ | {
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"Skin, tendons and ligaments become less flexible over time. Part of the \"stiff\"ness as well is not necessarily because the body won't make the movement, but because it causes pain before you get there. The accumulation of past injuries that aren't properly cared for makes this worse. For example, not going to physical therapy after you injure yourself comes back to bite you later. One of the many sad side effects of the massive up charges the US puts on medical care. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if people in countries with socialized medicine have this problem to a lesser degree.",
"One of the main factors causing stiffness is the increase in fibrous tissue that restricts movement of muscles and joints.\n\nWhenever we exercise vigorously at any age we produce microscopic tears in muscle and the connective tissues such as tendons, ligaments and fascia that keep our bodies in one piece. The tearing of tissue triggers inflammation. This is the process by which the body repairs itself. Part of the repair process involves laying down a scaffolding of collagen fibres, usually in a random disorganized manner rather than well aligned with the usual direction of pull on that part of the body. The matted fibres are what is called scar tissue. If we subject the newly deposited fibres to gentle movement, the misdirected fibres get either removed or re-aligned and we are left with correctly oriented fibres that allow our joints and muscle to function smoothly. However if we move too vigorously or erratically, we simply tear more fibres and re-commence the cycle of inflammation and repair.\n\nAlthough the damage starts with vigorous movement, being sedentary does not help because collagen fibres also get laid down between adjacent tissues that are not moving, binding them together, so we would become completely moribund. If we then move forcefully the fibres will tear and we commence a cycle of inflammation and fibre deposition.\n\nWith age, there is an almost inevitable build-up of excessive collagen fibres and other debris left behind after multiple cycles of the repair process, and our muscle and joints become stiff.\n\nThe way to minimise this is to keep active in a manner that minimises tearing of tissues and promotes optimal repair of those tissues that do get torn. The strategies for achieving this are:\n\n1) Build up exercise gradually ensuring that tissues are strong enough to resist tearing. Strength building exercises (either body weight or in the gym) are a useful adjunct to aerobic exercise such as running\n\n2) Warm up at the beginning of exercise so that any poorly aligned fibres are gently re-aligned rather than abruptly torn apart creating a new cycle of inflammation.\n\n3) Avoid erratic movements, especially movements that require strength near the limit or your current strength;\n\n4) Massage, foam rolling or gentle stretching to remove knotted fibres can be helpful.",
"As you get older, the amount of fluid in your joints reduces, this results in them becoming stiff and harder to move as the bones don't glide across each other as smoothly as before, this can then cause damage to the joints as well as arthritis restricting mobility even more.",
"Think of it as lubricating door hinges, after a time due to reduced lubrication they can become stiff and creaky,",
"Not enough Yoga or that Chinese old folks flowing movement dancing they do to Teletubbies music!\n\n\n\n\n\nu/Angela_white32 covers the how n why very well! Top post.\n\n\n\n\n\nSeriously once you get past 40 especially if you're active - was MTBing and weight lifting until 45 - you start noticing just how lacking in the range of movement you now have. Women have it worse as their geometry means their knees basically fall apart at any age but past 40 it's not good. I'm male and my knee rehabilitation physio (it went opening a door) was me plus 14 women aged from 15 to 70 the majority were sub 30 and slim athletic running build which is basically what killed their knees!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOnce I realised just how restricted my movement was I knocked weight lifting on the head and took up Yoga. Even beginners Yoga is vicious but I like the challenge and after 6 months whilst I've still got a way to go my range of movement is so far improved it's amazing. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI still cycle as much as possible and since Yoga have upped my I feel comfortable gear by 3 smaller on the rear whilst on the big front cog. When I get to the point I can't do Yoga I'm joining a TellyTubbies dancing class.",
"Do yoga and you won't be so stiff if you keep it up into your old age. \n\n\nand if you're already old do yoga anyways it will help."
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bjl09v | why is following through a swing so important in racket sports, baseball or golf? surely once the ball is hit, a follow through serves no real purpose? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bjl09v/eli5_why_is_following_through_a_swing_so/ | {
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"Nothing affects the ball after it's hit, that's true. But you also don't want to be slowing down your swing until after you hit the ball, which means that a follow through is inevitable if you're doing it right.",
"If you're expecting to stop as soon as the ball is hit, you change the mechanics of your swing and begin to decelerate earlier, etc. It's not about having any effect on the ball directly it's about not screwing yourself up in the events leading up to the contact.",
"A follow through is an indicator of how the contact with the ball is being made. Let’s use baseball as an example. If your follow through is always low, then you know that you are swinging at a downward angle. This will result in the baseball being hit into the ground. Instead of telling someone to just hit the baseball up, you say follow through higher and that forces you at an upward angle instead of downward. It’s really hard to swing down and have the bat finish above your head",
"Imagine a car hitting a wall. If the car stops on it's own when it hits the wall there is little damage yo the wall, now if the car went right through the wall would more or less be destroyed."
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1dpqnw | how does currency conversion work? | What if the U.S. just decided: "Fuck it!" and printed many bills in excess?
What if the U.S. Treasury did this secretly, so it is publicly believed that the total U.S. currency out there is the same? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dpqnw/eli5_how_does_currency_conversion_work/ | {
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"Do you mean \"inflation\" ?",
"This one is actually really cool, and works without anyone knowing the 'exact' amount of currency in the world. \n\nWhen one country wants to purchase something in another country - for example the Bangladeshi's ship the sweatshop clothing or the sum of all the Americans purchasing canadian coinage to cross the border for a fun trip - there is created a demand for the coinage of the foreign nation. At the same time, the other country is purchasing in our country. \n\nThe trade balance between the two countries exactly equals, subject to a slight delay, the currency exchange. Now, if one country devalued it's currency by flooding the market with currency, it would be 'easier to get'. So when the comparison gets made between the amount we bought of your stuff, and the stuff you bought of our stuff, the one with the 'cheap currency' would suddenly be worth only a little of the other guys. This happened in Mexico when hyper-inflation caused the Peso to radically devalue - there's actually old bills that say 10,000 pesos, they devalued them by 1000 so they suddenly equaled 10 pesos again - across the board, because they had experienced a period of hyper inflation when people across the border (or inside the country) could get currency way, way too easily, making it worthless.\n\nSo basically it doesn't matter if people _know_ that there's more bills or not - the actual presence of the bills in the system makes them too easy to get, which is reflected in the currency exchange rates. \n\n\nAnd when five american dollars equals six canadian dollars, it means that Canadians bought six dollars of american products for every five dollars we spent in canada/on canadian goods. Minus a little fee every time for the transaction, which is why government-set exchange rates (such as when you go to China) sort of suck compared to getting the guy at the hotel to exchange your bills on the downlow."
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3w018w | how do search engines catalog web pages? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3w018w/eli5_how_do_search_engines_catalog_web_pages/ | {
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"Following links. I'm sure these days there are additional ways, but that's the primary mode of discovery.\n\nA search engine has an initial set of pages it knows about. On that page are links to other pages, both internally and externally. A web crawler basically keeps following links which is how the concept of \"the web\" [of links] originated.\n\nMany domains can also choose to have a sitemap which is a file that outlines all the pages on the site including some that might not be linked to directly (e.g. you can only get there from a product search for instance).\n\nOn the opposite end, a domain can have a robots.txt file that instructs search engines to ignore certain addresses. (Commonly used for logged-in only sections of sites).",
"Well, they have something called crawlers, which are \"crawl\" around web pages and find links on webpages. They then follow these links and keep a huge record and catalog them using their very complex PageRank algorithm. This algorithm takes into account a huge amount of factors, including pages linking to it, # of links leading out, content quality, etc. This is all put into their massive database that you can search for anything. "
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epkpuk | why does blood rush to your head but not your feet? | When you go upside blood will rush to your head but when you are staying blood doesn't rush to your feet. Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/epkpuk/eli5_why_does_blood_rush_to_your_head_but_not/ | {
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"There are little valves in your veins that keep blood from pooling in your feet. Alas, they aren't sophisticated valves that switch over to do the right thing when you are upside-down.",
"It can. Your body is designed to operate in the upright position at 1G (blood pressure keeps the system moving properly). If you want blood to pool (rush) in your your lower body you just have to go past 1G. This happens to fighter pilots during extreme maneuvers. The result is you'll black out. Fighter pilots wear suits that literally squeeze their lower bodies and force blood back up to the rest of their system. \nLow blood pressure can also create this pooling affect. \nBlood rushes to your head while inverted bc your body is literally fighting gravity to get blood to your brain. If it suddenly has gravity doing that job for it, blood pools in the head and without gravity assist to leave, can also make you pass out. Part of the reason astronauts must be in peak physical condition. Too high or too low blood pressure in zero G environment could make you sick.",
"It does if you have POTS. \n\nAlso it does naturally want to rush to your feet because gravity, but we have blood vessels in our legs that contract to help return blood upwards.",
"Our evolutionary history is one in which we have been generally standing upright, and generally not upside down. We've evolved mechanisms, therefore, that are meant to help handle the effects of our normal posture on our blood pressure. We have one way valves in our legs. Our leg muscles help push blood up into our body. If we fainted anytime we got up too fast, that'd be a significant survival disadvantage.\n\nOn the other hand, since we spend so little time upside down, there isn't the same pressure for humans to evolve a mechanism to handle that."
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2mrvz9 | ... what exactly is "building a tolerance" to alcohol? | I understand building a resistance to viruses etc., but when someone builds a "tolerance" to alcohol, what exactly is going on? Is it that our bodies become resistant to the effects of the alcohol, or is it that our bodies learn how to function better while under the same effects? Like if a person (same weight and size) builds more of a tolerance to alcohol, is their BAC the same as the other person but just have better composure, or do they literally have a different BAC than the less tolerant person.
Just a random thought I can't wrap my head around. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mrvz9/eli5_what_exactly_is_building_a_tolerance_to/ | {
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"Your liver breaks down the alcohol in your body. When you drink more alcohol than your liver can handle, the remainder circulates through your bloodstream while 'waiting it's turn'. When it gets to your brain in sufficient quantities is when you feel the 'high' of being drunk.\n\nTo keep it simple, your brain wants to maintain a level of 'normal' (think of it as homeostasis). It doesn't like feeling weird or unusual, it wants to chug along and do its thing. After an extended period of use (which is different for everyone) you brain basically says 'fine, if you're going to do this then I will adjust'. This is when tolerance occurs, and now it takes even more alcohol in your bloodstream to feel like you did when you drank less.\n\nI will leave the specific biology of it to the biologists, but keep in mind that although your brain has adjusted to not feeling this, your liver cannot process more alcohol, no matter how long you've been drinking. This means that even though it now takes more to feel drunk, it does NOT take more alcohol to reach the legal limit (.08 in most states) for drunk driving.\n\nSource: I was a licensed substance abuse counselor for three years."
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6p0oa7 | how you can make people hold such big secrets as area 51 without having some leaked information? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6p0oa7/eli5_how_you_can_make_people_hold_such_big/ | {
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"Because otherwise you will be convicted of treason. Or are you talking about conspiracy theories?",
"They choose staff very carefully. The warn them of the severe penalties for leaks. They avoid telling any person information that person doesn't need to know. This previous post explains more:\n\n- [Eli5: How does area 51 keep its secrecy with so many employees (current and former) that work(ed) there? ](_URL_0_)\n\nLots more info on how this is done in several other contexts:\n\n1. [ELI5: How do production teams and studios prevent leaks for highly anticipated movies and TV series? ](_URL_6_)\n1. [ELI5: How does the White House prevent visitors or the press pool from planting a bug in the Oval Office? Do they sweep it after every visit? ](_URL_7_)\n1. [ELI5: in the age of the internet, how come thousands of great magic tricks remain secret? If they're not, where do I visit ](_URL_5_)\n1. [ELI5: How does companies like apple keep the majority of new release stuff secret seeing it's mass produced? ](_URL_3_)\n1. [ELI5: How to companies prevent leaks? ](_URL_4_)\n1. [ELI5:Answer an ELI5 FAQ How do companies keep a secret formula or ingredients such as Coca-Cola or KFC? ](_URL_1_)\n1. [ELI5: how can the coca cola formula be a secret these days. Can't any chemical engineer just study the drink and break down the ingredients? It's largely just high fructose corn syrup with water and CO2. We've solved tougher questions](_URL_8_) \n1. [ELI5: How is it possible that no one ever leaks critical algorithm information from secretive companies such as Google and Facebook? ](_URL_9_)\n1. [ELI5:How does a game company keep its next work-in-progress game a secret? ](_URL_2_)\n",
"Leverage. You just make sure they are too scared to talk. Since you also REALLY do not want your secrets to be out, you make sure to keep an eye on them. When they're about to talk, intimidate them. If they did talk, kill them and tell the others what happened to the person who talked.\n\nIf someone successfully hides from your (agency's) influence, you discredit them so that even if they talk nobody believes it. Though it's expensive, because you'll still have to move / adapt your operations so that if anyone does still investigate the discredited claims, they find no evidence. (further strengthening the discredit)",
"Can't be done.\n\nThree can keep a secret, if two of them are dead. Benjamin Franklin\n\nBen was off by one. The best kept secret of the 20th century was the identity of Watergate's Deep Throat. He found out he had cancer and promptly went public.\n\nThere do exist men of integrity who will take a secret to their grave but assembling a group of them is statistically unlikely. \n",
"If someone told you would you believe them? ",
"People like money and freedom. Violate your nda with the government and you lose both. You could also be sequestered if it's a big enough project. ",
"You really can’t. The best proof that there is nothing super secret at Area 51 is the fact that nothing has leaked other than their work on stealth aircraft and related. ",
"Definitely part of it, as others like /u/concise_pirate says is choosing staff carefully.\n\nThe other part of it, is that more often then not, the sort of information you get at classified locations isn't really anything...interesting.\n\nI once worked on radars and I knew (forgot it all by now) a bunch of associated stuff...but nobody would have cared at all except for countries that want weaknesses. What's the point in bragging to someone that you know the frequencies a given missile can see or not see? If anyone is suddenly interested in sleeping with you over that, either they are the most intense technophile or they are a spy.",
"There's a tactic called \"poisoning the well\" where if something leaks, you leak tons more fake info that gets gradually more ridiculous. Let's say something big did happen at Roswell with a UFO crash and some info got out. At this point if someone approached you with valid, legit info about it, you would assume they're crazy conspiracy theorists because all the easily-disproved wackiness around Roswell and UFOs. You wouldn't believe them. The actual leak is tainted by the flood of fake info.",
"An Oxford University researcher [wrote a paper using probability to show how quickly a conspiracy theory would be revealed](_URL_0_).\n\nBasically, the more people involved, the quicker it will be revealed. And it's impossible to keep something under wraps if too many people are involved. ",
"An illustration from TV. Stargate had a device that created a wormhole to other planets. The US government kept it secret. At one point a human looking alien (who had his memory repressed) produced a show about that very premise called Wormhole Xtreme. He subconsciously recalled secrets and used them for the show. The government sent an advisor to the set and publicized their involvement. Thus, if anyone broke the real secret, they could just say that the guy was delusional and referencing Wormhole Xtreme and the truth was kept hidden.",
"This question reminds me of the \"Manhattan Project\" in Oak Ridge, TN. They were able to build a nuclear bomb without any impacting leaks because none of the workers knew what they were doing. Each person had a job; machine a part, turn a dial, pull a lever etc, but they didn't know why they were doing it. Only a very few people had any knowledge of what was actually being done. \n\nSo in short, separation of duties can go a long way. Leaked information isn't as useful if it is only 1/1000 of the total project. ",
"If we had discovered anything Alien during our time here, the people involved in Area 51 wouldn't be the only to witness it. That would be just pure luck.",
"That's what the Men in Black are for, obviously. Things get leaked all the time, they just make sure we don't remember it.",
"I applied for a job requiring security clearance to see secrets.\n\nThe hiring process took about 2 years. They had a polygraph test, phycological test ( done by a psychologist ), background check by the police, references and they even ran your fingerprints against all unmatched finger prints lifted from crime seems across the country.\n\nIf you pass all that, you might get an offer .\n\n( I stopped the process because it was too stressful ).\n\nAll that for an agency most people don't know exists.\n\nAnd if you do get hired, any time youmlwave the country, you have to get permission from your supervisor.",
"Specifically from the military side: \n\nBy the time someone has risen in their career to the point where they're assigned at Groom (or some other \"black\" site), they've been thoroughly vetted, and are generally a 'known quantity' from a security perspective.\n\nMy stepfather was career Air Force, a pilot, and toward the end of his career was assigned to the 117 program (we later found out) at Groom. For several years toward the end of the 80's, he and my mother lived in Vegas, and he commuted every week from McCarran to Groom on 'Janet airlines'. All he could tell my mom was that he'd be home when he got home. There were a few deployments (probably training) where he was gone for several weeks, and all my mom had was an assurance from other wives that if something happened, someone would let her know.\n\nTo this day, he hasn't spoken a word of what he did there; we only figured it out based on stuff that happened afterward. Once the 117 was general knowledge, he deployed with one of the squadrons, and eventually assumed a position of squadron leadership when they moved to their final operational base.\n\nHe's been retired since the late 90's, and the 117 has been mostly declassified (not completely, though most of the technology is outdated and no longer used), but there are very few pieces of information that he's ever revealed or confirmed.\n\nFor instance, every pilot who qualified in the 117 was given a \"Bandit\" number indicating a permanent call-sign. Through research of my own, I discovered his Bandit number (listed in two publicly available books about the program I found at the Air Force museum); while the roster of Bandits has been publicly released, he still refuses to even confirm that that's his number. To this day he still won't answer any real questions about the program, even though the plane has been retired for almost a decade.",
"I suppose it's possible that the secrets held there are not too mind blowing after all. They could be military technology secrets that might have been worth something to USSR intelligence back in the day, but quite mundane or insignificant to the general public. Like for example, aircraft that is invisible to conventional radar, or missle defense technology. Even if somebody did want to leak information, they would have probably leaked it to somebody who cared and was worth something to, and we would have never heard about it anyways. Those are my thoughts anyways. ",
"Compartmentalization is the primary way of keeping a secret. Many people know little of something but almost no-one knows the big picture of what they are working on. \n\nInfo does leak. Foreign intelligence agencies are able to obtain info on US military projects, just as the US obtains info about foreign countries. But these agencies aren't going to post the info they found online or advertise that they have inside sources so so leaks can go unnoticed for years.",
"Probably because there is nothing much going on except high secret military tech testing .\nAnd they choose their people extreme carefully. \n\nNo Ufos or stuff . Just testing of engines , planes , radars.\n\nBut EVERY big nation does.\nOr do you think you know everything that is going on in secret Russian test labs/Areas . Or Chinese .\n\nThey all do that \n\nEdit : autocorrect ",
"It's also fair to point out that the secrets around Area 51 aren't that great. The general public knows that the base is used to test stealth planes and other military technology. To the average citizen this is meaningless information. This would be valuable information to enemies of the US, but then you risk treason as well as being court martialed. \n\nEveryone knows a lot about their specific jobs that they don't talk about because it's boring to other people. Throw in the fact that you can potentially serve jail time for spreading said boring information and you have in incentive to not talk about it.\n\nAs for alien conspirators, even if the US government were hiding information on aliens and UFOs, it is unlikely they would keep that information in Area 51. Why would the government hide information about aliens in the most famous alien location on earth? Maybe once upon a time they did, but they wouldn't anymore.",
"In addition to the wonderful answers here, there are also a few methods you can employ to keep someone from learning too much:\n\n1. Role Separation \n2. Job Rotation \n\nFor example, you might have an Electrical Engineer who is hired to work on Project #1, System #1. He doesn't know everything about that system, because he is only allowed access to Function #2. He doesn't know what Function #3 is nor what Function #1 is.\n\nAfter a while, to prevent him from learning about other functions, you change his role. This could happen as often as every year! So now instead of him working on System #1, he's transferred to Project #8, System #67, Function #34. He's still an Electrical Engineer so he can pick up where the previous Electrical Engineer stopped, but he has no idea what all the different projects have in common.\n\nIt's a very effective method for keeping large project secrets safe.",
"The federal government does detailed background checks. You have to fill out the SF86 form about your history going back decades. It is a felony to lie. The fbi (they use contractors to do this) has people contact references and knock on doors. I was a reference for my next door neighbor. For high level clearances they require a polygraph and you can be subject to more polygraphs ( or you get fired). Big things that get people ruled out are debts( you are at risk of being bribed), level of foreign contacts, risky behavior ( recent drug use , alcholism... No one cares if you smoked weed back in the day as long as you dont lie), cheating in relationships( if you are having an affair you can be blackmailed). \n\nAfter the check, it goes to a committee to see if you pass. The detail of the check depends on how high your clearance. If you are not a high priority case a Top Secret can take a year. Low level ones where they just do criminal and financial checks, employment checks dont take that long. I have only had low level stuff. Stuff I have had access too was less sensitive than the banking data I get access too now in the private sector. The low level stuff was little more than SSN numbers and I needed a background check( you can steal peoples identity with that). \n\nIf you get declined you can appeal and hire a lawyer. People can sometimes win appeals. They appeal because decline means no job. The biggest stuff that causes people to fail are debts and lying. So e idiot posted on a forum about lying about smoking weed. First its a felony to lie, second if you get caught lying, you are permanently unemployable in any sensitive positions( and that is alot of jobs in the DC area). \n\nBasics of what Area 51 does has been leaked. They use it to test top secret aircraft during R & D. SR71 and the B2 bomber were tested there. They like test of 007 style gizmos ( I am exaggerating) there too. \n\nIts not perfect. We still have leakers. Some woman just got arrested for it for leaking nsa stuff. These are valuable in the IT sector in the DC area because you go to the top of the list for alot of jobs since contractors dont have to wait for you to get cleared. ",
"Skeptics always say that such projects are impossible to keep secret because somebody would talk but the recent case of the UK media celebrity Jimmy Saville's pedophile life disproves that. Over a 40 year period he raped hundreds and possibly thousands of children, male and female and had at least dozens of police charges filed against him but was never questioned, arrested or even exposed in the media once. Thousands of people must have known directly about what he did. The reason no one leaked? People are basically shallow and want to protect any possible damage to their own lives. It's sad but true.",
"Honestly part of it is just that real secrets are not nearly as interesting as aliens, and often wouldn't even be explainable to a non specialist.",
"I worked on a thing which was coded top secret. My bits of it at least. Nobody threatened our family or our health. Care was taken but nobody had to tell us to do so. It was pretty universally reinforced in such a way that nobody wanted to be that guy.\n\nNow what we did was largely positive. And like someone else said, not terribly interesting. Something like the Snowden thing which was big and hostile (?) or invasive (?)... Not sure of the word because i don't think \"negative\" is a fit... may be guarded differently.\n\nFor us, we didn't care if some foreign power got hold of it. We cared if Americans found out too soon. To my knowledge, it still isn't publicly known though I've seen mention of it a few times and its kinda cool. Don't worry though... by now it's absolutely irrelevant information.\n\nWhat they did do for us is basic stuff like you'd see in some corporations. No phones in the buildings. No notes left the building. Handouts were collected afterwards. We didn't refer to the thing by name or nature.\n\nEnough that unless you were really paying attention, you wouldn't hear the dog whistle.",
"The answer is you don't.\n\nIf you have a top secret project where secrecy is a must, you keep the number of people who know about it to an absolute minimum possible. You vet all of these people very in depth, and only choose people who have a high level of trustworthiness. This way, you can minimize the risk of information getting leaked out.\n\nBut as the number of people who know about a project grows, the chances of the information getting leaked also grows. The old adage \"Two can keep a secret only if one of them are dead,\" applies here.\n\nMost of the time, this leakage is to other governments or specific communities. This isn't because people won't tell the news media, it's just that the general public doesn't think it's all that interesting. There are even a lot of cases where facts are \"leaked\" and create a sudden uproar in the general public, even though it was general knowledge in specialist fields. NetSec guys weren't surprised by Snowden's leaks at all, because they had been following the production of the tools which made the tapping possible (and debating their ethics) for years.\n\nSo whenever you hear about a conspiracy that's both really interesting and a lot of people would have to be involved in it, like aliens crashing in Roswell, or the moon landing being fakes, you can pretty much assume it's not real. ",
"I always thought if I knew some huge government secret and I was on my death bed, I'd have to let it all out ",
"Looks like this has already been plenty well answered but briefly-\n\nwith respect to a lot of big secrets, well, there ARE leaks, there has been lots of leaks in many big top secret things- many NASA projects, Area 51, Military secrets, the cold war was RIFE with people selling secrets back and forth, I mean, there ARE leaks, they are basically inevitable. That's why you can go watch videos of Buzz and Gordon Cooper and Jimmy Carter talk about those times they saw aliens on youtube. \n\nBut to answer your question a little better- compartmentalization, and especially, oversight through compartmentalization is basically the biggest tactic to keep the inner workings of any organization secret. If the different functions of your organization are partitioned into groups that are then run separately from each other, that way if there are leaks in one area the damage is hugely mitigated as those leaks should be contained as long as your respective compartments don't know anything about the others. ",
"The government makes employees sign secrecy agreements. Violations can result in termination, imprisonment, or worse. \n\nWith these agreements as leverage, the government literally gets away with murder. People look the other way because they don't want to lose their job and go to prison. \n\nIn regards to a51, this is a known secret intelligence facility. So I imagine, 100% of it's employees intended to keep secrets from day 1. They don't station you at a51 if they think you're a security risk. ",
"My father went to Area 51 in it must have been the 1980s. He was a high up defense engineer (now deceased). He said that although you absolutely need security clearance for Area 51, there's actually far more secretive bases through out the US and abroad. \n\nEveryone knows about Area 51. Makes for a shitty secret base. \n\nMy dad worked on how planes could dodge being seen by radars. I'm pretty sure it was the stealth bomber. This was all declassified I the 1990s and thats when he first mentioned it to me. ",
"By talking about it like it's the Mother of all Secrets.\n\nSimilar to how a lot of people think Ft. Knox holds the gold - that's not where the gold is.",
"Part of the issue is having the people understand the need for secrecy and the validity of the \"cause\". The properly chosen people will keep a secret if, for example, it's a secret new weapon and they understand why they need to keep it secret. If you expect people to keep a secret about, say, a hidden program which violates laws or the constitution then there will be some people (think \"Snowden\" or \"Manning\") will decide they should be telling the world.\n\nAnother \"trick\" is to limit the people involved. If you fly over population, some will notice the new aircraft. If you order a huge number of routers, or have foreign orders specially re-routed first, someone in that company will figure out that things are not as they should be. Manhattan project, those who really knew were relocated to the middle of an isolated desert. But anyone who wanted to and was involved in say, university physics, would notice the elite and promising novices of the field were disappearing into the government. (Plus note even then, some were alternately loyal and did pass data to the Soviets).\n\nThe problem is when two people know it, it's not a secret; when three know it, you don't even know for sure who leaked it.",
"I'm sorry to inform you but Area 51 isnt a \"big secret\"\nJust propaganda of aliens so then we could research during the cold war.",
"It's pretty simple really: the people who have access have to believe in the government, the importance of the mission and keeping the secret.\n\nWe see a lot of leaks these days because people have lost their trust in the government and think the government is doing things that are illegal or otherwise not good for the public.\n\nOnce you have that, limit access to need to known bases and keep on the look out for disgruntled employees, people who are in financial need or can be blackmail for some reason.\n\n",
"It's just not worth it. As a member of the military my goal is to help others, mainly the people of the USA. If I leak secrets that means my fellow soldiers could die, or worse yet, civilians. Combined with a need to know basis (even if you are allowed to know information of that classification level you won't be told unless it is required for your job) and severe punishments if you blab, most people find it easier to just not talk about it.",
"Maybe not complete secrecy per se but compartmentalizing information is a good start to this. Security clearance and classifications in the military are a wonderful example of this in work. If one link in that chain is weak and leaks, without the context of the bigger picture available it wont matter as much or at all. Plus depending on how far you go with compartmentalizing... The list of people able to leak a specific set of details can become very short, which in itself is a good deterrent to leaks if the people on that list value their lives/freedom.",
"There are undoubtedly leaks.\n\nThere just aren't leaks about the made up stuff people want to believe goes on in there.",
"It can't, On a long enough timeline everything gets leaked.\n\nSo sry, but no Roswell aliens or we would know by now.",
"Mitchell and Webb explain it pretty well without actually explaining it.\n\n_URL_0_\n",
"Death threats. Probably. Maybe. No? Okay...",
"We expect millitary research say on nuclear devices or new bombs, weapons, etc, not to get leaked why would it be any different for conspiracy?\n\nCompartmentalization is why millitary research doesn't get leaked to foreign agents, you can't leak something you don't know about, none of the people working on Fat Man even knew what they were doing.\n\nLet's say there's a powerful laser gun that they're working on & at least 2 people on the project have to know everything, risking a leak is not an option so you prepare multi-choice scenario's in advance, you remove their names from any government database so they will seem less legitimate, you move them out to small towns and set up everything they need there discreetly so again they seem less legitimate, you get every scrap of dirt on both of them, you prepare debunk propaganda campaigns in absolute detail, you prepare people willing to testify against them, you popularize the term conspiracy theorist so that people have a bias against whistleblowers, you poison the well of legitimate theories by publishing fake information.\n\nThere are billions of options they can use.",
"Nevermind Area 51, I'd like to know how they keep the events of a Game of Thrones season secret with so many people involved in the production and how easy it would be let the secret out without reprucussions.\n\nIt's as if the Game of Thrones production crew are as much fans as everyone and can't wait for everyone to be shocked.",
"Having a clearance and knowing the penalties for disclosing classified material it better be worth it. Unless it changes the lives of everyday Americans that effected the freedom I would absolutely never do it. Levinworth prison is nothing to fucking joke about. ",
"You pay them a lot. You put the in prison if they leak information. Big carrot...big stick.",
"I'm more impressed by Valve being able to leak zero information about HF3. Have they never pissed off an employee?",
"Compartmentalization. To anyone who's worked in the intelligence community, you're accustomed to most information being compartmentalized and only accessible by having a \"need to know\" which is granted by clearance/caveat. \n\nFor example, having a TS/SCI clearance obviously means you've been granted access to viewing Top Secret as well as sensitive, yet compartmentalized data. Your job, responsibilities, and geopolitical focus within work all play a key factor in determining what data/intelligence types you're given access to. \n\nExample:\n\nBob, Fred, and Karen are all on the same analysis team. Bob is a SIGINT analyst, Fred is a HUMINT analyst and Karen is a collections manager working in the SCIF all three work at. (SCIF: Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) \n\nAll three have a common purpose, a goal or mission objective- however all three are able to execute their duties and responsibilities at work, independent of one another and their actions, as well as information they are given access to. \n\nEssentially what I'm trying to say in how it relates to this question, is that loads of contractors, analysts, and agents can all work on a really secret base, or work all on a really secretive program, and little if any information will ever leak out because most people have threads of information. On their own, whatever information they possess is relatively useless and extremely disputable without coordination and verification of additional sources. \n\nIssue is all of these additional sources are unknown to you, mainly anonymous, all have been threatened with prison if they leak, and usually like their $100k salaries they take home. Sooooo, they don't talk. \n\nTL,DR - Everyone in intelligence mindlessly works like chickens with their heads cut off, Big brother makes it a pain in the ass to have coordination of leaked intelligence sources. ",
"You can't. Everyone knew about Area 51, the government just kept denying it until it was declassified.",
"First is like the other guy said, they pick the right people, have them sign nondisclosure agreements with *harsh* penalties, and also probably monitor as much as they can to prevent leaks before they happen.\n\nAnother idea is that, while secret stuff does go on there, it's not what everyone's hoping it is, so the information they could leak wouldn't interest most of the people wondering if/hoping that certain things are going on there. Like, everyone wants it to be aliens and super advanced prototype aircraft, but in reality it's just another base where they test out moderately advanced aircraft components, so even if there was a big leak most of the people wanting a leak aren't going to be interested. This comes to my final theory, which is that leaks do happen but because they're so mundane to you and I that we don't hear or care about them.",
"Plot twist: they don't hold secrets about Area 51 without having leaked information--you just don't believe what information does exist because \"aliens.\"\n\n😳\n\nSource: my uncle works at Nintendo",
"You can't, which is why most of these \"secret conspiracy that involves many people making a coordinated effort\" things are not real. ",
"/r/securityclearance\n\nBreakdowns a lot of information and details of different clearances and what all goes into keeping information secure.",
"Nondisclosure agreements tend to work. I know from experience. I'll tell you about it in 70 years or so.\n\nAnd yes, I am totally serious.",
"Another method of secrecy is compartmentalization. You know your job, and its positions, but may not even fully understand the project.\n\nFor example, during WWII, the US engaged in secret operations to infiltrate German POW camps, contact prisoners, smuggle them tools, money, and weapons, and help them dig out.\n\nSome of the people on the project, had no clue what they were working on. One person's job is to figure out how to hollow out chess boards, or wooden hair brushes to fit paperwork inside. Thats all that person knows.\n\nAnother guy has a job to transport mail from one military base to another civilian post office. This guy has no idea that counterfeit Germany money, and an escape briefing was hiding in chess pieces inside the packages. \n\nWhen the mail returned, a civilians job at the post office, was to separate packages with a certain address, and set them aside for the military to pick up. These civilians had no idea these packages were responses from captured soldiers behind German lines.\n\nOne way to ensure secrecy, is to break a project into smaller, compartmentalized jobs, and dont tell anyone what the big picture is. ",
"My grandfather was a senior scientist on the Manhattan project and then later helped develop the engines for the blackbird. We would have never known except they were death bed confessions to my dad. My grandmother told us how weird he reacted to the A bomb. \"Now, it's done.\" She always wondered why he felt satisfaction and pride over relief. \n\nIn the case of my granpa and by extension my grandma it was a matter of patriotism and that was easy to get behind during the times he was working in secret. Also IIRC, most of the important people lived in an exclusive neighborhood. The people on the projects were friends and their wives knew each other their and kids went to school together. That's a bit of peer pressure.\n\nIn the end it comes down to the same thing that keeps any cabal together. They have a common ideal, a common goal, and as peers keep each other and the system of rank together. Also the threat of a black site jail and tour family's ostracism from everything they've known. ",
"Part of the technology we recovered from the alien spaceship was a mind control beam. People who work there have a mind block installed to prevent them from leaking information, and when they leave Area 51 their memory is erased and a cover story about testing aircraft is implanted.",
"There is leaked information. You HEARD about Area 51, right?",
"If I read the front page correctly, then I think some Wisconsin company may be on the right track.",
"interesting information here, specfically about \"compartmentalizing information\". \n\nI met a girl on tinder in San Diego who worked as a civilian in \"national defense\". I was so damn curious about what she knew or what she did but she wouldnt tell me a damn thing. nothing.\n\nEventually she said \"even if i did know anything, i don't know what it is\". She said she only knows small parts of large programs, so she doesnt even really know what she knows. It made sense once she explained it. Basically they deprive her of info, I guess its a \"need to know\" thing.",
"Typically, it helps when you can threaten everyone who touches it and passes it along with several years of jail time. And when the press can get shut down on top of it, they also tend to play ball.\n\nWhen the contents of the message may as well be \"whoever says this is going to prison for 10 years\", it's a message that's never relayed.",
"I personally believe Area 51 isn't anything special, sure it is classified, but it could honestly just be a spec op training site, CIA blacksite, NSA site etc. \nIF Area 51 was as secret as many seem to think it wouldn't stick out the way it does. The nail that sticks out gets hammered, the real classified shit is hidden right under our noses. Think about it, if they were doing real top level secret shit, why not do it in a neighborhood in a city? A couple of guys living at an apartment unit in inner city LA, or an entire apartment building rented out just to agents working on some shit. Nobody would think twice. You go trough everything that is at Area 51 people ask questions including our enemies. ",
"There have been leaks. Just like there is a lot done to keep employees quiet, there is a lot of work being done to discredit the leaks when they happen, so that people like you stay completely unaware, even though plenty of testimony and evidence is out there.\nAlso one legitimate answer for you is compartmentalization. They have so many different employees working on small specific things so that they're only aware of what they're working on and they don't understand or get the big picture. All the employees are on a strict need-to-know basis.",
"Fun (apparent) fact: back in WW2 era when they were making the secret bombs and all that, illiteracy was a job requirement for the cleaning staff and all them kind of jobs so they could read the secret documents. ",
"Explain like you're 5? Pinky swears. If you break the pinky swear, you get your pinky cut off. \n\nDepending on the situation, it can extend to your entire arm or your head. ",
"Because it is just an air Force base and not something like aliens. This is actually the biggest proof that the government hasn't had proof of aliens all along. ",
"Secret success: equations give calculations for keeping conspiracies quiet\n\n_URL_0_\n",
"When I was growing up in Vegas I had a friend who's parents worked there and when they left the site they had to sign a twenty year non disclosure agreement or face espionage charges. I thought it was romantic because that would joke saying they got married to one of the few people they never have to lie to",
"They do have leaked information. Lots of it. They just purposefully leak similar information to Hollywood writers so the real leaks just sound like fiction. ",
"They choose people very carefully. I had a friend who was top secret clearance Air Force and they sent some guy to interview me. He just showed up at my door like \"hey we need to talk about a friend of yours.\"\n\nI can't imagine what they would do for Area 51. ",
"Follow up in regards to the questiom: Does every President in the US knows every top secret activities in Area 51?",
"I used to work for an international humanitarian organization that assesses violations of human rights in conflict zones. Not that any of the information was super 'secretive', but we had certain security clearance levels and were given time-sensitive information that had to be assessed before being released to the public. Violation of such meant legal punishment.\n\nThe main way they kept leakers at bay, and I worked on really sensitive cases politically, was that they decentralized the information that we were allowed to assess. Eventually we would all figure out the bigger picture, but while we were working on something and analyzing the implications we essentially had no idea where what we were doing fitted into the bigger picture.\n\nFor example, I would be given a timeframe and satellite images of a certain envoy. I had to assess how long the envoy was crossing a certain region of the map. Thats it. \n\nOnce I was done figuring out that envoy #147 went north along route X for 12 miles and stopped at height #675 for approximately 4 hours, then moved west along route Y until nightfall I would submit my report and thats the end of it. \n\nA week later I would see a complete assessment, where a certain institution had violated a ceasefire brokered during X, by moving a weapons stash to a region where it was sold to hostiles, afterwards the hostiles used the said weapons to raid a town killing ~30 people. My contribution was that my assessment of the movements of the envoy proved that said group of people supplied weapons to the hostile institution at height #675. I had no idea what I was doing prior to that.\n\nIts essentially divide and rule",
"Another thing that has happened is that we've been taught to dismiss everything slightly odd as a \"Crackpot Conspiracy Theory.\" This was an [initiative launched by the CIA in 1967](_URL_1_).\n\nMy uncle is a \"Crazy Conspiracy Theorist.\" He is also a Marine Veteran, but he's the oddest looking Marine you'd ever see. Instead of the 6'2\", bulky, perfect specimen of a \"man\" you normal expect to see of Marines, he's the opposite. He's very short, sickly, weak, and has a health issue that makes him clumsy. But he passed all his marine training via special waivers, and his training group was just taught that he was there for other reasons and to \"help him keep up.\"\n\nHe won't talk about WHAT he did in the Marines, anymore, but it was during the 1960s and 1970s. He's told me it was technology related, and that the kinds of things he did are unforgivable and blood curdling. Now he has an extreme distrust of the government, lives off grid deep in a rural area, and latches onto every conspiracy theory he does hear as \"Probably true.\" Things like chemtrails and HAARP \"weather control\" are very likely in his mind. It doesn't matter if they work or not, just that the government has a history of trying everything (even [employing psychics](_URL_0_)) on the off-chance it works. \n\nBut ultimately, my point is, even if my Uncle went to a newspaper to talk about the things that he helped with, he'd be laughed off as a conspiracy theorist, even if they didn't know his views on things like Chemtrails. If what he talked about was published, the general public would reject it as conspiracy theory. Have you ever talked to someone about the Vault 7 wikileaks? If so, you probably heard them reject it as conspiracy theory. \n\nIn other words, a single leaker is unlikely to ever be heard, and will probably be drowned out by flat-earthers and big foot searchers, anyways. \n\nedit: Using a throwaway, just cause my regular username would show exactly who I am, and would let people dox my uncle. ",
"There will also be leaked information but what you do is create a counter narrative. For Area 51 for example you hire a bunch of people to write a bunch of crazy books about Aliens, you leak a bunch of stuff to the National Enquirer, etc. Then you get people to debunk this stuff and call the people crazy. This makes it nearly impossible to figure out what is real and what is made up. So if anything that is real does leak it will be buried with a bunch of fake stuff. Also since the people who know the secret are the people creating the counter narrative they make the counter narrative very similar to the actual narrative.",
"there are some really great comments here- but would like to point out that Really big secrets DO get out- everything from the Pentagon papers to Nixon - Snowden - Manning- and of course now Trump, just to name a few. \n\ni totally agree with most the top comments - would also like to point out that places like area 51 are probably not that exciting - they test aircraft.. not harbor aliens. ",
"I was in a military intelligence unit in the Army. It was a drone unit. I was just a truck mechanic. We never heard anything about the secret stuff that went on mostly because it was boring AF. A lot of the top secret things that go on in the military just isn't interesting. It's just a \"secret\" because the \"enemy\" could use it against us in battle. Think of it like a game of battleship. The person you are playing against can't see where your ships are. To a person not playing the game and has no stakes in it, the \"secret\" is an arbitrary alpha numeric code. That's boring.\n\nFurthermore, a leak is protected by the first amendment. That's why leakers are rarely thrown in prison. Leaks are usually made by an institution to the press in order to have a record for the public to see. That's why Comey leaked his notes from his meeting with Trump. He wanted the public to know that Trump was up to something. And now you know why Trump hates leakers.",
"Military contractor side working on black projects. Maybe 200 total.\n\nOn one, I was cleared in and worked for 6 months. One day someone stopped by my desk and said\"come with me for a briefing.\" I went to a conference room with some other people only to discover that the program we were on was a cover for another program. \n\nWorked on that one for six months. And a guy showed up and took me to a room for another briefing. Turns out that program was a cover for something else. I still don't know if I ever was on the real program.\n\nMy relatives, old school teachers and friends from all over the USA would call me and ask me if I had robbed a bank. The FBI would interview them about me without telling them why. I told them it was for a project dealing with the B-52.\n\nI worked on one program for two years and walked into a conference room to discover my wife was on it too. She had been on it longer than me. We discovered later it was the 117.\n\nWorked on one program for a couple years and someone showed up at my desk telling me to fly to Seattle. I sat in the waiting room of a big warehouse all day and then a lady came out and said \"come with me.\" I walked through some doors and into a huge hanger with a full size mock up if the B2 bomber. That was how I learned what that project was about.\n\nI worked on several projects that I never did find out what they were.\n\nWhen we went to Utah or places in that direction, we would fly to a hub city and then have tickets and business cards under a different company and a different name to take the next flight. \n\nI never went to dreamland.",
"Not Area 51 but knew a few people who worked at a high up government lab. Super smart people but they never told a soul if they were a janitor or a scientist. ",
"I thought about this for a while now. What I would do is if I was trying to make sure that my secrets kept away would be to create this cultof mystery around a base that would be thousands of miles away from where the actual Secret labs were. \n\nPurposefully leak that the remains of alien bodies in a crash site where at Area 51 to keep all the conspiracy theorists and Foo Fighters focused on that one location when in reality everything is stored in Vermont or something. Basically a red herring.\n\n",
"Carefully selected staff and knowledge of what happens if you leak anything. Federal prison is a good deterrent. ",
"Lots of good and very detailed answers about the employee element. On the other hand, the complex stayed \"secret\" by posing as something else. I mean you cannot hide a massive airbase, but you *can* obfuscate what is actually done there.\n\nAlso the old guys take secrecy seriously. My great uncle worked for the CIA? Or some form of military intelligence in Europe during the 1960s and 70s. He was very much mechanically inclined in later life, always tinkering and making things, but her took his secrets to the grave. I would love to have heard his stories. I imagine him being 'Q' from James Bond, making all sorts of badass spy gear.",
"Late to the party, but most people who are given any information are on the same side. Couple of trivial (not national security) examples that have happened to me recently.\n\nI work for a a company that makes a pretty well known product in the UK. Recently, we were told of a brand redress, and new advertising campaign. We were asked to keep this to ourselves. I had no problem doing that, and neither, I'm sure did my colleagues. End of the day, early release of something like this could be harmful to the company and impacts sales, which could impact our jobs.\n\nSecond one was that in my spare time, I marshal at motor races. A few months ago, a lot of us received an email asking for volunteers at an extra even before the British GP (The trafalgar square thing on the Weds for the curious). Again, we were asked to keep it quiet as the organisers didn't want it becoming public so early. Again, no problem keeping it quiet, as it could jeopardise the event if it got out. Why would I want to do that.\n\nUsually, it's in your own interest to keep something you are privvy to secret. Of course, there are always people who want to show off what secrets they know, but with something like Area 51, leaked information could jeopardise lives, and even national security. Most people are not willing to do that, just to show off.",
"There's a lot of things going into this, but of course it all depends on each and every one of the employees. But just to mention a few of the things I noticed: Safety, career options (not a good outlook after revealing secret stuff) and ones personal feeling of pride and honor.\n\nI've worked with money production in a very secure facility (well, duh... ;)\n\nIt's not military but it's still pretty hardcore secret stuff. I had to get a Cosmic Top Secret security clearance. I believe that it's the highest clearance in NATO terms. That check was performed by my countrys equivalent of the United States Secret Service or FBI. Perhaps it's more a combination of the two in my country.\n\nAnyway, they look into your personal finances, your spouses finances and I don't really know how deep they dig. I do know that they visit former employers and ask if you're reliable as a person and if they have any reason to object to you being cleared.\n\nThen there's the hiring process. They make it very clear what the consequences of spreading the secrets around could be. For you and for the country. For the people that may be injured or killed in a heist if you reveal safety issues of the facility to outsiders. All that stuff.\n\nLemme tell ya...it makes you feel pretty cool that you're about to know shit that is so secret and important.\n\nAs this point they've had interviews and personality tests enough to know you better than you know yourself. They know that you're probably the right fit for the job.\n\nThen they'll put you in there. Let you see it in all it's glory. And your new boss gives you the **talk**:\n\n\"If you think for one second that you'll get tempted, don't take the job. Yes, there are billions going through here, but we track every single note. You can't take one without us noticing. You'll be miserable if you get tempted, because you'll know that it's impossible to steal here.\"\n\nThe reality of the job begins to set in. This is really happening.\n\n\"You can't talk about this at home either. Not to your wife. Not to your friends. If you get drunk and talk, you can't take it back. You can get hurt and you can hurt others. Most kidnappings in financial industry is so-called tiger kidnappings where they take your wife and children and force you to do things.\"\n\nWhat...the...f...?\n\n\"You can tell people where you work if you want to. We have no rules about it. But my advice is to be smart. It's tempting to talk about it and brag because what we do is very special and doing it makes us feel special. But you'll come of as an idiot when you can't answer a single question when someone wants you to prove that you're not lying. You'll sound self-important and full of shit. You could be the cleaning guy for all they know.\"\n\nWell, that does sound kinda right, doesn't it?\n\n\"My family and close friends know where I work and what my job titel is. Any questions about it are dismissed with as little info as possible. If someone I don't know or trust asks me about it because they heard something, I just say that I work there and that I'm not permitted to talk about it.\"\n\nOkay, then...I adopted this mindset and used to set my own rules of how much I would say and not say.\n\nFor instance, the facility is closed now, so I have no trouble saying that I knew the inner layout of the place. I would never have said that before even though it's obvious. But I would have denied it and said that I was placed in an office part of the facility away from the printing press while in fact I had direct access to it.\n\nIt's a very famous building I worked in, but during the 5 years I worked there, no one besides my wife knew where my office was. Plenty of people asked, but I told no-one. I told my wife because if we got hit by a bomb attack, I wanted her to know which side of the building I was in.\n\nBut I would never have risked the safety of my coworkers just to impress someone. It's unlikely that someone would attempt a heist, but why make it look easier for the bad guys by giving them info? I would be directly responsible if something happened and someone got hurt.\n\nI know also about certain security measures in bank notes that are still used internationally, but are unknown to the public. You can read about them in certain online counterfeiting forums but they are classified secrets. I may even know about some that have never been leaked (okay, I sometimes get tempted to tease a little bit. Sorry ;)\n\nI can't talk of this stuff because it may make it easier to counterfeit bank notes in other countries and I don't want to be responsible for that. It would be a personal defeat for me to succumb to that temptation.\n\nI know a lot of great stories that I can never tell because I could risk comprimising the security of other facilities and thereby putting other people in danger.\n\nSo yeah, there's a lot going into all this secrecy. And people have different reasons to comply. I think that the methods of keeping secrets have developed to a point where you use as many methods as possible to get a nice even spread to make sure that everyone understands that it's in their own best interest to be quiet about this stuff.\n\nThat's the real answer to this question, I think.",
"So I've spent the last decade plus studying how scientific secrets are kept by the government and military (it's my job — I'm a professional historian — and [I'm writing a book on nuclear secrecy in particular](_URL_0_)). If I were going to generalize it would be along the lines of:\n\n* Very intensive screening procedures that try to ferret out any potential conflict of interest, vulnerable spot, etc. This by itself is _not_ sufficient it should be noted — background checks often fail and what you did in the past doesn't necessarily hold for the future, but it's a crucial first step.\n\n* Constant warning of the consequences of mishandling the information. Lots of drilling about the procedures of security (\"OPSEC\"). The development of a \"culture of secrecy.\" You need people to feel it in their bones that the secrets are important and that really bad things will happen (to them, to others) if they get out. Even today if you talk to ex-military who worked on Cold War defense projects, they'll frequently clam up even though a huge amount of this stuff has been declassified. One scientist who worked on the atomic bomb during WWII told me it was shocking to hear the word \"uranium\" used after the attack on Hiroshima, because for the previous three years he was not supposed to use it and associated it with essentially swearing.\n\n* Isolating the work and people from \"everyday life\" helps to reinforce all of the above. It also allows more complete monitoring of people. Hence isolated secret labs and sites. This is not _required_ — plenty of people work in classified circumstances in big cities like DC — but it helps. Sites with classified information tend to have plenty of security, etc., to emphasize the importance and increase overall control.\n\n* Active and visible means of checking and re-checking people. Security clearances aren't \"one time\" — they get renewed, you get reinterviewed, you get reinvestigated. They look not just for who your shady friends are or aren't, but much more mundane things like drug/alcohol problems, large debts, etc., that are sometimes signals for people breaking security in one way or another.\n\n* Depending on the kind of info in question there are procedures to try and make it hard to move it around, e.g., not allowing USB drives. \n\n* Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, limiting the number of people who know the really big secrets helps a lot. Compartmentalization, or the \"need to know policy,\" basically says that you limit the number of people who know something to the bare minimum who need to know it. The more people who know a secret, the harder it is to keep — every person you let \"in\" to it is another person who might later leak or spy or screw up. \n\nThe latter point is really important. The secrets that have really had a chance of being held for a long time tend to be pretty small groups of people. (The Indian nuclear program surprised the CIA in part because it was so small — every scientist was doing two or three jobs, essentially. This made it very hard to detect.) \n\nSo for BIG secrets with BIG groups of people, like the US WWII atomic bomb project (Manhattan Project), even with compartmentalization (90% of the people involved did not know what they were ultimately building), the length of time the secret can be held is pretty small. The people who ran the security on the project knew this — they were just hoping to keep it enough of a secret so that when the first bomb was used, it would be more or less a surprise. _Even then_ there were leaks, some very bad, and a diligent intelligence service would have seen evidence of the project (the Germans and Japanese seem not to have gotten much sense of it, but the Soviets definitely did, and a few other groups of scientists — including a number of Indian scientists — totally figured out that it must be going on, just from various leaks and other signs). The Manhattan Project was only secret (to whatever degree) for only 3 years, and it was constantly threatened by the press and by Congressmen (who resented not being told what was going on, but seeing evidence of something big and expensive) blowing the lid off.\n\nThe time element is key, too — it's a big difference to say, \"I want this secret kept for 50 years\" and \"I want this secret kept for 4 years.\" This is one reason to doubt a priori any assertion of conspiracies that would involve hundreds of thousands of people and yet be \"kept\" for multiple decades — there are essentially no verified examples of something like that happening. More common are things like the US nuclear program which, while it involved a lot of people, sliced and diced the knowledge up into smaller pieces (and smaller groups of people), and _even then_ had considerable leaks, espionage, etc.\n\nThere's no way to _guarantee_ success at this though, at least not in a country with freedom of movement and a free press. It only takes one dedicated leaker or spy who doesn't care about the consequences (or thinks they can get away with it), to make it come tumbling down, as has happened again and again. So there is an open question in many cases as to whether all of this is worth it.",
"I had a very low security clearance in the Marine Corps because I was an MOS 2111 (small arms repairman) and worked in an infantry battalion armory in the battalion level repair cage. My security clearance was ENTNAC, which is the lowest level, or was, forty years ago.\n\nA Marine infantry battalion possesses an incredible array of weapons. As a battalion, we had two hundred and fifty M1911A1 .45 ACP pistols, six hundred and eleven select-fire M16A1 5.56mm rifles, thirty-six M60 7.62mm machine guns, twelve 40mm M2 mortars, eight 81 mm M29 mortars, six 106 mm recoilless rifles, six M40 7.62 mm sniper rifles, etc.\n\nWe tried to total up the actual value of all our battalion's weapons once and we couldn't do it. (For one thing, the U.S. government pays a much lower price per weapon than would be typical on the civilian market. For instance, they listed an M16A1 as costing $359 or something like that, and on the civilian market they would have cost several thousand dollars. Today, more like $15,000 on the civilian market.)\n\n*All* weapons are kept secured in the battalion armory unless the Marine has orders to draw out his/her weapon. Individual weapons (like rifles or pistols) are assigned to individual Marines. Crew-served weapons (machine guns, mortars, etc.) are drawn out by the gun crew that is assigned to them (usually for cleaning or gun drills, occasionally for a live shoot.)\n\nEverybody who worked in the armory was instructed to not talk about security procedures, how we double-checked things, how we went about counting weapons every day, how we performed a \"serialized inventory\" once a week under the supervision of an officer (the officers hated that shit, it was a rotating duty) and so on.\n\nThe external security of the armory was the responsibility of the Area Guard. Within the fenced armory compound were sandbagged bunkers and firing positions that covered every approach. Every sentry had a radio and was armed with a shotgun or an M16 and a combat load of ammunition. The sentries on duty are backed up by two more shifts of sentries, one in the rack asleep, and one on standby with their gear close to hand. They all take their duty seriously. Very seriously.\n\nThe interior guard was the responsibility of the armory personnel (us.) We took *our* duty very seriously. Anybody crazy enough to attack a fortified armory building manned by United States Marines must have a serious death wish.\n\nI served in that battalion armory over forty years ago. Any information I had of a genuine intelligence value is way out of date, but I still won't discuss details about it. I know that it's silly, but we were charged with a national security obligation, and I stand by the oath I took.\n\nAfter I got out of the Marines in 1981, I worked for a man who was a nuclear weapons specialist in the Air Force. He wouldn't tell us a damned thing about working on nukes in 1962. That's just the way it is.\n\n",
"It is simple really. Info *does* leak, but it isn't the answer people want, so people don't listen. We knew Lockheed Martin had presence at Area 51 for years with all the various stealth fighters that had ties to Lockheed Martin, we even knew it was called Groom Lake, but no one *wanted* that answer so no one listened. ",
"Because there's nothing actually there as interesting as what your imagination and pop culture have invented. ",
"It's less \"leaked information\" and more released statements and vivid imaginations/utter bullshit.",
"There's 1000s of people who come forward and share things about all kinds of govt programs, but no one ever believes them.",
" I think they probably split up information into levels of rank for employees. Area 51 is huge, there are multiple sections and departments and multiple employees in these departments, and employees are only given the information needed to the extent of running their department effeciently. This is where the the phrase, \"that information is above your pay grade\" comes from. And also by limiting the access to information by level or rank of employment will make it easier to figure out where a leak came from. For example, if Level 3 intel is leaked then they rule out employees with Level 1 & 2 access because they wouldn't and shouldn't have been privy to such intel, so the leak must have come from higher up; and even so, the intel leaked would be limited.\nThis method of limiting information based on levels of access, paired with constant and strict warnings about the leaking of information, paired with the knowledge that very bad things will happen to you and/or your family if you do leak information, will definitely ensure that confidentiality and discretion is practiced by everyone. \n\nTried making this as ELI5 as possible, hope it helped.\n",
"As a guy who has worked in an industry of secrets for over a decade... it's because it is actually rather boring... otherwise it would have been leaked. ",
"A through and well ingrained implication of disappearance if your NDA is breached.\n\nMy father was DEA for 20 years and told me he visited the site once and was above ground for a little under an hour but said he was under contract to not disclose any more of what he saw; not even to his own family.",
"Well, there are so many politicians with really sick dirt in their closets because the people running the show can hold it over them to keep them in line.\n\nFor less fucked up everyday people you can threaten their families.\n\nSome who are respected for their work from the time before threatening family members are like the guy behind United Nuclear, or the retiring Lockheed Martin chief scientists who leak information.",
"Treason is not a light word when you get to that level. Plus to get to that level you have to be a special kind of loyal.\n\nPlus no one knows everything or at least few do it makes your secrets smaller.",
"Best of luck with the knowledge that very bad things will happen to you and/or your family and friends and family.",
"In the case of most whistleblowers, they think they are more inclined to keep it quiet as the Death Star.",
"They look not just you but your family, your friends, and all it is unlikely to ever be heard, and will continue to be able to tell you that they don't even need to know for a limited time, or otherwise not good for the show.",
"If the secret tech they may have tightened security concerning the alien abductions stories are true or the Cold War."
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1ryfwb | why did humans in ancient europe/asia form modern civilizations faster than the ones in the americas? | Humans in the east were living in civilizations with great infrastructure/craftsmanship while humans in the west didn't. Why is this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ryfwb/why_did_humans_in_ancient_europeasia_form_modern/ | {
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"I'm afraid I can't ELI5. But if you are interested there's a book (a very long book) by Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs, and Steel that very thoroughly explains this.",
"One could argue that at least aspects of pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas were far superior to Europe/Asia- i.e. Incas- and their complex highway systems, or Aztec and Mayan mathmatics",
"In an extremely short, correctish reply? The Europeans were in the perfect position to create a massive society. The small European kingdoms were constantly competing to outdo one another. Trade from Asia via the Silk Road brought many new technologies to Europe, which the European nations quickly adapted to suit their own needs. In addition, the Europeans had domesticated animals. The animals allowed them to cultivate land and eat without hunting/gathering, plus horses were rockin' when it came to war. \n\nLiving in close quarters with these animals gave the Europeans extremely high immunities to disease. They were often afflicted with terrible diseases like. Smallpox but they were immune to damage from them. Because of this, when the Europeans came to the new world, the Indians died in hordes.\n\nAnd lastly, on the other side of the ocean the native empires were mighty but weak in these areas. They had no domestic animals to speak of (ASIDE FROM LAMAS, WHICH THEY DIDNT USE FOR MUCH!) and they're weaponry was totally not advanced at all, because most if their wars were small, ritual affairs. The Europeans wiped the floor with them once they entered the picture.\n\nHow do I know this? Guns, germs and steel. Jared Diamond is a boss!",
" > Why is this?\n\nThe better question to ask is if your perception is accurate. The answer to that is no, not really. Humans in the Americas had cities and craftsmanship. They had richly developed societies, cultural practices and interaction with each other. \n\nDid they transplant themselves over to Europe on large ships with steel cuirasses and muskets? No. To ask why the Europeans did that in respect to the Americas and not vice versa would be a better question, and one that requires a much more complex answer.",
"They didn't. Human development is a hugely complex thing, and while you can say that in some areas (like metal working) Europeans had the upper hand, in other ways the peoples of the Americas were more advanced. When it comes down to it, they were really just vastly different forms of civilization who developed along differing trajectories. The problem is that we teach history really incorrectly, with a European bias. The main reason natives in mainland America come off as so backwards in the colonization periods is that somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of the population of America was decimated by disease, so when Euro's began to settle they basically came upon the ruins of a civilization, an so based a lot of their assumptions upon that, without a bigger fuller picture. \n"
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b1w9it | how are gasses like helium or sulfur hexafloride harvested? won't it all float up into the atmosphere or sink into the lowest points in the earth, respectively? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1w9it/eli5_how_are_gasses_like_helium_or_sulfur/ | {
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"The helium we collect is mostly created by radioactive decay in radioactive ore. The helium can become trapped on its way up through the ground and form gas bubbles. It is not only helium which gets trapped in these gas bubbles but also sometimes natural gas as well. When we extract the natural gas there can be a bit of helium in it. But during the refining process this helium is separated as a waste product. The most economical for the gas companies is to just release the helium into the atmosphere but this have been illegal in the US. However with the depletion of US gas wells it is expected that the price of helium will increase by orders of magnitude.\n\nSulfur hexafloride on the other hand is a man made substance created through different chemical reactions. So it is not harvested but created."
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3hsjbu | why are football fields such a popular unit of measurement? | Pretty much everywhere we can find football fields being used to describe big things, but why?
People who don't follow football, like me, don't know the exact size of a football field. Not only that, football fields in the CFL and NFL are different. If we count association football (soccer) fields, then it gets more confusing.
So ELI5? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hsjbu/eli5_why_are_football_fields_such_a_popular_unit/ | {
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"For most Americans, a football field is a very relatable size. It's an even 100 yards, and the popularity of the game makes it something most people can accurately envision in their heads.",
"Generally speaking, most people have at the least an idea of roughly how large a football field is, as it's something that is seen reasonably often on TV/in person. Of course there are people that don't have this mental image, but for a decent percentage of the population it is much easier to visualize something that is 3 football fields long than something that is 330 yards long.",
"Mainly it's because people have a very hard time picturing the size of large things in their head. If I tell you, the school is 100 yards away. Then you know precisely how far away the school is, but that may not be a meaningful measurement for your brain to actually work with. \n\nWheres, for purposes of estimating, we can pretty well say that everyone has at minimum seen a football field. While the fields are all slightly different sizes, that does not really matter here because we are only using it to estimate anyway. \n\nSo \"that jet is almost as long as a football field\" indicates that it's quite large, not a small plane at all. Wheres if I specify that the 747-8 is 76.25 m long there's a good chance that you won't know if that's large or small for a jet. "
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2k3ygh | how do we know "privacy" search engines like duckduckgo are (not) doing what they claim to do? | since tracking, logging, filtering, and all the fun stuff they claim they are NOT doing are done server side, how can any user really be sure?
[tinFoilHat] maybe duckduckgo was set up by the NSA to track people who are trying to stay anonymous[/tinFoilHat] | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2k3ygh/eli5_how_do_we_know_privacy_search_engines_like/ | {
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"I suppose one way of knowing is this: They don't have any products that would use collected data (to my knowledge). Google, for example, collects lots of data, and it uses it for their various products (think Google Now).\n\n\nSome companies collect data and sell it to other companies (Google does not sell their data, they use it themselves). So, as far as I know, Duckduckgo doesn't (1) have products that use gathered data, and they don't (2) sell private data. So unless they're hoarding up private data and keeping it secret, it's safe to assume they're truthful about not tracking you.\n\nIf you happen to be worried about your data being tracked, I'd suggest using a VPN provider. :)"
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crhy7y | how do commercial airplanes take off? | I know there’s a lot of aerodynamics involved, but I mean more so how does a metal machine thrust it self in the air? Do the jets blast out some sort of...air? Force? What keeps the plane going besides the aerodynamics parts.
Apologies I really know absolutely nothing about planes or flight | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/crhy7y/eli5_how_do_commercial_airplanes_take_off/ | {
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"Fixed wing aircraft can use any sort of thrust to move forward - jet engines, propellers, rockets. Thrust is, basically, a \"push\" in some direction. If you were to sit in a wheelchair and push something heavy like a bowling ball forward away from you, it would also push you and the chair backwards - because you're pushing against the bowling ball.\n\nAircraft do the same thing, but they push air or exhaust gases, which is air plus hot expanding burnt fuel. Air is very light, but it does weigh a little, so if you push it really hard and really fast you can get quite a bit of thrust from it.\n\n\nPropellors are just like fans, they push against the air in exactly the same way. Get them going fast enough and they'll push enough air to make an airplane (or a boat, or anything) move.\n\nJets work by burning fuel together with the oxygen in the air. They're designed in such a way that the hot, expanding exhaust all expands in one direction (out the back of the engine), thrusting an aircraft forward. In this case, the thrust comes from the mass and speed of the exhaust gases (plus the air moving through the engine) - the fuel has quite a bit of mass, and burning it makes all that mass explode, speeding it up. (The heavier the bowling ball, and the faster you push it, the farther back your wheelchair will roll, right?)\n\nEdit to add: Rockets are somewhat similar to jets, but they carry their own oxygen on board. They can burn a lot more fuel at once, because they're a lot less delicate than jet engines (which have to perfectly handle intake air for use in the combustion reaction). This translates to much higher thrust, but are also less efficient. They're not usually used as aircraft engines.\n\n\nSo, you've got thrust, but how does that translate to flight? The answer is lift.\n\nAt its simplest, it's using the shape of the aircraft to change the direction of motion as it's pushed through the air. Imagine a fan spinning in the wind - because of the angle of the fan blades, wind pushing against them causes them to move at an angle to the direction of the wind. These fan blades are similar to wings, as an aircraft is pushed through the air, the wings catch that air at an angle which pushes them up. It takes quite a balancing act to translate that into smooth, stable flight!\n\n\nAnother important thing, especially for level flight, is Bernoulli's principle. It's based on air pressure, and is the reason wings tend to be more curved on top and flatter on the bottom. That upper curve means that air split by the wing has a longer distance to travel over the top than the bottom. If the amount of air on top and bottom are the same, but it's spread out over a longer distance on top, then the air on top has less pressure.\n\nThe higher pressure air underneath the wing tries to equalize, to fill the \"empty space\" on top, so it pushes upwards against the wing, also generating lift."
]
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[]
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22et9w | obamacare "aca" | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22et9w/eli5_obamacare_aca/ | {
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"This question concerns one of the more frequently asked topics on ELI5, so it has been removed. Try the searchbar!\n\nIt's okay to re-post questions, but please indicate that you did a search and that previous questions/answers didn't help you understand."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
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13z7yb | places like title pawn | I don't understand the point of pawning the title to your car. Doesn't that mean the owners of the title own the car? How is this profitable and how does it affect long-term customers? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13z7yb/eli5_places_like_title_pawn/ | {
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"You have to understand what it means to pawn something. You aren't selling it. You are getting a loan and backing it up with collateral. You pawn your car and get $5000. You have to pay that money back, with interest. If you don't pay it back, they take your car. It's that simple."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
4f0tag | why/how do some people pass out on amusement park rides and then wake up like it never happened? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f0tag/eli5_whyhow_do_some_people_pass_out_on_amusement/ | {
"a_id": [
"d25080g"
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"G-force moves a not insignificant amount of blood away from the brain. How much it moves and how long the g-forces are sustained determine the degree to which you experience symptoms ranging from blurred or otherwise severely impaired vision, to blackout or even GLOC (completely unconscious).\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAnd, for your morbid reading pleasure: _URL_1_"
]
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[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-LOC",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster"
]
] | ||
7a2bzb | is there any way to 'green' the sahara desert and middle east? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7a2bzb/eli5_is_there_any_way_to_green_the_sahara_desert/ | {
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"The Sahara actually was greener. There are pictographs left on canyon walls showing game animals, giraffes, and other game. These of course were left by humans showing what lived there. It was long ago. The Gibraltar land bridge might not have been breached by rising ocean levels. The Mediterranean may have been a set of salty lakes. There are salt beds under the Mediterranean, the remains of salty lakes which dried up.\n\nSo during the stone age hominids roamed the Sahara hunting game. The climate was different then. Climate change, the geologic kind which occurs over thousands of years, not what we are doing to the world now which happens in decades, has produced the desert we know now.\n\nYes plans could be devised to change the landscape of regions. It would take cooperation among governments and long range planning. It would take enlightened government by wise rulers.\n\nNone of this is likely to happen. But we can dream.",
"we can pretty much do anything we want to with land: if it is financially viable.\n\nThe problem is that land in Africa and the Middle East is essentially worthless. There is no point in investing resources into reclaiming desert when there is plenty of other land nearby. On the other hand, if you took five square miles of the sahara and could somehow attach it to Manhattan island it would trigger bidding wars and frantic development attempts never before seen.",
"The Hadley Cell. Hot moist air rises at the equator and descends over the deserts as cold(er) dry air. Cold ocean currents off the western coast of Nth Africa (Canaries Current) also work against rainfall as westerly winds can't pick up much moisture. Sure we can improve things by not chopping down whatever vegetation can grow there but the world's deserts are largely where they are for reasons beyond our control."
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cequvq | how do non-stick frying pans work at a molecular level? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cequvq/eli5_how_do_nonstick_frying_pans_work_at_a/ | {
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"text": [
"Polytetrafluoroethylene, PTFE, aka Teflon is a fluorocarbon molecule. Made from carbon atoms and fluoride atoms. It doesn't like to stick to anything, forms no atomic bonds with other atoms, because it's stable as it is, carbon-fluor bonds take a lot of energy to break, so it likes to stay that way.\n\nThen how does it stick to the pan? The aluminium that most Teflon coated pans are made from is pitted with tiny tiny holes all over it's surface, and the Teflon gets stuck in there.\nBut it's not a strong adhesion, which is why you needed to treat those pans gently, no scratching, and no cold water intro a hot pan, the Teflon will detach over time.\n\nTL;DR Strong independent molecule that don't need no man."
]
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[]
] | |
3hj4i0 | what's the purpose of having such tall radio and tv towers? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hj4i0/eli5_whats_the_purpose_of_having_such_tall_radio/ | {
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"text": [
"The transmissions travel line-of-sight. The taller the tower, the more people can receive the signal, since the curvature of the Earth will eventually put people out of range. The higher you go, the larger area is able to be covered."
]
} | [] | [] | [
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6e0216 | why do we always "cut" a globe down the pacific ocean to make a map instead of the atlantic ocean? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6e0216/eli5_why_do_we_always_cut_a_globe_down_the/ | {
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"The Prime Meridian (0 degrees longitude) runs through the UK and is usually right in the center of a world map. To the right are the eastern longitudes, and to the left are the western longitudes. This matches real life because if you face north, east is to the right and west is to the left.\n\nIt also goes back to when the world was Eurocentric, where Europe was the dominant power in the world and therefore in the centre of the map.",
"Because there's no way to make a vertical cut through the Atlanta without splitting some land mass in two, while the only threat to that in the pacific are some tiny islands.",
"it could change depend or where you live too.\n\nYou put you're country more or less at the middle, like i'm in Japan and in some maps Japan is in the center"
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1ht6vm | does the energy i get from caffeine run out faster if i exercise? | When I drink caffeine I get an energy boost, will this "high" stop quicker if I exercise, using more energy like fat and carbohydrates do? I'm sorry if it's hard to understand my question, English is my second language. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ht6vm/eli5_does_the_energy_i_get_from_caffeine_run_out/ | {
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"text": [
"also try asking this in /r/askscience ",
"I'm not a scientist, but I don't think so. Caffeine does not actually give you any energy, it simply makes you feel like you have more energy. Therefore, it is not used up like fat or carbs are. So unless exercising releases a chemical that interacts with caffeine, exercise will not affect the \"energy\" you get from caffeine."
]
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[],
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2dxtoc | if i have a deck of cards shuffled randomly, can i theoretically calculate how long it would take to get the cards back in the original order i had them in? | If I have a deck of cards randomly shuffled and am able to do a "perfect shuffle" (each card interlocking with a card from the other pile), can I theoretically calculate the amount of times it would take to get my cards back into the original order? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dxtoc/eli5if_i_have_a_deck_of_cards_shuffled_randomly/ | {
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"cju51mi"
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"text": [
"What do you mean by \"random\" versus \"perfect\" shuffle? Do you mean that you exactly split the deck in half each time? 26 cards in each hand, interlocking? "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
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3exgzw | why does it seem like most transgender people in the media are trans women? | Most of the popular/famous trans people that I can think of, like Laverne Cox, Caitlyn Jenner, and Andreja Pejic are trans women, and it also seems like most of the trans people in interviews are trans women also. What's up with that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3exgzw/eli5why_does_it_seem_like_most_transgender_people/ | {
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"I think it helps that Laverne Cox is on one of the most popular television shows in recent years and Caitlyn Jenner is part of a famous family/won the Olympic decathlon. \n\nFor a popular/famous example of trans men, check out the story of [Brandon Teena](_URL_0_), who was portrayed by Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry.",
"There will probably be more famous trans men fairly soon. \n\nI personally think this is because when a female individual becomes a man, most people shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives. When a male individual becomes a woman, a lot of people get really upset. So trans women are a bit more \"exciting\" for the news."
]
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[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Teena"
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cmuyzo | why does the os itself get buggy at the end of a phones life? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cmuyzo/eli5_why_does_the_os_itself_get_buggy_at_the_end/ | {
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"There are several factors. One, over the life of a phone many different apps are installed, deleted, updated, uninstalled, etc. All of these actions contribute to a lot of digital clutter in your phone's storage and memory. This can be somewhat mitigated by performing factory resets and regular clearing of the cache partition.\n\nThe bigger reason is that app development moves really fast and updated/new apps get larger and more complex in order to take advantage of each generation of fancy new phone. App developers have to keep up with phone development to stay relevant and after a couple of years the apps that once ran well on your phone have grown and become more resource hungry taxing the phone hardware more."
]
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btbx92 | why can eyes heal so quickly in comparison to other parts of the body? | I had a scratch in my eye this morning. It hurt like hell. Obviously got something in there that scratched the lens. It irritated me for hours, but now, 10 hours later, all gone, no pain,all healed.
Yet any type of scrath on my body can take 2 or 3 days to heal properly. Why are eyes so good at repair? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/btbx92/eli5_why_can_eyes_heal_so_quickly_in_comparison/ | {
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"text": [
"Your eyes, nose, mouth, skin all have faster replicating skin or specialized cells because they are on the outside of the body. \n\nIn order to protect those vital parts of our body, we are able to re-generate the protective layers faster.",
"The scratches are not the same. The scratch 'in' your eye is merely a scratch on the cornea, the outer layer. It's like getting a light scratch on your skin that you can't even feel (like just a white stripe). Those heal very fast, but the scratch on your skin that bothers you is through two or more layers, often drawing a bit of blood too, so that's harder to repair and takes longer."
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2cvive | cops have radar guns which allow them to see the speed of a moving vehicle. can they be used in a moving vehicle to tell the speed its moving at? | Radar gun in car, point at an object outside car...
is it possible to get your own speed by using a reference point outside of your car and a radar gun? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cvive/eli5_cops_have_radar_guns_which_allow_them_to_see/ | {
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"text": [
"Yes. Several cop cars have this feature already.",
"I assume so. The principles remain the same, as long as you're pointing at something far away enough that it remains in your frame of reference. \n\nWhat I want to know is if you can tell an object is speeding by using the radar gun while you, yourself, are moving too? ",
"As long as the gun is pointed straight ahead.....not sure about having to hold it out the window though. You may get the difference in speed between the gun and the windshield which I'd hope would be 0.",
"Radar guns will work in the car, however this is not what they use when they have the \"radar gun\". They use a laser gun to determine speed of an individual car, the police car must be stopped and shot through an open window. A radar doesnt get the speed of a actual vehicle but rather the speed of passing vehicles or vehicles that are moving.\n\ntldr: Police use laser guns to determine the speed of a single vehicle, window must be open and car stopped. They use radar to get the speed of the fastest cars nea r them, radar is used in a moving vehicle.",
"Yes, they do. \n\nI believe Radar Guns use the [Doppler Effect](_URL_0_) to measure the speed of the car. Which works both ways whether you or the car is moving."
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aayjxd | why are people in mexico not trying to speak more of their indigenous languages that was prevalent before the colonial language spanish? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aayjxd/eli5_why_are_people_in_mexico_not_trying_to_speak/ | {
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"text": [
"Put simply, it makes far more logistical sense to speak Spanish, as it is a more universally known and understood language. This makes all aspects of life (jobs, education etc) easier. ",
"Why aren’t Americans trying to speak the Native American language?",
"For one Spanish is already the standard there so why complicate things. Secondly, most Mexicans are the Spanish, they are descendants of them or a mix, there are very few indigenous Mexicans left and some of them do speak those ancient languages and do try to teach their kids the language but eventually the tribes get smaller and smaller as young people move to the city for work and education and end up integrating themselves and loosing touch with their culture. It would be like saying why don't people in the USA try to learn native languages, for most people there is no need or reason to and for the people with a cultural connection, life is hard enough for the average person trying to keep up and survive in a constantly changing world"
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nevou | (15) why do we use rats for testing and not a species biologically closer to humans (such as monkeys)? | Confused at a bar... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nevou/eli515_why_do_we_use_rats_for_testing_and_not_a/ | {
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"text": [
"monkeys are expensive, rats can do some jobs perfectly fine, hence why they're used",
"Rats are close enough for the things we test on them.\n\nRats are small, reproduce easily, can be kept alive at a cheap cost, and generally people have less of a problem with killing rats than primates.\n\nFruit flies (drosophila) are chosen for very similar reasons and Thomas Hunt Morgan, the man who popularized the use of drosophila, won the Nobel Prize for his work on them.\n\n\"About 75% of known human disease genes have a recognizable match in the genome of fruit flies\", and they're not even mammals like a rat!",
"We use mice even more than rats, but there are lots of reasons. First of all, monkeys are big; they require big spaces to house them. They're dangerous; non-human primates can carry all kinds of viruses that are no problem for them, but fatal to humans. Example: [Herpes B](_URL_0_), cold sores for them, fatal encephalitis for us. A chimpanzee is also strong enough to rip your arm off. Monkeys are also quite expensive, for the above reasons but also because a lot of work goes into making sure lab animals are comfortable and as happy as possible, given their circumstances. Mice aren't very smart, so it's easier to keep them happy and healthy. \n\nQuite frankly biological closeness isn't always all that important. Some of the basic systems of limb patterning were worked out in mice and applied almost perfectly to humans; it's just a question of how far back the trait of interest evolved.",
"as an aside, did you know that all laboratory rats and mice are born by caesarian section?",
"monkeys are expensive, rats can do some jobs perfectly fine, hence why they're used",
"Rats are close enough for the things we test on them.\n\nRats are small, reproduce easily, can be kept alive at a cheap cost, and generally people have less of a problem with killing rats than primates.\n\nFruit flies (drosophila) are chosen for very similar reasons and Thomas Hunt Morgan, the man who popularized the use of drosophila, won the Nobel Prize for his work on them.\n\n\"About 75% of known human disease genes have a recognizable match in the genome of fruit flies\", and they're not even mammals like a rat!",
"We use mice even more than rats, but there are lots of reasons. First of all, monkeys are big; they require big spaces to house them. They're dangerous; non-human primates can carry all kinds of viruses that are no problem for them, but fatal to humans. Example: [Herpes B](_URL_0_), cold sores for them, fatal encephalitis for us. A chimpanzee is also strong enough to rip your arm off. Monkeys are also quite expensive, for the above reasons but also because a lot of work goes into making sure lab animals are comfortable and as happy as possible, given their circumstances. Mice aren't very smart, so it's easier to keep them happy and healthy. \n\nQuite frankly biological closeness isn't always all that important. Some of the basic systems of limb patterning were worked out in mice and applied almost perfectly to humans; it's just a question of how far back the trait of interest evolved.",
"as an aside, did you know that all laboratory rats and mice are born by caesarian section?"
]
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da4es9 | what is the physiological reason behind “post-nut clarity” after you ejaculate? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/da4es9/eli5_what_is_the_physiological_reason_behind/ | {
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"When you are erect, your body is putting more blood flow to your penis so when you ejaculate your penis will eventually shrink and more blood will flow through your body and brain.",
"By way of example, have you heard of those experiments where they hooked electrodes up to the pleasure center of a mouse's brain and the mouse could give themselves a shot of pleasure by hitting a button? The mice would hit the button over and over, forgoing food and water, until they died. All they did was pleasure themselves, to the determent of their very lives.\n\nHuman brains have limiters built in to avoid this very outcome. Reproduction is important for a species, so we focus on that when we are \"horny\" but once we have concluded our reproductive act, our brain flips that part off so we can go focus on the other things we need to do to survive. \"Post-nut clarity\" is just us stopping being focused on sex and focusing on other things."
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a8f3ra | why do some hairs turn completely white seemingly overnight? why don't they just stop having color at the root and the tips stay colored as it grows? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a8f3ra/eli5_why_do_some_hairs_turn_completely_white/ | {
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"In all probability, you have mistaken one hair for another, which is easy enough to do. Beyond that, since we cut hair towards the tips, you may have simply removed the colored portion of some hair. Additionally, hairs with darker tips and gray roots may be easier to miss in the bulk of your hair. ",
"Outside of bleaching (either chemical or from excessive sunlight) hair doesn't just turn gray. Hair is dead and inert.\n\nYou are simply finding new grey hair that was hidden behind darker hair."
]
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3zmkt1 | why is it that our instinctual response to minor injuries is anger? | I'm meaning when we have minor injuries like an accidental cut or an unprovoked animal bite and our first instinctual reaction is anger (usually expressed as swearing or just the feeling of anger). Is this because anger/hostility towards a potential assailant would be the most beneficial response to halt further injury and is there any negative effect to not expressing that initial 'rage'? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zmkt1/eli5why_is_it_that_our_instinctual_response_to/ | {
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"Someone else may have a more current and complete answer, but I recall studies of this response in lab rats/mice, amicably getting along until one is given an electrical shock, and it lashes out at the other. It's something I try to remember, and mention to people, so we can fight the instinct in ourselves. Of course, lab results don't come with guaranteed explanations, but the suggested explanation was as you say, an adaptive defensive measure."
]
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[]
] | |
1mc6sn | how is gta v's budget $250 million? where does all that money go? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mc6sn/eli5_how_is_gta_vs_budget_250_million_where_does/ | {
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"text": [
"Ever watch the credits at the end of a video game or movie? That's where",
"Developers, computers, office space, rights to songs... They pay for a lot of stuff to create such massive games. Read the credits. ",
"The salaries take the biggest chunk. Programming is free per se, as is producing artwork. Programming especially pays really well.\n\nA good real example of this is Skullgirls, the development costs of Squigly. From indiegogo:\n\n$48,000: Staff Salaries - 8 people for 10 weeks\n$30,000: Animation and Clean-up Contracting\n $4,000: Voice recording\n $2,000: Hit-box Contracting\n $5,000: Audio Implementation Contracting\n$20,000: QA Testing\n$10,000: 1st Party Certification\n$10,500: IndieGoGo and Payment Processing Fees\n$20,500: Manufacturing and Shipping Physical Rewards\n\nThat's $48 000 just for 8 people over 10 weeks. That's roughly $2400 per month for one person. For a big scale developer like Rockstar, the salaries are probably higher. Let's say $3000. If there were 100 people who worked on the game for 5 years, the development costs (aka salaries) are already 18 million dollars. Now obviously there are way more people than that, but that's just a very rough estimate. Then there are the myriad of other much smaller things, but they all accumulate very quickly. Then there's the marketing, which takes a massive share of the overall development cost.\n\nSo yeah, if you look at the credits, there are so many names. All of them needed to get paid.",
"There are a lot of people that contribute to developing a game, and it takes many years to build most triple A games. There are programmers, level designers, modelers, concept artists, animators, audio engineers, voice actors, testers, language localizers, writers, production staff, support staff, management. There is marketing, advertising, producing physical media, and distribution costs to contend with as well. I am probably missing some other things, but triple A games can easily out pace the movie industry in terms of production time and cost. Edit: forgot to add musicians and licensing costs too. \r\rTL/DR; Lots of people + many years = lots of cost."
]
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ed17ko | how does a sink know that the person has pulled up the lever for cold or hot water? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ed17ko/eli5_how_does_a_sink_know_that_the_person_has/ | {
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"The sink doesn't have a clue, nor does it care. The handle for cold water is connected to a pipe that carries cold water. The hot water handle is connected to a pipe that carries hot water."
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33z69f | baltimore riots | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33z69f/eli5_baltimore_riots/ | {
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"Fred Grey was arrested on charges of threatening people with a knife. He was brutally dragged into a police van, and 30 minutes later his spine was mostly severed, which wound up killing him. The recent stream of black people getting killed by police in dubious circumstances (or straight-up murdered as the guy in NC) has angered the black community, for good reason. Anger leads to protest, protest leads to rioting when the crowd doesn't have a central leader."
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1ddddx | why are some people stupid? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ddddx/eli5_why_are_some_people_stupid/ | {
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"Variation - we can't all be average.",
"I personally believe (and have no evidence to back it up, it's just my opinion) that everyone has the same relative amount of mental capacity but somewhere in our lives we subconsciously decide what we're going to use it on and then do so for the rest of our lives. \r\rThe main reason I have this theory is because I'm always amazed (less so since formulating this) at the kinds of things \"stupid\" people know, realize, or are aware of that completely escapes \"smart\" people. Some people give a lot of their mental prowess to simply maintaining what they believe is a proper method of living. They're referred to as stuck in their ways, and even though true, it is likely that few people in the world could detail the kinds of things they're \"stuck\" in. Others yet become fascinated with the stars and no matter how stressful, they determine themselves to learn all they can about the universe and are called nerds, and considered intellectual, yet things like the simplicity of picking up women or making friends escapes them. \r\rI try not to judge people because I have learned from experience that *everyone* has something they can teach me. The homeless man on the corner, and even former president George W. Bush have some knowledge that I don't. I was taught this very pointedly ten years ago when my autistic cousin showed me how to use something I was about to throw out because it seemed useless to me. "
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6e4rrh | what's the difference between a flash drive and external hard drive? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6e4rrh/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_flash_drive/ | {
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"You can now get external flash drives. \n\nA traditional hard drive has a disk similar to a CD but is made to an industry standard. A flash drive is like a USB stick which is a solid state and means no time wasted spinning the disk loading the info. ",
"An external hard disk is called as such because it utilizes a Hard Disk Drive (HDD). One of these drives has a metal platter with different magnetic sections, called sectors, that are read by a small magnetic sensor called a head on the end of an actuator arm. Many people are now moving over to flash storage, however, which is what a flash drive utilizes and thus is named for. Flash storage does not contain moving parts but rather is similar to a large grid of capacitors and transistors that are used to keep data. It is faster to access than an HDD because you do not need to wait for the disk to spin to the correct location. It can decay, however, unlike an HDD. The more an area of flash is written the more it wears out and eventually it will fail.",
"To add onto the other comments, hard drives are mechanical, so they are very sensitive to physical abuse, especially if they're running at the time.\n\nDrop a spinning hard drive, and the heads slam into the disk, destroying both instantaneously. Lights out for your precious data.\n\nYou can drop and shake an SSD all day long even while it's running full steam ahead, and it simply won't care because there are no moving parts to get damaged.\n\nAlso, since they're mechanical, HDDs can also wear out over time. \n\nHowever, at the end of life, hard drives still win. When a hard drive dies of old age or suffers an electronic as opposed to a mechanical failure, the data can still be recovered professionally as long as the disks inside are intact. \n\nAn SSD, however, is pretty much impossible to retrieve data off of once it dies."
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cmmnps | when you hear something like "the dow is down 500 points" what does this mean? specifically the "points" part | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cmmnps/eli5_when_you_hear_something_like_the_dow_is_down/ | {
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"The Dow is an index of the market. It indicates how the market as a whole on average is doing. The points is referring to the current Dow value. Let's say the Dow is 25,000 today but falls 500 points tomorrow. The Dow would then be at 24,500. This is a fall of approx 2%.\n\nThe largest companies on the stock exchange make up the Dow. The company themselves did not lose 500 points. As companies are not valued in points but in dollars. On average across the board the largest companies lost 2% of their market value. This does not mean all companies lost share value, just on average across the board they lost 2%.",
"Dow Jones Industrial Average is a stock market index made up of 30 large companies in a variety of sectors (some examples are Apple, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson, American Express), it’s used as a general gauge on the stock market. It has lately been trading around 26,000 points but today fell almost 800 points, or almost 3%, suggesting investors have strongly negative feelings toward recent Trump trade decisions and how those will impact the economy.",
"What’s the points thing? How are points calculated?",
"The Points are referring to the general dollar value of the stock based on how many people are trading it versus own it.\n\nAnd the Dow is just an average of all the stocks in its index, so if one company has a bad day, the Dow doesn't move much.\n\nIf multiple companies in the Dow index have a bad day, the Dow suffers and its average moves down.\n\nWhile usually a sign of bad news, sometimes it is an overreaction where people sell to protect their investment but repurchase days later. \n\nSo, the Dow could be down 789 points today, but by next week it has gone up 1500 and recovered all that was lost.",
"**edit** This comment is NOT correct. Please ignore. Leaving the comment up so others might learn.\nBeginning of incorrect comment:\n\nA point is a dollar.\n\nWhen a stock is being traded at $5.00 per share on Monday, then on Tuesday it is being traded at $4.00 per share, that stock has gone down one point.",
"Lot of mostly correct stuff below, but here's the ELI5 skinny:\n\nOver a hundred years ago, a guy named Dow came up with a concept of tracking \"the general market\", instead of each individual stock. He, along with a stats guy named Jones, created an index called the Dow Jones Transportation Index (DJT) in 1884 - this was a price-weighted index of (initially) nine railroads; eventually this grew to 20 companies in areas such as freight, airlines, etc. In 1896, they added the Dow-Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) of 30 major industrial companies. (The industrials are what most people think of when they refer to the \"Dow\".) Finally, the Dow-Jones Utility Average of 15 major utilities - electricity, gas, etc. - was created as well. Together, they form the DJ65, although that is not followed as closely as the DJIA. \n\nEach index was an attempt to gauge the overall movement of the market. For example, suppose Exxon is up $3, but GM is down $1.50, while Caterpillar is up $0.75 but Apple is down $1. Did the overall market go up or down that day? All stock indices attempt to answer that question. The Dow is considered the narrowest of these indices, as it only includes 30 stocks, whereas the S & P500 contains 500 stocks, and the Russell 2000 and Wilshire 5000 contain even more. \n\nOne of the tricks to keeping the index meaningful is adjusting for stock activity (like splits), and for corporate activity (many companies have been removed from, and added to, the Dow over the years). For example, Apple splits their stock 2:1, so what was a $100 stock is now $50. How does this get reflected in the average? The DowJones people came up with a mathematical technique to adjust for this called the Dow divisor, which is too far beyond ELI5 to explain here. \n\nIn addition, some companies fail. For a long time, Woolworth's was a member of the Dow, but in the early 1990's, after many terrible years, it was removed from the DJIA, and replaced by Wal-Mart. Similar fates have befallen such former stars as Western Electric, Bethlehem Steel, US Steel, and International Harvester. Each time a company is added/removed from the list, the Dow is recalculated so that the effect of the change isn't noticeable. This allows us to use the index over the years. \n\nA fall of 500 points today is not the same event as a fall of 500 points in the 1960's, because the index is so much higher. In the 60's, the Dow was trying to top 1,000; today, it's about 25,000. A fall of 500 points in 1968 would have been 50% of the Dow's value, and would have been a catastrophe, but a fall of 500 points today is 2%, and while troubling, is not nearly as bad. \n\nIn general, rising markets signal confidence in the economy and business; falling markets signal the opposite. But one day's movement is generally just noise; you need to look at longer trends to see what's happening.",
"One thing that is kind of funny is that everyone will tell you that the S & P 500 is more relevant--and they are right, and this is something I've known for like 20 years--but I always look at the Dow first.\n\nIf you follow baseball, the Dow is kind of like batting average--it's a benchmark that's been around a long time, but other far more useful measuring sticks have been developed since. And I still look at batting average first before looking at WAR or OPS. Old habits die hard.",
"Great response everyone, Thank you so much!",
"It's a barometer for the stock market. It's a small group of stocks that are meant to represent the stock market as a whole. \n\nThis basket of stocks are blended into an average, and based on the movement of each of those stocks the Dow moves based on a weighted average. \n\nWithout trying to sound like a crazy person: The headlines make it sound really great when you hear am absolute number \"500 points\" \"700 points!\", but in reality, you need to look at the percentage that it moves. 3% - while not minor - doesn't have the same \"oh shit!\" impact as 700 points.",
"You know how in Civilization games at a certain point you can see every civ's score giving you a general idea how everyone is doing? If suddenly every civ's score dropped like 50 points in one turn (which is unlikely but let's just say) then you know something really majorly f'd up just happened in the game.",
"Sounds like the OP really wants to know what an INDEX is. I'm not a finance expert but maybe someone can build off of this:\n\nAs people have said already, the Dow or other market \"indexes\" are an attempt to measure the health of the economy. They look at the performance of a group of stocks. The price of each company's stocks may go up or may go down independent of how other companies are doing. The index provides a big-picture look across multiple companies.\n\nIf I asked you to give me a snap shot of how these companies are doing on a day-to-day basis, you might be tempted to give me the AVERAGE of all the companies' stock prices over each day. Like tracking the average price of milk/gallon over time.\n\nHowever, stock from company A is not the same as company B. When you buy stock in a company, you're actually buying something called a \"share\". Different companies have different number of shares. A share is very much what it sounds like; if I had a pie and I wanted to share it with multiple people, I'd cut it into several slices. But how many slices? Now if I wanted to sell a piece of that pie, how much would I sell it for?\n\nWhat's worse is that I can change not only the price per piece of pie, I can change the number of pieces (shares).\n\nLet's say there are other people selling pie, but some people have bigger pie, smaller pie, pies with more pieces, less pieces, and the prices per piece are all over the place because maybe apple pie is selling better than peach at this time of the year. Now I ask you to tell me how the pie market is doing, accounting for all of these differences. It probably seems like taking an average of the price/piece of pie doesn't really cut it.\n\nSo instead you, you make a pie \"index\" which is just a fancy way of saying, you're looking at multiple VARIABLES or PROPERTIES of each pie provider, not just comparing price/pie. You take into account how large the pie is, how many pieces there are and how much people are willing to buy the pieces for. Maybe you can come up with some other useful properties to measure the health of the pie market. Then you take these variables from all of the major pie companies, put them into a fancy formula you've developed where you multiply things or divide things and at the end, you get a number. \n\nThough this number might have something called a \"unit\", like \"$/lb\", it's probably something very complicated and ugly. So you decide to make your pie index sound cooler, and you name the number that your formula spits out a \"point\". It sounds way better to say that the pie market has increased 10 pie points rather than 10 $/cubic-inches-of-pie/piece-of-pie (yuck).\n\nLastly, let's say you were looking at 10 different pie providers for your index (even though there are many others who produce pie). Suddenly, peach pie--one of your 10 providers--goes out of business. If you took the average of share prices, this would be a HUGE deal. But you were smart and accounted for multiple variables which does something called NORMALIZING. This means, regardless of the price per piece of pie, you can swap pecan pie in for peach pie and your magical \"points\" aren't affected that much. This makes your pie index way cooler than a boring average!\n\nFun fact, similar mathematical gymnastics (indexes) are used in science and engineering (but the units are different). \n\n//\n\nTL;DR: Indexes help compare the performance of dissimilar things. In the case of the economy, stocks from Company A are not the same as Company B so if you want to look at the performance of a market as a whole, you need to create an \"index\" which looks a many important properties of a stock. Because indexes look at many properties, the actual units of the index are complicated and \"points\" is used because it sounds better.",
" \n\nYou walk into a arcade game room full of pinball machines with different scores. A manager named Dow wants an idea how high all the high scores on his machines are at any given time. He compiles a list of his 30 most popular pinball machines and combines them into an index. Index like average (weighted) of the high scores of those 30 machines. He comes into work one day and all of a sudden, the index (average) of those machines is down 500 points b/c player's aren't playing and demanding refunds on the quarters they spent on the 30 machines. He exclaims \"OMG THE PLAYERS TODAY SUX!! Bringing my arcade average down puny noobs F\\*\\*\\*! Sh\\*t i'm losing money, my owners are going to be pissed.\" The next day he comes in and the index (average is up 1000 points, he exclaims \"BOO YEA worthless players finally improving. Hope they pump more quarters into those machines and keep setting new high scores. My owners gotta get paid so i can have a job.\"\n\nIn real life terms, the Dow index being down 500 points just means more people are selling their stocks than people buying stocks for the 30 large revenue companies in the Dow Index. 500 points is nothing to be scared of. If it was 5000 i would be worried b/c when more people sell stocks than buy, it usually signals a recession coming.\n\nQuarters = money buying stocks. Owners = investors, pinball machines = companies stocks.",
"PSA: The Dow is actually a pretty crappy gauge of the stock market. The only reasons why it still gets referenced are: 1) tradition and 2) Dow Jones owns one of the best financial news sources in the world (Wall Street Journal). It’s the WSJ’s one flaw, in my opinion.\n\nBetter stock index: S & P 500, which is market cap weighted (instead of stupidly price weighted like the Dow). And the S & P 500 tracks the largest 500 stocks (instead of only 30 industrial stocks like the Dow).\n\nEven better stock index: Total US Stock index, like VTI for example (Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF). This index includes essentially all US public stocks, so there are 3,600 companies in it instead of only 500 like the S & P 500 or 30 like the Dow.\n\nEven better stock index: Total WORLD Stock index, like VT for example (Vanguard Total World Stock ETF). This index includes essentially all public stocks in the world, so there are 8,300 companies in it instead of only US ones like VTI or only the large US ones like the S & P 500 or only a few large US industrials like the Dow.\n\nContext is key 🔑",
"* Take the 30 stocks that are in the Dow\n\n* Add up all the prices (if the Dow was made up of 2 stocks, stock A and B, with prices $1/share and $3/share, you would be at $4 on this step)\n\n* Divide by the Dow divisor. This is a number that can only be computed by historical averages, so it’s hard to pin down exactly how it’s calculated. For now, it’s roughly 0.14\n\nThe number you got is the Dow. \n\nEveryday the prices change, and the Dow divisor stays relatively the same. So when all the prices go up, the Dow goes up. The number the Dow increases by is the “points gained”.",
"Just ignore the DOW its a useless index that basically exists due to historical legacy. Follow the SP500 instead its a way better market indicator. And ignore the points since they are also meaningless. Look at the % change on the day to see how the market did that day.",
"It doesn't look like anyone answered the part of your question about what a \"point\" is. (TLDR: A point is about 15 cents.) First of all, understand that the Dow is a rough measure of the health of the stock market, and in some sense of the U.S. economy as a whole.\n\nImagine that you wanted to buy one share in each of the 30 most popular stocks. That would cost you 3,838.52 today (not counting broker fees, etc). This is what the Dow used to mean (except it was 12 stocks instead of 30). But sometimes, companies do things that shouldn't affect the score. An example is a stock split, which means that everybody who owned 1 share now owns 2 shares. Or maybe a stock isn't very popular anymore and should be replaced in the formula by a different stock (we call this reindexing). So some math dude decided that a \"point\" doesn't mean a \"dollar\" anymore, but should be adjusted so that splits and reindexing shouldn't change the score.\n\nRight now, if you think in terms of buying one of each if the 30 most popular stocks, one \"point\" equals about 14.7 cents. So if you hear \"the Dow fell by 500 points,\" that means the price of one of each of the 30 most popular stocks fell by about $74."
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63vsx8 | why do icebergs sink a portion of its entirely body? why not the whole? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63vsx8/eli5_why_do_icebergs_sink_a_portion_of_its/ | {
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"Ice has a lower density of water -- about 91% of water. Since it's less dense, it won't completely sink, but it's still dense enough that most of it will be underwater."
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684p4m | are bears closer related to felines or apes? and if applicable, why is this a dumb question? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/684p4m/eli5_are_bears_closer_related_to_felines_or_apes/ | {
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"Bears and Cats are both members of the order Carnivora, while apes are the member of the order Primates. So bears are closer to cats than apes.",
"They're closer to sea lions than both felines or apes. They are a basically a dog, which is equally distant to cats and apes depending what you judge it by, but in terms of scientific classification they are closer to felines as they both belong to the Carnivora order.",
"The ancestors of bears and cats split off from one another roughtly 42 million years ago. The ancestors for bears and primates were likely split ~100 million years ago. And it's not a dumb question, these things are *not* easily reckoned. "
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2fci5y | why doesn't google adopt reddits comment system for youtube when it's obviously way better? | I just don't get it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fci5y/eli5_why_doesnt_google_adopt_reddits_comment/ | {
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"Cause Google + must be made to be successful.",
"How would it look if they up and said \"welp, we've failed. Let's just use what that other company did.\"?\n\nIn an ideal world, everyone would think, \"Good for them, trying to improve the user experience\"\n\nBut you ain't living in an ideal world, sunshine.",
"Surely it would be simple for Yougle (cmon, its better than Gootube) to implement threaded comments. I don't know how their pages are configured, but the comments seem to take so long to load as well.",
"Google are generally terrible at UI. They don't really care about the user experience. Their successful products are basically monopolies so they don't have to care. And their unsuccessful products don't make any money, so they care way more about getting them to grow and make money and they rarely bother to put time and energy into the user experience. ",
"YouTube is the Comcast of user-generated video streaming sites. There is no viable alternative to YouTube. There is nowhere else on the internet where you can watch your favorite professional gamer, favorite music video, and favorite home-made video of a cat falling off a window sill on the same website. Nobody uses Google+ for any other reason than to create a YouTube account, and the comment system is practically broken. Dozens of the website's attributes don't function properly if they even work at all. Google has removed features that allowed you to personalize your YouTube page to the point where there is three fucking buttons on your channel and the background is white. Google also implemented a copyrighted content identification system, which has destroyed peoples' entire careers who used YouTube as a primary source of income, just so they could get some endorsement money by the companies who asked Google to do it. Many people are upset with the direction YouTube has taken within the past 3-4 years. But guess what? Google doesn't give a fuck. You have nowhere else to go. Thats why the comments, along with hundreds of other problems with the website, will never be fixed. ",
"Reddit's comments aren't all that great...",
"Why do you assume \"it's obviously way better\"? Note that the websites have different goals..Youtube being a video streaming website while Reddit being a content aggregation website. Different goals could very well require different comment systems to have users interact the way they want them to."
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3c1fs2 | can someone break down what the hell is happening? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c1fs2/eli5can_someone_break_down_what_the_hell_is/ | {
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"A popular admin was recently fired. This decision was not communicated to the moderators of several subreddits who relied on her as a go-between between them and celebrities (for AMA threads). This decision, along with a series of other acts showing poor communication between the admins and moderators caused the moderators to \"go dark\" in several major subs, privatizing the subreddits to prevent people going on as a n act of protest. The moderators have since ended the strike, apparently because the admins have been in contact and have stated they are willing to make some concessions. We'll see how it all progresses."
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2i8b9y | why am i always so cold that i shiver uncontrollably when i get out of bed early to an alarm, but when i wake up later and naturally, i am a comfortable temperature? | **Bonus info:** The temperature in my room stays constant throughout the night.
**Bonus Question:** Does anyone have a suggestion on how to help me be warmer when I get up? I have to be up and moving by 3:15am tomorrow...so any advice would be appreciated. (It is hard enough to get out of bed early, but being so cold makes it even worse.) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2i8b9y/eli5_why_am_i_always_so_cold_that_i_shiver/ | {
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"Your body temperature varies throughout the day based on circadian rhythms. Average temperature is 37 C +/- 0.5 C throughout the day with lowest temperature in the mornings and highest in the evenings. \n\nThese very small internal changes can make you feel cold or hot depending on the circumstances.\n\nPhysical exercise like doing 20 push ups when you wake up can help warm you up as the increase in heart rate increases blood flow. Stimulants like coffee will do the same thing.",
"Human biorhythms work in 1.5 hour intervals. Try sleeping exactly 7.5 or 6 hours and see if it makes a difference. I've found that going to sleep at exactly 10pm allows me to wake up perfectly fine at 5:30am. "
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184e10 | the difference between producer, executive producer and director in movies | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/184e10/eli5_the_difference_between_producer_executive/ | {
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"Executive Producer: The one signing the checks, so approving everything.\n\nProducer: The one who tries to make sure the film will be as successful as possible, both through \"advising\" on the script, story, casting, etc., and in the eventual marketing of the film.\n\nDirector: The person who actually makes the film and oversees the various phases of putting it together. Depending upon the director's contract, they may or may not be able to over-rule the producer on requested changes.",
"Well if we relate it to building a house:\n\nThe Executive Producer is the one who gives the money or some part of the money needed, along with their name, to attract the right builders and contractors to get the job done. It's common to see big names attached as exec producers on projects you would never imagine them working on. This is to build hype but also to attract bigger talent/staff. This can almost be looked at as a sponsor in that they are not necessarily in charge. \n\nThe Producer is responsible of all that is needed to build the house: finding material, finding the builders, finding the locations, etc (they have dept heads which do all the work but the producer is responsible for it all getting done.) This would be considered the boss of the project, though that really depends on the agreement with the director. \n\nThe Director is like the foreman. He has the blueprint (storyboards), he is there, real time, telling everyone what to do and overseeing each wall being built, ensuring that it maintains the design they are going for. He screams when things don't go well and is generally the person everyone is trying to ensure is happy. Director's will keep you into extended hours if that shot isn't captured just right. \n\nWho is responsible for the vision of the house is more difficult to determine. Many times it is a shared vision and most times it negotiated by all 3+ (there is usually more than 1 exec producer) though, arguably, the director's vision is what drives the look and feel, at least in the smaller details. ",
"Let's put this in terms of an actual film, say Lord of the Rings.\n\nImagine the fellowship are a cast of actors. Gandalf spends the whole film keeping them in order, making sure they are in the right places at the right time and generally holds a greater sense of everything that is happening. He's the **Director**.\n\nLord Elrond doesn't actually take the journey to Mordor with them, but he talks with important people on the Council and makes sure the trip has been approved and everything can go smoothly. He's the **Producer**.\n\nGaladriel shows up to provide the fellowship with gifts. She essentially helps fund the fellowship but other than that serves little purpose. As a thanks, the fellowship decide to credit her as the **Executive Producer**.\n\nSource: I'm a film student.",
"Lets use McDonalds as an example, with a burger you order there being a movie.\n\nRay Kroc, the owner of the McDonalds namesake is the **executive producer**. He owns the company and if he wants, can be a main part of what happens, like what promotional burgers they currently offer. Other times though, he can just sit back and let the company run itself.\n\nThe store manager is the **producer**. He's in charge of making sure the store is profitable and that burgers are delivered in a timely manner. He doesn't make the food himself, but he orders the supply of buns, wrappers, and the personnel necessary to make it.\n\nThe cook is your **director**. He's the one that actually makes the food. Lets assume he takes great care in working with the condiments, meat, and cheese to get them perfect on your burger, making it the best burger he can before promotion wraps it, and the theatre puts it in a bag for your consumption.\n\nMichael Bay is a cook that gives you a Fillet O' Fish with no tartar sauce when you ordered a Big Mac, then insists it's better than what you wanted.",
"Tom Wilson (Biff Tannen) sums it up at around 1.05 onwards in this video.\n_URL_0_ ",
"I'm seeing a lot of analogies in this thread, so I wanted to throw in my favorite comparison, from Jerry Bruckheimer.\n\nThe management of a team is a lot like a sports team. The cast and crew are the players on the floor. The director is the Head Coach instructing them on how he wants them to play. The producer is the General Manager. He doesn't (or shouldn't) be meddling in the gameplay of the players, but he's an overall umbrella of the operation (making sure they have a place to play, negotiating contracts, taking care of logistics). The Executive Producer or the Studio would be the team owner.",
"Movie = race\n\nDirector = jockey\n\nProducer = trainer\n\nExec. producer = owner\n\nKinda.",
"Executive Producer = Money\n\nProducer's get everything together. They run the production.\n\nDirectors have much more of a creative role, telling actors what to do etc. "
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2wgpfa | how can a judge order a man to pay child support for a child that is demonstrably not the man's own (and with whom there has never even been a nominal custodial relationship)? | Please note the case of [Carnell Alexander](_URL_0_).
The man's DNA proves he is not the father and the child's mother admits that she lied in the paperwork.
The document server claims that Alexander was notified in person of his parental status (thus starting a timeline for response). Yet, this was impossible because he was in jail.
So there are two instances of fraud. To add, he has never had a custodial relationship with the child.
Yet, the judge orders full payment or punishment.
Can someone explain? Can this judge's ruling be legally upheld? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wgpfa/eli5_how_can_a_judge_order_a_man_to_pay_child/ | {
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"The time for him to bring these issues to court was 25 years ago, when he first discovered that he was ordered to pay child support. It's too late now.",
"Didn't he sign his name on the birth certificate (knowing the child wasn't biologically his) and that's why he is being forced to pay child support? That's what I heard.",
" > Alexander says he didn't learn of this until years later when he was stopped for a traffic violation and was told that he was being arrested for back child support.\n\nThis happened in the early 90s, according to other articles on the topic. Even if you start the timeline there instead of when he was supposedly served (and apparently wasn't) with notification of being named as the father, he's still 20 years late in correcting it.",
"Not all states / countries require you to be the biological father of a child in order for the mother to collect child support (and vice versa). Some only require you to have been in a relationship with the mother where you provided the financial support, or for the child to consider you to be his/her father figure.\n\nSo maybe the law doesn't say what you think it says.\n\n\"Can it be legally upheld?\" Well... if it was, then yes."
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7dlh7m | why social media apps prefer showing a trending or popular timeline as opposed to a chronological one? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7dlh7m/eli5_why_social_media_apps_prefer_showing_a/ | {
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"It shows stuff people are more likely to want to see (popular stuff) so they keep using the service as they keep seeing relevant things",
"Remember, on platforms where you're using it for free, you're not the customer, you're the product (the advertisers are the customers). So they want to show things you're more likely to click on first."
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1pscsh | how does the buying, selling, and timing of tv commercials work and not affect other show's time slots? | Episodes all have varying lengths. Episodes airing for the first time seems easy enough to guess how it works. There is an expected viewership number, demographic, etc., and with the show being cut to a certain length, the remaining time can be bid on and that's a commercial. But does the broadcast station give them *exactly* 30 minutes (or 60, etc.) in order to keep an overall broadcast schedule?
Does the network "advertise" to advertisers (e.g. we have huge viewership of 18-40 y.o. males, sell your commercial here), or is it the other way around?
What about when a show goes to syndication? Does the station have to fill the same amount of minutes/seconds with commercials the showed originally aired with?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pscsh/eli5how_does_the_buying_selling_and_timing_of_tv/ | {
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"I can respond to the breaks part of your question. The shows have a TRT or total run time, and segment times, mid-break, and end break. These times are put into a computer and adjusted within a few seconds with :03 of bumpers to make up the total. There's a formula that's been used for years that the breaks averaged 2:02... But today they are getting longer. Since it's all file based today, it 's timed down to 3 seconds over a 24 hour period. "
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f6mwm2 | why do quick, deep, breaths cause a feeling like a high? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f6mwm2/eli5_why_do_quick_deep_breaths_cause_a_feeling/ | {
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"because you're hyperventilating and you're body doesn't like that.\n\nwhat's cool, though, is if you intentionally hyperventilate, your hands will eventually become painfully numb and your arms will spasm. the numbness will creep up your arms, almost like when they fall asleep in the middle of the night. we called them \"t rex arms\" when I got my wilderness first responder cert. if you can stand to not panic and prevent yourself from actually hyperventilating, it's a cool experience. if you think you'd freak out, you could have a friend be a breathing coach for you to calm you back down. \n\nthat's why it's important to help someone who's having a panic attack... the breathing is a relatively \"easy\" thing to fix, but it can go sideways and scary real fast if they don't understand going on.",
"Re breathing in a paperback for a couple of minutes restored lost C02 and reverses symptoms almost at once. High is not quite it. More like dizzy or faint",
"Specifically, when you hyperventilate, you lower the concentration of CO2 (carbon dioxide) in your blood. This changes your blood chemistry; your blood becomes more alkalotic (less acidic -- the concentration of H+ or hydrogen ions lessens). As a result of this, you develop a temporary lowering of calcium ions (Ca++) in your blood (they get bound to a protein called albumin).\n\nCalcium ions are important in muscle contraction and nerve conduction. Hypocalcemia (low blood calcium) produces the feelings you are talking about. Nerve conduction is altered (so you get tingling around your mouth, and in the hands, for example), and muscle contraction increases."
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26z9lf | how is the amount to sue determined? i understand that some amounts are specific to the loss but how to people sue for 1 million dollar for something like a vet secretly kept their dog alive and didn't tell them. how is that and emotional amounts determined? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26z9lf/eli5how_is_the_amount_to_sue_determined_i/ | {
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"It depends on why you're being sued. Some things have the damages you can sue for laid out in the law. Others are based on how much actual loss you incurred. The variable amount for \"pain and suffering\" varies widely depending on the specific circumstances behind the lawsuit. Determining that value can depend on things like the relative worth of both parties (a middle-class individual suing a giant corporation would get more than if they sued another middle-class individual), the emotional weight of the case (the aforementioned dog example would play to jury sympathy and get more money than somebody just damaging your car).",
"Three common types of damages: compensatory (restorative - to recognize the loss suffered by pl), punitive (punishment for flagrant breach of pl's rights) and exemplary (societal deterrent - to make an example of them). There are also other types such as aggravated damages, where there are aggravating factors that made the breach worse.\n\nWhat damages will be awarded is largely a matter of judicial discretion, with some guidance from precedents. For example, a successful action in negligence might result in punitive and/or compensatory damages, whereas a successful action in gross negligence might cross the threshold to award additional exemplary damages. In other words, the act of [gross] negligence was so reckless that exemplary damages be awarded to act as a deterrent to the rest of society.\n\nThe amount claimed by the plaintiff could be anything, but typically will be within a range established by preceding cases. \n\nContrary to other comments, the jury does not assess damages. A jury is the trier of fact and the judge is the trier of law. The jury determines guilt or non-guilt, and if guilt is established, the judge will make an award of damages and costs.\n\nIn some jurisdictions (e.g. New Zealand) excessive claims for damages by the plaintiff can result in the Judge awarding costs to the defendant (i.e. payable by the pl) (see: s 43, Defamation Act 1992)."
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97llzh | how does an ice cream maker work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/97llzh/eli5_how_does_an_ice_cream_maker_work/ | {
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"Ice cream needs to be constantly stirred while it freezes. That way you entrain air into the mixture and get a nice texture.\n\nA home ice cream maker has three parts - a bowl, a paddle, and a turntable.\n\nThe bowl is filled with coolant, which you freeze. When you pour the ingredients into that bowl, they will eventually freeze.\n\nThe turntable makes the bowl spin while the ingredients are freezing. The paddle stays stationary in the mixture. As the bowl turns, since the paddle is staying still, the mixture gets stirred by the paddle.\n\nThat's really all there is to it. ",
"Ice cream is frozen custard (or something similar to custard). However it's frozen in a special way. It's churned or starred constantly while it freezes. This process creates lots of tiny bubbles (basically it's frozen foam) for the special texture of ice cream. To do that you need a way to constantly stir ice cream, and freeze it very quickly. \n\nHome ice cream makers usually have a double bath, allowing very cold ice water (the salt added to the water allows the water to chill below 0C/32F while remaining liquid) and either a hand crank or a motor to spin a paddle that churns the custard as heat is transferred into the cold ice water and it freezes. ",
"The air argument is not correct. It is the formation of specific forms of ice crystals in the mix that give its texture. The constant churning is what enables this. If you don't churn it while freezing, you get large chunks of ice forming. Not very smooth.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > ABSTRACT: The smoothness and perceived quality of an ice cream depends in large part on the small size of ice crystals in the product. Understanding the mechanisms responsible for producing the disc‐shaped crystals found in ice cream will greatly aid manufacturers in predicting how processing and formulation changes will affect their product.\n\nThis is why refreezing meld ice cream is never the same. You would have to refreeze it in a churn to get it back."
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1oag2l | why are people so fascinated with popping and gore? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oag2l/eli5_why_are_people_so_fascinated_with_popping/ | {
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"WTF is popping and gore?!"
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flmzg5 | after a tooth is removed how is it that the hole left gets completely filled over time? | I understand how the wound would heal but how does the body know to fill in the entire hole left by the tooth removal? That space didn’t have any gums before, since a tooth was there but it all gets filled. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/flmzg5/eli5_after_a_tooth_is_removed_how_is_it_that_the/ | {
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" > At just 24 hours after your extraction, the focus of the activity inside your socket revolves around the blood clot that’s formed.\nThe clot itself is composed of platelets (sticky cell fragments that initiated the clot’s formation) and red and white blood cells, all embedded together in a fibrin gel. (It’s the fibrin gel that gives the clot its semi-solid consistency.)\nStarting at this point and continuing on during the days that follow, platelets in the clot and other types of cells attracted to it begin to produce chemical factors and mediators that initiate and promote the healing process.\n\nHere's a good explanation I found. Wounds in your mouth heal *very* quickly compared to the rest of your body. The hole is filled in with platelets in your blood, blood cells, fibrin (which is what makes normal scabs) gel, and these other cells are attracted to the wound. Much like white blood cells are attracted to foreign bodies in a cut or something. The chemical process initiated by all this tells your body to build new gum cells in this area.",
"Dentist here - inflammation and normal trauma processes carry out cell growth, tissue differentiation, repair, etc. like they would for any wound. The body doesn’t like voids and will fill them. They first heal to close the wound, then slowly over time remodel into a smoother shape (bone and soft tissue).",
"Alllriiigghttt, sooo this is my forte!\nLemme explain!\n\nThe tooth is embedded inside a bone. \nNow, the inner part of the bone surrounding the tooth has special cells.\nThis cells create more bone.\n\nNormally, when the tooth is present, it acts as a stopper, and prevents those cells from producing bone haphazardly, and a nice little balance is maintained.\n\nOnce you get the tooth removed, well, those special bone forming cells start multiplying and producing bone to fill the hole.\n\nNow, imagine a 3-D structure. The bone left after you remove the tooth is like a donut. The edges of the donut act as a signal for those special cells to stop filing the hole with bone.\nThe bone is covered on top with gums, and that heals up like a normal wound; and forms a nice cover layer for that new bone.\n\nCapisce?"
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fluzwa | why do babies sleep with arms up? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fluzwa/eli5_why_do_babies_sleep_with_arms_up/ | {
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"When I had a kid the doctor told me that you swaddle a kid (wrap them tight in a blanket) to resemble the tightness of a womb and when you let them go free they just don’t know what to do with their arms so they just move them around",
"Not a scientist or anything, just my observations of my 7 week old twins here. \n\nBabies have a really strong startle reflex. You know that feeling when you're almost asleep and you suddenly think you're falling so you jump a mile? Babies do that pretty much constantly, and they throw their arms up in the air every time, I guess in an attempt to \"catch\" themselves. When they relax afterwards, the arms just go wherever gravity leaves them, since babies don't have a lot of control of their hands even when they're not asleep, and that position is usually up by their heads. \n\nOne big reason people swaddle their babies (wrap them up tightly in blanket) is so they can't move their arms, so that this startle reflex doesn't wake them up any more than it already does.",
"Scientists speculate that it might be due to the Moro reflex (When startled a baby will raise its arms). If the baby then falls asleep the arms will end up beside their head as they relax.",
"My baby (only 2 months) sleeps starfish on her back. Looks like she just got drunk and passed out flat on her back with arms straight up. Super weird."
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6ufrm7 | why do we start talking about deep and introspective things with our friends/loved ones late at night? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ufrm7/eli5_why_do_we_start_talking_about_deep_and/ | {
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"I think I can offer at least one contributing factor.\n\nWhen we are tired, or sleepy, that tends to lead to a release of inhibition. During the day, we inhibit the \"heavy\" conversations in favor of light, small talk because we see it as inoffensive/safe to all people. But when we get to know someone better, we feel better about moving past that small talk into more complex subjects which could have the potential to offend, but could also cause a deeper connection to be built. \n\nSo, into the later night, we let go of this inhibition that holds us back, because our tiredness/sleepyness causes us to be more \"careless\" in a small/subtle way. We are more likely to take the risk of offending someone or learning that they do not think like us, in order to try and foster a deeper connection with them.\n\nSome, maybe even most, of my heaviest introspective conversations took place under the influence of drugs and alcohol. I think that's because I and the other person had let go of that inhibition in favor of diving deep into those topics, both to build a better friendship and to see if we were not alone in thinking those things. \n\nWe are more likely to consider opening up about things on our minds that we are not sure are on others, when we are not in full control of our actions. And sleepiness is a kind of drunkenness."
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63wzp5 | would it be possible to turn the giant pacific garbage patch into a floating territory? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63wzp5/eli5_would_it_be_possible_to_turn_the_giant/ | {
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"It's a region with a higher concentration of plastic particulate that the background levels, and in parts it can be *very* high, but mostly it's not a naked-eye phenomenon. Most of all it's not a big pile of garbage... that would be much easier to manage. The problem is that the plastic breaks down into *tiny* fragments. Now, it's true that there are some sub-patches (MUCH smaller than the overall one) in which macroscopic garbage floating on the surface has collected, but that's not the bulk of the patch.\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > For many people, the idea of a “garbage patch” conjures up images of an island of trash floating on the ocean. In reality, these patches are almost entirely made up of tiny bits of plastic, called microplastics. Microplastics can’t always be seen by the naked eye. Even satellite imagery doesn’t show a giant patch of garbage. The microplastics of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can simply make the water look like a cloudy soup. This soup is intermixed with larger items, such as fishing gear and shoes. ",
"While there might be some patches of plastic floating together, there isn't some large mass of plastic that could be considered land. It's an area of the ocean where there is an extremely high concentration of plastic suspended in the water surface: microbeads and microfiber, other micro and macro plastics, styrofoam and possibly large buoyant debris.",
"It's packed with plastic compared to the rest of the ocean similar to how the air is packed with dust compared to space. Yeah there's more, but you're not going to be able to climb on it."
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2vnpty | how is it that i can look up and play nearly any song i've ever heard in its entirety on youtube, but if i include even a snippet of a song in an uploaded video i get flagged for copyright infringement almost immediately? | Seriously, this totally baffles me. Even if I include a 30-second clip of an obscure old song in a home movie, I still get flagged for infringement within minutes… while the entire song is available a dozen times over on YouTube. What gives? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vnpty/eli5_how_is_it_that_i_can_look_up_and_play_nearly/ | {
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"YouTube has a gigantic database both for audio and video copyrights. When you upload something that match the wave forms (in case of audio) of an existing song from that database, the system automatically sends you a message alerting that the content is not yours. But it also sends a message to the owner of that song, asking if they let that video be shown with their music or if they want to block it.\nSo it totally depends on the owners, if they approve your movie or not... Usually when it's big YouTube channels they let it pass, because it's a way to market the songs... When is small homemade videos in small channels, they dont get any gain from that, so they block it. ",
"I'm going to assume it's because a video of the whole song helps further their presence. When someone searches for the song that video will come up and could lead someone to want to buy their merch/go to a concert, etc. \n\nMeanwhile you using a small portion of their song isn't really helping them - you're just using their song without asking. "
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1n27iy | why does windows 7 support 192gb of ram? when would this be useful? | In class today we were researching different operating systems and when I was reading through the Windows 7 Wikipedia page I was surprised to find it supports that much memory. My question is 'When would this be used? and why they made the public version capable of this?' Thanks for responses. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1n27iy/eli5_why_does_windows_7_support_192gb_of_ram_when/ | {
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"Servers. Some minecraft servers with thousands of people online at once require up to 200 GB of RAM",
"There's no doubt a lot of code shared between the Windows server editions and home editions, including at the low level, and it does no particular harm to have that be an upper limit on a home computer, so why not? Servers can and do get up there into the 100s of GB of RAM.",
"The average user would only use a small fraction of the total amount of RAM allowed, but that doesn't meant that everybody does. Computer systems running large databases or working with other large sets of data can use hundreds of gigabytes of RAM at a time.\n\nAs for why it's specifically 192GB, Microsoft probably set it to that so that the people who need more RAM will buy the server editions of Windows. It's plenty for personal users who might be working with big data, if they're doing intensive analytical work or something like that, and it's low enough amount that large businesses have another incentive to buy the server editions.",
"Suppose you ran a windows PC that was configured to have 8 cpus and 8 gpus, and you were using it to cluster process option pricing for the whole stock market for your local algorithmic trading house on the cheap. Or, you wanted to deploy a custom workstation for your in house artists that could load a whole 128 gb scene into main memory at once.\n\nThere are lots of professional scenarios where RAM that big is in use right now.."
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1tvk4s | i've heard since you're constantly losing and regenerating cells about every 7 years you have a completely new body. if this is true how are tattoos permanent? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tvk4s/eli5_ive_heard_since_youre_constantly_losing_and/ | {
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"Because the cells surrounding the ink particles regenerate/die off at different times. Think of a prison that's constantly being rebuilt brick by brick, but the bricks are replaced one at a time and all randomly. ",
"A tatoo is ink. Ink is not a cell. The cells change, the ink remains, in, around, between, under and over the cells of your skin.",
"The part of your skin that keeps dying and flaking off and being regenerated is all in the epidermis. Underneath that layer, there's the dermis, which is the part tattoo ink is injected into. The tattoo needle is really just pushing tattoo ink far enough down into the skin that it makes it through the 5 layers of the epidermis into the dermis. Tattoo ink that doesn't make it all the way through will not stay in the tattoo. ",
"The cells will regenerate that is true.\nBut the ink is below the upper part of the skin and this part will \"stay in place\" meaning the ink will stay too.",
"Total cell count is replaced every seven years or so, but a living body is not composed only of cells, but also of extracellular materials. These materials (examples include collagen, fibrin, elastin, bone, etc) last longer than seven years. This is why tattoos last so long and why you can have a scar for longer than seven years.",
"Along these lines, what about laser hair removal?",
"The cells in different parts of your body die off at different rates. The stomach lining only lasts a few days. Neurons last very long, but there is some evidence that even they are regenerated despite the old notion that they don't.",
"You'll keep seeing that whole \"every 7 years you have all new cells\" thing come up again, and again, and again on reddit. Just remember that it's wrong. It's about as scientifically sound as the whole \"you only use 10% of your brain\" thing.",
"Not all cells regenerate -- that's why strokes and heart attacks leave a permanent defect. Cells on your skin and within your gi tract, do reproduce themselves, and replace the older ones quite frequently. And the comments about the tattoo ink actually being inside the extra cellular matrix (not actually being within the cells) is also true. ",
"This is merely a follow-up question. Because tattoos fade over time, is there any substance to the notion that they are in fact not permanent? But instead the life of the [remaining] ink is just longer than the human life span?",
"I think a better question is then, how do people die?",
"First of all, tattoo's frequently aren't permanent. You ever notice that they fade? A man gets a tattoo at 17, and it's black as night then, but fast forward 60 years to when he's 80, and it's hardly visible. Sure it takes a while, probably longer than a lot of people will live, but not permanent. (Source: Grandpa) \n\nAnyway, why that's the case is that 1. not everything in your body is cells. 2. Ink isn't made up of cells. \n\nSo it's typically inserted into non cell stuff, where is just kinda chills for a long time. ",
"If you look at skin biopsies from tattooed areas under the microscope, you can see ink particles within macrophages in the superficial dermis. These guys are quite good at rather non-specifically mopping up foreign material of this sort. Some will migrate into nearby lymphatic vessels- and you can even sometimes see tattoo pigment in nearby lymph nodes. But the great majority of these inked-up macrophages just sit there in the dermis. They'll move around a bit over the years (whether actively or passively I don't know) leading to the faded diffuse smeary tattoos you see on older people.\nInterestingly (to me anyway as a pathologist) you see very similar pigmented macrophages in the lung and mediastinal lymph nodes- only here the black pigment is inhaled soot.",
"Also, if the cell replacement thing is true, how do we have distant memories? Where are they stored and kept?",
"Tattoos are permanent, but they do get \"fuzzier\" and fade over time. ",
"I believe that the \"new body in 7 years\" claim is misleading for the sake of sensationalism.\n\n\nSome cells such as skin, digestive tract and many other types of cells are continuously replaced. Many cell types are not replaced. \n\nThe total number of new cells generated can eventually reach the total number of cells in your body, which is where the \"new body\" claim is coming from. Meanwhile, many types of cells just stay put for most of your life.",
"so would wolverine loose his adamantium as time went on? (had magneto not sucked it out)",
"But if my body replaces the cell's, am I the same person as I was 7 years ago? Is this the same if I were a boat with all the parts replaced?",
"I've got scars from when I was a kid, so basically I'm stuck with them?",
"I would imagine that if the cells are stained with ink, when the cells split during mitosis, each daughter cell gets some of the ink. Probably why they fade after time as well\n"
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2cspei | separate facebook message app - why the mandatory breakout separation? | This is more for the mobile side of the equation. But I don't like the mandatory breakout app for the Messages feature.
Was there a need for this? What problem does this solve? Has there been a lot of people asking for a less streamlined experience? Having two different apps for a one-branded experience is the very opposite of easy - it seems disjointed.
Unless they're considering separating the messages component on EVERY experience (browser, etc.), I don't think this is a good move. I already have a texting app on my smartphone, but I typically prefer the messages component of the existing app because:
1) It's already in the Facebook app.
2) I don't have (or want to) associate with people in my text messaging app separate from my Facebook profile. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cspei/eli5separate_facebook_message_app_why_the/ | {
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"To be fair, the apps run really smoothly together. Click on a message in Facebook at it automatically pops up in Messenger. Plus, chat heads is awesome. I've been using the app since they introduced it, and it's definitely an improvement. It's not like you have to go \"Well I want to message someone. Let me close Facebook, navigate my apps, find Messenger, open that, compose a message.\" ",
"It solves the problem of having to deal with a large amount of code. Something the size of the Facebook app requires a large number of programmers to maintain, and programming gets harder the more people you have to add to a project (there's a book called The Mythical Man-Month that goes into this in depth). Having multiple smaller projects allows them to improve both products faster.",
"Couple of reasons.\n\nFirst is maintainability. It is easier to build and update the smaller apps rather than trying to track the new feature requests and incorporate them in complete app.\n\nSecond is importance of messaging. Facebook has realised that messaging in itself is an extremely popular section of apps, especially with its recent buyout of Whatsapp. I feel there would a future integration of features with Whatsapp user and code base. Having a separate app will simplify that process. "
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wzxp7 | my 12 year old brother wants to know why the debt between all the countries in the world cannot simply "cancel each other out." | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wzxp7/eli5_my_12_year_old_brother_wants_to_know_why_the/ | {
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"Because debt isn't the same thing as negative money. If I owe you $200 in ten years, and you owe me €300 in five payments over the next seven years, what's the right way to cancel those out?",
"To understand this, he must understand what created this debt in the first place; and there was a [very relevant ELI5](_URL_0_) done about this before. ",
"The debts that most governments have are bonds not loans, governments have two ways of raising large amounts of money, taxes or bonds. This won't be very ELI5 as it's quite hard to do since governments operate very differently financially than normal people and it's a damn mess of mutual indebtedness.\n\nA friend Bob wants to borrow $100 (a bond) off you he says he will pay you back in a month with an extra $10 (interest) as thanks. You trust him, Bob has a good reputation (AAA S & P rating) for paying off his personal debts with interest and on time (the bond matures), it's an easy and safe way to make an extra $10, you'd be pretty stupid to not lend Bob the money as it's 100% guaranteed he will pay you off with extra $10 or risks his good reputation next time he asks for money.\n\nLets say you are so confident that Bob will give you the money on time plus the extra $10 that you borrow $100 from another friend Fred, this way you have the cash in your pocket to spend now, you say you will pay Fred the $100 and an extra $5 when the times comes to pay him off for the trouble of lending the money. This isn't a bad deal you have $100 in your pocket still and even with the extra $5 you offer you to pay Fred you will still be $5 better off when Bob pays you back. Fred does the same thing with a friend of his called John, he borrows say $95 and will pay an extra $5 to John when the time comes to pay off the money.\n\nNow here's the problem you are relying on that $100 + $10 from Bob to pay off Fred, if Bob doesn't pay up or can't pay the whole amount you won't be able to pay off Fred, and Fred won't be able to pay off John who might not be able to pay off someone else, it's a huge chain of mutual indebtedness that relies on Bob's excellent reputation for paying off his debts on time.\n\nIn the past Bob had a machine that let him print money if he couldn't pay you off, say Bob only had $90 at the end of the month, he would print off an extra $20 so he could pay you and protect his excellent reputation, you didn't mind this as you and all your friends do it and it guarantees you get all the money you were promised originally and you didn't do it very often, only as a last resort. Bob borrowed money from lots of people and most of the time he paid off the debts fine, sometimes printing money to pay the debts but only as a last resort.\n\nRecently Bob and everyone else lost the ability to print money as a last resort, when the time comes to pay off debts he doesn't have a last resort any more, so he starts borrowing more and more money from friends to pay off other friends as he can't do it himself any more (for whatever reason, pay cut at work or something). He has a good reputation so people keep lending to him (multiple chains of debt), they are all relying on Bob to keep his word so they can can keep their word when it comes to paying debts.\n\nCan you see the problem? It's a house of cards that will collapse if one person can't pay up since no one can print their own money any more, they are all relying on one debt to be paid so they can pay off another debt.\n\nBob comes clean and tells everyone he was lying all along about his income and that he can't afford to pay off debts any more, he was using the money he borrowed poorly, spending well beyond his income. His friends all say that if he doesn't find a way to pay his debts they won't lend him money again for a long time but because they all really need Bob to pay the debt so they can pay theirs they agree to help Bob get the money to pay off the debts and save his reputation. Now all the friends get together as a group and agree to borrow money from someone else (they will issue bonds to raise money) to pay off Bob so he can pay them off, before they do this they make Bob agree to a contract that limits his spending and he has to cut back his spending (Austerity measures), bob and his family don't really like this but have no real choice other than to lose their reputation.\n\nNow if this all sounds like a real clusterfuck it's because it is, replace Bob with Greece in that and his friends as other European countries, the group they all belong to near the end is the European Central Bank which is the only place allowed to print money any more, individual countries can still issue bonds as can the bank itself. Essentially the Euro Central Bank ends up selling bonds to China and the money for those bonds will go to Greece to pay off its debts, but that money came with a lot of conditions which the Greek people don't like.\n\nAs for cancelling the debts, well anyone can buy bonds, governments, businesses, anyone even you and me. You might be able to cancel some mutual parts of the debts between countries but that won't work with multiple non-government parties involved. A country can write off the debts but that destroys their reputation as a trustworthy investment and no one will invest in them again, they'd have to rely solely on taxes for income.\n\nThat's pretty long and i don't know if it answered the question, i was more curious if i could write a simpler version of a current debt crisis.",
"A lot of this money is owed not to other countries, but *people* in other countries.\n\nI might have decided that Greek bonds were a great place to put my life's savings. Cancelling that debt might be good for the Greek government, but it would ruin everything I worked for my entire life.",
"The debts aren't to other countries. It's not as simple as China owes the US $200 billion, and the US owes China $250 billion, lets just cancel it out and just make the US owe China $50 billion. The US government is in debt mostly to individuals and corporations, who invest in their debt- in the form of bonds. If you have a US savings bond, or treasury note, you own some of the debt of the US gov't, and they owe you money. ",
"I once read a very good explanation in ELI5 about 2 people (representing countries) trading bread for tables that explained this problem very well. I can't recall it correctly though, maybe someone else can?"
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ytu4k | the obama birth certificate controversy. what happened and why | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ytu4k/the_obama_birth_certificate_controversy_what/ | {
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"Obama runs for President. The idea that a black man could be elected President within a generation of Civil Rights seemed impossible to many people. So imagine their asses clenching when he destroys 365-173.\n\nSo now that he WON, they need to think of some reason his victory might be illegitimate. This is what they came up with. Citizenship has NEVER been a central issue of any white Presidential candidate in US history regardless of party. The US has a long history of trying to marginalize minorities, especially in this EXACT way; by requiring they somehow satisfy a higher standard of proof to legitimize themselves. Why is this suddenly an issue with Obama? Oh, but don't call it racism or you'll be accused of \"playing the race card.\"\n\nBut Obama does it anyway. Releases his [Birth Certificate](_URL_1_). Situation finished, right? **WRONG**.\n\nThen people complain that is NOT his \"Birth Certificate\" but rather \"Certificate of Live Birth\" (you can't make this shit up). The conspiracies flare up again. It was FORGED, it was ALTERED. His father's race would have been listed as \"Negro\" not \"African\" in 1961.\n\nKeep in mind here, his Certificate of Live Birth that was released is sufficient enough for the US State Department to issue you a US Passport. Pretty sure it's even evidence enough to apply for Security Clearance. The \"Long Form,\" as it was called is locked up in records in Hawaii where Obama was born.\n\nSo the head of the Department of Health of Hawaii comes out and says he had PERSONALLY looked at Obama's long Birth Certificate and that it is there, and legitimate. **STILL NOT ENOUGH FOR THEM**.\n\nSo round and round we go about the \"long form\" certificate. We later find out he's having to deal with this nonsense while dealing with Bin Laden raid. But eventually [the long form is released](_URL_0_).\n\n...and then the conspiracy nuts start all over again."
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22ns8c | from an evolutionary viewpoint, why do men have facial hear, while women dont? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22ns8c/eli5from_an_evolutionary_viewpoint_why_do_men/ | {
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"Well I'm no scientist, however, both men AND women do have facial hair.(if you ever get close to woman, you can see the \"peach fuzz and tiny hairs on her face.) What influences things like thickness and intensity can be attributed to the sex hormone, Testosterone. That's why men grow facial hair. The evolutionary advantages probably include showing how masculine and healthy you are when you have a strong full beard. Women can show their feminine health with less body hair. That's what I imagine to be correct. Much like an alpha ass lion with a big bushy mane.\n",
"Also women who drink lots of alcohol develop facial hair because of the body's response to it. Alcohol triggers the production of Testosterone during consumption and oestrogen during withdrawal (hangover). Men have \"barriers\" to prevent testosterone overload. Women do not. Men who drink to much suffer all round drops in testosterone because the body then learns that it's being triggered by an outside source and needed produce until triggered. ",
"It could be that women were/are attracted to more hair, as this would potentially signify more testosterone and more likely hood of survival. So as early human women chose men with the right amount of hair, that trait was passed on. Similar to birds colorfulness and elaborate mating dances. "
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1esjpb | what is apple doing to avoid paying tax? | I've read lots on how Apple have Irish subsidiaries and stateless profit sinks etc. but how does it all actually work? And is what they're doing immoral? Or are they simply paying the right amount of taxes for each individual country they operate in?
An explanation specific to the methods Apple uses would be brilliant. It's been difficult getting my head wrapped around this thing.
Found a great article from Business Insider which basically sums it all up. - _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1esjpb/eli5_what_is_apple_doing_to_avoid_paying_tax/ | {
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"While I can't outline specifics, the general gist is this;\n\nCompanies pay taxes on profits(revenue-costs). If you want to pay less taxes, you have to reduce your profits. One way to do that is by hiring a company that you own to do some work, that (basically) transfers your profit to a different jurisdiction where it is subject to less taxes. \n\nSay you had $1,000,000 profit and the US wanted to charge 35% in taxes. If you kept everything in the US you'd pay 350,000 in taxes. However, Ireland only has a 10% tax rate, so you buy a company in Ireland and then hire them to do \"consulting\" for the US company for $500,000. Now you only have 500,000 in profits in the US so you pay $175,000, but you have 500,000 in profits in Ireland which takes 50,000. For a total of 225,000\n\nSo, at the end of the day, by doing some fancy accounting you managed to drop your tax rate from 35% to ~22%. Do this in more extreme ways and you can drop it even lower. ",
"Its called a [Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich](_URL_0_), No, seriously, it is. (click the link for an infographic).\n\n/u/Mistuhbull explained it fairly well, however its MUCH worse than that, they dont do it to \"reduce\" their tax burden, they effectively ELIMINATE it altogether (no taxes), by claiming a net loss. As in \"gee, we dont have any profits to tax because we spent all our money paying our own subsidiary in Ireland.\"\n\nOf course, the flip side to this is once they do this...they are not allowed to simply send the money back to their US Headquarters without incurring the 35% tax on it. Apple itself has over $100 Billion in cash tied up overseas (more than the GDP of Vietnam). \n\nSo, what many Corporations have been trying to do is lobby Congress to approve another \"Tax Holiday\" where they can \"repatriate\" some of this cash back to the US at a much lower rate (last time it was 5%). Of course they do this under the guise of \"well, if we could just repatriate this cash, we could hire more people and there will be more jobs!!\" \n\nSounds good, except for the fact that the LAST time they tried this (in 2004), they actually [did the opposite](_URL_1_), and ended up laying off 10s of thousands of people in the process. (And this was when the economy was still doing GOOD, mind you).\n\nAs for the morality: its simple, taxes pay for services that EVERYONE uses, including corporations. By not paying taxes, they essentially are still given the same services the rest of us enjoy, but placing the burden to PAY for them on the rest of us. \n\nApple ships their products all over the country, so who pays for the infrastructure to keep our roads open and accessible? Who pays for the FAA to regulate the airspace and flight plans of the Aircraft that haul their product from place to place? When a natural disaster such as the tornados or a Hurricane hits, it destroys everything...including Apple Stores and warehouses that store their product...so who pays for the rescue and clean up efforts, and later the rebuilding efforts? If someone breaks into one of their stores and steals merchandise who pays for the cops to investigate and the courts to prosecute the offenders? (dun-dun). If an international ring of Apple counterfeiters is selling knock-off Apple products, thereby cutting into their profits, who pays for the FBI to investigate? Who pays for the FCC regulation of airwave frequencies that the iPhone is used on? \n\nIm sure there is other taxes that local Apple stores pay for some of this, but the point is, there is countless number of services that the Government provides, services that Apple are entitled to, just like any other business, but by avoiding paying taxes, they are getting these services for free, while the rest of us are basically subsidizing their services while ALSO buying their products. "
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30u0ya | what are the 'half-moons' on people's fingernails, and why are some people's different sizes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30u0ya/eli5_what_are_the_halfmoons_on_peoples/ | {
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"The half moons on your hand are named lunula and they vary in size, although the reasons why they do are unknown, the disappearance and difference of color in them may need medical attention. \nEdit: changed absence to disappearance\nThanks to dread for catching that"
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1wl04d | if both china and the united states rely on each others existence for overall/worldwide stability, why do they continuously provoke each other militarily? | Everything I've read throughout most of my travels in the world always talk about global stabilization coming from the balance and "go-throughs" that are maintained primarily through China and the United States. As an outsider looking in, it seems to be odd if both countries know this yet every article I've read the past 3 years has included "US intentionally violates Chinese maritime laws" or "China tries to stop US naval operations in international waters" etc etc. What is the reason and what do either countries hope to accomplish? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wl04d/eli5_if_both_china_and_the_united_states_rely_on/ | {
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"Because we don't agree with each other on a lot of issues.\n\nJust because a war between the two countries would be beyond devastating doesn't mean we are close friends. The US and China have many fundamental differences in philosophy and that's before you factor in economic and political differences.\n\nAs an example, China wants Taiwan to be a part of China.. Taiwan is an ally of the US and we float a Carrier Battle Group off of Taiwan purely to remind the Chinese that Taiwan is off limits. \n\nSo both sides try to remind the other that \"hey we don't have to take your shit\" even though... realistically.. we do.",
"There's relatively little real friction between China and the United States. The US does operate an aggressive intelligence-gathering effort at the edge of Chinese territorial claims but for the most part it does so while remaining in international waters and airspace. There are some disagreements about that since China and the US don't always agree on where certain lines on maps should be drawn, but those debates are fairly minimal in the grand scheme of things.\n\nThere are two main areas of friction. First, Taiwan. China wants Taiwan to be reunified with China. Taiwan wants to be an independent country. The official position of the United States is that Taiwan is a part of China, but that Taiwan and China must work out the terms of their reunification peacefully. The United States is bound by treaty and law to defend the territorial integrity of Taiwan which means that technically if China tried to invade the island the United States would go to war to stop it.\n\nSecond are China's claims to territories in the waters in the South China Sea. These claims are tenuous at best, specious at worst, but China is powerful enough to make them stick. Every rock in those waters is claimed by one or more countries and those claims are meaningful because international law allows whomever claims them to extend a 200 mile \"exclusive economic zone\" around their coasts. Every one of those islands is thus potentially a bonanza of oil & gas rights, fishing rights, and military observation and control points. China wants to displace a lot of other claims on those islands and the United States has made it clear that it will object to any such attempts. In the case of some islands disputed by Japan and China, the United States has clarified that it considers its treaty obligations with Japan to include those islands, so if China tries to take them by force the United States says it would go to war to stop it.\n\nOutside of these disputes the relationship between China and the United States is very harmonious. The two countries have an enormous bilateral trading relationship and China holds more than a trillion dollars of US government debt. Both countries are clearly in agreement in the need to ensure the freedom of the seas as both are trading nations and want to make sure shipping is not impeded. Both are dependent on foreign sources of energy (the US less so than in the recent past, but the US is still very sensitive to the world market price for oil & gas) and they need the major energy producing areas of the world like the Persian Gulf to remain peaceful and provide uninterrupted shipments of oil & gas.",
"The primary reason is the increase of China's economic growth and economic influences around the world.\n\nUS is still militarily unmatched, but China's increasing economic influences makes US extremely nervous, as China is wading into 3rd world areas that were traditionally US's sphere of influence (because those nations previously didn't have any alternatives).\n\nChina's economic influence is a subtle but indirect challenge to US power in the long run, because China is now the \"alternative\" that many nations are looking toward. They are secretly whispering, \"hey, if US plays hardball with us, we can always turn to China for money and support.\"\n\nThus, in response to China's increased economic influence, US increased its military presence in China's backdoor. (It is correlated that US military /surveillance of China increased, both in Asia and in other parts of the world, in relative proportion to China's economic growth).\n\nPart of this response from US is just kneejerk reaction, because US doesn't know what else to do. Part of this is to monitor China for \"intentions\", which is highly speculative.\n\n---\nThe fundamental problem is actually more for US, because China is simply not playing the same game as US.\n\nUS strategic thinking still uses the \"Cold War\" model to trying to fit China into the USSR role, but that's just wrong.\n\n\"Cold War\" is like Chess, where each side is trying to take over territorial control from the other side. The game is 1 or the other. If both sides try to take control a square, 1 side will lose a piece.\n\nBut China does not play the current geopolitics like \"Chess\", China plays \"GO\", an Asian game where the pieces do not move, no pieces are taken, and \"control\" of territory can be done across \"borders\" indirectly.\n\nTake for example, US's \"Asian Pivot\". US bills the move like in Chess, i.e. we will help Asian nations to defend from Chinese influence. It's either or. If US in, China will be out.\n\nHowever, that's not how China plays in Asia. China trades with everyone in Asia, even those who have disputes with it. I.e. China has pieces of influence all over Asia, designed to make it difficult for the region to remove Chinese influence without huge self-sacrifices.\n\nChina's \"Long game\" as some call it, is \"GO\", where China bypasses US's chess moves, to continue to increase Chinese influences. To a point, where US will simply have no move left (i.e. when the cost of any moves would be too high and too little in results).\n\nUnfortunately for US, it still plays this as chess, so it still sees only possible \"confrontations\", instead of merely subtle long term influences.\n\n"
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7m630p | why do plastic water bottles start to smell bad when left for a prolonged period after being opened? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7m630p/eli5_why_do_plastic_water_bottles_start_to_smell/ | {
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"2 Main things: 1 standing water breeds bacteria, so water left to sit will get nasty no matter what it is in.\n2. cheap plastic bottles will leach plastic into them over time (and quicker if its warm). This is why all those bottles have small print saying not to reuse them. Its not too bad if its a day or 2, but you probably shouldn't reuse a bottle for more than a week (if that).",
"Ahoy, matey! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5:Why does water left in bottles start to smell bad after a few days? ](_URL_2_) ^(_19 comments_)\n1. [Why does a plastic bottle start to stink after a while? ](_URL_1_) ^(_5 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do many plastic water bottles cause the water to smell/taste bad after being opened and allowed to sit for a while? ](_URL_4_) ^(_2 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do plastic bottles stink after a couple of days with the same water? ](_URL_3_) ^(_3 comments_)\n1. [Why does my water bottle keep smelling bad? ](_URL_0_) ^(_9 comments_)\n"
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/5borqf/why_does_my_water_bottle_keep_smelling_bad/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/79nd8r/why_does_a_plastic_bottle_start_to_stink_after_a/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51kn0d/eli5why_does_water... | ||
6gpgqa | why is / r/politics so left-wing biased? shouldn't a sub with that name be as neutral as possible? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6gpgqa/eli5_why_is_rpolitics_so_leftwing_biased_shouldnt/ | {
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"If you want unbiased, an internet site who's primary demographic is tech savvy young urban Americans is a terrible place to go. \n\nThat's about as hard left leaning group as you are likely to get without polling a Manhattan gay bar.\n\n",
"You need to remember that there is a fundamental issue with the way reddit is programmed. Because downvotes actually have an effect (causing a timer) then anyone with an opposing or unpopular view is silenced even if they are making a perfectly justified and rational argument. Add to that, that most people who hold right wing views tend to be older, that means they often aren't on the same websites such as reddit. \nFurthermore, r/politics really only has their posts revolve around media, which is left biased. That means you only get to see one biased view instead of an objective report."
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fqnkox | what role does ecology play in conservation? | Why is ecology important? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fqnkox/eli5_what_role_does_ecology_play_in_conservation/ | {
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"Ecology is basically the underlying science behind a lot of conservation. You can’t easily preserve a species or an ecosystem without understanding the interactions and mechanics of that community, or if it’s even possible to restore it in the first place. \n\nConservation is more then just ecology- there’s a huge amount of outreach, communication, and public policy making that also goes into it. But ecology basically gives conservation a scientific backing and allows us to statistically point out that it’s working and make sure it’s having the effect we want."
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yvbkg | why is a cell phone called a cell phone? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yvbkg/eli5_why_is_a_cell_phone_called_a_cell_phone/ | {
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"The cell-phone towers have a grid like signal shape. Each tower's signal reaches out about a mile but a circle allows either too much overlap or dead zones. Because circles don't work, the cell towers are allocated in a hexagonal pattern. I.e. each tower has a hexagon about 2 miles across. These hexagons are known as cells, therefore, the phones that connect through the towers are cell-phones. \n\nEdit: Found an animated diagram that would also help with visualizing.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"
]
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20w9mw | what makes one pianist better than another?? | I listen to Classical from time to time and there are "songs" I like, but I can't really tell between a great pianist and a good pianist. To me, once they become competent, they all sound amazing. What are you expert music ear people listening for that I'm overlooking?
On Youtube, there are some comments about Liberace never being a great pianist. I didn't get what this meant. To me, he sounded fucken amazing. Is this like Hipsters.. the classical version? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20w9mw/eli5_what_makes_one_pianist_better_than_another/ | {
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"It's more how they play it than what they play. It's extraordinarily difficult for instance to play softly with the same level of technical skill as it is to play it loud. Listen for how they change between notes, the dynamics and articulation, if it's a piece without a set tempo how they give and take with the tempo to emote, and watch them as they do it. \n\nTake two decent recordings of the same piece and you'll hear two different interpretations. ",
" > To me, he sounded fucken amazing. Is this like Hipsters.. the classical version?\n\nSometimes, yes. But asking those questions you're pretty much on a good way to discover that kind of music as the true art it really is. I think with the piano it's even harder to distinguish great musicians from outstanding musicians. It's way easier with instruments where the musicians have it 'easier' to put their soul into their music. As in strings or brass. I'm not saying it's impossible and /u/Holy_City already gave a good explanation on how to do it.\nBest thing to do on youtube: Ignore the comments that try to ruin it for you. \nExample for his statement: Listen to [this](_URL_0_) and then to [this](_URL_1_)\nThe first one shows you perfect execution, no mistakes and all the notes were hit in perfect tune. The second version is also perfect execution but this time the pianist is putting his/her emotions into this song. For me, that's the difference between music and art, you can like music, but art can bring you to tears.",
"This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but generally I've noticed that there are four main factors that make or break a pianist:\n\n* Diligence. No matter how good a pianist is, he could always be better by practicing more. Someone who can sit down and play for eight hours is going to end up being a better pianist than someone who poops out after 45 minutes. \n\n* Dexterity/agility. Some people are just more naturally gifted than others. You can strike each key an infinite number of ways--combine them in different ways, apply the different pedals, etc., and the best pianists are those who have mastered playing different chords, scales and arpeggios (basically, broken up chords or strings of notes)--in all different ways. Not merely soft and loud, but also staccato (short/broken up) and legato (connected/smooth). In most music, each note was placed in the composition for a reason, and an excellent pianist will give each note the special treatment it deserves. \n\n* Intelligence/training. The more easily you pick up on music theory, the better a pianist you will be. Once you learn about the different chords, scales, modes, etc., it makes it a lot easier to sight-read a piece of music (play it well without having seen it before). It also makes it easier to adapt to different genres of music. Training in music history can be helpful as well--oftentimes there is great emphasis on authenticity, or playing a piece as the composer meant it to be played, and it can help to have some understanding of what instruments of the time were like, and what audiences expected of a keyboard player back then.\n\n* Showmanship. Being able to impress music scholars is one thing, but capturing the fancy of an audience is another. You can perform everything correctly in a piece and never stir an audience to passion, or you can make a load of mistakes and the audience can love you. While this ties into other factors (it's easier to cover up mistakes if you have better knowledge of music theory and dexterity), it also comes down to your personal qualities like charisma and charm. ",
"By \"makes one better,\" I'm going to assume you mean, \"How is the skill of a piano player measured?\" \n\nMusic is a language, and musicians are essentially trained \"talkers.\"\n\nVocabulary. *What does the player choose to \"say?\"* This is a bit tricky, because different players have different goals. \n\nJazz pianists strive to learn new \"words\" and \"phrases\". They have \"conversations,\" where much of the music is made up on the spot. They still select a \"topic\" beforehand (though some jazz is completely improvised). Better players say more, and with more variety. (Think of someone who describes everything as awesome, and only awesome. It's boring to listen to.)\n\nClassical pianists strive to interpret and master \"speeches.\" They learn new \"words\" and \"phrases\" in order to recognize them in text without stopping to \"sound them out.\" \n\nEdit: I'll add articulation. *\"how does the player say what they say?\"* Loud or soft, fast or slow, etc. \"Better\" players have a wider range.\n\nThese are not exclusive groups. Many players study both styles.\n\nWhen someone says Liberace was not very good, they likely mean that what he played was not very challenging, and/or he did (edit:not) have a very large vocabulary. Think of someone who knows a few 5 dollar words and forces them into every conversation. You might be impressed at first (especially if they use words you don't know), but once you've heard \"mercurial\" 15 times in a row, you'll recognize the pattern. \n\nThat's the technical side of \"better.\" We can analyze players and compare their performance in those categories. \n\nIt's art though, so the real \"better\" or \"worse\" judgements are based upon taste, and taste is subjective. As you \"talk\" and listen to others \"talk,\" your tastes will likely change. If you think Liberace is the best, you're right. \n\n"
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJgUVI4LdPs",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2-1u8xvk54"
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233idh | what is the point of rebates? why not just lower the price instead of giving back a rebate? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/233idh/eli5_what_is_the_point_of_rebates_why_not_just/ | {
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"Becuase not everyone will claim the rebate. So the retailer gets to take in the full price for some of the products",
"The truth is that not many people cash rebates in. Usually they require sending something in my snail mail and jumping through hoops. Most people don't bother.\n\nSo it drives up sales, but ends up not costing that much.",
"Totally agree... I'm sure they don't get many people who actually remember to send in their rebates so they end up making more money. Also, I've sent in rebates I have never gotten back and the company fights with you about it too. So, I feel like it is a crooks way of getting more money. \n",
"Short Answer: Not everyone who buys it for the rebate will actually use the rebate.\n\nLong Answer: You might have 100 sales before the rebate and see that jump to 200 sales with the rebate. However, of those 200 rebate sales, only 25 people might actually send in the rebate, of which only 20 get it approved under the terms of the rebate. Therefore, you've made 20 additional sales at the rebate price and 80 additional sales at full price - plus your original 100 sales at full price - instead of 200 sales at a reduced price.",
"One point that hasnt been mad yet: The rebate is offered by the manufacturer. This way the retail shop doesnt take a hit on their profit margin, and the manufacturer sells more units.\n\n",
"On topic, and HILARIOUS!\n\n_URL_0_",
"When I worked at Staples, the manager said 7% was the number of people that actually mailed in the rebates correctly. ",
"Everyone has mentioned that most people don't redeem a mail in rebate. What I have not seen mentioned is that a rebate is also market research for the manufacture. The manufacture can learn about who exactly is buying their product and where these people are. A short survey is usually required with a rebate and the lets the manufacture know things like the age group, gender and location of people that are buying their products.\n\nI may have intended to sell my stuff to teenagers but I find out later that older adults are buying more of them. I can change future advertising to include these people. I could find out that people in one region buy a lot of my things and another region buys very little. I could either refocus advertising in the low sales region or ignore them and focus my related products in the high sales region.",
"They are hoping some people will forget and they have to hand out less of the discounts."
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bw64rw | why do you hear helicopter sounds when you have your windows down while driving on a highway? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bw64rw/eli5_why_do_you_hear_helicopter_sounds_when_you/ | {
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"Resonant frequency of the cabin. You can relieve this by opening another window a small amount, preferably on the other side of the car.\n\nThe resonant frequency thing is the same reason why a whistle, or a flute works, too. It's just that a car cabin is so much larger that it's resonant frequency is much lower. So low, it's subsonic. (lower than 20hz)."
]
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1o8izj | why are copy machines still huge? shouldn't have the technology we have decreased their size? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o8izj/why_are_copy_machines_still_huge_shouldnt_have/ | {
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"If you're referring to office copy machines, they're usually more than just copiers. They're usually an all in one scanner, copier, printer and fax. Also a lot of space is dedicated to paper storage. Those things hold a lot of pages of a lot of different paper sizes.",
"The technology already exists. In fact, printers are available that are capable of copying, scanning, and faxing without being much larger than a typical printer. As DeepDuck said, a lot of the space is there just to hold things like paper or ink. "
]
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3o3qs7 | how did they get the actors names to appear at the bottom of the screen in movies before computers were a common thing to have? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3o3qs7/eli5_how_did_they_get_the_actors_names_to_appear/ | {
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"One of the most common ways was to print the names or whatever words you wanted on the screen on to a clear piece of film. They could then play the movie on one reel while making a copy. Then play the clear film while recording it onto the copy. So it would record those words on top of the film of the actors. \n\nThere is at least one other method for accomplishing this, but I read a book about film making 12 years ago and honestly this is the only technique I remember because I thought it sounded like a pain in the ass.",
"Since the 70s, Chyron graphics systems have been the standard for television broadcast.\n\nBefore then, they would actually typewrite or stamp stuff onto transparent film and overlay it on the movie film."
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2a50un | why is time in india +0530 gmt and not a round number like +0600 or +0500? | Why the 30 minutes? It seems bizarre to me that it could be 1 pm in one city and 1:30 pm just down the road. Why the 30 minute off set and not the typical hour? I looked this up on the Googles and couldn't find any clear answers beyond generic "historical reasons" type things. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a50un/eli5why_is_time_in_india_0530_gmt_and_not_a_round/ | {
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"Time zones are whatever a government decides they are. What makes half an hour more or less weird than a full hour? Perhaps I'm biased here, in that there's one province in my country that uses a half hour time zone, but there's nothing inherently weirder about using a half hour offset. ",
"What is more bizarre is that India only has the one official time zone, despite the fact that it crosses several. India's time zone was made as a political statement to show unity in the nation. "
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1yv5hu | why does everyone think the new pope is so awesome? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yv5hu/eli5why_does_everyone_think_the_new_pope_is_so/ | {
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"Because someone of power in the Catholic Church is finally responding to the criticism. Not to everything just yet but it's there in what he says and slowly in what he's doing following that. It's refreshing compared to the quick dismissal and silent treatment we've had before. It's not yet exactly where we want it but we are seeing some changes."
]
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4cky3u | those fan shaped math equations from good will hunting. what exactly is being solved? | Picture for reference: _URL_0_
What is he actually solving? How does one drawing translate into the next drawing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cky3u/eli5_those_fan_shaped_math_equations_from_good/ | {
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"He is doing [Graph Theory](_URL_0_). He was trying to find all of the homeomorphically irreducible trees ~~of a certain diameter~~ with 10 vertices [EDIT: I didn't remember right], if I remember right. It would take a bit more than I can muster for this post to explain all of what that means, but it is actually a fairly simple problem. As in, after a month in an introductory graph theory course, you'd be able to do it in 5 minutes.",
"[Numberphile actually made a good video about this exact thing, and they explain it well.](_URL_0_)\n\nIt's actually really simple, you can do it yourself at home. The \"challenge\" is to draw all *homeomorphically irreducible trees of size n=10*, which is a lot of long words that basically mean this:\n\nDraw as many *trees* as you can (those dot network things) that follow these rules:\n\n* No \"cycles\", basically, the lines can't converge back in on themselves like a triangle, once they split off they can't reconnect.\n\n* The angles of the lines don't matter, just where they split mathematically *(homeomorphically)*\n\n* Each parent line has to split into more than one line before any of it's child lines can split. This one is explained better in the video, but it basically means no redundant lines than can be reduced into one line. *(irreducible)*\n\n* There have to be ten dots. *(n=10)*\n\nIt turns out, there are exactly ten trees that fit the description, and that's what Will Hunting \"solves\" in the movie (but it's not that hard).",
"[Video explaining it.](_URL_0_) \n \nBasically, you have to draw 10 dots and connect them all. However, all the designs have to be unique, they can't just be try same lines but at different angles, you can't make a cycle (a triangle or rectangle for instance), and you can't have a line doing nothing, meaning you can't place a dot on an existing line and make it count. \n \nThe problem actually isn't as hard as they make it out.",
"Short version:\n\nThey aren't really equations, they are just visual aids he is using to try to work out a problem.\n\nLong version:\n\nHe is trying to find all the unique shapes you can connect a set of dots into without making a loop. Which dots are where doesn't matter, and if two shapes can be turned or stretched or flipped into each other, they are considered to be the same. The technical term for this is \"homeomorphically irreducible trees\".\n\n"
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8cscp3 | why nuclear energy is very clean? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cscp3/eli5_why_nuclear_energy_is_very_clean/ | {
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"Because the amount of nuclear waste produced per person is very small, and that energy is produced without putting all the usual crap into the atmosphere.\n\nObviously there's the problem of storage/disposal of nuclear waste, but there honestly isn't very much of it (especially considering the massive volumes of trash we produce) even if 100% of our energy were nuclear.",
"Nuclear energy uses radioactive material to heat up water that then turns a turbine, which spins a generator and creates power. If done properly the only matter that actually is released into the environment is just run of the mill steam. The other main by product is of course nuclear waste, but that can be contained. As long as you have a proper nuclear waste disposal facility nuclear energy is incredibly clean. If the waste isnt disposed of properly though, it becomes a huge issue. ",
"[Using this as a source](_URL_0_).\n\nA typical 1GW coal plant consumes 10,000 tonnes of coal per day. Where a nuclear reactor consumes 250 tonnes per year, of raw uranium. To put that in perspective, a coal power plant consumes a 1 mile long train full of coal every day, and converts it almost entirely into CO2 (so that entire train of coal is placed into the atmosphere, every day).\n\nA nuclear reactor by contrast consumes just 1 train car of (raw, unrefined) fuel every 3 months. The byproducts are not released into the atmosphere, they should eventually just be placed back into the earth, though in practice it's currently just left on sight, it doesn't really take up all that much space.",
"1 kg of uranium ore will produce about the same amount of energy as 400 kg of high-quality coal.\n\nThat means you have to dig less of it out of the ground, transport less of it, and store less of it. In addition, nuclear reactors have no emissions besides of water. No sulfur, no soot or ash, no carbon dioxide that gets released into the atmosphere."
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291sp5 | how does or why would vpn protect you if your ip address is general in the first place? | [After finishing my question, I realize I am indeed in need of a more literal ELI5. I perhaps need to ask more about how IP addresses work] Or really, why bother if you're using a communal wifi/internet source? My laptop's IP address changes based on whichever wifi I am attached to. If it's that vague, how does anyone get specifically targeted for illegal online activity? I'm not advocating or against torrenting and such, but (bear with me) when I look up my IP address through any number of googled websites, I just get my number from a server usually a couple cities away. How does that get pinpointed to me when my server may be in the next county? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/291sp5/eli5_how_does_or_why_would_vpn_protect_you_if/ | {
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"VPN's work as if you are sending your information to another computer just like yours via a tunnel that ships the information back and forth from the source(ie. Pirate bay and such). This fools the network by thinking you are only sending and receiving data from this sole computer, when in fact you are watching YouTube videos at work or playing games.\n\nYour ISP hands out keys or 'IP addresses' to their customers. Enabling them to access the internet via their networks. When on a public network the administrator can track data flow and monitor what you are doing, this is why a VPN comes in handy. It masks (or encrypts) your data flow, not your PC.\n\nYour PC also has a MAC address which does not change based on which network you are on. Its like the registry number of your computer.\n",
"ISPs know your IP address and if there is a violation on a certain IP, will provide your name in the event of court orders, etc.\n\nWhen you look it up on a site, they don't know exactly where you are, they only approximate. The ISPs know exactly where you are, however.\n\nA VPN will make it look like you're traffic is coming from another location by tunneling it through that location. ",
"**Normal, unencrypted:**\n\nYour cable modem/router has a public, known, IP address assigned to it by your ISP. This address is traceable to you (the customer) and it is the address everyone else sees on the internet.\n\nWhenever you communicate with another machine on the Internet (such as a web page) the information transferred is divided into \"packets\" each of which is stamped with that IP address. These packets pass through machines owned by various entities including your ISP, and can be monitored and their contents viewed and traced. So people can see what you are doing, what pages you are looking at, and know that it is you.\n\nThink of it like having a conversation with someone through snail mail. You write down part of that conversation and put it in an envelope and put your address and his address on the outside. Though illegal, those envelopes can be opened and the contents viewed.\n\n**Normal, encrypted:**\n\nLet's say one of the web pages you are going to is a \"secure\" web page, like a banking web page or facebook or something similar. When you connect, various pieces of information are exchange to set up an encryptoed session. The information contained in the packets is encrypted and cannot by deciphered by anyone else unless they somehow get the decryption key. The IP addresses remain the same. So people can still see where you are browsing and that it's you, but can't see what information you're exchanging.\n\nBasically same as before with the envelope scenario, but you are using a code, so even if they open your letters, they can't read them. But they still know you are sending letters to a specific person.\n\n**Finally, VPN**\n\nA VPN is a \"tunnel.\" Basically you have a specific piece of software on your computer called a \"client.\" This client then connects to a VPN server and sets up an encrypted tunnel between your computer and the VPN server. All of your traffic is now being routed through the network you are connected to through the VPN. For example, lets say you use a VPN to connect to your work network. Now, as far as everyone else is concerned, it's as if you were browsing the Internet directly from your work. All of your traffic that other people see is going from your home computer to the VPN server and is encrypted. They can't see the traffic going to other web pages because that's coming from your work with a different IP address.\n\nTo go back to the envelop analogy, you not only use a code to encrypt the letter itself, but after you put it in an envelope you put the only the destination address on the outside also encrypted, then put it in *another* envelope with your address and a different destination address. People who intercept your message will only see it going to the different destination address, not the real destination address (which is encoded).\n\nWhen it goes to the first destination address, they are able to decrypt everything, and they pass your letter onto the real destination address. They are essentially acting as an intermediary, obfuscating who you are talking to and what you are saying."
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31sqhv | why are spam emails written so badly? | Whenever I clear out my inbox, I usually see a couple from some random person with a click-baity subject. The last one I got was something like "Di d th em tell you ?" I can understand the bad english, but not putting spaces in the middle of words. Why are these a thing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31sqhv/eli5_why_are_spam_emails_written_so_badly/ | {
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"To weed out smart people.\n\nThey intentionally write them poorly as only the stupid will respond, and the stupid are more likely to fall for the scam.",
"They are trying to avoid spam filters that look for key phrases."
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[],
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8ta4ns | does sleeping on your stomach puts stress on your rib cage? and if it does, isn't it dangerous? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ta4ns/eli5_does_sleeping_on_your_stomach_puts_stress_on/ | {
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"Yes, it puts stress on your ribcage. Sleeping on your back puts stress on your spine. \n\nare these dangerous, normally no. \n\nare you sleeping under large weights? do you have a degenerative bone disease? the three common sleeping positions are not normally dangerous. \n\nnot all stress is equal, not everything under stress is dangerous. ",
"Former mattress salesman (scientifically trained) chiming in:\n\"Yes and No\". Scientifically, the best position to sleep on is your right side, (no stress to spine, ribcage/organs, or heart) but unless you are afflicted with some grievous medical condition (where your doctor will doubtless have told you how to sleep) you should sleep however you find comfortable, as the benefits of good sleep are felt in all systems of the body as are the maluses of poor, and these will greatly outweigh the small differences of the different positions. Your mattress and other sleeping appliances should support whatever position you tend to naturally assume, soft mattresses for those who sleep on the side (as most of us do, we also tend towards the foetal position as it protects the soft parts of the body), those who sleep on the back can entertain firmer mattresses if they fancy (sleeping on the back is rare, it is a vulnerable position) and those who sleep on the stomach should seek out the softest of mattresses. I should mention, as it is a persistent falsehood, that a very firm mattress is *not* especially good for the back, or for a bad back! SOME causes of a \"bad back\" can be helped by one (if you sleep on your back!), but this is for physicians to determine and not for conjecture or other such!"
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3fl7w2 | why are movie "trailers" called "trailers"? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fl7w2/eli5why_are_movie_trailers_called_trailers/ | {
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"They used to come after, or 'trail', the main attraction. After someone figured out noone stuck around to see them, they started putting them before the main attraction, but the name stuck. ",
"It used to be that films were preceded by smaller films, and 'trailed' by advertisements for upcoming films.\n\nWhen I was a kid (early 1970s) we would get to the theater early to watch 2-3 short clips, usually The Little Rascals, the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, the Three Stooges, Laurel & Hardy, or Charlie Chaplin. Almost always black-and-white. Then after the film there would be preview of upcoming films. (This *may* have been regional, I grew up in southern California.)\n\nMid-70s we moved, and the 'trailers' came before the film, nothing after it. I don't know if that was a time thing, or a regional thing.\n\nMy grandparents told me about how going to the movies - a big deal in their day, something you'd get dressed up for - the short clips were often accompanied by live music, anything from a piano to an orchestra. (Again, possibly relevant that they lived where I grew up, not so far from Hollywood.) Then during WWII that changed into unaccompanied news from the war and reminders to 'Do Your Part'. After the war, it switched back to short cartoons or films but the live accompaniment disappeared.\n\nThey went to see 'E.T.' after not going to the theater for almost two decades; I asked them how it was but they didn't really watch the film, having spent the whole time bitching about how they got there right on time to avoid the (by then nonexistent) cartoons but *still* had to sit through twenty minute of 'trailers' that in defiance of all that is proper and good were shown *before* the damned movie started. They never went to the movies again."
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kf930 | is there a scientific explantion yet for why we're sentient? | Scientists seem to know a crapload about the brain but I've never really seen anything relating to the fact that at this very moment I am like... conscious.
Do they have any clue why? Is there some area of the brain that has to do with it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kf930/eli5_is_there_a_scientific_explantion_yet_for_why/ | {
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"I think you overestimate our understanding of the brain, its one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. I think the answer is we don't know, But would love to learn otherwise.",
"Consciousness - in the sense it's used in philosophy - is not studied in science.",
"It's an illusion. Your body and mind are nothing more than an extremely complex, deterministic machine.",
"I think you overestimate our understanding of the brain, its one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. I think the answer is we don't know, But would love to learn otherwise.",
"Consciousness - in the sense it's used in philosophy - is not studied in science.",
"It's an illusion. Your body and mind are nothing more than an extremely complex, deterministic machine."
]
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oy3gq | how does mitt romney make $20m a year in income doing nothing? | What has he invested in, how does his tax rate work, and how can anyone else do that!? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oy3gq/eli5_how_does_mitt_romney_make_20m_a_year_in/ | {
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"It's not that hard to make money if you already have lots of money. You just let other people use it and either charge interest or a share of the profits.",
"I posted a quick explanation of capital gain yesterday [here.](_URL_0_)\n\nHe owns about $200 million worth of companies. Those companies are growing more valuable all the time. He buys and sells millions of dollars in ownership all the time. All in all, he sells about $20 million more than he buys every year. Meanwhile, the value of what he still owns grows by more than $20 million each year."
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[],
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ox0up/eli5_how_do_millionaires_pay_such_a_low/c3ks867"
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3d5fup | why 50 cent filed for bankruptcy. is it because he's really broke? or is he doing some money strategy? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d5fup/eli5_why_50_cent_filed_for_bankruptcy_is_it/ | {
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"Bankruptcy doesn't really mean \"broke.\" Like if I had $0 in my bank account, but I had no debt at all, I wouldn't be declaring bankruptcy, I'd just be dead broke.\n\nBankruptcy basically means \"I admit that I have too much debt and no real way to pay it. Can the government (the courts) protect me from my creditors, so they can't just take all my stuff?\"\n\nWhen you declare bankruptcy as a normal person, you're pretty much forced to sell of anything non-essential (essential being home, car, some personal stuff), and after that you enter a debt repayment plan that the court imposes, so that you can pay off your creditors as well as possible. The banks won't get exactly what they're owed, but they'll at least get something.\n\nWhen a company or some individuals with a lot of debt, like 50 Cent, you'd file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It's similar, but it allows the company or individual to continue their normal functioning while they're working out their repayment plans.\n\nOf course, bankruptcy absolutely ruins a person's credit, and it can be nearly impossible for the average person to get any form of credit for several years after, while that bankruptcy stays on your record. Even for a rich guy like 50 Cent, this isn't going to improve his situation at all, but it will make his debt more manageable at the expense of his future credit.\n"
]
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3gws0f | how do explosions make the sound we all associate with explosions | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gws0f/eli5_how_do_explosions_make_the_sound_we_all/ | {
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"By moving large amounts of air very suddenly. \n\nRemember that what we think of as sound is nothing more than changes in air pressure. It just so happens we have a dedicated organ (the ear) that is very good at detecting even the subtlest of changes and another dedicated organ (the brain) that's really good at interpreting those changes and piecing them together with the info from our other senses to help build our perception of the world.\n\nSo when there's an explosion, the sound is caused by the air being pushed outwards from the point of the explosion very fast and at very high pressure."
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lhlue | eili5: airline tickets...why are they so expensive if you buy too far in advance, and why do flights get more expensive as the time approaches? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lhlue/eili5_airline_ticketswhy_are_they_so_expensive_if/ | {
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"Basically what your trying to do is condition people to buy tickets so you can schedule flights easiest.\n\nThe cost to the airline for a full plane full of people or a plane with one person are similar. But the return on that cost get's higher the more people you place in the plane. As such airlines like to schedule flights so that the most number of people are on them, and that takes time to plan.\n\nTo penalize people for booking flight to early they increase the cost, the provide a incentive for people to book flight earlier (And allows them to squeeze more money out of desperate people.)\n\n\n**I THINK**\n\nAs for to far in advance it's sort of the same thing. Some airline dislike people buying flights to far in advance because it locks them into a price and flight before the schedule can be done. Things like Fuel cost, pilot strikes, marketing shift can all raise the price or lower the price of tickets. To compensate for this airline will charge more in case something bad happens.",
"Airlines do something called *demand pricing*.\n\nThey set the price of the ticket, based on expected demand and competition. Then starting about 2 weeks before the flight, they check and see how full the flight is. If it is mostly empty, the drop the price of the ticket...if it is getting full, they increase it. \n\nThis way, they keep the planes full, but leave room for people who are willing to pay more, like business travelers.",
"Basically what your trying to do is condition people to buy tickets so you can schedule flights easiest.\n\nThe cost to the airline for a full plane full of people or a plane with one person are similar. But the return on that cost get's higher the more people you place in the plane. As such airlines like to schedule flights so that the most number of people are on them, and that takes time to plan.\n\nTo penalize people for booking flight to early they increase the cost, the provide a incentive for people to book flight earlier (And allows them to squeeze more money out of desperate people.)\n\n\n**I THINK**\n\nAs for to far in advance it's sort of the same thing. Some airline dislike people buying flights to far in advance because it locks them into a price and flight before the schedule can be done. Things like Fuel cost, pilot strikes, marketing shift can all raise the price or lower the price of tickets. To compensate for this airline will charge more in case something bad happens.",
"Airlines do something called *demand pricing*.\n\nThey set the price of the ticket, based on expected demand and competition. Then starting about 2 weeks before the flight, they check and see how full the flight is. If it is mostly empty, the drop the price of the ticket...if it is getting full, they increase it. \n\nThis way, they keep the planes full, but leave room for people who are willing to pay more, like business travelers."
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60y6c4 | why are canadians considered to be one of the nicest people? did anything special happened? is canada such a nice place to live in? | I'm from Europe and I have always seen things about how nice canadians are. Even jokes about that. I'd like to know more. Thank you | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60y6c4/eli5_why_are_canadians_considered_to_be_one_of/ | {
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"Canadian culture values politeness in public. It's part of the national identity, along with peace, order, and responsible government, winter sports, multiculturalism, and disdaining the loud variety of patriotism the US is so fond of.",
"I've always assumed Canadians were considered so nice because their American neighbors in New York and New Jersey have a reputation for being rude. They make anyone else look pleasant. Same goes for the American South's reputation for hospitality. Are we really that friendly, or are we just being compared to the neighbors?",
"And all the frustration and anger we hold back is stored until we put on a pair of skates and pick up a stick. \n\nYou want to see nice? How's about I crosscheck you into next week, eh?",
"We help people all over the world. Many countries have been helped by our peacekeeping efforts. And we are generally polite. \n\nWe even won many battles during the world wars and even hid the Dutch princesses in our country while the nazis invaded them. They send us 100,000 tulips every year in appreciation. \n\n\n_URL_0_",
"I've lived up North where it gets stupidly cold. -30F in the middle of the day cold. The cold seems to weed out the lazy first off. Secondly, when you live in that sort of climate that can kill you, at some point you're likely going to have to rely on your neighbors for help. Either you got snowed in with no food, you lost power, car got stuck, etc. If you're a dick, no one will help. Well, they still will because everyone else is trying not to be a dick for when THEY need help, but most of the population figures this out. \n\n\nThat being said, yes there are other countries where it gets cold. But they're not located right next to a country full of assholes. I say this as an American. So you get this dtark contrast. I have lived in the Northern US with such a climate and in the more moderate states. The people, generally speaking, are night and day different. We see this every time we head back home for the holidays. We've forgotten how nice everyone was there by comparison until we encounter it. \n\n\nPurely anectdotal, but a widely held theory in the colder regions. It takes a special type to willingly live in a place where the gas pump can get cold enough the display stops working and the warm card from your wallet is too big to physically fit in the reader.",
"we were formed by two enemies, the french and the english, who decided to form a country not through war (which was happening in the States), but through diplomacy. and at night getting drunk and flirting with each other's wives. everything else came from this.",
"Canadians don't have a fallback to 'freedom of speech' that Americans have. We see speech as a privilege less than a right, therefore our speech is less combative, more conciliatory. The term 'friendly Canadian' is basically from American media, a nod to the fact Canadians speak softer, apologize more and generally offer verbal conciliation readily in comparison to Americans who are taught early to stand behind every statement they make, with a show of force if necessary, because failure to do so is failure to defend your right to free speech. In reality, as a Canadian, many Americans I've met are far friendlier than some Canadians I've met, and folks in Seattle or Portland, Oregon treat folks from BC better than they get treated in Toronto due to our local proximity. \nCanadians are no less or more friendly than anyone else, we just look it standing next to our neighbour. ",
"This is my belief on the matter, although I can't say I've seen any strict proof. \n\nCanada exists at the juncture of a large number of factors that combine to make it a ridiculously nice place. \n\nFirst-borders. Canada has one. It's with a country that is basically their best friend (aside from that little 1812 kerfluffle). The border is so ridiculously unguarded I've wandered through with just my drivers license and a half a case of russian ammunition (Border guard: \"Is....is that RUSSIAN writing?\"). \n\nCompare this to most other places where 'The times those fuckers from over the hill raped everyone' is a pretty big part of history. You can tell me it's good natured all you like, but I've seen the English, French and Germans talk about each other and there are Undertones. Undertones and Unstated Tensions. Canada has none of that. \n\nCanada has ridiculously low population density. Even though 90% of the place is snow, there aren't that many of them. So even with trends towards urbanization, you had a nation that was essentially 100% small towns and villages until very recently, and still has a fuckload of same. This builds a strong sense of community and community mores that reinforces canadian attitudes. Even it's cities are cute little PlayMobil cities.\n\nLittle to no militarization. Like almost all of NATO, Canada spends well below the mandated 2% of GDP on defense. (1%, you damn poutine eating chislers :P ) While their special forces are tip top, and their adventures in the world wars are legendary, the part where they hang out with basically the Army to the World (Except the Parts of the World We Don't Like, Obviously) sort of obviates a strong militaristic nature. \n\nHomogeneous population. Aside from the French (and the Quebecois have a rep as the Not Nice Canucks) it's basically all scots-Irish furtrapper descendants. Compare this to the US- I don't just mean the Black/White racial tensions of the US. The US is really more like ten countries with very different backgrounds, and a relatively high level of regional tension resulting (Coast/Heartland, Rust Belt/Southwest, the way everyone picks on New Jersey....). \n\nEven recent immigration trends are largely confined to cities and large urban areas. Again- this creates a strong culture that isn't under internal tension. \n\nThe US as counterfoil. Despite the ridiculously close relationship, Canadians, as a culture are somewhat sensitive to the part where they're basically one states worth of population. And not even a really big state. So there's a strong desire to create for themselves a distinct cultural identity. \n\nAnd American culture, for about 300 years now, has been noted for being loud, brash, and rambunctious. So the obvious cultural contrast is a really nice and polite society. \n\n(Although I never got the \"rude American\" meme. Americans have an almost eerie obsession with politeness as compared to most Europeans.)",
"I think Tom Brokaw explained Canada quite well in this video explaining us to Americans.\n\n_URL_0_ ",
"I'm from Nova Scotia. Cape Breton, specifically. We are known for our hospitality and friendly attitude. We are a hot spot for tourism. Tourists are welcomed off cruise ships and instantly treated as though they were born and raised here. You may be a complete stranger, but if you are in my house, or you are stuck and know nobody, you're going to be treated as though you are family. We don't believe anybody is better than we are, nor do we believe we are better than anyone else. We were once prosperous but lost all of our industry. We know what it's like to need a little help sometimes. We help those in need where we can and whenever we can. No questions asked. You're poor and starving? Come over. My cupboards are yours. You're wealthy but life threw you a curveball and suddenly you're on the street and hungry? My door is open. My parents raised me that way and I thank them for it every single day. \n\nI'm not sure what the rest of Canada is like, but I hold the door for an awkwardly long time if the person is further away than I thought. I say 'sorry' probably 500 times a day. I am genuinely sorry if I accidentally bumped into you or if I am in your way I always say sorry as I move to the side. I even work at a Tim Hortons. I write your name and draw a smiley face on your drink lid. If I don't know your name, I will ask it! \n\nMaybe I just strive to be overly Canadian and overly friendly. I fit the stereotype of friendly small town Canadian. If the rest of the world were like my little hometown, I can imagine the world would be a very peaceful place. I get anxiety/cringe when I'm in big cities and people don't apologize for bumping into you or people just say fuck you and don't hold the elevator door. \n\nSorry if I didn't answer your question. Started to ramble. Sorry. "
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4r6p2e | why does the us talk about salary in annual context instead of monthly like in for example sweden? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r6p2e/eli5_why_does_the_us_talk_about_salary_in_annual/ | {
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"This depends from country to country and job to job...If you mention your annual salary you actually know how much in total the other earns, it takes into account 13th or 14th month salary (Christmas and paid holiday). \nIn the US there are also people which a paid weekly... \nIF we talk about money in Germany (normally you do not discuss your salary) you can mention both, annual or monthly payment."
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xqwcw | why do many political leaders have money in swiss banks? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xqwcw/eli5_why_do_many_political_leaders_have_money_in/ | {
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"it's not about political leaders. Rich people have the bank accounts. It's because Swiss banks are notoriously secure, and tax free.",
"Switzerland has banking laws that do not require their banks to divulge anything about who had money in them or how much. So if you make money doing something illegal or corrupt...or just don't want to pay taxes, a Swiss bank is a pretty good place to hide that money."
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95ista | what does tesla going private mean and why is it a big deal? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95ista/eli5_what_does_tesla_going_private_mean_and_why/ | {
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"That they will be privately owned and are therefore do not need to placate shareholders.\n\nIt can drastically change the direction of the company since they don't have to focus entirely on things that generate the most profit.",
"Going private does several things for them. \n\nIt eliminates the requirement for public disclosure of finances. Public corps have to release info on their finances. Private corps don’t have the same obligations. \n\nIt also prevents people from short selling Tesla stock in advance of reports and complaining loudly about the earnings in hopes of driving down the stock price. When you short sell, you agree to sell stock at a current price for a later date. You hope the stock price goes down so you can buy it cheaper than what you are selling it for. So these people want the stock price to go down and try to help make that happen. \n\nAdditionally they can add obligations on private stock that you can’t really do on public stock. They can require you give them first chance to buy the stock if you decide to sell for instance. \n\nAnd lastly they declare what the stock price is at any given point in time. Public stocks are worth what someone will pay you for a share. Private stocks are worth what the company says they are worth (to an extent). ",
"Going private means that your shares are not traded at a stock exchange. Being so, you don't have to please the general public as the value of your company does not come from the market opinion about it. As long as what you do pleases the current shareholders, you can do stuff that would make your shares prices crash."
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3qm4vv | in most fpss, equipping a suppressor to a weapon reduces its "damage" value. how accurately does this reflect reality? why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qm4vv/eli5_in_most_fpss_equipping_a_suppressor_to_a/ | {
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"That sort of depends on how much \"game logic\" you're willing to put up with.\n\nIn reality, adding a suppressor to a gun has either no effect on the projectile at all or causes a negligible increase in muzzle velocity. \n\nHowever, this is where \"game logic\" comes in. If you fire a supersonic round out of a suppressed gun there is still going to be an extremely loud noise as the bullet breaks the sound barrier. If you actually want a very quiet shot, you need to use subsonic ammunition that moves much slower. In game terms this subsonic ammo would have a lower damage value.\n\nSo, if you assume that your game character is switching to appropriate ammo when he starts using a suppressor then it makes sense.",
"A suppressor negligibly affects the terminal ballistics of the bullet fired from the weapon.\n\nA suppressor works by channeling expended gases into baffles to mitigate the abrupt rupture of air outside the barrel.\n\nThe correct ammunition paired with a suppressor to effectively utilize its primary function (SEE SUPPRESSING) is the defacto reasoning behind decreased damage. The ballistics of a sub sonic 9mm and super sonic 9mm are measurably different, as is the kB reduced via an attached suppressor.\n\nTo answer your question. Incorrectly, unless you are some Tom Clancy game.",
"The suppressor doesn't really reduce the damage the bullet would do IRL very much at all, but games aren't trying to reflect reality, they are trying to be fun. If a suppressor grants you an advantage by making you quiet, it has to come with a disadvantage or you would just always use them.",
"Well I'm not a gun guy in real life anyways but obviously it's or balance in video games.\n\nUsing a silencer or suppressor usually allows you to\n\n- not appear on the minimap when firing\n\n- have quieter bullet sounds\n\n- remove the \"tracer\" effect on your bullets.\n\nSo it would be pretty unfair and pretty overpowered to do all of that without any real downside.",
"Suppressors do not tend to slow bullets. The only suppressors that CAN do this are integral suppressors which are designed to bleed off gases to keep the bullet subsonic. Effectively it makes the barrel of the gun shorter. There are also suppressors that are designed to be fired \"wet\" and have wipers that seal against the bullet as it passes. These will reduce the velocity a tiny amount. Otherwise, adding a suppressor to an existing gun would not slow the bullet.\n\nSuppressors can actually increase accuracy as well (tends to be the opposite in games) because they slow the gases behind the bullet, which are then less prone to \"push\" on the base of the bullet asymmetrically. To maintain accuracy a gun needs to have a very \"clean\" crown (end face of the barrel) in order to release the gases as symmetrically as possible. "
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6518cr | what is germanys argument against spending 2% gdp on military as agreed under nato | Honestly curious. I keep looking for articles on this and all I see is them saying they won't but no explanation as to why they think they don't have to. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6518cr/eli5_what_is_germanys_argument_against_spending_2/ | {
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"America spends enough to cover their 2%.... so fuck it?",
"The German military while not the most costly is one of the most sizeable and effective if the militaries near them. They don't need to spend a lot to be an effective force.\nJust because America spends a disgusting amount of money on military doesn't mean it is required to spend that much to be an effective force.",
"none? last i heard germany agreed to raise it to 2%, it just wont happen overnight"
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3bo5yr | how do music apps like spotify store the songs on our phones for offline play mode? aren't they worried about piracy? | Spotify and many other apps provide a 'Play Offline' mode. Do they just encrypt and store it on my phone? How can they stop someone from just copying the songs? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bo5yr/eli5_how_do_music_apps_like_spotify_store_the/ | {
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"Yes (they encrypt the music, and compress it too). They are encrypted on download. It works like this: Spotify has a server with a private key (only accessible by Spotify's servers). To access the music that's stored on your phone, the app gives it's public key (the one given to your device) to Spotify, and Spotify will say either 'No. I don't know that key!\" OR \"OK. Here's some music!\" To listen offline, the app gets permission from Spotify's servers to listen to music offline for a period of time (30 days). After that, the app (which has it's own clock so you can't change the time on your phone and keep listening) says \"Umm.... No. I need to check with Spotify's servers to see if I still have permission to do this.\" Then the cycle starts over again. Edit: Question added",
"I have spotify premium and ive tried this... its nearly impossible to find the files and when you do you need to extract it and they are damaged after you do that and wont play.... ",
"They store it how you'd store any other file. Though it is indeed often compressed and encrypted. There's also software limitations to check every so often that you do own the rights.\n\nBut to answer your second question.... nothing. People can and do pirate this way. Even just with streaming (no offline play) you can just grab the cached files and store them outside of the program.\n\nGenerally the way that it's done for these programs is obtuse and frustrating enough to not make it worth the effort. As you commonly need special tools and such to extract the music.\n\nIIRC, itunes at one time attempted to make a new file format to combat this issue (with DRM built in)."
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29b7vd | if a cat can survive jumping from a skyscraper, could they also survive a fall from a bridge? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29b7vd/eli5_if_a_cat_can_survive_jumping_from_a/ | {
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"Cats have a surprisingly low terminal velocity compared to humans, and a much more flexible frame; to answer your question, yes.",
"Don't throw your cat off a bridge.",
"A cat can survive multiple scenarios of falling. Their ability to \"right\" themselves so that they are falling towards the ground \"feet-first\", combined with their ability to form a mini-parachute with their body structure and \"skin flaps\", minimizes damage in a controlled impact.\n\nI'm way too tired to look it up now, so I'm just going to throw out some nominal numbers, so don't quote me on the exact numbers, but there was a study done a few years ago involving hundreds of cat falls. No, the researchers did not drop cats on purpose. They collected data on numerous cat falls that had occurred in the past, primarily from high-rise apartment buildings.\n\nOnce again, these are nominal numbers, don't quote me, but this is basically the general idea:\n\n1) Drop \"Kitty\" from 4 meters or less... She'll probably survive. Kitty will hit the ground in an uncoordinated state, hard. She may have completed her little \"righting\" twist motion, probably not, but she won't be fully stabilized in it. The impact forces will likely break some bones.\n\n2) Drop \"Kitty\" from more than 4 meters but less than 12 meters... This is the Danger Zone. She won't be able to fully right herself and stabilize that position, and she certainly won't have time to go into full \"Parachute Mode.\" Kitty will hit the ground at maximum Kitty Velocity, and will most likely die from internal injuries.\n\n3) Drop \"Kitty\" from a height higher than about 12 meters... She'll right herself, get into full \"Parachute Mode\", and she'll be thinking \"I could do this all day long.\" From the 4th floor all the way up to the 400th floor, Kitty will simply be in a controlled descent that she is well-designed for. Most of these falls end in a broken leg or legs, and possibly a couple of bruised or broken ribs.\n\n---------------------\n\nThis all depends on the maturity of the cat, the age of the cat, the body of the cat, the agility of the cat, etc.\n\nIt also depends upon air density. If Kitty falls from the peak of Mt. Everest to a spot 1000 feet below -- SPLAT! There is not enough air density for her little parachute trick to slow her to a speed that will keep her from getting killed. Sea-level cats have the best chance of survival. This entire situation is about aerodynamics, and it just works better in dense, sea-level air."
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1kewh1 | why do some people not get hang overs? | I never get hang overs. No matter how much I drink I never get any things close to what People describe as a hang over.
If I drank a lot and forgot to drink water before passing out then I might wake up completley dry and need water, but after drinking I'm as good as new. How can my biology be so different from the majority? What exactly cause a hangover ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kewh1/eli5_why_do_some_people_not_get_hang_overs/ | {
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"It's probably the cocaine. ",
"Ahh... how sweet life was before the age of 30.",
"How old are you? I promise you this will change as you get older. ",
"From what I understand hangovers are a mix of dehydration (low levels of water in your body) and poor blood sugars. \n\nDo you find yourself peeing a lot whilst drinking? \nAlcohol is what's known as a \"diuretic\" which means it makes you flush the water out of your body. This is why people use the toilet a lot when they are drinking. \n\nIt is possible that diuretics are not as effective on you and so you aren't peeing lots and lots of the water out of your body. It is also possible that you are just so well hydrated (full of water) BEFORE you start drinking that you still have enough in your body the morning after.\n\n*edit*\nAge also plays a big part in this, younger people tend to be able to recover more easily. You know you need to cut down when you have the dreaded double hangover which lasts until the morning after the morning after...",
"That's my secret...I'm always hungover.",
"[This video](_URL_0_) explains what else is going on in the bodies (more specifically, livers) of people suffering from hangovers BESIDES dehydration. Doesn't necessarily answer the question, but I thought it was relevant.",
"I dont believe that researchers know 100% why we get hangovers. But, I learned in a pharmacology class that one other probable cause for hangovers (other than dehydration) is the way alcohol is metabolized in the body. Ethyl alcohol which is broken down in the human body is first converted to acetaldehyde, and then this acetaldehyde is converted into acetic acid radicals (Acetyl Radical). Acetyl radical is eventually broken down into carbon dioxide and water and then urinated out. Acetaldehyde is a poison which is a close relative of formaldehyde. If you do not have enough enzymes in your body to break down the Acetaldehyde, it builds up in your body creating some of the symptoms of a hangover. So, my guess is that you may have more enzymes in your body that help you metabolize the various metabolites of alcohol and then don't get the effects of a hangover. "
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bcejnf | why do so many of the men in older movies have such deep voices? | In addition, why do so many of the men and women have incredibly similar voices? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bcejnf/eli5_why_do_so_many_of_the_men_in_older_movies/ | {
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"Depending on how old you are talking, it could be because in early movies with sound the actors were trained for stage acting and didn't know how to transition to film. Which is also why emotional reactions are so overdramatic. However, younger older films is probably because they had deeper voices or because they were trying to adhere to stricter gender stereotypes. Also, it may have something to do with the recording equipment being used at the time.",
"I don't think they particularly have *deeper* voices, but the reason they speak differently is that accents change over time. It's not just in movies. Movies with sound are almost a century old at this point; that's plenty long enough to document multiple shifts. If they sound \"incredibly similar,\" it's probably because they are all speaking with the same accent that is not yours. A person from the 1940s would probably simlarly think you and I sound \"incredibly similar\" (and also strange).",
"Due to early microphone designs, people had to learn to speak a certain way in order to maintain clarity in the recording. I like to call this \"the radio voice\". Even though microphones improved, dictation remained as an important skill for actors for a long time. Very few practice it now which is why people sound more \"normal\" in modern movies.",
"Today I learned I always thought that it was because smoking was far more prevalent back in the old days bus leading to men with deeper voices",
"Could it be today's society has made it so comfortable for men tobe effiminate?"
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2bqh44 | how this is made? | ELI5
I saw this thing in this year's Positivus festival (music festival) and I was wondering how do you make it and if it's possible to make it in home (like DIY thing) Sorry for my bad English and I may not put in the right subreddit.
Here's pics _URL_0_
It's like made of wood fiber and covers with something. It's really durable and can resist bad weather.
I thought it would be a good place to read books or take a nap.
Thanks in advance! :D | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bqh44/eli5_how_this_is_made/ | {
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"/r/DIY may be a better place to ask this. This subreddit is generally for the explanation of concepts."
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zutd0 | - why do clones (usually?) die quickly. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zutd0/eli5_why_do_clones_usually_die_quickly/ | {
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"We're not very good at it yet, so we end up causing genetic abnormalities. Most genetic abnormalities hurt the thing we cloned, making it die faster.",
"Its pretty damn hard to explain like your five, but here we go.\n\nClones are made from young to adult organisms. Since we are not giving birth, but copying them, that means the clones cells are the same age as the original being. Meaning it will die earlier in life because it has the same amount of time left as the original organism.\n\nIf you want the scientific answer(probably not, seeing as you are on ELI5, but fuck it.)It has to do with telomeres. Every time a cell in your body divides, it snips off a part of DNA, almost always a useless pair of information. Telomeres protect this from happening but eventually they cease to work or even be present on a chromosome. During this time, cell division begins to cut off a part of the DNA sequence that helps assist in the functioning of an organ or hair growth. This is essentially how aging is. The older you get, the less functioning cells you have.\n\nIf a clone is made from a 21 year-old man, the cells in the clone would have chromosomes as if they split and recombined for 21 years. Making the cells in the clone the same age as the cells in the original.\n\nEDIT: Reworded and spelling",
"People are made up of billions of little parts called 'cells'. These are best likened to tiny machines, mostly made up of carbon and water, but with lots of other molecules thrown into the mix. The basic jobs of a cell are a, make more of itself, and b, help other cells around it survive to make more of themselves. Different cells accomplish this via different methods. Some cells are part of your digestive track and are specialized to suck nutrients out of mushed up food. Some cells are part of your muscles and are specialized to move or support. \n\nHowever, EVERY cell contains within its center, in an area called the 'Nucleus', a list of instructions. These instructions contain information on how to do the things each cell needs to, mostly by rearranging the nutrients absorbed from food into useful shapes called proteins. They also contain plans for building copies of itself *and* every other cell in the body.\n\nThese list of instructions are called chromosomes. They are made of a complex chemical called Deoxyribonucleic Acid. You've probably heard of this chemical called DNA instead.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEach individual instruction encoded in the DNA is called a 'Codon'. It matches up to a nutrient, called an 'Amino Acid'. Several Codons together make a 'Gene', which is a set of instructions for building a whole protein... say the protein that acts as the pigment in your hair, or the protein that makes digestive juices for your stomach and intestines. \n\nMost cloning attempts so far attempt to take the entirety of the nucleus and implant it into an 'Egg Cell', created by a female of the same species that donated the nucleus.\n\nThere's a problem here.\n\nEach chromosome is responsible for duplicating itself pretty often when it makes new cells. This means that it builds a duplicate of itself until each chromosome is doubled-up, and then splits down the middle, with each duplicate going to a new cell.\n\nDNA, since it is so tiny, is pretty fragile. It can become frayed, damaged, or otherwise altered by seemingly random occurrences. Sometimes this changes the DNA for the better... Most of the time it does not. It's a neutral change that doesn't really make any difference, or it's a bad change... and the cell's damaged instructions mean it does bad things... like grow into a cancerous tumor.\n\nHappily, there are all kinds of mechanisms in the cell to prevent this kind of thing from happening. When it happens anyway... well, we call it cancer for a reason.\n\nDNA is especially prone to fraying at the ends, like a piece of string. To keep it from fraying, there is more, very repetitive DNA tagged on to the end of each chromosome. This DNA is called 'Telomere'. It works to keep the DNA at the end of the chromosome from breaking off or becoming damaged.\n\n_URL_2_\n\nEvery time a cell divides, the length of Telomere grows shorter and shorter. When there's no more Telomere left, the cell self-destructs.\n\nThis is thought to be one of the primary causes of aging.\n\nWhen cells need to make a new cell that has lots of Telomere, say for making a new creature of the same kind when parents mate, they replenish the Telomere at the end of each chromosome, along with some other fairly significant changes.\n\nGetting a cell with a 'full' supply of Telomere is HARD to do. So if you take a cell with a short supply of Telomere and implant its nucleus in the egg of another animal, the resulting animal's cells think they're already as old as the original animal that donated the nucleus.\n\nThat's what happened to Dolly the sheep.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nOne place that's fairly easy to get cells with full supplies of Telomere are animal fetuses. They have lots of 'Stem Cells', which are cells that have a full supply of Telomere and haven't specialized yet.\n\n_URL_3_\n\nThere have been some successful clones made of larger mammals using this kind of procedure, but it seems to become more and more problematic the larger the animal. The last I heard, the best 'healthy' clones were rabbits, mice, cats and dogs.\n\nResearch on stem cells is fairly new, and tends to be somewhat controversial.\n\nHowever, even implanting a nucleus form a stem cell into an egg cell can STILL cause damage to the DNA inside it, or other parts of the cell, making it much harder for the resulting animal to survive. The success rate for creating 'healthy' clones is relatively low.",
"Everyone has DNA inside of them that tells their body how to work and what to look like. Everyone has their very own DNA, except clones. Clones are made by taking someone's DNA and copying it for the clone. Peoples' DNA wears out as people get older. Since clones start out with already worn-out DNA, they don't live very long.",
"Your body has a life bar like in a video game. As you get older the bar gets shorter and shorter until you have no life left, then you die. Some people start out with a very long life bar, some with a short one. If you get hurt very badly your life can be used up real fast. \n \nWhen we clone a person or animal the clone starts out with the amount of life bar left at that poiint in time, not the original startup amount of life when the first person/animal was born. Think of it as a kind of Level down version of the character. "
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[],
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"https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/DNA",
"https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Dolly_the_sheep",
"https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Telomere",
"https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Stem_cells"
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