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43056h | did plants like fruits and vegetables evolve so we could eat them? were they inedible to us in the past? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43056h/eli5did_plants_like_fruits_and_vegetables_evolve/ | {
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"Wild plants evolved that their seeds would be eaten and pooped out by animals.\n\nDomesticated plants are bred by humans to produce more of the edible part. Wild potato's, corn/maize, rice, bananas, apples,etc do not have as humam tasty fruit.",
"Basically, yes. The purpose is for animals to carry the fruit away. Seeds either drop while the animal eats the fruit or in some cases survives the digestive tract. But in either case, the seeds have been successfully dispersed.",
"In the cast of fruits: yes. The big advantage animals have over plants is that they can move around, they aren't bound to a single location. Plants evolved to take advantage of this by creating nutritious fruits containing their seeds. The ~~plants~~ animals would eat the fruit, and the seeds, the fruit would get digested and the animal would deposit (to put it politely) the seed elsewhere. Thus the seeds from the tree can be spread over a much greater area than if they just fell to the ground. It's worth mentioning that most modern fruits have been extensively bred to be far larger, sweeter and contain less seeds than their natural counterparts.\n\nVegetables are different. Vegetable basically means \"Any part of a plant that we eat which isn't a fruit\", so you can't really lump all of them together. But in general though most vegetables did not evolve to be eaten, they either happened to be edible or where bred that way. ",
"There's a difference between botanical fruit and culinary fruit that's very important here. \"Culinary fruit\" is what we generally think of as fruit, and excludes things like cucumbers and chili peppers. However, cucumbers and chili peppers are botanical fruit, because they're specifically created to encourage animals to eat them, which helps spread the seeds inside. \n\nSo, *botanical* fruit, which includes some vegetables (like cucumbers), but not others (like celery), evolved specifically to be eaten by animals. Vegetables generally did not.",
"You'd be amazed what we now consider staple foods originated as.\n\nUntil we started cultivating them Ancient tomatoes were the size of berries; potatoes were no bigger than peanuts. Corn was a wild grass, its tooth-cracking kernels borne in clusters as small as pencil erasers. Cucumbers were spiny as sea urchins; lettuce was bitter and prickly. Peas were so starchy and unpalatable that, before eating, they had to be roasted like chestnuts and peeled. The sole available cabbage—the great-great-granddaddy of today’s kale, kohlrabi, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower—was sea kale, a tough and tongue-curling leafy weed that grew along the temperate sea coasts. Carrots were white and scrawny. Beans were naturally laced with cyanide.\n\nJust as examples, further reading\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\n_URL_3_",
"Some plants produce edible structures specifically so they can be eaten and the seeds spread. Most were further bred by humans to be gigantic tasty mutants. compare a 5mm wild strayberry with a 5cm modern cultivated strawberry.\n\nOther plants are edible simply because they don't put work into being poisonous. Cattails which grow in many marshy areas have an edible starchy root (not unlike a potato!) and when young and tender, the greens and flower buds of the plant may also be eaten _URL_0_ The starchy root is used by the plant as an *energy storage*, so it's full of nutritious starch the plant was going to use as energy, and the young tender parts of the plant are edible because his species doesn't bother to fill itself with poisons, oxalates, thorns, etc. Such defenses take energy and some plants don't bother. \n\nSimilarly you can eat young bamboo shoots, when they're soft enough for us to eat.",
"To be more accurate both have evolved together. Some fruit is evolved like others have said to have seeds that can survive and sometimes even need to go through the digestive tract of an animal. However animals have also evolved to be able to eat plants as well. Humans could not digest a cows diet, cows have 4 stomachs involved in digestion. In this case cows evolved to be able to digest grass and grass evolved to be able to survived being cropped nearly to the ground by cows. The reason we have so much coal is at one point nothing could digest lignin so trees piled up and never rotted or decomposed. Then termites and other organisms evolved to fill the needed lignin eater niche. ",
"The poisonous plants and fruits did not dominate and rapidly expand as edible ones because they killed the animals eating them, whilst edible plants spread more rapidly and survived due to seeds being spread out more. \n",
"The top answer does not answer your question. The answer is simple. Small things that somewhat resembled corn were eaten by our ancestors, and had been those small things up until the invention of agriculture. Once we were able to grow plants, we discovered that if you plant the seeds from a \"big\" corn thing, those seeds will grow into more big corn things. If, once again, you find the biggest corn thing in the bunch of the ones that you planted, and plant its seeds, you will get even bigger corn things! Continue this process, called selective breeding, or artificial selection, and you will end up with bigger and bigger corns! It is possible that in the future, today's foot long corns will be considered small, and even bigger ones will exist. The same thing happens with other vegetables, fruits, nuts, that we grow, and animals that we have domesticated.",
"Most food, as we know it today was \"engineered\" by humans. Most plants we eat never existed even close to their current form in the wild. A few, such as corn, can't even exist without human intervention. Most animals we eat are the result of thousands of years of selective breeding and domestication. Don't get me wrong though, there's still edible wild animals and plants. A lot of sea food is still caught in the wild to this day. Crab, lobster, and fish are a few good examples. So your answer is no, they didn't evolve, they were engineered by humans. "
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39x6eo | why is out-of-focus light in the background of a camera/movie shot look octagonal? | Is there something about light dots that makes the shutter pick up an octagonal shape? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39x6eo/eli5_why_is_outoffocus_light_in_the_background_of/ | {
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"You vary the amount of light going into a camera using its 'aperture', and it's this that causes that effect. \n\nIn humans the effect is circular because the pupil itself (our 'aperture') is circular. \n\nIn a camera, the aperture is created using overlapping leaves that allow the opening to be changed. Whatever shape this opening is will manifest in out-of-focus points of light. \n\nSee [here](_URL_2_) \n\nThat effect in general, whatever shape it is, can be used creatively, and is known as [Bokeh](_URL_0_)\n\nYou can create gimmicky effects using things called Bokeh Filters which are just screw-on addons to your camera, like this: \n\n[Bokeh Filters](_URL_3_) \n\n[Example of the results you can get](_URL_1_)\n\n\n\n",
"It has to do with the iris of the lens. The iris is just like in our eyes....the diameter of the opening varies to adjust the amount of light entering the camera. Think of a beach scene...you'd want it more closed to limit the light. Then for a night scene, you'd want it open to get as much light as possible.\n\nThe actual shape of the iris is made from the blades that rotate to open or close the opening. Certain lenses have 6 blade irises, some have 9. These will generate different shapes.\n\nInterestingly, if you watched the opening scenes of SNL recently, they placed a cutout of the SNL logo on the iris opening. When out of focus, the lights made the shape of the logo instead of the octagonal shape you described. "
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349do8 | why arent there anymore bearded us presidents like abraham lincoln? there dont seem to be many bearded politicians overall. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/349do8/eli5_why_arent_there_anymore_bearded_us/ | {
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"it's out of fashion and it has been for a long time, in very conservative workplaces having a beard is still not considered a good idea. \nThis is losing importance as personal expression gains territory anyway. But you still can't find many bearded politicians outside of islamic countries. ",
"In the 19th century it was relatively difficult to shave yourself, so generally you could not be clean-shaven unless you went to a barbershop regularly: as a result, soldiers tended to have luxurious facial hair that got long while they were out campaigning, and beards, mustaches, and sideburns were considered extremely masculine. However, in the 20th century three things happened. (1) The safety razor made it easy and safe to shave yourself. (2) Chemical warfare made the fit of a gasmask over a soldier's face part of military preparedness. (3) There was also a general concern with keeping soldiers hair under control, as modern armies started to understand that disease could be controlled if parasites (like fleas and lice) were controlled. So in WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam, military regulations were for soldiers to be clean-shaven. This meant, first of all, that draftees got used to being clean-shaven during their years in the military and thought of it as \"normal\", but also that the \"soldier\" look was transferred from \"wild facial hair, no grooming\" to \"zero facial hair, meticulous grooming\".",
"I remember reading once that shaving became popular after the first world war required shaving to wear a gas mask, and at the time having a beard meant you didn't fight for your country so beards fell out of style. Not sure if that is true, it could just be a myth."
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nhnit | why animals such as dogs can live off of brown pellets but humans much have extensive diets. | I guess more what I'm trying to say is like whales can live just off of krill and still maintain healthy but if humans only ate one thing there whole life they wouldn't be very healthy. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nhnit/eli5_why_animals_such_as_dogs_can_live_off_of/ | {
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"Not necessarily. Krill, for example, contains the nutrients that a whale needs. Humans could certainly develop nutritionally-complete pellets, but why would we when we can choose what we eat?",
"There is a company that have made a product that apparently we could eat. Its called \"one square meal\" and it has 1/3 of everything you need. Three a day and voila. Its the human version of dog biscuits. I've got some in my emergency kit. ",
"First of all army [C-Rations](_URL_1_), and their newer form [MRE's](_URL_0_) are design for something like this. I don't know if any serious problems would occur from eating just these, but if they did I would have to guess it would be due to a mineral or vitamin deficiency.",
"I think there was a thread in food a while back similar to this. There is something known as [\"Prison Loaf\"](_URL_0_) which is essentially human food. Apparently it is kinda grim but gives you what you need to survive.",
"Well although humans and other animals are very similar (both part of animal system) we have different needs/foods as per evolution. That's just what whales need to survive, but we can't compare ourselves to them because our needs and digestion systems are so different. Humans could theoretically live off of compressed food pellets (that's what people with feeding tubes do - they are fed by food paste) but humans choose not to because we have the ability to choose and express ourselves in terms of our meals.",
"The human need for food variety is psychological. We could come up with food that would be healthy to eat every day, but most people would go nuts eating it for long periods of time. That's because humans did not evolve in environments where there was a particular food that would provide everything we needed; we were always better off eating a variety, so we evolved to seek out variety. ",
"There is actually a guy that lived off Monkey Chow for a week, and video blogged his findings to youtube.\n\nHere's part one: _URL_0_\n\nBecause monkeys are so biologically similar to humans, he concluded that you could be sustained by it. But the videos are so much more interesting/disturbing than that.",
"EAT BACHELOR CHOW! NOW WITH FLAVOUR!",
"Not necessarily. Krill, for example, contains the nutrients that a whale needs. Humans could certainly develop nutritionally-complete pellets, but why would we when we can choose what we eat?",
"There is a company that have made a product that apparently we could eat. Its called \"one square meal\" and it has 1/3 of everything you need. Three a day and voila. Its the human version of dog biscuits. I've got some in my emergency kit. ",
"First of all army [C-Rations](_URL_1_), and their newer form [MRE's](_URL_0_) are design for something like this. I don't know if any serious problems would occur from eating just these, but if they did I would have to guess it would be due to a mineral or vitamin deficiency.",
"I think there was a thread in food a while back similar to this. There is something known as [\"Prison Loaf\"](_URL_0_) which is essentially human food. Apparently it is kinda grim but gives you what you need to survive.",
"Well although humans and other animals are very similar (both part of animal system) we have different needs/foods as per evolution. That's just what whales need to survive, but we can't compare ourselves to them because our needs and digestion systems are so different. Humans could theoretically live off of compressed food pellets (that's what people with feeding tubes do - they are fed by food paste) but humans choose not to because we have the ability to choose and express ourselves in terms of our meals.",
"The human need for food variety is psychological. We could come up with food that would be healthy to eat every day, but most people would go nuts eating it for long periods of time. That's because humans did not evolve in environments where there was a particular food that would provide everything we needed; we were always better off eating a variety, so we evolved to seek out variety. ",
"There is actually a guy that lived off Monkey Chow for a week, and video blogged his findings to youtube.\n\nHere's part one: _URL_0_\n\nBecause monkeys are so biologically similar to humans, he concluded that you could be sustained by it. But the videos are so much more interesting/disturbing than that.",
"EAT BACHELOR CHOW! NOW WITH FLAVOUR!"
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18r1cv | how par2 files can completely recover a missing rar file in a rar group? | Regular parity is easy to understand but I've had entire far files replaced. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18r1cv/eli5_how_par2_files_can_completely_recover_a/ | {
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"They contain error correction data about the archive. I don't know the exact details of what they use, and it would probably be beyond ELI5 anyway, so instead I'll use a simple example just to illustrate the idea. I'm sure you can find the exact method with some googling if you want to.\n\nSo let's say you have 5 rar files in your group. Let's treat each of them as a series of bits, that is just ones and zeros. Let's say that the contents of the files are like this. Each row is one file, the start of the file is the left most bit.\n\n 00110101110010101\n 11010100101111001\n 01000111010111111\n 00000000011111001\n 11111001110111000\n\nThen we can calculate a parity file. For each column, count the number of ones. If there's an odd number of ones, then the bit for the parity file for that column is one. If there's an even number of ones, then it's zero. This then makes the number of ones for each column for all the actual data files and the parity file an even number. The data bits in the first column are 0, 1, 0, 0, 1. There's an even number of ones there so the parity bit is zero. The next column is 0, 1, 1, 0, 1. There are three ones there so the parity bit is one. The whole parity file will be\n\n 01011111100010010\n\nWith this file we can now restore any of the actual data files if we have the rest. The idea is simple. We know that there must be an even number of 1 bits for each column. So if we have an odd number of ones in the existing data files and the parity file, then the missing file must have a 1 in that column. Otherwise it must have a 0. Let's say that the the second file is missing. The first column, including the parity file, is 0, ?, 0, 0, 1, 0. There's an odd number of ones there so the missing value must be 1. Second column is 0, ?, 1, 0, 1, 1. There are three ones there so the missing value must be 1. Next column is 1, ?, 0, 0, 1, 0. There's two ones there so the missing value must be 0. And so on. \n\nThat's pretty much the simplest error correction you can do. It relies on us knowing where the errors are to begin with (we knew which file was missing). If one file was just corrupted, but we didn't know which one, then we couldn't fix it with this error correction code. We could only say that the one bits don't add up so there must be an error here somewhere but we don't know exactly where. There are more elaborate ways of doing the error correction which address these issues, almost certainly RAR uses one of those better methods.\n"
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3q0lxy | how have humans evolved/progressed so fast? | How have we achieved so much in the 200,000 years we have been around?
It is a remarkably short amount of time when compared to another species like the dinosaurs, especially when they were around for 165 million years, and they didn't seem to change much at all. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3q0lxy/eli5_how_have_humans_evolvedprogressed_so_fast/ | {
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"Writing, not having to relearn everything in every generation, reading what others have learned.\n\nBuilding on knowledge of people that came before us.\n\npassing what we learn to next generation.",
"Evolution wise, we haven't really changed in those 200k years. A fifth of a million years is a blink of an eye in evolutionary timescale.\n\nWhat happened was that evolution got us to a point of sufficient intelligence that we could build on the knowledge of previous generations. Writing accelerated this many times over. Although some intelligent animals pass on knowledge to their children (sponge foraging dolphins), none of them have the necessary intelligence related attributes to make this leap forward.\n\nIf you look at humans who grow up with no social contact (feral children) or tribe members cut off from contact of modern society (most of these tribes have been contacted, but some studies from the last century still exist) you can see humans as we \"were\" 200 thousand years ago.",
"Communication. This is the answer. Our ability to work together and share ideas has ultimately allowed us to be the most dominant species on this planet. ",
"Paleontologist here. I'd like to correct you on your assertion that dinosaurs didn't change much. \n\nDinosaurs changed immensely over the course of 165 million years. Over that time, they went from a small group of relatively similar closely-related organisms to one of the most diverse groups of animals in history, easily as diverse as modern mammals. \n\nBut I see what you're trying to say. They didn't go to space. \n\nWell, from a natural evolution standpoint, humans haven't changed much. We're very similar now to our 200,000 year-old ancestors, and frankly not much different from the earliest apes ~20 million years ago. Our biological evolution isn't much different from the dinosaurs, or any other organism, really. \n\nHowever, we very recently (over several centuries) hit upon some very successful strategies in culture and technology. Our cultural evolution allowed us to create major governments and global societal systems, and our technology gives us major innovations in transportation, development, etc. These forms of evolution are not constrained by rates of reproduction or genetic variation. Instead, they're also constrained by our own communication and imagination, and as things become more and more computerized, they aren't even constrained by those anymore. This means our cultural and technological evolution can take off wayyyy faster than natural selection could.\n\nSo comparing our progression to dinosaurs, or any other living thing, is a little bit unfair. We're playing by different rules. "
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3nsraz | why do some airplanes wing tips go up | I would guess that the tips go up for better gas mileage but I don't understand why this would help compared to a conventional wing. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nsraz/eli5_why_do_some_airplanes_wing_tips_go_up/ | {
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"Your guess is correct, they do increase gas mileage. The reason for this is that on a plane without winglets (wing tips that go up) the ends of the wing produce a effect known as a Wing Tip Vortice, which basically means the air wants to swirl around instead of flowing straight over the wing like it usually does, as can be seen in [This Picture](_URL_0_). These vortices cause wingtips to produce less lift then the rest of the wing would which means that you need to make a wing longer then you would if those vortices didn't occur. Adding winglets though dissipates these vortices causing the ends of the wings to produce more lift allowing for a shorter wing and less drag, which is what would cause the fuel efficiency to go up. \n\nIn other words, normally the air at the ends of the wings likes to make swirls making that part of the wing inefficient. Adding winglets causing that air to go straight instead making the wing more efficient. This allows for a smaller wing which produces less drag and as such makes the plane more fuel efficient. ",
"It reduces vortex shedding from the tips. The air coming off of the wing tips makes a swirly cone of air. Causing the air to swirl around like that takes energy, which comes from the plane. The plane is wasting energy swirling air with no benefit.\n\nThose vertical wing tips get in the way of the air rolling off the tips of the wings and minimizes the swirly effect. Less swirlines means less drag.",
"I had a \"kids in science\" book when I was about 8 years old in 1986 or so that said winglets were first invented by a teenager with a homemade wind tunnel in the early 80s. Any truth to this?"
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a7giv5 | how do hydraulics work? (how can a tractor lift so much)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a7giv5/eli5_how_do_hydraulics_work_how_can_a_tractor/ | {
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"Hydraulics are cool. When you apply a pressure to a fluid, the pressure instantly spreads through the fluid. Since pressure = force/area... you can increase the force by increasing the area (it sounds counter intuitive, but it's true). So, if you push down with a force of 10N on an area of 1cm^2, then your pressure is 10N/cm^2. If your output has an area of 100cm^2, and the pressure is the same, then the force on the output will be 1000N - because 1000N/100cm^2 is the same as 10N/1cm^2."
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50ci0d | why do single serving (greek) yogurt containers keep the fruit contents in the bottom of the container? | I'm just not certain why they don't offer it already mixed. Is there a point? Is it just more efficient to manufacture / mass produce? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/50ci0d/eli5_why_do_single_serving_greek_yogurt/ | {
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"1. More efficient to produce. It takes a machine to mix it together thoroughly, to guarantee each cup gets the same amount of fruit.\n\n2. Aesthetics. Machine-mixed might look really bad when you pop open the top, because some yogurts don't have emulsifiers which means liquids can separate out.\n\n3. More \"fun to eat\". Interactivity can be a selling point, as long it isn't a burden. In this case, it's certainly not a burden."
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edj6sg | how does a weedwhacker transmit power from the engine to the rotating piece? | Specifically on weedwhackers with a curved arm connecting the engine to the cutting section. It baffles my ignorant brain lol
Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/edj6sg/eli5_how_does_a_weedwhacker_transmit_power_from/ | {
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"The motor delivers the power the same way the motor does in a car. The motor is connected to a drive shaft. In the curved necked weed whacker, I believe there's a cable that's connected between the drive shaft and cutting head.",
"I found this article to explain it very well:\n[link here](_URL_0_)\n\n\"In both curved and straight shaft trimmers, a motor connects to a cutting head by way of a shaft. The shaft on both models is going to be where the handle and the throttle are mounted. Within the metal shaft, a drive cable runs the length of the shaft, spun by the engine, and turns the cutting head at the other end of the trimmer.\nThe curve of the shaft, or lack thereof, will influence the drive cable. In a curved model, the drive cable will need to be flexible to accommodate the curve in the shaft. This will have a direct effect on the durability of the cable, as the drive cable constantly bends and spins within the metal shaft.\""
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46v38h | why do horses need to be put down when they break a leg while most other animals don't? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46v38h/eli5_why_do_horses_need_to_be_put_down_when_they/ | {
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"Horse bones are incredibly dense and fairly difficult to break, but when they do break they do not heal well, easily, or quickly and are very prone to infection. Most would die a slow painful death from infection, even with antibiotics and other medical care. Those that survive would most likely not have full use of the leg, and have a leg prone to break again. ",
"One horse leg on average holds up 300 pounds of horse and is used to surviving a fuckload of punishment, because running is what horses *do*. So while you see stories of some dog using a prosthetic or getting a cast, that's because they lay down most of the time, are relatively light for their size, and have enough shit to do without running. A horse would break a prosthetic in a week, and it would be absolute torture to many to keep them from running for 3 months. ",
"When the horse is propped up by a sling to take pressure off the leg, they will slowly suffocate because of the lack of expansion in their ribcage.",
"A good combination of the previous answers, the weight bearing, the infection, and then just the behavior of the horse. We're talking a creature anywhere from 700-1800 pounds that's a prey animal. Confining them for long periods of time isn't the same as putting your 50 pound dog in a crate. They will randomly freak out and potentially hurt themselves worse. In addition, they're not an animal you can just take to any vet. They need specialized equipment and space, usually found at agricultural centered universities, and it's expensive with no guarantee of success. ",
"When a horse breaks a leg, it's not clean. Imagine breaking a twig, it breaks in two.\n\nNow, imagine breaking glass. It shatters. What is easier to repair?\n\nNow put that on a horse, factor in its size, then factor in the cost. I've heard it can be a long endeavor.\n\nHere is an article\n\n_URL_0_",
"Horses are very heavy and need to be on their feet 23 hours a day, moving for most of it, for both their mental and physical health. Trying to heal a broken leg means using slings to hold the horse upright, fighting poor circulation from not enough movement, and trying to prevent hundreds of secondary issues from offloading roughly 300 pounds of weight onto bands/the other legs/a cast. Plus, a running horse will put thousands of pounds through a leg bone... You need it to heal very strong. It is possible to do in this day and age, but extremely expensive and time consuming, and not very pleasant for the horse. It's definitely not an option for an average horse owner, and is generally only tried for very valuable stallions, where you can recover some of that money through breeding. ",
"I'm sorry but most of the explanations on here or partially or completely wrong. I am a vet student focused on equine medicine and was just recently discussing this with one of my professors who is a renowned equine surgeon and has cut open more horses than most people have ever seen.\n\nThere are several reasons:\n\n1. Horses are pretty weird anatomically - they have no muscles below the knee. Part of their ability to run super fast is this really incredible tendon/ligament system - muscles higher on the body load the tendons and ligaments with huge amounts of power (picture a spring). Because of this, the bones in their lower leg (which is almost always where they break) are relatively very thin but also generating massive power. This ratio is much more extreme in the horse than other animals, so it means that solving it with a few pins like you might in other animals won't do the trick. In addition, this massive power makes it more likely that the horse will basically shatter the bone rather than just a simple break or fracture . Also, they're just really big.\n\n2. u/cantcountnoaccount described foundering well - if the horse can't move his legs around, he can't circulate blood through properly and it somewhat pools in the hoof and the attachments of the hoof to the bottom of the leg weaken. Compare this to a human or dog, where we can wiggle our toes and whatnot to help move circulation through - remember, horses have no muscles below the knee.\n\n3. Trying to keep a horse from moving around for any extended period of time is a nightmare. There's a saying I heard that all horses have two goals in life: homicide and suicide. They will colic and die if a bird looks at them wrong. In addition to the possibility of foundering, a horse is pretty likely to just lose his marbles if you try to keep them sedentary for too long - they may try to climb out of their stall, break whatever apparatus they're in, colic (severe and sometimes fatal stomach ache), get ulcers and whatever else. You can't force them to lay on their side for very long at all - they're too heavy and will have difficulty breathing and damage nerves.\n\nWhen deciding whether or not to save an animal, quality of life must always be considered. A dog may do perfectly well and have a wonderful life in a cast for a while and then with a moderate limp - this is not true for horses. Further, cost can be very prohibitive; it's worth it for very very expensive horses (think Barbaro) but for your average pleasure horse, the cost and pain is just not worth it or generally feasible.",
"Horses with fractures usually heal ok with a lot of slow, careful rehab (6mos to a a year of stall rest, a couple years of confinement in small spaces, limited free time outside, lots of wrapping - basically pony jail). Even a complete break can be pinned and usually healed with the above treatment, plus being suspended in a sling. Unfortunately, a shattered leg bone is not feasible to repair. It cannot be glued back together strongly (at least not with out current medical technology). Lots of horse leg fractures are treated and healed, some complete breaks are healed, but shattered legs are a death sentence.\n\nThe ability to heal depends on how badly the bone is broken, but moreso the attitude of the horse itself. Few horses can withstand pony jail without breaking down mentally (they get depressed, ulcers, lowered immune systems and sometimes lose their patience and freak out). They don't generally understand the reasoning behind their confinement, but some will stoically accept that pain and confinement is the new norm.\n\nBone is strong in compression but really weak in torsion. Horses don't run in straight lines in free play - they spin, buck, rear and kick. When a horse is allowed to be a horse after coming off confinement, there is always a risk they will rebreak it, and worse than than before. You can put them through physio to keep them safely active, but ultimately when they run loose they will play. ",
"Oh, a question I can answer!\n\nIt's a combination of issues with treatment, and with the expense of treatment. /u/cdb03b got it right when they mentioned that it's incredibly difficult to get a broken bone to heal correctly in a horse, and that the horse would never have the full use of its leg afterward. Part of it is the density of the bone, and part of it is, as /u/cantcountnoaccount pointed out, the circulatory system of a horse is dependent on pressure and release from the hooves in order to keep blood circulating properly throughout all of their limbs (which is part of what makes them so prone to infection when they lose use of one of those limbs).\n\nThe physical difficulty of getting an isolated horse bone to heal well is what leads to the difficulty in treating it. It's incredibly physiologically stressful on the horse. Healthy horses spend like 18-22 hours of a given day standing on all four legs and meandering. If a horse breaks its leg, it must be literally immobilized for weeks in order to not put *any* weight on the leg, until the healing process is stable. But horses who cannot stand, who are kept laying down, develop a multitude of other problems - laminitis, difficult breathing, sores, lameness in other ligaments/tendons/muscles/etc. You'd be extinguishing a grease fire in the kitchen, only to turn around and realize the wildfire from the forest had consumed the rest of your house.\n\nAlso, as /u/cantcountnoaccount pointed out, horses are resistant to anything containing their leg. When you put support wraps on a horse who's about to take a long trailer ride or be stabled for a while (to help with circulation when they can't walk around), a horse who has never had wraps on will spend some time kicking their legs out and high-stepping, until they figure out the wraps aren't going to hurt them. That doesn't even bring the hoof into the equation - horses with items on their feet (even if it's a boot with medicinal stuff like poultice or antibacterial soak that's making them feel better) will go to *extreme* lengths to get That Thing off their foot - kicking, stamping, flinging, chewing at their own leg. If you were going to effectively cast a horse with a broken leg, it may need its foot casted, which it would *not* like, and it'd probably need to spend the whole time sedated.\n\nAnd, lastly, you may have seen other animals with broken legs that have healed, right? Dogs, cats, etc. However, those animals don't *need* to put weight on their leg, and don't *need* it for their gait in the same way that a horse does. Cats and dogs frequently find a way to walk on three legs, but due to a horse's skeletal structure and the way they're gaited, they simply can't walk or support themselves long-term on only three legs, let alone trot/canter/pace/etc. If you were going to go to extremes and consider amputation, you'd have to look into expensive and sophisticated prosthetics. Which brings me to my last point.\n\nBut BadBalloons, you might say, haven't race horses been effectively treated for broken legs before? And this, my friend, is where it gets sad. *Yes*, you can immobilize a horse in a sling and cast its leg and treat it for the broken leg, *if* the horse has a personality type that's amenable to the treatment. However, it would require round-the-clock care, high-tech vet facilities, and lots and lots of surgeries, as well as months of recovery, only to be able to *maybe* function as a basic-level horse. The simple, sad fact of the matter is that most horse owners don't have extra hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around to treat their horse, only for it to never return to its former utility. Horses already cost high-hundreds to thousands of dollars a month. And at the end of the healing process, a showjumper is never going to be able to show at the same level, a reining horse is never going to be able to slide the same. Even if your horse is just a backyard pet, you're already spending hundreds a month on feed or waste removal. There's no reason to spend that much extra money, and probably go into debt, on a horse who can't do his job anymore. The only horses this isn't true of are racehorses, but it's hugely conditional. Racehorses are a prospecting sport - you're paying for potential, either in the horse or in their future babies. *If* your horse who broke its leg had enough potential as a stud, or to a lesser extent as a broodmare (not sure if it's worth it to breed a mare who's had a broken leg), then it's worth treating their leg because they can make up the hundreds of thousands of dollars of vet bills in stud fees or future baby sales. But there's only a few top-performing racehorses who have that much potential, at any given time.",
"First of all, not all broken/fractured limbs have a poor prognosis, but a broken limb for a horse is certainly much more serious. Horses are on their legs much more than dogs/cats. Veterinarians always say dogs and cats are born with a spare leg and it's quite true.\n\nAs for horses, they only require 1-2 hours of REM sleep lying down, and they are standing the rest of the day, every day. They even get a couple more hours of \"naps\" while standing up. The importance of their legs cannot be understated. Horses can starve to death if they have sufficient joint problems preventing them from walking around to graze. A seriously broken limb is just a shortcut to that.\n\nCoupled with the fact that they are incredibly massive animals that are prone to silliness, it makes it very complicated and risky throughout the medical process - of performing surgery to align and immobilise the joint until it is healed, and finally rehabilitating the animal. To make things worse, the cost of going through that for a horse would be incredibly huge.\n\nSo, depending on the fracture, a broken limb is inherently more life-threatening to a horse than a dog/cat. Medically, it has a worse success rate and greater costs of fixing it. It means that, more often than dogs/cats, a veterinarian would simply not have a medically or economically feasible option of helping the horse other than euthanasia.\n",
"My family dealt with this for one of our horses. She hadn't even broken her leg. She had gotten spoked and something ripped up her upper right leg. We spent about $2000 on med and stabling at the vet and gave her a month to heal. Unfortunately not only could they not keep the stitches in but she got an infection. \nHorses are extremely fragile for being such a large animal. Add that they are prone to mental health issues when locked inside and infection when hurt and outside, it makes putting them down when they get severely injured merciful. ",
"Watched a good documentary about the 2006 Ky. derby winner Barbaro that broke his leg,and the owners tried to save his life.\"Barbaro;A nation's horse.",
"Horses can't breath if they have to lie down for any significant amount of time. We raise horses and had a mare who cracked a front leg, and we managed to rig a sling in a stall and save her, but we have lost two with broken hips. Heartbreaking..one was a baby.",
"because they can't stay on the other three legs long enough correctly for the 4th one to heal properly.\n\nThis also applies to elephants.",
"A lot of good answers on here. The only thing I'll add is that a broken leg does not automatically require that the horse be put down. Depending on which leg and how severe the break is, they can sometimes pin it and give the horse enough function in the leg to live relatively comfortably. It will never get back to 100% again, but fairly good. These days you only see on the spot euthanasia for the most severe breaks and/or the most problematic bones. ",
"My horse broke it's leg and a vet healed it, but can't ride it anymore. Like someone said, the legs don't heal well.",
"Here is a handy field guide for equine medical procedures.\n\n_URL_0_",
"I don't know why I browse this site for information. We've got people here telling others that their answers are wrong, and putting in their own info and claim to be experts but I have no way to verify. This place is filled with laymen trying to explain concepts probably with little to no thought put into how they acquired their information. Sure I could research and try to develop a well developed opinion of what the hell is going on but fuck that, I do plenty of that in school.\n\nI place too much trust on this site. I guess there's quora but sometimes it's no better. Sigh. ",
"I've had horses for the first 20ish years of my life. (my mom was an avid horse trainer, as was I in later years. I also did horse shows for 10 or so years).\n\nHorses can't lay down easily. They can, and they do, but they weigh so much that they start crushing their internal organs. If they can't get up (due to pain in the broken leg), they will lay on those same organs for days or weeks or however long until the organs are crushed and the organ stops functioning, slowly killing the horse. \n\nThey have tiny little stick legs and weigh around 2000 pounds (907 kg) which makes it difficult to get up.\n\nSo its just a mercy killing. Be crushed by your own body weight for any number of days/weeks/months or die mercifully.\n\nSomeone said you should ctrl + f Because they, so I'm adding that in to make it easier to find.\n\nLike I said, I only know stuff from the first 20 years (I'm 33) and I don't know much from the past 10 years. I see below someone said they can put pins in and hope for the best. That's still a lot of weight to carry around on a broken leg. There are a few ways to prevent broken/chipped bones. Most people will wrap their horses legs (vet wrap, sticky, stretchy tape) or use some adjustable soft cast (like after your own cast comes off). You also make sure your field is full of rock and holes (perfect way to break legs).",
"I see most people are posting giant paragraph explanations. Like you were really 5: Horses basically can't survive a broken leg and even if they did they'd be severely messed up for the rest of their lives. Even if they just get a fracture they are very likely to die from it anyway even if treated.",
"As someone who's family is very involved in racing, I'm glad this thread isn't full of ill informed \"animal cruelty\" nonsense",
"I had a horse who recovered from a broken leg. It was a very long, very difficult recovery, and was down to the incredible commitment of the vet and the amazing nature and will of the horse.\n\nBertie was an Irish Draught X Thoroughbred, and was about 25 when it happened, pretty old for any horse. I was on holiday, and someone had taken him for a ride without my permission, or that of the person looking after him (my sister) for me. I was told that he stumbled while cantering across a field. The vet took one look at him and decided he needed to be destroyed. My sister requested another vet. Geoff agreed to try, but admitted that saving him was incredibly remote. If nothing else the general anaesthetic that would be needed to operate, would be likely to kill a horse of his age. She told them to try. He was in theatre for hours, but he made it through. At this stage I came home and discovered what had happened. His leg was held together with more metal than bone, and the whole thing had been somewhat experimental, and we really were only at the beginning. \n\nOnce back home, we made some adaptations to his stable. He needed to stay still, for a weeks, and his big roomy stable wasn't going to work. We put a temporary wall in to cut the size in half, stopping him from being able to move about. We raised his water and feed bowls and so they, with his haynet, were at nose height. \n\nAfter almost 3 months he was allowed to start moving about. The wall was removed, though he was still tied to prevent him laying down (the strain on his leg while getting down and up again could be enough to destroy his progress) Next we moved on to walking, starting with about 20 feet, gently increasing as he became stronger. It was over a year before he was able to be turned out in the field with his friends, and another before I rode him again. Throughout it all Bertie stayed the same gentle, trusting, beautiful natured giant he had always been.\n\nGeoff (the vet) was incredible. He had fought to get Bertie treated and operated on at the amazing Animal Health Trust in Newmarket (they took him on with no charge), and Geoff never charged a penny for his time either. Geoff is a man of very few words, and most people find him a tad stand offish. After witnessing him 'dropping in on his way home' (which was nowhere near his way home) every night for over a year, I can tell you Geoff is a vet who doesn't give a toss about the owners opinions, he is only concerned about the animal, and in my books that makes him a very good vet.\n\nBertie eventually passed away 12 years later. He lived to a ridiculous age. He had been unusually quiet and laying down more than normal. I sat in his stable with him and we both knew it was the end, and shortly before Geoff arrived, Bertie had a massive heart attack. Both Geoff and I sobbed as he finally put him to sleep. I still tear up remembering him today. He was a very, very special horse.",
"In grad school, I worked in a materials testing lab that just broke shit to find out how strong it was. One semester we teamed up with the vetmed school to test one of their new procedures. Full disclosure, I am not a vet so I don't know the terminology or ins and outs of the procedure, but... They were working on stabilizing the ankle? joint in older horses. The joint right above the hoof. Procedure A was the old method that worked but took longer to perform and required a longer healing time. Procedure B was the new procedure that took less time to perform and had a shorter healing time. They wanted to find out if the stabilizing in Procedure B was as strong as Procedure A. So when a horse would die (I guess) they would perform each procedure on different legs and then these twelve inch-ish sections of horse leg would show up at our lab (they stunk). We built and special fixture to cradle the legs properly and then would use our machines to apply pressure to the joint. The whole point of the story was to say that horse bones are hella-strong and super loud when they break. The bones would usually break before the stabilized joint would give out. It has been too many years ago to remember the specifics of the test (numbers, terminology, etc.) but it was a pretty neat experience.",
"Horse feet are essentially them standing on one toe or finger compared to humans and other animals having the weight spread evenly. They are huge animals putting enormous weight on such a small area. When they break their legs in any place they have to put their weight onto the other three legs which puts enormous stress on them. This usually causes them to get disease in the other legs, namely founders/laminitis which is inflammation of the hoof. This is extremely painful and can cause lameness itself. So it's a never ending cycle of leg/foot pain and once the broken leg does heal the muscles have wasted to a large degree. They don't eat, they're prone to developing colic, etc. Horses are just not well put together animals",
"my mother is dressage trainer and qualified for the equestrian Olympics. People are saying it's because the money. this is false! my mother has had beloved horses that had broken a leg and had to be put down. one of these horses had a $200,000 stud fee. but any way a horses can not manage to remain standing on 3 legs. their feet act as a heart extender keeping the blood flowing through their whole body with each step. to recover they have to be on all feet which is impossible for such a large animal to do. \n",
"Raised horses and showed my whole life, so a self proclaimed expert here. ( with herds usually larger than 30) A horse unlike allot of other livestock is incredibly dependant upon their ability to stand, they sleep standing, they produce heat during the cold by walking around to stay warm and many other things. To a horse, a broken leg is the equivalent of a human having all 4 limbs amputated, (maybe an exageration). To most farmers, it isn't financially feasible to put a horse through the necessary rehab that only has a slim chance of them recovering, even if they do recover, they'll never walk the same. Time horses quality of life at that point is greatly diminished and offers the owner no service. It also puts on incredible amount of stress on the horse which commonly leads to fatal conditions such all foundering or colloque. So usually the most humane solution id's to put the horse down.",
"The Guardian has a good article on this exact topic.\n[Broken Horse Leg](_URL_0_)\n",
"Let's just be clear there are certain bones in horses legs, that if they break can be mended. Not all horses will be surely put down if a leg is broken. Not to mention the size and work and medication needed is extremely high in comparison to say a dog.",
"An example of this is the racehorse Barbaro. There's a documentary of him on HBO, I think, and it was the saddest thing to watch. That family tried [EVERYTHING](_URL_0_) to save him. ",
"I am so late to this conversation and this will probably be buried, but whatever.\n\nIt ENTIRELY depends on the break and how much money you want to spend. Shattered sesamoids in both front legs? The horse gets put down. Same with compound fractures of any sort or bones that are badly broken.\n\nBut some fractures DO heal, and heal quite well. Take racehorses, for example. Wise dan had multiple fractures and came back from them. Shared belief had a hip fracture and was rehabbing and back in race training when he died of colic. I have tons of friends with horses that had spiral fractures to their cannonbones or even higher up the leg that healed just fine.\n\nI even know of a standardbred that shattered the bones in his front ankle. They were put together by pins and screws, he healed and had a wonderful race career before he retired to be a carriage horse.\n\n'Broken leg = dead horse' is a myth, and an inaccurate one, at that. ",
"Thought it was just racing horses because their broken bones would now be too weak to race competitively again. Surprised to say Reddit has taught me something ... ",
"If he break occurs in a hind leg, it's pretty much an automatic death sentence. The way a horse's body works, they can't pick up a hind leg and move around like a dog or a cat. A front leg fracture may or may not be fixable for reasons others have already stated. A big reason l, unfortunately, is economics. A horse has a finite monetary value. Most people aren't blessed with unlimited funds, so they have to decide just how much they can spend before the return outweighs the cost of a new horse.\n\n Unless the AQHA rules have changed, horse semen cannot be extended and frozen for AI service. One collection can be used for one breeding. Jockey Club, the Thorobred registry does, I think, allow their stallion semen to be extended, frozen and shipped for insemination.",
"In addition to the medical reasons being listed, the cost is atrocious. In some cases, the break CAN be healed, but you'd typically only see it attempted with extremely valuable stallions, who have an outrageously high stud fee.",
"Horses cannot exist as a non-weight bearing animal. Unlike a paw, on a dog for example, horses support an enormous amount of weight on hooves that require upkeep (in a domesticated animal, obviously). Their hooves are complicated structures that must remain in good condition for the animal to survive. Breaking a leg, thus creating a situation where the horse must exist as three legged, puts added pressure/stress on their other hooves which can cause a downward spiral pretty quickly.",
"I don't think they have be \"put down\". It is just that the owners feel that they can no more benefit from owning the horse. It is easier and cheaper to kill them then to heal them.",
"What about like a big wheel? I've seen dogs and cats with wheels for legs. Couldn't it be made so that the horse can stand level?",
"Can't find the comment now, but someone said they had a horse who broke a leg it happened when he was 25. Anyway the horse lived until 37! \n\nIs 37 normal or old for a horse? Compared to dogs that's really old. Really old compared to like a deer or elk. Also are horses intelligent? Compared to say a dog or pig? (Pigs are pretty intelligent.) ",
"Horses' bones do have a hard time healing, and there is an extra chance of hind leg injuries during recover. However, the biggest part is the difficulty of keeping them immobilized in a sling. They don't do well in casts and they become very agitated and likely to have stomach problems (which are potentially deadly). It's nearly impossible for them to heal properly, and if they do its a very miserable process for the horse.",
"I've always just assumed it was some lazy medieval practice. \"My horse appears to have broken it's leg. Might as well kill it and steal another from those peasants over there...\"",
"Most of this reputation for putting horses down after a broken leg comes from before modern Veterinarian Medicine, when most everyone in society used horses as transportation. If a horse broke a leg 100 years ago the most humane thing to do would be to shoot it. in modern times there are options but the prognosis for an adult horse who has broken a front leg is grim, very grim. ",
"I grew up on a ranch where my mom runs a therapeutic riding center for disabled children. She just recently put a horse down. The horse suffered a minor fracture a while back, but its hard to mend such injuries (you can't really tell a horse not to run around). Eventually, she became increasing agitated--obviously in pain--and wouldn't even let my mom touch her anymore as the injury became worse. I remember the night she was born, watching her emerge into the world with my mom, and grow into a loving and happy mare. It was heartbreaking to see how she acted towards my mom and the other horses after the injury. \n\nMy mom said the night that she finally had to decide to put her down, my mom couldn't stop crying while feeding the horses, and kept apologizing to the horse she was going to put down in a couple hours. At this point, the horse had a hard time standing, but whenever someone would enter her stall she would usually throw a fit and act distressed. This time, though, my mom said she hadn't seen her act so calm in months, like she knew her fate and had excepted it. She even let my mom lay against her as she said goodbye. \n\nI know this doesn't answer your question, but sometimes the pain a seemingly minor injury for another animal causes serious distress in horses. It's not easy to let them go, but sometimes its for the best.",
"So much misinformation here...\n\nA horse carries a ton of weight over 4 tiny hooves. When the horse breaks a leg, that weight is shifted to the three remaining. Those three become sore and weak from bearing so much extra weight, and then their \"good legs\" might go bad during the time it would take the \"bad leg\" to heal.\n\nAdditionally, the lower parts of horse legs have very little meat to them. They are almost literally skin, bones, ligaments, veins, etc. Therefore a break is usually catastrophic; there's no \"meat\" to protect the bone from shattering horribly.\n\nThirdly, if you wanted to put the horse in a sling to support its weight and allow the leg to heal, you'd be putting a ton of pressure on the horse's tummy (where its major organs are.) This is why horses \"stand up\" when they sleep and don't spend 8-12 hours at a time laying on their sides/tummies like humans and dogs and cats do.\n\nAlso, a champion super-racer would be worth more as a live stud... there are plenty of champs that would have been worth more alive that surely the owners would have saved if they could have. It's not a matter of \"oh that's too expensive\" it's \"we literally can't save this animal.\"",
"They don't ALWAYS have to be but down. It really depends on the type of break in the bone. I have seen slighter breaks with very good turn around. A favorite lesson horse at one of the barns I rode at slightly cracked a bone in the lower part of one of his front legs. That healed, they rehabbed him and he went on being a lesson horse.\n\nOne of my friends horses got cast (leg got stuck while he was rolling in his stall) broke a bone in the top part of his hind leg. He was 12 at the time, and he was put on stall rest and healed up quite nicely. My friend still rides and shows him to this day. She keeps up with his joint injections and he's a beautiful jumper.",
"Horses would need to be pretty much stationary whilst their leg healed, which is not practical for either owner or horse. how does one support an animal as big as a horse to take the weight off one leg? the cost and stress to the animal is deemed too much and hence the animal is put to sleep (have owned several horses, one of whom broke his leg :( )",
"All above depends as well on the type of fracture.\nWhen the bone shatters into multiple pieces it's harder to cure.",
"So, horses have what is basically a pumping system in their feet so every time they step, it helps pump blood up from the legs back towards the torso. When they break their leg, they have very poor circulation through that leg, causing it to atrophy (become very weak). To compensate the horse will only stand on its other leg causing an extreme imbalance in terms of muscle size. Reconditioning the horses legs to balance back out is almost impossible. So at best, if the horse doesnt have the limb amputated it will just end up with one bum leg, and one very strong leg causing it to be extremely slow. Source: Friends dad is a rancher who raised horses for years and told me this.",
"I've seen how horses will stand watch over a fallen horse. That just doesn't sound like a creature that would pick on another for being injured.",
"Literally how it was explained to me as a child: \n\nWhen we break our leg, it's like a piece of blackboard chalk being snapped in half. \n\nWhen a horse breaks it's leg, it's like the piece of chalk was put in a vice end-to-end and crushed until it shatters. ",
"I was driving to school one morning and came upon a car wreck that involved an Amish buggy and horse. The horse was laying in the road. I drove by at the exact moment the deputy pulled out his gun and shot the horse at point black range. Not a fun way to start off your morning, let me tell ya. ",
"Because they will not remain immobile long enough for a break to heal. They will continually reinjure themselves indefinitely."
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2zcmyw | why do our butts itch when we sit on hard surfaces for a long time? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zcmyw/eli5_why_do_our_butts_itch_when_we_sit_on_hard/ | {
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"I imagine because there is reduced blood flow to your butt your body reacts in a way that you need to scratch and move your butt to restore blood flow",
"I too have experienced this. I think it's because your butt settles into a cushioned surface, whereas with a hard surface, it just splats against it, crushing your clothing in between. Eventually little fibers from your clothing start to tickle as your skin and fat are smashed against your pants.\n\nSource: Fat guy who sits on wooden chairs who has some ideas",
"this happens to me too, but only on hard metal bleachers for some reason. ",
"I get this ALL the time, but only if I'm wearing leggings. Anything thicker (jeans, sweats) no problem. ",
"This used to happen to me when I was in gymnastics wearing a spandex leotard or spandex pants and sat on the bleachers for too long watching the other girls after a meet! I'm convinced it's from a) sweat or b) the stretchy material stretches and contracts, making mini \"pinches\" on your skin. ",
"What you're looking for is someone smart to tell you \"when compressed for long periods of time the nerves in the skin on your butt create an itching sensation.\" Or something like that.\nWhat you got is \"butt poop itch fat?!\" "
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812k93 | is the velocity of light not relative like other velocities? | My understanding is that velocity has no meaning if it has nothing to be relative to. If you are going near the speed of light in a void with nothing else around to compare to it is the same as not moving. But how then is there a maximum speed in the universe? The speed of light could be slower or faster depending on what it is relative to. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/812k93/eli5_is_the_velocity_of_light_not_relative_like/ | {
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"That's the weird thing about the speed of light - unlike other speeds, it isn't relative. If you and I were both measuring the speed of the same light beam, and I'm sitting on earth while you're zooming through space at a very high speed, we'll both measure the same value for the speed of light. This is essentially Einstein's special theory of relativity. ",
"That's what makes relativity so complicated. **Because** light always moves at the same speed, it turns out that distance and time can't be constant.",
"There are basically two principles of special relativity:\n\n1. The laws of physics work the same in all reference frames. Among other things, this implies that position and velocity only make sense to talk about with respect to a chosen reference frame; they are \"relative\".\n2. The speed of light is the same in all reference frames.\n\nSo if you see something traveling past you at the speed of light, everyone else will see it traveling past them at the speed of light as well - no matter what their own speed is relative to you. This is why the speed of light is a maximum speed: you can't overtake the beam of light since it will appear to be traveling 299792458 m/s away from you regardless of how much energy you put into accelerating.",
"The speed of light is constant in *ALL* inertial reference frames. Unlike most other things, it does not matter how fast or slow you are moving to the source of the light; you will *always* measure the speed of light (in vacuum) to be the same.\n\nWhy is light constant? Well it's a postulate of special relativity. Special relativity is based on these two postulates:\n\n1. The laws of physics are invariant (i.e., identical) in all inertial systems (i.e., non-accelerating frames of reference).\n\n2. The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of the light source.\n\nWith these two postulates, the weird consequences of Special Relativity follow, for example time dilation and length contraction.\n\nSo where the hell did Einstein think to make light speed constant. Well Postulate 2, 'follows' from Posulate 1. Read the second answer to this [StackExchange post](_URL_0_)\n\nBTW - Anything with zero rest mass will move at the speed c in all inertial frames. And anything with a non-zero rest mass can *not* reach c in any any inertial frames.",
" > My understanding is that velocity has no meaning if it has nothing to be relative to.\n\nThat's more philosophy than physics. Richard Feynman wrote a good rant about it in the *Feynman Lectures*. You can find it [here](_URL_0_) (section 16-1), and I'll just quote the most relevant part:\n\n > One of the consequences of relativity was the development of a philosophy which said, “You can only define what you can measure! Since it is self-evident that one cannot measure a velocity without seeing what he is measuring it relative to, therefore it is clear that there is no *meaning* to absolute velocity. The physicists should have realized that they can talk only about what they can measure.” But *that is the whole problem:* whether or not one *can define* absolute velocity is the same as the problem of whether or not one *can detect in an experiment*, without looking outside, whether he is moving. In other words, whether or not a thing is measurable is not something to be decided *a priori* by thought alone, but something that can be decided only by experiment. Given the fact that the velocity of light is 186,000 mi/sec, one will find few philosophers who will calmly state that it is self-evident that if light goes 186,000 mi/sec inside a car, and the car is going 100,000 mi/sec, that the light also goes 186,000 mi/sec past an observer on the ground. That is a shocking fact to them; the very ones who claim it is obvious find, when you give them a specific fact, that it is not obvious.\n\n > [...] That the earth is turning on its axis can be determined without looking at the stars, by means of the so-called Foucault pendulum, for example. Therefore it is not true that “all is relative”; it is only *uniform velocity* that cannot be detected without looking outside. Uniform *rotation* about a fixed axis *can* be. When this is told to a philosopher, he is very upset that he did not really understand it, because to him it seems impossible that one should be able to determine rotation about an axis without looking outside. If the philosopher is good enough, after some time he may come back and say, “I understand. We really do not have such a thing as absolute rotation; we are really rotating *relative to the stars*, you see. And so some influence exerted by the stars on the object must cause the centrifugal force.”\n\n > Now, for all we know, that is true; we have no way, at the present time, of telling whether there would have been centrifugal force if there were no stars and nebulae around. We have not been able to do the experiment of removing all the nebulae and then measuring our rotation, so we simply do not know. We must admit that the philosopher may be right. He comes back, therefore, in delight and says, “It is absolutely necessary that the world ultimately turn out to be this way: *absolute* rotation means nothing; it is only *relative* to the nebulae.” Then we say to him, “*Now*, my friend, is it or is it not obvious that uniform velocity in a straight line, *relative to the nebulae* should produce no effects inside a car?” Now that the motion is no longer absolute, but is a motion *relative to the nebulae*, it becomes a mysterious question, and a question that can be answered only by experiment.\n\nThe upshot is that the speed of light is special, and there is no deep philosophical reason why it should not be - that is, no deep philosophical reason why motion ought to be relative. In the real world, it turns out to be relative in certain ways, and not relative in other ways."
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29q9sd | how much of a pro-wrestling match is choreographed and how much is based on instinct (or other factors) | Obviously most people realize that the outcomes and pre-determined and major spots or 'events' in a show are pre-planned and possibly rehearsed, but how much of your average WWE pay per view match is "off the cuff" as it were? or is the referee with the ear piece directing every last movement of the wrestlers involved? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29q9sd/eli5_how_much_of_a_prowrestling_match_is/ | {
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"The outcome is decided by the organization. The wrestlers have a meeting discussing what moves they will do and how the match will flow (who's winning at what point). During the match, they talk to each other. My understanding is every move is discussed live as the match is going on. So as far as I know it's 100% choreographed.",
"It really depends on the performers and how ok they are with how much improvising. Generally the outcome and major spots are preplanned like you said but most everything else is improvised. You can actually see the wrestlers telling each other moves as they go through the match. If you ever watch a Botchmania video they usually do a segment where they show the wrestlers telling each other what moves they are about to do. The ref with the ear piece is usually getting directions from backstage like how much time is left for the match. They generally do not get specific directions as to exactly what they want the wrestlers to do. "
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2ncsap | why don't north americans use water for cleaning after "number two"? probably nsfw | I recently moved to Canada for university from Asia. I have noticed that most, if not all, toilets only have toilet paper as a way to clean.
For you North Americans who are confused about what I'm talking about, Google" bidet shower". In Asia we spray water to clean ourselves after excretion - I don't think that's a common practice in north America. I was also told by my German friend that it is not common in Europe either.
But logically, why don't you guys use water? Think about it like a shower: would you feel clean by wiping yourself with toilet paper after a workout instead of taking a shower?
In case you're wondering, I use water, then wipe with tp, but only toilet paper in Canada though - I haven't seen a toilet with bidet showers yet. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ncsap/eli5_why_dont_north_americans_use_water_for/ | {
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"According to an answer from a similar question. North America adapted indoor showers early and daily bathing became a thing before the bidet was able to catch on. \n\nI unfortunately can't back that statement. ",
"I've got no clue why certain countries have adopted the bidet & others have not. What I can offer you is an excellent workaround - *flushable moist wipes*. They're like baby wipes for adults. They're relatively inexpensive & can be found in most supermarkets on the toilet paper aisle. ",
"You can just wet the TP if you want... problem solved. you don't need an asshole centering module, or need to make a splashy mess, or have an extra contraption in your bathroom. Also, water doesn't clean your asshole, it may however remove some of the excess shit.",
"I'm English and we do this too. There's even a theory that it led to the end of the British Empire. When our Indian house servants saw we only wiped we became a subject of derision, even pity and secretly looked down upon - the sun was inevitably to set on the Raj once they knew.",
"I'm Italian and every time I've lived abroad what I missed the most was not the food, was not the weather, was not my mom, was not my mandolin, it was the bidet.",
"Yes! I'm from Asia. The struggle is real. \n\nOP I love how your example is a workout. Except this is not sweat, this is shit. If there was some shit on your hand would you just wipe it off too? I always wonder. \n\nAlso, what about when you partake in ass licking etc. What's the protocol yo?",
"It's impossible to say why something didn't catch on one place but did in another, but there are theories. There was an article that presented some of them in [The New York Times.] (_URL_0_;)\n\nOne theory was that because bidets were popularized by the French and because the English hated the French, bidets never made the jump to the US because of leftover Franco-hatred.\n\nAnother is that Americans in Europe for World Wars would often visit brothels and literally no other establishments, so they associated bidets with seediness and immorality.\n\nAt this point, bidets (and using water in general) are so foreign to most Americans that it's a huge hurdle to get them comfortable with the idea. As one person is quoted in the article, \"I wouldn’t use it. It seems very unnatural.\""
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1dy91t | why didn't native americans in north america leave impressive ruins like the incas did in south america? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dy91t/eli5_why_didnt_native_americans_in_north_america/ | {
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"I'm gonna go ahead and guess the climate in Central and South America allowed for people to settle down and build cities easier than could be done in North America. ",
"What makes you think they didn't?\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"
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3idiuu | why on earth is social media sites like vine and snapchat so popular | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3idiuu/eli5why_on_earth_is_social_media_sites_like_vine/ | {
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"People like to feel like they are connected to others and in the loop of new ideas. This feeds into that need. They make sites where you can share bits of your life with strangers to feel like you matter in a world of general obscurity. Some of those videos will reach millions of views while many others fade into obscurity before they've been seen by anyone. The person making them, though feels like they've reached out to others while people watching feel like they are getting to witness someone else's life. \nIt feeds into our instinct to connect with those around us. The internet has just made our local community much larger.",
"Younger people have shorter attention spans. These < 10 second videos are right about the optimal amount of attention most are willing to give. And of course, it feeds into the whole FOMO nonsense."
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309cis | why do people say "what is -----" on jeopardy | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/309cis/eli5_why_do_people_say_what_is_on_jeopardy/ | {
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"Because it's one of the rules of the game. The Jeopardy people make you say it as if you were providing the question to an answer. ",
"The \"question\" that is on the board is actually the answer. So, contestants have to \"ask\" their answers in the form of a question. ",
"Alex gives you the answer, your reply has to be the question *in the form of question*.\n\nPeople have lost because they gave the correct answer but in statement and not question form.",
"The guy who invented jeopardy was on the daily show once, and he explained it as follows.\n\nHe said that jeopardy was one of the first attempts to have a real quiz show after the big quiz show scandals earlier in the 20th century. Those involved shows were the producers would give one of the contestants the answers in advance, to guarantee \"interesting\" winners. \n\nWhen he was trying to pitch jeopardy, TV executives were still wary of these kinds of scandals---not that they thought jeopardy would involve cheating, but that people wouldn't watch trivia because they'd assume it was rigged---and so he came up with the idea of \"answering in the form of a question.\" It allowed them to do gimmicky ads saying that you didn't have to worry about cheating because *everyone* got the answer already (in the clue on the board), and they weren't looking for answers, they were looking for questions."
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1k81jg | why the nfl has a salary cap, but mlb does not. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k81jg/eli5why_the_nfl_has_a_salary_cap_but_mlb_does_not/ | {
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"Each league has its own Collective Bargaining Agreement, which dictates the terms in which each team operates.\n\nThe NFL, NHL, and NBA have salary caps because the player's union and the owners agreed to implement them. MLB chose to use a different form of salary control, called the Luxury Tax, which means that if a team spends more then X amount over a set value, they have to pay additional money that goes into a fund that the league spends on things like paying player benefits and programs to develop baseball programs in foreign countries."
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5pvvww | why is cyberbullying still a problem if victims can just turn off their computer and leave? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5pvvww/eli5_why_is_cyberbullying_still_a_problem_if/ | {
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"People use social media in their day-to-day lives. Never going on facebook because people were bullying you on facebook is obviously a problem caused by cyberbullying.\n\nIf is also an easy way for a bully to get a bunch of ofherwise apathetic people on board with their bullying, which can also stretch into the real world interactions.",
"Because cyberbullying occurs in an environment in which everyone knows everyone else. \n\nIf the bullying incident occurs in a space where everyone is anynomous, then, as you say, one can simply turn off the computer. But if everyone watching the event is the same crowd that you go to school with, then it becomes very painful for the victim. And as far as the bully is concerned, ANY reaction from the victim will do. ",
"Why is it a problem if the clientele in a specific bar abuse you? You could just walk out of the bar...\n\nHopefully you can see the analogy here. Yes, you *could* turn off the computer and leave, but why should you have to? And what knock-on effect would that have for your social life, and your self-esteem?"
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2e79dh | are there any portuguese redditors that could explain the extent of the "all drugs are legal" thing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2e79dh/eli5_are_there_any_portuguese_redditors_that/ | {
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"That's called decriminalization (in contrast with legalization).\nIt means that if someone is found with a small amount of drug, said person will just receive a fine, or nothing at all depending on the officer discretion, won't be booked or arrested or anything. Also, because it is not a crime to carry small amounts of drug, when a cop gets you this information alone is not enough for the cop to allow him to perform searches on you or your propriety.\n\nEdit. Availability remains the same, it is still illegal to sell it so not much change here, except that drug dealers may carry smaller amounts with them in a given time so they could say it's for personal use.\n"
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9oh42r | how do substances like alcohol and illicit drugs potentially lead to defects in unborn children? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9oh42r/eli5_how_do_substances_like_alcohol_and_illicit/ | {
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"The actual physiological mechanics of the effects of alcohol on unborn children is still not well understood. \n\nThe mother passes nutrients to the baby via umbilical cord and placenta. Most of this nutrients is transported through the blood, as are most things in the body. \n\nAlcohol from mom’s blood will pass into the baby’s blood, and cause a multitude of issues known as fetal alcohol syndrome. \n\nThe general mechanism in which alcohol can harm a fetus is through DNA damage. Alcohol is a mutagen, or a substance that causes genetic mutation. When a baby is still developing, it is very prone to genetic mutations. Alcohol acts as a sort of catalyst to this “reaction” of DNA mutation, and is very dangerous. There is no definitive answer to what genes are specifically effected and why, as extensive research is still being done in this field. ",
"To explain it in at an understandable level - many substances, in some form or fashion, reduce oxygen and/or cardiovascular circulation to the fetus. This means less energy, less nutrients, less removal of waste products, slower development, more stress on the fetus (BIG factor here). \n",
"A human that's already born is basically completely formed. So any sort of chemical like alcohol or medicine that we consume will affect our behaviour or health but won't drastically change our biology.\n\nEmbryos and fetuses are in a constant state of significant growth and change. All sorts of little processes have to go *just right* to create a properly formed human, and so you don't want any chemicals with significant biological effects to be interfering with them."
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dow72u | time is the moving image of eternity | What does this quote from plato mean? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dow72u/eli5_time_is_the_moving_image_of_eternity/ | {
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"I'd ask for some more context and I'm not that sharp on plato but here's my take on it:\n\neternity is the line where time is the points. I mean, eternity is the whole dimension and time is what fills it. like eternity is the concept of a movie while time is the actual movie. every moment is a point in time which is the image of \"eternity\" in that moment. \"now\" is just the current frame in time in this current configuration of eternity. it's a weird thought and english isn't my main language but I think this means time is become eternity (?) or the \"embodiment\" of eternity as it happens (?)",
"Eternity generally means timelessness or infinite, ‘Time is the moving image of eternity’ could mean that time is moving through a endless ‘tunnel(?)’ while the tunnel is also moving\n\n\nThis is a question with extremely abstract answers this is my guess.\n\nI honestly have no clue"
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3rupkr | why is the stereotyp e, "a woman's place is in the kitchen" not carried over to ctual kitchen jobs, like chef, sous chef, line cook etc which are usually all male and exclude women? | I cannot edit title. Writing on small format and auto correct screwed me over. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rupkr/eli5_why_is_the_stereotyp_e_a_womans_place_is_in/ | {
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"Because the point of the stereotype is that the woman is staying at home, in her personal kitchen, cooking for her family and not doing paid work. It comes from the \"ideal family\" of the fifties and earlier, where the wife would stay at home and maintain the house while the husband went off and made money.",
"Tons of these gender sterotypes dissolve at the top of fields. Sewing may be seen as feminine but not sewing suits, teaching seems to be female dominated but not so much at a college level, healthcare seems to be female dominated until it comes to doctors, serving, hosting, and bartending can be seen as female dominant roles but in many high end places you'll see more males."
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dwtcwk | how is there so much carbon in the air? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dwtcwk/eli5_how_is_there_so_much_carbon_in_the_air/ | {
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"Carbon is put into the air through a whole variety of processes. We pay a lot of attention to carbon produced through combustion - e.g. the CO2 from cars, power plants and industry. These increase the levels of Co2 in the atmosphere significantly, but it's not the only source - it's perfectly natural for CO2 to be in the atmosphere from forestfires, the natural decomposition of carbon from dead plants and animals, the exhalation of oxygen dependent lifeforms like us. The release of these and then recapture of it by plants and other life is referred to as the \"carbon cycle\". Humans have greatly increased the rate at which carbon is released into the atmosphere and slowed the degree to which it is recaptured resulting in an increase in the CO2 levels in the atmosphere."
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69k0rl | the definition of caesium second | The formal definition of second (SI unit of time) is "The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Caesium-133 atom."
I could not make head or tail of it. :P
I know what is ground state and transition of electron from one orbit to another. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69k0rl/eli5_the_definition_of_caesium_second/ | {
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"Caesium-133 is a kind of atom. Its ground state actually supports two *different* states, which are called the hyperfine levels due to the very small difference between them. This transition takes a fixed amount of time, making it a useful basis for counting time.",
"How do you describe how long a second is to someone who's never spoken to another human being? Formal definitions like those are meant to be an absolute standard that can be reproduced independently anywhere. If you say a second is how long it takes a bird to flap its wings, scientists in a different climate with different birds can't relate. If you say a second is how long it takes for a certain weight to fall a certain distance, then altitude, air pressure, and a million other factors could change the precise measurement wherever you happen to be.\n\nThe most reliable way scientists have found to write down the definition of a second that anybody, anywhere could measure with total precision was to count out exactly how much radiation a cesium-133 atom emits during a second. Wherever you are in the universe, that type of cesium atom emits radiation at the exact same rate. "
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8coqbs | how is a raspberry pi actually used and programmed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8coqbs/eli5_how_is_a_raspberry_pi_actually_used_and/ | {
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"For typical users, you install a basic Linux system and it works a LOT like any other computer— Windows, Mac, etc, though the system is slightly different than Windows or Mac machines (where things are located, what programs are included by default or can be installed, etc).\n\nYou can then program and compile code using C, or Python, or other programming languages. This isn’t really an ELI5 subject but there are tons of resources available if you wanted to research this kind of info.\n\nThen you run the programs and it does... whatever your program tells it to. The advantage of the Pi is that it’s cheap and has GPIO (general purpose in/out) pins which can be monitored for basic on/off information as needed. This could be used for sensors in a security system for example, but also for buttons in basic or old-style game controllers, if you wanted to build an arcade box.\n\nRaspberry Pis are really just cheap computers, basically, and can do whatever any other computer could. A common use might be to check the weather and display it on a small screen. You can already do this on a laptop or cell phone, and you don’t need to program anything, just download an app. The advantage of the RPi is you can afford to dedicate one to only that purpose due to low cost, not because it’s better than an iPad or whatever that sits on your desk and shows the weather 24/7. "
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1l99lc | how does phalloplasty give a "female-to-male" transgenre a fully functional penis which can be erect and give him sensations ? | Sorry if bad english. Same question for vaginoplasty, as long as we're in the subject.
EDIT : what I've understood so far about phalloplasty is they use the patient's clitoris to form the glans and some of his arm's skin for the rest, so I guess there's no sensitivity on most of the thing. Question is, how does it get erect ? is that some sort of robotic prosthesis or does the operation recreate the spongious parts ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l99lc/eli5_how_does_phalloplasty_give_a_femaletomale/ | {
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"I do not think that \"a fully functional penis\" is what you would end up with at all.",
"What they usually do is move the sensitive areas around so that they're in the right place. If, for example, you tuck the skin from the scrotum and shaft inwards to make the vaginal walls without disrupting the nerve endings, it will still be \"wired\" to give the woman sexual pleasure. If I recall correctly, they usually use the glans to make a faux-clitoris too, since it's the most sensitive part.\n\nAs far as I know, phalloplasty is *much* more difficult from a surgical standpoint than vaginoplasty.",
"In order to have an erection, sometimes they have a type of air balloon inside the penis that is filled with air using a special valve. They have to do it themselves, which means they don't automatically get hard when they are aroused."
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wrt3t | how do europeans communicate with each other when they travel between countries? | Does everyone speak English when they travel from their home country to another country in Europe? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wrt3t/eli5_how_do_europeans_communicate_with_each_other/ | {
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"I was born and grew up in EU.\n\nIt's complicated. In most places, you just pick up the neighboring languages, pretty much like many people in California and Texas understand a bit of Spanish even though it's not their native language.\n\nBecause EU is a pretty crowded place, many people either understand or can actually speak another one or two languages.\n\nIn the west, you could try English or French or German. In the east, Russian might be a good bet.\n\nThings are changing, though. E.g., in Eastern Europe many of the young generation understand English and often can speak it passably.",
"I am British, and so I grew up speaking English as a first langauge. Many Europeans do learn English in school or from imported television, but more realistically, schools tend to offer lessons for the languages of surrounding countries. In England it is (or was, when I was in school) mandatory to learn basic French between the ages of about 11 and 16.\n\nAside from that, we mostly learn to get by with phrase books.",
"Honestly, \"Badly\" is a pretty good answer. At least in England, focus isn't placed on foreign languages in school. In the secondary school (11yo-16yo) I attended, you learned both French and German in the first two years, and picked one for the last three, cumulating in a GSCE. \n\nHowever, having said that, I know just about enough German and Latin/French to cobble together a meaning out of some European languages that use a fairly standard Roman alphabet. (Cyrillic screws with me a bit.)\n\nOf course, this is all personal experience. Don't take this as a standard, but please use it to piece together a hopefully-cojent picture.",
"It's probably worth mentioning that the romance languages (languages born out of Latin and the Roman Empire) are all very similar to each other. A lot of words are similar and grammar is almost identical. \nSpeakers of Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese can all \"get by\" in each others countries just because of the similarities in their tongues. \nEnglish is very widely spoken too and its use is increasing, and a lot of that is down to English language media (mostly movies) coming out of the USA. English is almost universally understood in Scandinavia and the Netherlands as far as I am aware. ",
"I'm a British student and during my summer holidays, I work as a waiter in a Restaurant in Edinburgh. Edinburgh has a very popular Festival late on in Summer (The Fringe) and we see a lot of tourists from across the world, especially from Europe. \n\nWorking in the Restaurant means that I interact with a lot of foreign tourists. To simply put it: Some of them speak very fluent English and some can't even ask you for water. It varies slightly.. I've noticed that the French and Germans speak quite fluent English whereas Spanish people, for example, can't speak very much (This can obviously vary, however). Most of the time the customers just point at the food menu to show me what they want.\n\nObviously a lot of schools in and around Europe teach a lot of the main languages such as German, Spanish, French, Italian. In Europe, it's common for the schools to teach English. One of my colleagues is from Lithuania, and he speaks flawless English. He is my age (20) and he told me that he learned to speak English by watching cartoons! \n\nI'm useless at languages so when I personally travel to Europe (I've only visited France, Germany and Spain) I rely on people in that country to speak English.\n\n",
"Im dutch and fluent in english.\nIn elementary school we had (very basic) french german and english.\nin hi school u have to choose either french or german aside from english.\n\nSo all in all we learn different languages in school. (though my elemtary school was a bit of an exeption with the foreign languages).\n\nI taught myself english far better then all of my friends by watching english TV (BBC) and the internet and by reading english books.\n\nbut to asnwer ur question:\n\nu dont :P\ni was in serbia last year, and the my generation speak some english. these days with internet everybody learn some english, just the older ppl have a hard time with it. Serbian (like all other eastern europian and russian) is just way off compared to what i know. so its a pain to learn. Arabian (turkish) supposedly is one of the easiest language. but also very different to what we know/ are used to.\n\nThe germanic languages (english, french, dutch and german) are pretty similar. the way sentences are made, the different verbs and the way they are changed when speaking in past/present/future are the same.\nthough english is by far easiest and germand hardest)\n\n",
"Most Europeans learn the basics of the country´s language and/or English, so that they can say things like ¨Where is the...? How much is...? Please/Thank you/Excuse me/Left/Right¨ So that they can ask for directions and buy things. Some people sign up for tours that are lead in their native language or English, and a lot of restaurants in tourist areas have menus available in many languages or menus with pictures of the food on it.\n\n ",
"Speaking other languages. I speak Dutch, French, English, enough German to get by and I'm learning Spanish now (through Duolingo!).\n\nThat means I can get by in most countries in the EU, since most people do tend to speak at least a bit of English or French.\n\n\nHowever, I met some Indian/Pakistani/Afghani guy once in a trainstation. He didn't speak English very well. I don't speak Hindi at all. Through some English words he spoke, and a lot of waving hands/pointing at things, we did manage to have a conversation. I think he was telling me how big his horse was hung."
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28nvb1 | how can stores like nothin butt smokes get away with advertising and selling cannabis if it's illegal? | I live in Texas if that makes a difference. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28nvb1/eli5_how_can_stores_like_nothin_butt_smokes_get/ | {
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"they actually sell cannabis or cannabis paraphernalia?",
"There's no law against having a picture of a pot leaf somewhere in a store. As for selling bongs and such their main argument is they use all the paraphernalia for smoking tobacco. What you use it for is your own business. Also most store train their workers to say words such as \" you can put tobacco in here\". ",
"Texan here. State law prohibits the sale of drug paraphernalia, however, it defines paraphernalia as items intended for drug use and/or items containing drug residue. \n\nAs long as the shop maintains \"for Tobacco use only,\" and never sells used items, it is operating within the law.\n\nFor other items such as magazines and bumper stickers, they fall under freedom of speech/ freedom of the press.\n\nFor synthetic cannabis, there is a perpetual race between manufacturers and the DEA to create new chemicals that act like weed before they are banned. That's why the names of these products changes regularly.",
"They don't sell cannibis. "
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9f1gc3 | if something changes the dna in an adult, how does that effect the adult (or is it just a concern for the offspring)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9f1gc3/eli5_if_something_changes_the_dna_in_an_adult_how/ | {
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"Most often it kills the cell.\n\nLess often it causes cancer.\n\nOccasionally it causes a harmless change, such as a bit of tissue that's slightly different from the rest."
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4xhwko | i've heard the income tax on the wealthy in 1950 was as high as 92%. does this mean that someone who made $1 million would only take home $80,000? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xhwko/eli5_ive_heard_the_income_tax_on_the_wealthy_in/ | {
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"Not exactly, albeit in this case close. Federal income tax works in brackets. Essentially, there are a series of \"buckets\" with progressively higher tax rates. I have pulled up one from 1950 specifically. The first $2000 you earned went in the first \"bucket\" and was taxed at 20%. If you earned a dollar more than that, only that would go in the next 22% \"bucket\". Thus you would pay $400 on tax from the first bucket and $0.22 on the last dollar, for a total tax bill of $400.22 on $2000 dollars, for an average tax of just a hair over 20%. This continues on to where the $150,000 to $200,000 \"bucket\" is taxed at 90%. Finally, for any income over $200,000, it goes in a bottomless \"bucket\" that is taxed at 91%. There were 22 tax brackets in 1950, so the total tax would be $67,300 on the first $100,000, $89,500 on the next $100,000$, then $728,000 on the last $800,000. Thus the net take home would actually be around $115,000.\n\nHere the discrepancy does not seem so extreme (until you consider the purchasing power in 1950), but that is because the income is so far above the lower tax brackets. Of course, this is simply a naive calculation from published tax brackets, ignoring the complexities of 1950 tax laws, of which I am certainly not an expert.",
"No, that's not how taxes work. Taxes are progressive and done in brackets. This is a simplistic example but if you make $100,000 dollars a year, and and all income up to $80,000 is taxed at 20%, and anything above is taxed at 30%, you're not paying 30% tax on all of that $100,000, just the $20,000 that you made on top of the $80,000 that was taxed at 20%. Additionally, there are many many many exemptions and deductions that would reduce the amount of tax owed.\n\nEdited below cause I messed up:\n\nI used the actual tax brackets and rate from 1950 (the person who posted before me is incorrect) and if you were married and filing jointly, and made $1,000,000, your tax due was roughly $550,000 depending on whether you were filing jointly or single, and what exemptions and deductions you claimed. You can see that this is an effective tax rate of roughly 55-56%. "
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oy1us | what makes abs brakes safer? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oy1us/eli5_what_makes_abs_brakes_safer/ | {
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"When you lock the brakes in a car the wheels stop spinning, and you slide. While you might think that would be the quickest way to stop a car, it's actually not. \n\nThe quickest way to stop a car is to brake hard enough, but to let the wheels roll a little bit instead of stopping them entirely. This is what ABS does: it pumps the brakes really quickly to keep them rolling in little bits, and avoid skidding.\n\nEdit: The 'safer' part comes from 1) better stopping, and 2) better control. When you skid the car can go out of control since skidding is just sliding. \n\nNo skidding = no sliding = better control.\n\n",
"The system alternates between - grip between the wheel and the road, and the wheel and the brake pads. Cycling between these 10-20x times a second means you are most stable and quick at slowing down. You couldn't do this manually."
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3ij16i | difference between parole and probation? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ij16i/elif_difference_between_parole_and_probation/ | {
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"Parole is a supervised period after being in jail; probation is supervison without jail time."
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8tsvyw | why we get mini mouth blisters on the inside of our cheeks when eating or sometimes at random | I'm not talking about any std - these are small little bubbles that you can pop with your finger fairly easily. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8tsvyw/eli5_why_we_get_mini_mouth_blisters_on_the_inside/ | {
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"Did you eat something hot and burn your mouth? Maybe a food allergy?",
"Are you talking about canker sores? Like they are little white bumps that kind of sting?",
"I have actually looked into this, and from what I've found I cannot find any concrete answer. I know this isn't an ELI5 answer. It just seems certain foods can trigger it, and you feel it almost instantly, and it pops almost effortlessly and the pain is gone, it may even be a mild allergic reaction. Some say it is a blocked salivary gland. Mucoceles is another possible cause but doesn't seem to fit my experience well."
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2ua1fi | if women wear hijabs because appearance doesn't matter, why do they wear make-up | I don't mean to be offensive, but i always hear women online and learn in school that women wear hijabs for modesty and because they believe a women is more than her physical appearance. Yet many of these women are also wearing make-up. I'm just curious as to why they also wear make-up if they do not believe in being judged physically. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ua1fi/eli5if_women_wear_hijabs_because_appearance/ | {
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"Women don't wear hijab because appearance doesn't matter, they wear it because in their culture it's inappropriate to display their hair/shoulders. They still want to look good, it's just that part of their culture is being modest. \n\n",
"Makeup is for themselves, or for their spouse, not for society. Hijabs are for modesty outside of the home.",
"I'm pretty sure the idea of Hijabs wasn't devised by a woman. They are something that their culture dictates that they wear in order to not give men \"impure thoughts\". When a woman wears makeup under her Hijab, it's likely because she still wants to look nice just for the sake of her confidence/self esteem even though actually letting that makeup be seen would be deemed \"immodest\". "
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3bdrh6 | subcutaneous, intramuscular and intravenous injections and how/why they differ. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bdrh6/eli5_subcutaneous_intramuscular_and_intravenous/ | {
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"Speed of absorption and ease of injection are the two main factors.\n\nSubcutaneous refers to injecting into the fatty tissue just underneath the skin. These aren't used too often because adipose (fatty) tissue has poor vasculature, so whatever you inject doesn't get absorbed readily. However, if you want the stuff to linger then this can be the ideal route (ie - tuberculosis skin test). Its simple and safe because, again, little vasculature means less risk of side-effects or irritation.\n\nIntramuscular is a pretty common one for stuff done at the clinic - vaccines, vitamins, etc. Muscles have more blood flow so the stuff gets absorbed faster, while still being close to the surface and being a generally easy target to hit. The deltoid (shoulder/upper arm) and gluteus (butt) muscles are the two primary targets since they're large and easy to access (drop your pants/roll up your sleeve)\n\nIntravenous is when you need things to act fast, and I mean within minutes, of injection. This taps directly into the venous blood flow, so it takes a steady hand and a keen eye to put the needle right into the vein without pushing it aside or going straight through it. Some people are easier to access than others - fatty tissue, age, and scarring (from repeated injection use) can make it harder for one to access a vein. The typical favourite is the antecubital vein located on the anterior (front) surface of your elbow. It's usually nice and big, near the surface, and away from the major nerves in your arm (as opposed to, say, your radial vein, which is next door to a large nerve bundle)."
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2gckmk | why are humans warm blooded? (previous topics didn't help) please though, explain like i am a little kid | Read the title hahaha | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gckmk/eli5_why_are_humans_warm_blooded_previous_topics/ | {
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"\"Warm-blooded\" really just means that you are able to regulate the temperature inside of your body. Since you are able to do this, the outside temperature will not have any effect on the internal stuff that goes on in your body, which is a huge benefit to mammals.\n\nTake the counter-example of reptiles: reptiles are cold blooded, which means that they are dependent on the outside temperature in order to function. The way that reptiles gain the heat that they need is by warming themselves in the sun. Imagine if you had to do this every time you wanted to go walk around. It would be pretty inconvenient. ",
"Homeostasis is the ability to regulate certain variables within a system, in this case, the ability to regulate your own body temperature. It's a desirable trait that eventually evolved (simpler animals don't have this ability), and is only shared by mammals and birds. It is advantageous, and allows to develop more complex organs and is crucial to maintain a highly developed central nervous system and superior cognitive abilities (our brain is one of our more heat-sensitive organs), but it also has larger energy requirements, which is not suitable for all environments and organisms. ",
"Evolution. We are warm blooded because it works well to be able to operate in many climates. Cold blooded creatures become more scarce as you get to places that have strong winters. ",
"Regulated body temperature in mammals likely evolved prior to or just after the Permian Extinction event roughly 252 million years ago, and more than likely has a common origin with the mesothermic ancestor of dinosaurs, and their descendants, modern day warm blooded birds.\n\nThe common ancestor of mammals, synapsids, had large sails on their backs used to catch warmth from the sun, which could be circulated around the body through the circulatory system. As the temperature of a solution changes, so does the rate of a chemical reaction, and different chemicals are affected by temperature disproportionately relative to each other. In cells, many proteins and enzymes are extremely sensitive to changes in temperature, pH or salinity. Mammals eventually evolved to maintain a stable body temperatures in light of this earlier adaptation, and I believe its 37 degrees celsius across all mammals.\n\nWarm bloodedness, in both birds and mammals, allows a more efficient metabolism, and coincides with a period in evolutionary history where both groups eventually evolved into forms more capable of supporting their own weight, and thus enabling faster movement by running. This contrasts with their amphibian or reptilian counterparts, like alligators, turtles, snakes or frogs, which drag their bodies along the ground, move in short bursts, and are easily exerted.\n\nWhile we may need to eat more and more often than our cold blooded counterparts, warm blooded animals have greater endurance and stamina, which is necessary for maintaining flight, physically overpowering prey, or traveling large distances. We also have faster regenerative capabilities, and longer life spans on average. Synapsids also developed larger brains around this period, specifically in regions relating to olfactory and tactile sensory perception, characteristics now shared by all mammals, and the emergence of early fur and feathers is believed to have shortly followed.\n",
"In the end it comes down to chemistry. A chemical reaction, such as the one that gives an organism the energy it needs, progresses faster at higher temperatures. Thus at higher temperatures organisms can use energy faster to grow faster or compete more effectively.\n\nSome organisms have developed methods of elevating their own temperature above that of ambient temperature to guarantee that their metabolism is running at the optimal speed all the time. This gives them a set of advantages such as being to determine their own activity cycle rather than being limited by the sun for warmth to give them the speed they need. But they also have drawbacks, such as significantly higher nutritional requirements, which are balanced out by the benefits of self regulated temperature, the longer activity cycles (more time to get nutrition) and more effective digestion of acquired food."
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2excg8 | if a dam can produce so much energy then why not just build 2 dams in a row. the water can pass through the first dam , then 100 yards later, gravity can pull it through the second? | I know this may be a foolish question but in my head it makes sense. Whatever water went through the first dam is still being pulled down shore so why not just let it go through another few dams as well for even more electricity? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2excg8/eli5if_a_dam_can_produce_so_much_energy_then_why/ | {
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"Sometimes the water is a few hundred above the turbines. \n\nIf you put another dam in line it would have to be a few hundred feet below the previous dam. You need the change in elevation to create power. \n\n It you made 1 really close right after the 1st dam and it was close to the same level. The water level after the 1st dam would push against the outlet of the 1st dam and you would not have any power .\n[Bad drawing but I hope it makes sense](_URL_0_)",
"Basically… Dams make power from gravitational potential energy (water falling)…\n\nIt is more efficient to have one BIG dam from the highest you can get the water to the lowest you can get it and actually have it flow away (a big hole for example would just fill and any new water you put in will flow away… it provides no real benefit and is costly to make). \n\nDividing that distance in two does't give you any more energy, but would increase production costs significantly.",
"a dam works by converting potential energy (in the form of elevation) into kinetic energy (spinning the turbine)\n\nwhether you do it in 2 steps or 1, the maximum energy you can get is the same. due to effects that reduce efficiency, it's actually better to do everything in 1 go.",
"You are thinking of a water wheel, which is basically a turbine \"pushed\" by the flow of a river.\n\n\nA dam, instead, works by forcing water to fall from a really high spot onto a turbine.\n\n\nThe water falls from high up, so it goes fast, passing through a turbine at the bottom, which harnesses that energy from falling water.\n\n\nMaking two dams in a row wouldn't help anything. Making the dam taller would.\n\n\nImagine if you put a wall through a river. The water from upstream would build up until it was high enough to fall over the wall. The falling water could be harnessed for energy.\n\n\nWhat would happen if you put two walls next to each other? The water would build up behind the first wall, fall over, fill up the space between the walls, and then start to fall ovr the second wall. You could harness energy from water falling over the second wall, but what about the first wall? No water is falling ovr it anymore! Because the space between the walls has filled up! The second dam isn't helping anyhing, you only have one \"dam effect.\"\n\n\nPlease note, most dams don't simply let the water fall over the top ;) They direct it down through the interior of the dam, where turbines are located. I just hought it'd be easier to grasp that way.",
"You can. The problem is that rivers don't descend that fast. When you build a dam that's 200 feet high, the river backs upstream to a point where the river was 200 feet higher in elevation. That might be 40 miles back. (Look at how long reservoirs are behind dams.) It wouldn't do any good to have another dam 2 miles back, because you'd just be backing water up the downstream face of that dam, which would lose the effect of that upstream dam.",
"The Nimbus dam in northern California is located immediately downstream of Folsom dam. The wiki states it's a base load dam but doesn't state the specs but if you stand on the American River bike trail you can see the high tension power lines coming out of it.\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_2_\n\nLake Natoma,California (zoom out to see both)\n\n_URL_1_"
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8cix5h | why do some tree seedlings cost more than others? | I get that if you have a rare tree it will cost more, but there's a dramatic cost difference between common baby trees. For example, river birch seedling cost $14 and Red Oaks are around $6. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cix5h/eli5_why_do_some_tree_seedlings_cost_more_than/ | {
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"Supply and demand. There could be a multitude of factors from number of seedlings a certain tree makes per year to the costs of raising such a seedling to the popularity of that species of tree in the market... you get the idea. It's Econ 101.\n\nNow if you're asking about a specific species of tree, you'll probably need to ask someone who actually works with that species to get an idea why it's more expensive."
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3xsvm4 | how do you differentiate letters in a fast communicated morse code? | Since the letters have variable length codes (more frequent letters are shorter combinations I presume), we need something to determine the start of a new letter in morse. A pause works well:
...(pause).-(pause)...
but if you go to higher speeds, the pauses must be smaller between the letters, and eventually it would seem difficult to hear a difference between lettering pauses and the pauses between each individual 'strokes', the spacing between the dots and dashes .
How does one go about it? In the example above the listener could confuse it for another other combination. The only conclusion I can make is that one would have to have SPOT ON timing and rhythm so that the pauses can be distinguished. But if it requires so much effort, why is morse such a good means of communication?
This brings me to my second question:
Couldn't one assign 2⁵ combinations for all the letters? That is a sequence of 5 dots and dashes per letter. Sure, the messages would become longer but it would be easier to read, and no pauses would be needed to send. You'd simply copy the information as it was sent and then group the contents of the string 5 characters at a time. I suspect sending information is not quite as important than interpreting it, so what gives?
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xsvm4/eli5_how_do_you_differentiate_letters_in_a_fast/ | {
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"It comes down to context. When you get really good at morse code, you're not hearing dashes and dots, you're hearing letters. When you hear something a little bit ambiguous, your brain is really good at figuring out the more logical interpretation.\n\nIn speech, people make pronunciation errors all the time, or slur words together - but they're still understood. It's kind of like that.\n\nSame with reading - I can mispel a word but you still know what I mean!\n",
"Morse code is really good for communication because all you have to do is turn the transmitter on and off, and do so for variable amounts of time. None of that fancy-schmancy sound stuff is involved. In fact, a device had to be, uh, devised to make the transmitter keying obvious. It's called a BFO, a beat frequency oscillator.\n\nWhen a TV show wants to show someone cleverly communicating with almost no technology, they show him/her connecting and disconnecting, say, a traffic light circuit. All they do is turn the lights on and off, but they do so in a particular rhythm that's recognized as SOS -- that is, dih dih dih, dah dah dah, dih dih dih -- that is, three short pulses, three long pulses, three short pulses. (This was chosen because it is simple and effective.)\n\nHow you people perceive it at high speed? A guy is standing on a street corner in New York holding a violin case. He asks a cop, \"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?\" The cop replies, \"Practice, man, practice.\" And that is the answer here.\n\nWhen a person learns Morse Code, he gets better and better at hearing what's going on and can learn to do so at higher and higher speeds. \n\nThere's even an invention that makes the sender able to send faster and more uniformly. It's called a bug. It's got a lever that rests in one position but can be pushed a short distance to the left or the right. When he pushes it to the left, dihs (short pulses) are emitted, one after another, for as long as he holds it there. When he pushes it to the right, dahs (longer pulses) are likewise emitted. (I might have reversed the left and right of this but the principle applies.)\n\nWhen a person is good enough at Morse Code to use a bug, he can transmit extremely rapidly. The dihs and dahs are emitted at a more constant rate than a person can do by hand.\n\nAs for the ultimate speed, well, of course, code could be sent by a machine at a rate faster than a person could perceive. The first tape recorders, invented by the Germans in WWII, were used to transmit Morse Code messages at four or eight (I'm guessing) times normal speed, so fast that the Allies who listened in on these messages had no idea what was happening. (I'm not sure whether they recorded them and slowed them down, which every modern science fiction movie would attempt!)",
"Dits are supposed to last one beat (however long beats are; that's what determines the speed of transmission); dahs are supposed to last three. There should be one beat between dits and dahs, three beats between letters, and five beats between words.\n\nAs long as the sender does a pretty good approximation of that, the message should come through unambiguously. But you're right, sending (and receiving) high-speed morse takes skill.\n\nA lot of modern hobbyists use a transmitting device with two levers, where one lever puts out a carefully-timed string of dits, the other dahs, which means that the overall rhythm stays consistent.\n\nAnyway, getting to your questions:\n\n > But if it requires so much effort, why is morse such a good means of communication?\n\nMorse *isn't* such a good means of communication; let me explain why. Morse code is great for (a) sending unencrypted natural language (b) by hand (c) with primitive equipment. If you're sending compressed or encrypted text- not (a)- then you don't get the benefit of having the most common letters use the shortest codes. If you're sending by machine- not (b)- then the hearable rhythm of morse isn't useful. And if you have advanced equipment- not (c)- you can send voice instead of mucking around with letter codes.\n\n > This brings me to my second question: Couldn't one assign 2⁵ combinations for all the letters? That is a sequence of 5 dots and dashes per letter. Sure, the messages would become longer but *it would be easier to read*, and no pauses would be needed to send.\n\nProbably not that bolded part. The different lengths of the letters makes it easier to tell them apart.\n\nAnyway, the idea of assigning each letter to a binary pattern wasn't lost on the inventors of the era; the [Baudot code](_URL_0_) did exactly that, and was used in early teleprinters. But that was even more dependent on precise timing the Morse code was, which put a limit on its overall speed."
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ez4ez4 | what is the deciding factors that determine a persons metabolism? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ez4ez4/eli5_what_is_the_deciding_factors_that_determine/ | {
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"Body weight. The heavier you are, the harder your organs have to work, abd the more calories you spend just to keep yourself alive.",
"Age, weight, activity levels, hormone levels and production, how often you eat and at what times of the day."
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7rxf1w | why are some animals much more aggressive than others? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7rxf1w/eli5_why_are_some_animals_much_more_aggressive/ | {
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"Different species have found different techniques for survival. Some get food by attacking, others by sneaking, others by just eating plants. Some defend themselves by fighting, others by fleeing, others by hiding.\n\nUsing a technique different from your competitors can increase your survival odds.",
"Assuming you know how evolution works, it's simply the result of a species adapting to an environment which favors aggressiveness. For instance, wolverines came into being in an environment where other animals would bully them, steal their food, or try to eat them. In this environment, it's very advantageous to be a super-aggressive animal that nothing wants to fuck with.\n\nOn islands which do not produce enough biomass to support many predators, there is a phenomenon known as \"island tameness,\" where the larger animals are very non-aggressive, and will not flee when approached by human beings. Examples include the Quokkas, Dodo birds, and many creatures in the Galapagos islands.\n\nOf course, there are some animals which are in the middle, such as dogs. They are aggressive enough that you wouldn't want to back them into a corner, yet friendly enough that they can maintain symbiotic relationships with other animals."
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7pe0f3 | what is actually happening in your brain/body when you have a migrane? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7pe0f3/eli5_what_is_actually_happening_in_your_brainbody/ | {
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"Short answer: nobody really knows.\n\nLong answer: Research is ongoing, and currently it appears it may be related to blood vessel constriction/dilation in the brain, but it could also be neurological. People who suffer from ocular migraines have an increased risk of stroke, so the blood vessel thing may be related in those cases; but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the same for all.",
"The current understanding is that there is an issue with blood vessels in the skull/face dilating in close proximity to nerves. These expanding blood vessels basically compress the nerve bundles and the mechanical stimulation causes them to fire/send electrical signals. The nerve bundles can contain not only nerves that transmit pain signals but also other sensory nerves so when the nerve bundles are compressed you get a whole host of signals being transmitted. This leads to many different sensations being perceived by the brain and is why it results in the pain, visual disturbances etc etc... \n\nThe most recent developments in drug research for migraine treatment is focussing on something called CGRP (from memory standing for calcitonin gene receptor protein). This molecule is released by nerves in response to chemicals and physical damage and plays a role in neural inflammation and nerve repair. So we may soon learn that the above explanation of the mechanism is way off and overly simplified like our understanding of most things in the body. ",
"Going on what a new drug called “[erenumab](_URL_0_) ” (trials have done very well and going for medical licensing in both USA & UK)\n\nThe protein - called calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) - causes blood vessels intertwined with nerve endings in the head to swell up.\n\nBut that is only a part of what we still don’t understand is happening to the body during migraines. As a sufferer with aura, I wish we knew. \n",
"As others have said, no one really knows for sure what causes migraines. There may actually be no single cause. Research is ongoing.\n\nI get migraines 2-3 times over the course of a couple of weeks. Not nearly as bad as some people, but any count above zero is far too much. Migraines suck.\n\nAwhile back, my doctor prescribed two different medications: Fiorinal, to try to head off a migraine that is coming on, and a triptan for after a migraine has taken hold. Taking those meds as prescribed did not help much. Through experimentation, I discovered that if I take a single pill of both, at the same time, then a migraine will completely disappear within the hour 99% of the time (and for that remaining 1%, one more triptan does the trick). For all you sufferers out there: Keep looking for medication, or possibly combinations of medications. There may still be a solution for you.",
"Well, one thing to definitely note is that the movements of stomach and intestines grind to a halt. This is a large reason why after the pain kicks in(they can still have effect if taken during auras) , pain killers don't work for most patients. Also, this is the reason people can feel nauseous, some patients report relief after vomiting and migraine treatments often involve prokinetic drugs. There are hypothesis that maybe migraines themselves have to do with gastrointestinal system due to this. Overall tho, not a lot we do know about them\n",
"I think it's always important to remember that the terminology in medicine is invented to help GUIDE expectations, treatment, prevention and prognosis. Almost all diagnoses are \"spectrums\", some being extremely narrow, others more broad. Migraine leans towards a more broad class of diagnosis because there is no objective test that will include/exclude it, unlike say a single gene, heritable disorder like Huntington's disease (I may stand corrected but you get the idea). \n\nThere a 'classic' and typically more common presentations of migraines often further subdivided into 'with aura' (a preceding neurological deficit/interference like a visual disturbance prior to headache onset) or 'without aura'. Then there are much less common, but quite clearly on the migraine spectrum, such as 'hemiplegic migraine', where someone will have weakness down one side of body/face during the attack (in extreme circumstances, these can even lead to strokes). Finally there are more 'atypical migraines' such as the abdominal migraine (more common in paediatrics). Amongst these, severity and duration of symptoms can very significantly but generally speaking a migraine will last between 3 and 72hrs (outside of this it becomes less likely you will lie on the migraine spectrum but not impossible either!)\n\nRemember, we cannot fit nature or the complexity of life into clearly defined black and white terms. We can only observe, collate and attempt to interpret. And this process is infinitely fluid and requires an open mind at all times! The human experience is incomprehensibly unique!",
"One more question, my doctor told me not to use hormonal contraception the combination one as it increases chances of migraine attack more, why? ",
"I think it has to be some sort of runaway inflammatory process. I’ve had migraines for about 8-9 years now and interestingly, when I started drinking coffee 2 years ago it reduced them by about 80 percent. I have runaway inflammation in other parts of my body though, namely my colon - ulcerative colitis. This gets me to thinking that migraines might actually be an autoimmune disease, or at least closely related to one. I’m 100 percent speculating and this is only based on my personal case, but if I had to put my money on it, that’s my guess. Normally autoimmune sufferers have a whole host of health issues so it at least fits the bill ",
"I have several types of migraines.. icepick migraines, ocular migraines, temporal pressure migraines, tension migraines that start in my back and run up to the top of my head. They all have one thing in common, me on the floor in a fetal position. Only one responds to cannabis use and that’s the back and neck one. The ice pick migraines last for 15-20 seconds and come in groups of 5-10 in an hour. Fortunately I only have to deal with these a couple times a year. I feel horrible for those that have migraines more often, such a horrible disruption to life.",
"I am having a fascinating time following this thread. It is rather nice to have people who really understand what it's like to suffer from migraine disease.",
"It’s crazy that migraines are still as much of an “unknown” as they were when I was a kid. The good news is that some over-the-counter pain relievers can actually help now. When I was a kid in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I would get them in three day strains. I would literally be incapacitated for 72 hours straight. No light, no sound, and a lot of steaming hot rags on my forehead. A lot of the time the pain would just make me pass out. Eventually I would be prescribed Tylenol 3 with codeine, which was really the only defense back then. The good news about migraines in my case was two things: you normally either grow into them or out of them, and growing out of them would be what happened to me, and, because of having these migraines so severely, they were able to determine that I had AVM. It was unknown if the two were connected, which I don’t think was the case. I would end up having brain surgery at 8 years old to rectify the AVM issue, but I would still have migraines until I was about 15. I think I’ve only had one, maybe two since then, but it has been years. Doubt if it is proven, but I am a staunch believer that susceptibility to migraines is hereditary and usually skips a generation. Long story short, I am glad the AVM was caught to not trade one painful issue for another after I grew out of the migraines. When I say I “feel your pain” to people in this thread, believe me, I feel your pain. ",
"I will say this since maybe it might help others. My 3 triggers are lack of sleep, dehydration and constipation. I manage to avoid those big 3 and now I don’t get them anymore. Get a good nights rest and drink a lot of water if you can. I know it’s easier said than done. Hope this helps. ",
"There are a bunch of different kinds of migraines. I get the vascular headache types. They think this type is caused by incorrect contraction, relaxation of blood vessels in your head/neck. Why \"muscles\" in your blood vessel walls? So you can go from lying down to standing up without your blood pooling in lower extremities and making you pass out. Probably the best understood type, but the human brain is still pretty \"black boxish\" like to study it, you put input into the box, see what comes out, and make inferences about the relationship. There is a Murican lithographer and a dutch mathemetician who just got a grant to work on their project for economical cellular scanning of whole body, (will try to find linky) I think it will take a jump like this to find the stabby center of what causes migraines. (I'm very lucky, when I feel one coming on, I can take a single shot of hard alcohol and it dilates the old vaso's just right, and stops it dead in it's tracks, my poor aunt has to take fancy medicine to only be in terrible pain and throwing up for 3 days instead of 7.)",
"Maxalt is the only thing that ever worked for me. I had tried lots of other prescriptions and nothing worked. Had a coworker give me maxalt and it was amazing. The brand name dissolves in your mouth if you have nausea. ",
"If you are suffering from migraines, have a look at [sumatriptan](_URL_0_). I've had migraines since I was 6 years old. I went to countless doctors and had numerous scans, bloodwork and whatnot. A few years ago a doctor recommended sumatriptan to me. First I tried the pill form and it didn't do much. I then tried the injectable and the result was unbelievable. When I feel migraine coming up I inject myself and in 15 minutes I am completely migraine free!\n\nIt is quite expensive, but it's the only thing, in my case, that completely stops my migraine. ",
"As a migraine sufferer, I'm pretty sure what is happening is that Satan is trying to claw his way out of your skull while simultaneously kicking you in the stomach. "
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c6sddq | how can people eat gold flakes in dishes without health consequences? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c6sddq/eli5_how_can_people_eat_gold_flakes_in_dishes/ | {
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"Your body doesn't absorb gold. Basically, lead networks with calcium in your bones. Mercury disrupts a cell's ability to control oxygen tearing them apart. Gold doesn't do anything like that, though some people do appear to be allergic to it",
"Because gold is inert. Our bodies don't absorb it. It passes right through you and you poop it out unchanged. Other metals like lead are toxic because they're similar enough to other elements our bodies use that it can't tell the difference and absorbs them. Gold is different enough that it doesn't fit into anything our bodies need so it just passes right through your digestive system untouched."
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2j3rq5 | when it asks what your race is on a form, why is hispanic/latino asked as a separate question? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2j3rq5/eli5_when_it_asks_what_your_race_is_on_a_form_why/ | {
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"IIRC, it's because Hispanic/ Latino is an ethnicity, not a race. \n\nWe're technically considered white.\n\n\nEdit: *I'm* technically considered white. Fuck, people, if one person said that Hispanics can be black fucking everyone said it. You can stop flooding my inbox with the same godamn thing. ",
"Because a whole lot of people in Latin America are indistinguishably white: maybe not Anglo, but Caucasian, European. The Americas south of the Rio Grande are colonized, overwhelmingly, by descendants of Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Germans, Poles, Russians. Also a lot of Africans and Asians, but that's not to this point.\n\nSo if you just ask us, we answer, correctly, \"white\" or \"Caucasian.\"\n\nBUT, there's different cultural and economic perception about us. Some entities want to count our numbers, specifically, so that they can make sure that we are being treated fairly by banks, schools, the government. Others want to count our numbers because they want to make sure that we are treated *differently*.\n\nPersonally, I gave up on that question. I just don't answer it anymore. I descend from Hungarians, Swiss, Italians, and Spaniards. I grew up in Brazil as part of the privileged 5%, so economically my family is better off than most Americans. In my case the only meaning that the question can have is to single me out because of the geographical accident of my birth. Other than that, I'm indistinguishable from anybody else. So for a long time now I've declined to answer the question.",
"You could be a white or black Hispanic, I'm Dominican and I look like an African-American while my younger brother looks like he could be European. Our blood is very mixed. ",
"When I was applying to colleges in the 80's, this stuff was just getting started. I recall one application for a very liberal New England school that had multiple different versions odds Hispanic/Latino. I particularly recall thinking the differentiation between Puerto Rican and Mainland Puerto Rican was interesting. ",
"The best answer in its simplest form is that you Hispanic isn't a race in the same way that being white is. You can be Hispanic but white, black, Asian, or whatever else. Ethnicity is a common or shared culture across people, whereas race has to do with outward appearance. Personally I think race is bullshit, we're all human, but that's just me.",
"Huh. I thought it was to try to get a tally of how many Hispanics are living in America. From others' comments, it seems to just be a technicality in terms of distinguishing race from ethnicity (not that I know the difference.)",
"This annoys me.. I'm white. But what about the majority of Dominicans. They are black. Its not a big deal bit the fact that we are just bunched annoys me ",
"What is white, then? ",
"Some Latinos feel strongly about being grouped with Spanish people. This lead to them adopting the term Latino referring to people from central and south America versus Hispanic which refers to the Spanish language. ",
"I worked on the US Census the last time around. We were actually told to ask the Hispanic/Latino question specifically because a lot of money in government has been allocated to government programs to assist densely populated Hispanic/Latino regions. So they use the numbers from the census to allocate those funds to the right regions. \n\nI bet politicians also use those numbers to find out what demographic they need to appeal to to win over that specific region. ",
"It depends. On government forms, it's because there are laws in place that track the information for anti-discrimination or census purposes and someone successfully lobbied for that designation to have it's own category.\n\nIn the case of medical forms, there are two reasons, depending on the situation. In many cases, there are requirements that they ask for reporting purposes, in which case they ask for whatever the government requires for their tracking. However, in some cases, medical forms ask because certain medical conditions have higher prevalence in certain people-groups, and the information can guide medical diagnostic procedures and treatment decisions.",
"I have worked for the U.S. Census Bureau and I can give you a very simple answer to this question: \n\nTo track the number of Hispanic/Latinos.\n\nUnder U.S. policy, Hispanic/Latino is not considered a race. Instead, Hispanics/Latinos are understood as coming from many different races (primarily White, Native American, Black, or \"two or more races\" in the United States.) But, the U.S. government still wants to track the number of Hispanics/Latinos in the country for many different reasons. Therefore, there is a separate box which serves this purpose. ",
"The classification of race has evolved over the years in the U.S. The first census only asked if someone was Native American, a slave, or neither. The U.S. started measuring other groups of people over time as their numbers increased to keep track of them and see how they were doing. There was a surge of immigration from Latin American countries in the 60s and many immigrants were discriminated against. Civil rights activists thought it would be important to measure whether they were being hired/promoted/ treated unfairly so they started asking if they identified as Hispanic/Latino.\n\nTo get to the root of the question, many Hispanic/Latino people have Spanish ancestry. The Spaniards reproduced with the locals in the new world unlike most other European groups for reasons that will take a long time to explain. Spaniards are Europeans and considered by most to be white/Caucasian. However, many also have central and south american indian/native american ancestry which is considered by some to be a different race. Census officials decided simply that Hispanic/Latino would be ethnicity on official forms and others followed the logic. ",
"Because \"Hispanic\" is not a race. It is an ethnicity, that is, a group of people who share common cultural origin. In this case, that means having ancestors from the Spanish-speaking world. \n\nThere are white Hispanics everywhere (esp. Spain, Argentina, and parts of Venezuela and Cuba). There are also lots of black Hispanics (ex. Dominicans), and Asian Hispanics (Peru). Many more have some degree of Mesoamerican ancestry (esp. in Central and South America). ",
"I just started working for a company from Spain and they told me that I couldn't put down that I'm white because I am not from England. I had to put down mixed/2 or more. "
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247b66 | can a sociopath/psychopath ever develop empathy? | Through CBT, social conditioning, brain surgery? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/247b66/eli5_can_a_sociopathpsychopath_ever_develop/ | {
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"The short answer is no.\n\nThere's some evidence that young *children* diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), the blanket/parent condition for sociopathy and psychopathy, can develop properly if they're given a specific regimen of vitamin supplements. But success probably depends on the cause and severity of their ASPD. Sufferers of ASPD can respond to conditioning, just as any person can, but the intended results may not be achieved and it could result in unintended side-effects. Cognitive behavioral therapy has proven more detrimental than it has been effective, because if a sufferer of ASPD does not *want* to learn from the therapy they will only learn how better to manipulate others from it. There are cases where cognitive behavioral therapy has proven effective, but by and large sufferers of ASPD are incredibly resistent to the notion that there is something wrong with them, or even that their behaviour could be harmful to themselves, which is described in psychology as a lack of \"Insight\". Brain surgery may eventually prove to be the most viable option for treating sufferers of ASPD, but currently there are no effective techniques. ",
"Mountain_11 is correct. Here, however, is one example of a young child from horrendous circumstances who with much, much, MUCH effort, this child, Beth, was able to develop empathy and wrote about the experience and lectures on it as well.\nThere is very graphic language but clearly, no ordinary therapy worked but some intensive therapy over time in a controlled environment did work. You can see the problems with this disorder and why it is so resistant to intervention.\n\n_URL_0_"
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551wuc | why aren't jill stein and gary johnson allowed in the debates? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/551wuc/eli5why_arent_jill_stein_and_gary_johnson_allowed/ | {
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"Ross Perot.\n\nThe prior system for debates allowed third party candidates, mostly providing an opportunity for the other candidates to take a drink off-camera. Then Ross Perot was in a debate, and surged in the polls following it. This gave both parties the notion that the right third party candidate might get some votes that way.\n\nBoth parties agreed that it would be **very bad for them** if a third party became an option in the US. As a result they formed a new organization to run presidential debates. The purpose of that organization is to assure than only the republicans and democrats can participate in televised debates. Both parties agree not to participate in any debate run by any other group.\n\nWhile third parties have influenced elections sense, Ralph Nader in Gore vs Bush for example, they've never been allowed into televised debates.",
"There are rules regarding who can debate. One of the rules is that all candidates must have at least 15% support in na average of five national polls. Johnson falls a little short of that, and Stein isn't even close. \n\nThe last non-major party candidate to have more than 15% support was Ross Perot. "
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6vq7p5 | after the us civil war ended, how did the union ensure that the former confederacy was not continuing to hold slaves? one would assume there was continued resistance to emancipation; did the union go from town to town, farm to farm? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6vq7p5/eli5_after_the_us_civil_war_ended_how_did_the/ | {
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"Most of the Southern states did not rejoin the Union until about 10 years after the war. During that time, they were placed under military occupation. The purpose of this, among other things, was to guarantee the rights of newly-freed blacks.\n\nOf course, when the troops left the Jim Crow era began and blacks in the South lost many of those rights again.",
"Two words: military occupation. \n\nFederal troops were deployed in Southern states until the late 1870s, tasked with enforcing federal law.",
"The US put the entire south under military occupation for roughly 10 years in what what known as \"reconstruction\". The army literally went about checking to make sure slaves were free. "
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409nug | what would happen if something could move at the speed of light while it was inside of something moving at the speed of light? | I think this a more Philosofical thing than real physics but I couldn't sleep thinking about it. Well, I thought that I could just imagine the same thing with something slower, like a bus, but travelling at such high speed would have the exact same result? Sorry for any grammar errors, I'm not american and a have pretty bad logic background. Thank you. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/409nug/eli5_what_would_happen_if_something_could_move_at/ | {
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"When traveling that fast time sort of, slows down, to make up for the situation you're thinking of. If you're on a train traveling the speed of light (which is impossible, so for technicality sakes lets say its going 1 meter/second slower than light), and you take a step forward, time is slowed down enough that you don't break the speed of light. At that speed, time would be stretched by a factor of about 300,000,000. So you \"walking\" actually only moves you about 7 nanometers per second faster than the train, but still not the whole 1m/s faster you need to go\n\nCan confirm: am Indonesian",
"It would simply maintain its position within the object. Replace \"speed of light\" with \"25 mph\" and the answer is obvious: If I'm in a car driving 25 mph, I am also moving at 25 mph. The distinction is that both the car and I are moving at 25 mph relative to the road we're traveling along. If you adjust the reference point for my speed to be in relation to the car, then the result would be that the inside object would simply hit the wall of the object it is inside of, and either bounce off or break through. Again, think of the car: you're in a car driving 25 mph. Someone in the back seat throws a ball forward at 25 mph relative to the car's position (50 mph relative to the road). The ball will hit the windshield. Simple as that.\n\nThings do get a little weird at light speed, though. Time slows down the closer you get to light speed, and eventually stops as you reach the speed of light. What this means is that the person inside the spaceship who is preparing to throw the ball (therefore achieving some speed faster than the speed of light) will not be able to throw the ball, because time will not pass for them, and it obviously takes time to throw a ball. To put it into numbers, the object inside has to accelerate, which is represented by the formula a = Δv/t^2. However, since we are at light speed and time is not passing, t=0, which leaves us with a = Δv/0^2, and as we all know, you cannot divide by zero. This leaves us with the confirmation that the person in the spaceship would not be able to throw the ball, therefore they would not be able to get that object to travel faster than the speed of light."
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2jyhg9 | how do languages whose word meanings rely on rising and falling pitches, such as chinese, deal with singing? | Does the pitch of the melody of the song affect the meanings of the words, or at least make it more difficult to understand? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jyhg9/eli5_how_do_languages_whose_word_meanings_rely_on/ | {
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"the same way. when someone sings, you just shift everything appropriately. and also, even if you use the wrong tone people still know what you're talking about. ",
"Wouldn't it be just like a song that has a question in the lyrics, where you'd adjust/adapt the inflection?",
"안녕하세요! \nIn Korean, many words sound the same. Actually, most verbs have very similar sounds due to the conjunctions having similar endings; however, in lyrical form, Korean is not as challenging as you may think. The Korean language is very reliant on particles and conjugated words creating context. So if a few words sound similar, you intuitively connect the particles and conjunction and it makes sense. \nAlso, popular culture has created words in Korean to help distinguish context. For instance, a word to say \"you\" is \"네\" which sounds like \"neh\" while the word to say \"My\" can be \"내\" which sounds like \"Neh\" so to avoid confusion, \"You\" becomes \"니\" or \"Nee\" and My is stressed more as \"Nay\" or \"내\"\n\nThus when singing \"I love you,\" you sing 니가 사랑해 (사랑해 = love) and no one thinks you love something you own. They know that you are referring to the person you are speaking to.",
"Chinese traditional vocal music is sung in falsetto, and is in harmony, not melody. Tones do not affect the nature of the music overmuch.\n\nModern C-pop is a different matter of course. Context is key; missing a word or two could cause you to lose the meaning. I know it does with me from time to time; sometimes I just guess at it whilst I listen."
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bm9uhp | why is the use of self-checkouts considered anti-labour, or "killing" jobs, when businesses must keep with the advancement of technology to stay competitive? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bm9uhp/eli5_why_is_the_use_of_selfcheckouts_considered/ | {
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"I don't use self checkouts because i have a job, and it isn't working in a supermarket for free."
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7eh2mu | what is the key difference between speculation and investing? how is it different from gambling? | As title states, what makes speculation different from investing? Is the only difference the time-frame? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7eh2mu/eli5what_is_the_key_difference_between/ | {
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"As I understand it, the difference is in the level of risk, and what that perceived risk means for investors’ behaviour patterns. Really high risk trades - whether this is because they only have a short lifespan to come good in, because you’re using borrowed money instead of your own, or because you’re relying on hearsay and gut feelings rather than on traceable metrics like previous company performance - are speculation, and are kind of like what normal investing would be like for a compulsive gambler.",
"to me..speculation seems a bit shorter term while investing seem a bit longer terms...as investing also bet on certain view which is kind of speculating as well...",
"speculation means - bet on it even you don't see the value. but you think everyone else will come in later to push the price up, and you can sell them. generally not very long term.\n\ninvesting means - bet on something you think it has actual value, whether it has the utility value or it is backed with real asset/business which its value is going to appreciate. ",
"Speculation, you don't really know what you are getting into. Most likely you just glad someone will purchase it at a higher price than you are.\n\nInvesting, you believe in the core business. Like Warren Buffet, he is an investor and believe in the business he is investing in."
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1vno8x | how exactly are mainstream pop artists so successfully rich and famous? | How exactly do record companies like Sony determine who is famous and who isn't? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vno8x/eli5_how_exactly_are_mainstream_pop_artists_so/ | {
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"Because they have the money to sit and and say we will pay X amount for you to play X song on your radio station. Thus, crappy pop star is born.",
"I'm not expert on the subject but I once asked my friend this after his cousin (a rapper) got signed by a record company and I got this response. I'm sure my answer doesn't cover all the details but may give you a better overall understanding.\n\nThe idea that record companies determine who gets to be famous and who doesnt isn't entirely accurate.\n\nRecord companies sign on a large amount of artists and pay them a \"salary\" to produce/come up with a certain number of songs every month. The songs are sampled by various people at the record company and they pick the ones they like. If an artist doesn't live up to expectations or can't come up with the required amount of songs, he gets dropped.\n\nThose artists that stay on end up appearing at gigs and often open for larger artists (if you go to a concert there are always lesser known artists performing first.) The crowds general reception determines how the record company moves forward with those artists. If it's good, they move forward with the artist and begin investing more money on things such as advertisement and providing the proper atmosphere for the artist to develop.\n\nFrom there on it basically depends on how well the artist's music sells. If the artists music creates revenue, the artist gets pushed by the company to generate as much as possible. If the music doesn't create revenue, it's tough luck and the artist begins to fade out.\n\nThis actually reminds me that I saw Lady Gaga perform at some small crappy club in Hollywood before she made it big. She was so unknown at the time that she was opening for the DJ of the night who happened to be Danny Masterson from That 70's Show... and he wasn't even the main act of the night if I remember correctly.\n\nI once read an article somewhere that said that for every 100 artists a Record Company signs, only one of them actually goes on to make it big and create revenue for the company. I can't remember if it was 100 to 1 but it was a pretty big number.\n\nEdit: Grammar."
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2j0q68 | why do some medevil helmets depict pony tails or mohawk brush things on top? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2j0q68/eli5_why_do_some_medevil_helmets_depict_pony/ | {
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"For the Roman legionaries at least the Crest of their helmet was used to signify officers as opposed to regular soldiers. The officers Crest ran side to side to make it easier to identify during battle. (commonly horsehair was used but occasionally other materials were used for it.)"
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1rj4uc | why does every computer i own need to have the clock reset every month or so when i'm almost always online? what do cell phones know about keeping time that laptops don't? | EDIT: OK, I get that it will keep proper time if I set it to "auto update" pref... I guess what I don't understand is why that needs to be set. If I never shut down the computer (sleep mode and the occasional reboot after updates) and it's always receiving power (plug or battery), shouldn't it theoretically always keep accurate time? Why can't it without checking for time updates? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rj4uc/eli5_why_does_every_computer_i_own_need_to_have/ | {
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"That's interesting! I've never had anything like that happen to my desktop or laptop. Are the clocks fast or slow?",
"Well, left to their own devices, any computer clock will drift a bit, laptops moreso than desktops. Most automatically set themselves though (it's built into pretty much all the big OSes)\n\nThe reason cell phones keep better time is because they're usually set to take time updates from the network by default and do so much more often.",
"Most operating systems support NTP (network time protocol) to keep them in sync, although for reasons not made clear to me, it's not always turned on.\n\nSince your cellphone is always in contact with the cell phone network, and because accurate time keeping is important for interfacing with the network when making calls, the cell phone network broadcasts the current time as a matter of protocol.\n\nWhy can't we keep perfect time? Circuits are analogue and no two are exactly alike at the lowest level. Those differences affect how fast the clock ticks in a computer."
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46vhh1 | why can't a supplement based diet replace a traditional diet ? | I have always heard that one. All products sold at the chemist (those big bottles of protein shakes and stuff, or multi vitamin pills) clearly add a mention saying that they do not replace a normal diet.
We know exactly what the human body needs as nutrients (often referred to as daily recommended intake). Like this amount of vit. C, this amount of magnesium, B1, B12, etc... From there, one, or a mix of, supplements could make for the whole combination of nutrients/vitamins intake the body needs.
Why would this "recipe" still not replace a "normal" diet ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46vhh1/eli5_why_cant_a_supplement_based_diet_replace_a/ | {
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"There are actually a variety of companies who make drinks/items that are full diet/meal replacements, that people can live off of (and homemade knock offs). I don't want to give them advertising so I won't post them. But yes this is a thing, apparently it takes some time getting used to it and its not particularly good tasting or exciting, but its possible. It's also not cheap either, though you can make it yourself.\n\nThere are even Reddit subs dedicated to this"
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en3ov5 | -plasma balls | Why do the strands of electricity follow objects theough the glass ball. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/en3ov5/eli5plasma_balls/ | {
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"There is a flow of electricity from the center electrode to your fingers just outside the globe. You can't feel it, it is very weak and also high frequency, about 35,000 Hertz. Such high frequencies flow only on the surface of any conductor, they do not penetrate. Inside the globe, there are many possible paths for this current but they form filaments due to an effect called pinching. When currents flow in in the same direction in parallel conductors the conductors are attracted to each other. This results in a pinching force making the very thin threads you see.",
"A gpobe of some kind is filled with nothing but a bit of nobel gas (like xenon or argon). In the center of the glode theres an electrode pumped with a high frequency AC voltage. This current ionizes the gas inside, making it conductive. The arcs you see are paths of current flowing through the ionized gas, very much like lightning. \nThe reason you pull small arcs to your finger is that AC goes through capacitors. Now your hand and the glass are not very good at it, but the make a very very bad capacitor."
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19c6yc | the extended euclidean algorithm for finding modular inverses | I must be a moron but anytime wikipedia gets into mathematics none of it ever makes any sense. I understand how to work the algorithm by hand using the back substitution method but I don't understand it well enough to turn it into a computer algorithm.
Basically, how do I solve something like 13^-1 mod 60 using an algorithm? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19c6yc/eli5_the_extended_euclidean_algorithm_for_finding/ | {
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"Well, remember what 13^(-1) needs to be. Let's call y the variable we are interested in, that is some integer which is 13^(-1) mod 60. By definition of inverses, we know y * 13 is congruent to 1 mod 60. So, this means when you divide 13y by 60, you get a remainder of 1. This means there is some integer x so that\n\n13y + 60x = 1\n\nThis is a linear diophantine equation. Solve for y using extended Euclidian algorithm.\n\nNow, if you don't understand the algorithm itself, it's pretty straightforward. Start with 60, take away as many 13's as possible to make the smallest positive number (or, smallest in absolute value integer if you want. )\n\n60 - 4(13) = 8\n\nrepeat now with 13 and 8.\n\n13 - 1(8) = 5\n\n8 - 1(5) = 3\n\n5 - 1(3) = 2\n\n3 - 1(2) = 1\n\nNow, you wanted to get a linear combination to be 1, and you're at that point. Now you need to \"backtrack.\" The last equation tells you 3 - 1(2) = 1, and the equation above it tells you what 2 is in terms of 5 and 3. So plug it in. \n\n3 - 1(5 - 1(3)) = 1\n\nSo \n\n2(3) - 1(5) = 1\n\nNow you can backtrack the 3, and then the 5, etc until you get 1 written as a linear combination of 60 and 13. The coefficient of the 13 is exactly what you want. \n"
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at5lu4 | how does a vacuum cleaner pick up dirt without touching or covering it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/at5lu4/eli5_how_does_a_vacuum_cleaner_pick_up_dirt/ | {
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"Think about the blowers that you use in your yard to blow dirt and leaves. It is sucking in air with a compressor that then blows out a funnel so that it can be directed and will be pretty strong.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nA vacuum cleaner is just moving the other direction. The motor is pushing air out of the unit to create a low air pressure zone. When that happens, the air outside the vacuum cleaner wants to take up that space (this is also how wind works). But there's only one way for the air to get into that low pressure zone. Through the opening in your vacuum cleaner. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo you could say the atmosphere is blowing the dirt into your vacuum cleaner."
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6szha2 | why do stomach bugs like the norovirus appear to spread rapidly amongst passengers on cruise ships? | It frequently makes it into the news that there has been another outbreak of a stomach bug on a cruise ship and so many passengers and crew have been affected. What is it about the cruise ship environment that makes this happen? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6szha2/eli5_why_do_stomach_bugs_like_the_norovirus/ | {
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"**VERY** cramped spaces, cleanliness isn't usually up to par, and nowhere to escape the outbreak.\n\nShips may look big, but they're actually very, very small. You fit 5,000 men on a carrier and every one of them is in a 6'x10' room sharing bunks. They work in the same cramped spaces, they eat in the same cramped spaces, they use the toilet in the same cramped places. It's ridiculous. This allows the bugs to transmit very rapidly.\n\n",
"First, these viruses are extremely resilient and infectious - you only need to swallow a few individual virus particles to be infected, and they can survive on surfaces for days or weeks.\n\nSecond, it's a very tight environment where everything is shared - chances are that if you touch anything outside your cabin, dozens of other people touched it recently as well.\n\nThird (but similar) everyone is eating food from the same kitchen. If the virus ends up in there, everyone is going to get it.",
"The number one reason is that people don't wash their hands, or wash them poorly. The virus is present in feces and vomit of infected individuals. Because of the lack of hygiene in small areas that contain many people, it ends up in your mouth very quickly. "
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cbvm1j | is there any legitimacy behind being ‘sobered up’ by a serious situation? if so, what physiological changes occur to allow this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cbvm1j/eli5_is_there_any_legitimacy_behind_being_sobered/ | {
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"It's more or less about the party ending abruptly and reality snapped in. \n\nStill drunk but you know better.",
"You're still drunk, but since alchohol is a depressant the \"downer\" aspect of the drug is countered by _adrenaline_. You're not more likely to pass a sobriety test, and you're still gonna crash your car, but you'll certainly _feel_ different than you did before the \"sobering\" event if it causes an adrenaline surge.\n\nYou asks specifically about psychological changes, and that is really just moving from a \"i'm in fun having aloof party mode\" to \"oh shit, this is serious\" mode."
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5uca7y | why do most modern helicopters have 4 or more blades, while most older helicopters have only 2? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5uca7y/eli5_why_do_most_modern_helicopters_have_4_or/ | {
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"First, that is not true. The first Sikorsky military helos in the US were a three blade design, while the popular civilian Bell 47 had two.\n\nThe lift you get is based on the total length of the blades and their velocity. However, the more blades you have, the closer together they are, and the more they interfere. The most efficient configuration is 2 very long blades, but it takes up more space and it more demanding on the blades.\n\nEarly helicopters were limited, because piston engines had poor weight to power ratios, leading to more 2 and 3 blade designs. Once turbine engines were introduced, they produced enough power per pound that more compact designs became feasible.\n\n\n\n",
"Many modern helicopters still have 2 blades. At least in Canada.\n\nSmall helicopters have 4 or 3 blades, but I've never personally seen a medium helicopter with more than 2 blades.\n\nSource: was a forest fire fighter and was around helicopters constantly",
"The Bell 230 and the 212 are mediums that have two blades.\n\nBoth those were replaced by 4-bladed versions (the 430 and the 412).\n\nThere are many factors that determine the number of blades. But in general, the trend you see in looking at the results of many development programs is this: smaller, cheaper, and slower helicopters have the fewest blades. Bigger, faster, and more expensive ones have more blades.\n\nNotice that the 412 (4 blades) has a max speed about 20 kt faster than the 212 (2 blades).\n\nIn general you can say the following:\n\nFor hover, low disk loading is most efficient. That means longer blades and therefore fewer blades.\n\nBut for speed, more blades are better. The blades turn slower and the tip speed is slower, allowing higher airspeed before the advancing blade tips approach supersonic.\n\nThis is illustrated by the 212/412 helicopters.\n\n-The 212 has two blades with a diameter of 48 feet and max weight of 11,200 lb. 100% rotor revs are 324 rpm.\n\n-The 412 has 4 blades with diameter 46 feet and max weight of 11,900 lb. 100% rotor speed is also 324 rpm.\n\nDisk loading \n212 = 6.19 lb/ft^2\n412 = 7.16 lb/ft^2\n\nTip Speed\n212 = 813 ft/s\n412 = 779 ft/s\n\nVmax\n212 = 120 kts\n412 = 140 kts\n\nSo the 212 has lower disk loading, it should perform better in hover (I don't have data on that). The 412 has lower tip speed and higher airspeed.\n\nEdit: re-wrote it with some numbers to illustrate.",
"* more blades - > less vibration\n* more blades - > less power\n* less blades - > more vibration\n* less blades - > more power\n\nGiven this, a broadly general statement suggests that since new choppers have more powerful engines, the next thing to do is make the ride more comfortable and reduce vibration.",
"Several reasons:\n\n* Sound. Listen to the Bell 204/Bell 205 (the classic Vietnam helicopter). It has two blades, and it makes a very heavy, booming \"chop-chop-chop\" sound that is very rough on the ears. More rotor blades make a more \"brrrrrr\" sound. As helicopters are often used in urban areas, sound levels are a serious concern. For example, you don't want to plop down an ambulance heli at a hospital when it's makes the windows \"pump\" with the noise.\n\n* Rotor diameter. More blades means shorter blades. This means that it uses less space, which is useful in many situations. Edit: This also means a shorter tail boom is possible. For example, compare the Bell 205 with the Bo105 and look at how much shorter the tail boom is.\n\n* Speed 1. Longer blade will have higher tip velocity, and if the tip goes supersonic, bad things happen, which means that with longer blades, you need to have slower rotation, which means less efficiency. As the forward going blade is traveling at tip speed plus the forward speed, this limitation is the main limitation to the speed of the helicopter.\n\n* Speed 2. Longer blades will have higher tip velocity. On a helicopter, the forward going blade will always move faster than the one going backward, and the higher the tip velocity, the larger the difference. This means that you'll get more lift on the side where the blade moves forwards, and if you go too fast, this can become a problem.\n\nThere are also advantages of fewer blades.\n\n* It's a simpler construction, which is important on cheap helis or if you really want to mass produce them. It also simplifies maintenance, which is important in some military situations.\n\n* Two blades takes less space in the hangar.\n\n* Rotor blades are expensive. Once again, a factor on cheap helis.\n\nThe overall trend, on anything but the smallest helis, is towards more rotor blades.",
"Because back in the day there was stereotypically only one parent who worked away from their kid, and would worry about their child.\n\nBut in modern times, no parents stay at home and both work, which means two parents worry about their kid.\n\nAs such, now modern helicopter parents work as a team and have 4 arms (Blades) instead of 2."
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fenvt2 | where wealthy people earn money from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fenvt2/eli5_where_wealthy_people_earn_money_from/ | {
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"Companies make money before you sell them. If you are the owner of a successful company you dont need a boss to take a salary.",
"Okay so I am going to break this down as much as I can and if you have more questions I’ll try to answer them.\n\nSo there are a few ways Rich People make money. Let’s start with the easiest to explain.\n\nSo let’s say you own a company. You sell Lemonade. You spent 5 dollars on materials and you said you would pay your brother 5 dollars. And your parents want you to pay them back the 10 dollars they lent you to get started. So if you lemonade stand makes 40 dollars you now have to pay back the 20$ you owe but now you get to keep the other 20$. You might want to put some of that aside so that when you do you lemonade stand next time you don’t have to ask your parents for money. \n\nThis is if you own 100% of the lemonade stand. But let’s say that your parents instead of wanting you to pay them back just way to 50% of your profits. Then you would pay your 10 dollars in expenses and the 10$ we are going to put aside for the next time we run our lemonade stand. Which gives your 20$ profit. But now you have to split this between you and your parents where each of you get 50% so you both get 10$ but now you can run the lemonade stand with out needing anymore outside money. \n\nThis is how you might get money from a company if you own the company. \n\nThere is another way that rich people make money. This is called investing.\n\nSo there are a couple types of investing I’m going to start with the easy one. Remember our lemonade stand? Well you have made so much money from running your profitable lemonade stand, that your brother comes to you saying “Hey! I want to open my own stand. I want to sell cookies. Can I borrow 20$”\n\nYou can do 2 things, you can say Yes of course brother I will give you 20$ but when you pay me back you have to pay me back 25$. Or you can do what we talked about earlier. You can say I want 50% of the company in exchange for my 20$. \n\nSo let’s break this down a bit further as we talk about stocks. So you bough 50% of your brothers cookie stand for 20$ meaning that your stake in his company is worth roughly 20$. But your brother is a cookie fiend and now has 500 cookie stands. Well you still own 50% of what now might be a 10,000$ dollar business. So you can sell some of your owner ship. So if you sold all of your ownership in your brothers company you have made a profit of 50% of 10,000$ which is 5,000$ then you subtract the initial investment of 20$ and you have now made 9,980$ off of this cookie stand. \n\nHope this is helpful. There are other ways as well but I hope this makes sense.",
"The company get profit from doing buiness. Some of that profit can be reinvested in the company for growth, but everything the owner can take it out of the company account and put it into their own account. If there is several owner, then the profit is divided amount them. You can also decide to give yourself a salary and everything else is reinvested into the company.\n\nIf there is several owner, but only one of them actually work to manage the company, you could have the owner decide to give a salary to the one that manage the company, then all the profit is divided amount the owner. They own the company, they can do manage the money as they want.\n\nIn a large company with investor, you own only a percentage of the company, and so those decision either need the approuval of the investor, and if it's big enough the investor vote a board, which gonna represent them. The board then can decide who will manage the company and if that person do something that they should like take the money for themselves, then the board can fire them or take them to court."
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g1jlxv | if all companies engage in stock buybacks, how does that affect our economy? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g1jlxv/eli5_if_all_companies_engage_in_stock_buybacks/ | {
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"Stock buybacks don't effect the economy.\n\nThey effect the value of the shares held by existing stockholders, and the price to be paid by future shareholders. Nothing else in the economy is effected, thus their desirability as a value return mechanism.",
"If a company takes its cash and invests it in buying its own stock, it is effectively giving that cash to its stockholders in the form of increased stock value instead of dividends. Some would argue this means that it is not investing in improving products, creating efficiencies, building new factories, etc - and therefore it is reducing long term growth. Others would argue it is letting the shareholders do that instead of the company, that it is a net zero change to the economy. For the stockholders, they get capital gains instead of income, which might impact their tax situation depending on where they live."
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6ii5kc | why is iran talked about negatively by the west and the middle east? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ii5kc/eli5_why_is_iran_talked_about_negatively_by_the/ | {
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"Most of the Middle East hates them because they are Shiite Muslims, unlike Arabs which are majority Sunni (sorta like Catholics vs. Protestants). Additionally, Iran has been flexing its muscles to gain more influence in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq by siding with Shias in those areas. \n\nThe US/West hates them because they overthrew (for good reason) their leader who was backed by the US govt. and then put held the US diplomats their hostage. Since then the US has sided with Iraq and Saudi Arabia as partners in the region. Both of whom hate Iran. Lastly, their nuclear program angers/concerns most of the Western world as does Irans support for various Shia terrorists in Iraq and Lebanon. \n\nFrom a more general perspective, there are two types of powers in the world: those who like the geopolitical status quo and those who want to change it. Those in the first type (USA) naturally end up siding against the other type (Iran). "
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4v367h | how are there places where the desert meets the ocean, like in saudi arabia? | I don't understand how you can have a dry sandy landscape right next to an ocean and not have any precipitation and vegetation. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4v367h/eli5_how_are_there_places_where_the_desert_meets/ | {
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"Ocean does not imply precipitation. Weather patterns are way more complicated than that, and it's perfectly possible for a particular stretch of ocean to receive less rainfall than a stretch of land of similar size somewhere else. The weather patterns that produce deserts and other arid terrain can occur just as easily near an ocean as they can far away from one.",
"You need two things for rain - moist air, and a reason for it to fall out of the sky.\n\nIf the prevailing wind always blows from the land to the sea in that location, then it's quite likely that the air will be very dry - so no rain there.\n\nIf the wind is blowing onto the land from the sea it's possible it's not been passing over the sea for long enough to collect significant moisture, or more likely there's no reason for it to fall as rain. If the airstream isn't deflected upwards by mountains, for example, then it may just move inland as warm moist air until it either rises, or cools, either of which can cause rain.",
"You'll find that deserts hug cold water currents. These cold water currents do not evaporate nearly as much and therefore do not precipitate as much, which forces deserts.",
"[Previous posts on drought near ocean](_URL_0_)"
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33mtpq | how does hunting preserve wildlife? | Hunters say that hunting preserves the wildlife ecosystem and keeps nature "balanced". How does this exactly work? Is hunting really necessary in order to regulate animal populations etc., doesn't nature do that on its own? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33mtpq/eli5_how_does_hunting_preserve_wildlife/ | {
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"That depends, if they have natural predators nature might do that. However in my country, for example, we have wild deer but no natural predators and so you're left with a choice:\n\n- Allow them to breed until they die of mass starvation/disease as they become overpopulated\n- Cull the population through hunting",
"When they're overpopulated there isn't enough food and they can starve to death, thinning out the numbers ensures there's enough food to go around. ",
"We have removed many predators that would keep a certain animal population under control. The reason why is that they would eat us too.\n\nDeer for instance can overpopulate and lots of bad stuff can occur because of it. Hunting deer keeps the population in check which keeps disease down.\n\nPersonally, I don't go hunting. It is necessary, IMHO.",
"Humans have taken large amounts of territory from the animals that naturally live there. Hunting controls the the population in the lessened territory as well as introduces a level of control on the mating populations. Large aggressive males or males/females to old to be viable mates are often taken to improve breeding stock and improve chances for other specimens. In the case of calf or juvenile hunts; reducing the population improves the chances for other young to survive with the resources available.\n\n A vast majority of the time hunting regulations vary year to year to adapt to the changing wildlife demographic and much of this surveying is done by hunters. ",
"Because of human influence in the environment some species grow bigger then others. If some predator population is too big it will mess up the rest of the chain.\n\nif there is too many deers it will mess up as well, therefore hunting regulates the numbers.\n\nnature does this on its own, but not after we fucked up the environment, killing too much of X and Y and introducing A and B on the region.",
"One obvious one that's been overlooked is that the proceeds from sales of hunting licenses often go directly to conservation.\n\nHowever, to supplement what others are saying: I live in a city that's interspersed with a lot of park land, and deer population is something that needs a lot of attention. If the deer population gets too high, food gets scarce, deer go out looking for food and in doing so, get hit by cars, which is a safety hazard for people.",
"Most of the fees collected for hunting pay for habitat. Hunter groups also preserve a huge amount of habitat via private foundations. \n\nMany animals (deer are a very good example) have no natural predators aside from humans. When was the last time you saw a wolf more than 300 miles from Yellowstone? \n\nNature will keep deer populations in balance, but it's going to involve a huge amount of starvation in cool years and more deer/car collisions. "
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5m3q27 | why do american judicial courts still have judges if it's the jury who decides over guilty or not guilty? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5m3q27/eli5_why_do_american_judicial_courts_still_have/ | {
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"judges instruct the jury and maintain order over the court. You know, on Tv, when they shout objection and the judge rules on it and tells the jury to disregard what they just heard because its not legally admissible.",
"In most any legal proceeding, there are questions of **fact** and questions of **law**. My answer will focus primarily on criminal law. Let's look at an example of a man who was arrested for selling what he thought was cocaine, but lab tests later revealed that the substance was only baking powder. \n\nHere we have a question of law. Does somebody commit the crime of intent to distribute cocaine if the substance they were selling wasn't cocaine, but they thought it was? Or must the charges be dismissed? The judge is the **finder of law**. His or her job is to answer the legal questions posed by the situation. \n\nLet's say that the judge determined that thinking that what you have is cocaine is enough for the charge to stand. The case proceeds to trial, and a jury is selected. The jury is the **finder of fact**. Their job is to listen to the evidence, and decide if the government has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant did intend to distribute cocaine. They don't deal with the legal issues. Their only job is to consider what actually *happened*.\n\nJudges also maintain other roles. They maintain order in the courtroom, rule on the admissibility of evidence, and deal with everything that happens before and after the trial (taking guilty pleas, setting dates, hearing motions, considering sentencing). In some situations, the defendant will ask for the judge to decide the entire case, without a jury. In other situations, the defendant is not even entitled to a jury, and the judge is automatically the finder of both law and fact. ",
"Judges still make many decisions. They rule on motions, they can dismiss jurors, decide what juries can see or hear. Judges have to make sure that all of the procedures and rules are followed so that a guilty verdict will not be reversed on appeal.\n\n And a judge has the power to throw out a jury verdict if he thinks they got it wrong.\n\nWe need judges since there are bench trials, no jury, the judge decides the verdict. \n\nAlthough due to mandatory minimums and sentencing laws limit judges power, they still have some power in sentencing.\n\nIn the US, over 90% of cases don't go to trial, they are settled by a plea agreement between the prosecutor and the defense. The judge must approve any deal.\n\n",
"Not all trials are jury trials. In criminal matters they many of them are, but in civil matters that's not always that case. The judge also does a lot of work on their cases before it ever makes it to trial.",
"I was a public defender (trial attorney) for 5 years, here's a short (I'll do my best but attorneys tend to talk a lot) version of what judges do.\n\n\nFirst thing's first. There's A LOT that happens that aren't trials. Depending on where you live in the states 95-99% of criminal cases are resolved with plea deals and never have a trial, and therefore no jury is ever assigned. Judges in these situations typically just keep things moving (make sure the police files are getting sent over in time and that lawyers are doing what they need to do in a timely manner), make sure that the accused understands their rights and the plea they are taking or rejecting, and then sentencing. \n\nSentencing is a big part of the judge's job. Unlike television most states don't let people agree to a specific sentence in a plea, you have to have a range of sentencing (i.e. you don't sign a pea to four years in prison, you sign a plea to 3-5). Judges decide the sentence within that range and are required to give sentences \"specific\" to the circumstances. This typically means they read briefs from both attorneys on the facts and additionally have the accused submit to an interview regarding their life circumstances, which can be quite time consuming given that a judge is probably giving 5-20 sentences a day. \n\nTrial actually doesn't have a ton of work for judges (I've had judges fall asleep in trial), their main responsibility there is to rule on objections. 90% of these are very straight forward and literally take seconds to resolve. The other 10% are supposed to be handled before trial (called motions in limine) and take maybe an hour, though I have seen the occasional one take an entire day. Other than that they don't do much in trial, it's pretty much the attorney's show (A lot of judges don't really like trials, they have a lot of work to do and don't really like just sitting around watching the trial).\n\nAnother redditor mentioned \"questions of law,\" and while they are technically correct it's worth pointing out that questions of law are generally handled by appellate judges not trial level judges. Trial level judges don't really have the authority to decide questions of law, instead attorney's brief them on the state of law and then the judge applies what appears to be the most relevant and recent law to the current situation. For example if you go to a judge and say 'the police searched me illegally' the judge doesn't say the police should or shouldn't have done what they did, they just find the most similar existing case-law and follow that decision. \n\nAppellate courts at the highest level (Supreme Court of the U.S. and various states) will decide true questions of law. They are the only ones with the authority to change existing legal rulings and decide what the rule is in new unheard-of situations. This is all pretty simplified though.\n\n**TL;DR** Am lawyer, would guess 90% of what a judge does is sentencing and making sure cases move through the system quickly.",
"People can still request a \"Bench Trial\" if they dont want the hassle of dealing with a Jury. Especially in cases where the defendant might be more prone to a bias situation based on the charge. \n\nIE: I was tried for sex crimes. \n\nI knew based on my own personal feelings that if I were on a trial and the defendant was on for sex crimes I might have an initial negative (bias) that I might not be able to overcome. Fearing that I might get a jury of people like that, I opted for a bench trial in the hopes that the judge would see past the feelings of the case and only deal with the facts. I lucked out. While I was still convicted, I spent no time in jail.\n",
"Judges make rulings of law.\n\nJuries make findings of fact.\n\nA judge will say \"if your actions were intentional, your crime is first degree murder, with special circumstances that make you eligible for the death penalty\".\n\nA jury will say \"we don't believe the your foot slipped, we think you ran over those preschoolers on purpose\".\n\n",
"Imo, explaining it like I'm 5 would be using an analogy: \n\nPlayers determine the outcome of the game, but they still have referees/umpires to make sure the rules are followed "
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4co8b2 | why do dogs often let go of toys when you blow air in their face? | I've owned several dogs that can hold a toy in their mouth strong enough that I can't pull it away, yet the release it instantly if I use my mouth to blow a little air at their nose. What causes this reaction? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4co8b2/eli5_why_do_dogs_often_let_go_of_toys_when_you/ | {
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5ee9us | why do major cell phone carriers allow companies like metropcs, cricket wireless, boost mobile, etc. to resell their network? | And for a cheaper price, too? I don't understand. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ee9us/eli5_why_do_major_cell_phone_carriers_allow/ | {
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"Metro, Cricket, and Boost are owned by T-Mobile, AT & T and Sprint, respectively. So it's basically them selling their networks to people who are more likely to pay cash money for a phone + service. Post paid customers usually pay by debit or credit and sometimes pay their bills after the due date. Meanwhile most prepaid companies have a set date to pay or else the customer gets cut off.",
"carrier networks are fixed cost. If they're not running at 100% capacity (minus whatever reserve capacity they want to handle peak loads) they're losing potential money. \n\nSo they'll often rent part of that capacity to other companies in exchange for a guaranteed income. They'll make more profit off that contract then they'll lose from customers switching ",
"Often, regulatory bodies such as the Commerce Commission in New Zealand, or the Federal Trade Commission in the USA force incumbent telecommunication companies to sell capacity to smaller telecommunications companies that would otherwise be unable to afford to set up their own networks.\n\nDue to exceptionally high costs associated with setting up a nationwide network, if regulators didn't force large, established telcos to sell capacity to smaller ones, there would be little to no competition - abuse of Monopoly Power could occur. Hence, due to antitrust motives (promoting competition in order to ensure that consumers are not forced to pay unfair prices for goods and services in the marketplace), regulators will force larger telcos to provide smaller 'start'up' telcos access to the established networks so competition and thus innovation and fair pricing is established.\n\nOften, smaller subsidiaries of larger telcos will also start up. In New Zealand, we have numerous examples of this - where our large providers (Spark, Vodafone) spawn 'discount brands', so that they can use their different facets of the same company to more effectively target individual consumers (like Skinny Mobile in NZ).",
"There are a couple of reasons for MVNOs (as they are called in the industry).\n\n* as someone pointed out, a phone network costs money. If you have the extra capacity you can sell it and monetize it.\n* financially, the MVNOs buy minutes/data/SMSs in bulk, presumably up-front. That gives the network owners a handy cash infusion that they can depend on.\n* MVNOs go after customers that the majors do not. They may have differing credit standards, or have storefronts in poorer areas. It may be that MVNOs are contractually prohibited from advertising to specific segments.\n* lastly, MVNOs may actually contract out with the phone company to provide support, which becomes another income stream for the carrier.\n\nOn some networks/contracts MVNO customers have a lower priority than the network's customers, so it's a win-win for everyone: people who can't get service with the majors can get a service they can afford, and the majors don't have to worry about the MVNO customers disrupting their more profitable/higher margin customers."
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9hu59l | why do electric cars (except tesla) have such a strange design compared with gasoline driven cars? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9hu59l/eli5_why_do_electric_cars_except_tesla_have_such/ | {
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"Part of it is practical, part of it is aesthetic. \n\nElectric cars don't require an engine bay like internal combustion cars do, so you don't need much front on them. Thus they can be designed prioritize other things like passenger space, weight, or aerodynamics without having that big piece sticking out. \n\nThe other reason is that early adopters of modern EVs and hybrids tended to be environmentalists, who wanted the car to look different in order to make a statement. These cars tended to have a \"softer\" and \"friendlier\" design aesthetic to reflect their environmentally conscious philosophy, but that didn't resonate with the car buying public. Most people have in their head what a car \"should\" look like. Western audiences tend to prefer more \"aggressive\" styling. Take a look at the Nissan Leaf for example. Same car, but two completely different design philosophies between the 1st and 2nd generations. ",
"I don't thing that is true. The most sold electric cars look like regular cars.\n\nLook at the imaged article of Best electric cars 2018 UK _URL_0_ with text at \n_URL_1_ to see that they are quite normal.\n\n\n\nIf you see ideas of concepts cars or other ideas they often look strange but that is to draw attention and look futuristic. But electric concept cars like combustion powered concept cars seldom make it to production. The idea design is often not practical and might be hard to produce make safe and aerodynamic. So most cars look the same because of requirements like that.\n\n\nThere as som ultra compact electric car like Renault Twizy that look odd. But it is not surprising as if you what to make as small as possible and are not limited by a large combustion engine the shape will change.\n\nThe Renault Twizy is legally a heavy quadricycle and have limited speed of 45 km/h or 80 km/h even if there is not max speed equipment. So a vehicle like that primary made for slow city traffic. They are also less safe then cars. So it is a compromise of speed, size, cost and safety.",
"Its because they dont actually want you to buy one. Their profit margins are much, much smaller on EVs than on internal combustion engine cars simply because its a newer technology. The Chevy Bolt, for example, is simply a car built to earn enough CARB credits to satisfy regulators. It is never advertised, and very few are actually built. Many dealers dont actually even have any in stock. Think about it, when is the last time you saw a commercial for an EV? Most commercials are for trucks, because the profit margin on trucks is higher than any other class of car.\n\nI think Tesla has somewhat forced their hand in a way, and now we are seeing normal looking EVs being announced because they are now losing sales. The Jaguar i-PACE, MB EQC, and Audi e-tron, and Porsche Taycan are all coming out soon and look like normal cars. "
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6btw08 | how do game developers develop games for consoles that are not yet released? also is the source code for games the same on xbox as it is on the playstation? or does ever piece of the code need to be rewritten. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6btw08/eli5_how_do_game_developers_develop_games_for/ | {
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"I'm not sure about the second part. But developers are given developer systems. They're more like a computer with the systems capabilities. I'm sure someone else can expand on it more but that's the base of it.",
"They get the manual for how to make games for said system early. \n\nMicrosoft or Sony have the designs for the games more or less down pat before they start producing the hardware. ",
"Console manufacturers settle on the hardware at least a year in advance of actually releasing the console. Then they make machines called 'dev kits' to send to devs. Dev kits are computers with the same type of hardware as the console, usually a little stronger (so they can run debuggers and other developer tools on top, and so that developers can test their game before optimising for performance). They generally don't *look like* the console, since they probably haven't finalised the design and there's no reason to try and make it pretty and compact. [Here are dev kits for the Xbox, PS2, GameCube and Dreamcast](_URL_0_) for example, the PS2's is a similar design just way chunkier while the others are in standard PC cases.\n\nAs for the source code: these days, it's usually *mostly* the same. Back 20+ years ago it was more common for games to be written totally from scratch with a specific system in mind, and the NES and Master System versions of a game might have totally different source code, one of the reasons ports had a lot of differences. These days, games are all built on top of a system called an 'engine'.\n\nSo imagine you're a programmer, you make an Xbox game, a shooter. First you program how to draw a 3D room, then how to move through that 3D room, then how to check whether two items in the room are touching each other, then how the room changes perspective if you're looking down from up high vs looking up from a crouch, then how objects fall down to the ground, then how the player moves their character, then how an NPC character moves from place to place on a schedule, then how certain objects emit light and how other objects create shadows based on their shape and distance from a light, and so on and so on. After years of work you finish your FPS game and release it, then you get started on another game, this one a third-person adventure game.\n\nAnd you sit down to write from scratch again and then realise hey, wait -- I'm just going to rewrite a ton of the same code, aren't I? Two different games but they both need to know how to fall back to the ground while moving through a 3D room with correct perspectives and lights as the player presses buttons... why don't I just re-use my code?\n\nIf you take all that code that 90% of games will use and package it together in one lump to be re-used for all your projects, that's more or less what we call an engine. And if your engine is good, you can polish it up and sell it to other programmers. Now they don't have to write all their games from scratch, they just have to learn how your engine works, what functions to call to do this or that, what format you expect textures and skins to be in, how your engine handles NPCs moving around on schedules, etc.\n\nWell, today, there are a few teams who focus solely on writing and maintaining engines for other people to use. And they'll make sure the exact same engine works the same way (or as nearly as possible) on Xbox, on PlayStation, on Switch, on Windows. So you as a programmer can just buy a copy of the engine, write your own code and design your own art and do your own designs and scripts and routines on top of it, and release it on multiple platforms. It's not always totally reliable and perfect, but it's possible for 90%+ of your code to be the same on Xbox and PlayStation and Windows because you're leaning on the same engine. And it's the engine team's job to make sure things work on all platforms."
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8jxhvj | cardio gets the heart working which ultimately makes it stronger. so why do recreational drugs that do the same thing cause harm to the heart? | Shouldn't cocaine, for example, help improve the cardiovascular system? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8jxhvj/eli5_cardio_gets_the_heart_working_which/ | {
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"Exercise stimulates the heart to increase in a regular and proportionate amount, some drugs can cause an erratic and very rapid heartbeat.",
"I used to think the same thing about panic attacks. \"I have heart palpitations! My heart is getting a great workout!\" But the stress hormones associated with panic attacks isn't good for the rest of the body. And the damage to endothelial cells of blood vessels from high blood pressure isn't good either. ",
"Higher heart rate alone is dangerous for the heart.\nHigher heart rate with higher oxygen levels in the blood (due to exercise) is what’s preferred to obtain a healthy training of the heart :)",
"when you exercise your whole cardio vascular (heart,lungs and arteries and veins) system adjusts to get more oxygen into your muscles, and also more waste out. \nAll the components are working in tandem, increasing, decreasing and stabilising as required. \nIts a very nicely synced system\n\nwhen you take cocaine its JUST your heart that increases. its now out of sync with rest of the system, even pushing against it and making your heart strain.\nThat's the problem. \n\nI suppose the cocaine case is a bit like having one formula-1 wheel on a car: its out of sync with the rest and you're gonna have a bad time.",
" > Cardio gets the ~~heart~~ entire cardiopulmonary system working...\n\nFTFY.\n\nHeart rate is but one part of healthy cardiovascular and pulmonary systems. Elevating your heart rate in isolation and calling it exercise is like fiddling with your speedometer and claiming you broke the land speed record.\n\n",
"When you do coke your blood vessels shrink up and the heart beats faster to push against it. Fighting against pressure. Thickens walls of heart, reduces pumping capacity.\n\nWith exercise its more about flow, and you have more blood coming back to the heart. Increases stroke volume which lowers heart rate when resting. This is why endurance athletes have low as fuck heart rates.\n",
"Nope.\n\nIf you have any condition that makes your heart work harder for a long time , you'll trigger some cellular pathways on your cardiomyocyte (muscular heart cells) that will make them grow from the \"inside\" of the heart and eat up the space reserved for blood in the ventricules.\n\nYour heart will be able to send less blood to the heart and wil try to adapt by beating faster and stronger and so on till cardiac failure.\n\nIf you have your heart work harder for a while buy doing EXERCISE (or anything that'll stimulate exercise), it's different.\nDuring exercice, you'll produce growth hormones, growth hormones will inhibits the pathways making your heart get bigger from the inside and will instead favorise the cellular pathway making your heart \"expand\" : Your heart will get a bit bigger, ventricular cavity will get a bit larger and you'll be bale to send more blood with less heart beat : That is why athletes have low heart rate.",
"Cardio gets your entire cardio vascular system working, not just your heart. When doing cardio, veins and arteries expand to receive more blood because your entire body is demanding it. A stimulant that increases your heart rate only does not do this, so your heart is pumping like mad through veins and arteries that are not expanded and calling for it putting a lot of strain on them.\n\nEDIT: Added a word.",
"While some drugs increase heart rate, some also block sodium or potassium (electrolyte) channels, which are essential in the sympathetic nervous system for regulating the QT interval (The heart's rhythm), and thus this dispositions the heart to not only speed up yet to also express arrhythmias and/or palpitations.\n\nEdit: More specifics. You're maximum heart rate is defined by you age. The exact general calculation is 220 - (age) = MHR. There are others calculations which are more accurate, like the heart rate reserve method which considers your fitness level when calculating your max heart rate, yet you don't really need all that for this explanation. That being said a lot of drugs that increase heart rate only increase resting heart rate, which for the average person is about 72 bpm give or take maybe 5 beats depending on their personal circumstances (E.G. Pregnancy, fitness level, health, and etc can all effect resting heart rate slightly). If you do a drug that increases your resting heart rate to say 90 or 110 beats per minute you have about 20-40 beats less before you reach your maximum heart rate. Now consider that this effect might be dose dependent, and based on how much you've done. Also, getting up and walking can increase the heart rate by as much as 20 beats or more depending on the duration and intensity of the walk. Doing anything more demanding like say bending and lifting, running, and/or etc might have a greater effect. Drugs which increase resting heart rate essentially reduce available effort because they reduce the time in which the maximum heart rate is achieved with continuous physical effort. Throw in the part where some drugs can effect the QT interval and you have a dangerous combination. These drugs essentially increase the risks of physical exertion.",
"Increased heart rate is a side effect of cardio, it is not the goal of cardio. The goal of cardio is to increase your heart's efficiency at delivering oxygen to the body.\n\nSimply increasing your heart rate does not increase it's efficiency, it increases its workload, which is not desirable over extended periods of time."
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5b316o | which privileges are stocks actually giving you in a company? | If you buy a tiny amount of Stocks for example, what are you even able to do with it except for selling it to another person which probably won't be able to do anything with it also if they actually grant nothing | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5b316o/eli5_which_privileges_are_stocks_actually_giving/ | {
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"A tiny amount of stocks rarely grants you a lot of power. Stocks are basically a percentage of the company's capital, also you get votes in the executive boards based on how many shares you own, therefore owning more than half the shares grant you total control. On the other hand, if party A owns 45% of the shares and party B owns another 45% of the shares, party C with 10% gets to settle issues should A and B disagree, but it's an unusual case.",
"Essentially stocks give you a chunk of ownership of the company. That means:\n\n* Share holders get informed about how the company is doing. For instance because they're allowed into shareholder's meetings.\n* Share holders have a vote in how the company is run.\n* Share holders get a annual pay outs when a company makes a profit.\n\nAnd all of those are based on how many shares or stock you own in a company. Let's say I divide my company up in 100 shares and you buy 1 share.\n\nYou don't really hold much power. If there's decisions to be made I essentially have 99 votes against your 1 vote. And you aren't allowed a big chunk of the profits, only 1% of the payout is yours.\n\nBut you're still a shareholder. And that means you get invited to shareholder's meetings and you get all the information available to shareholders.\n\nWhich might be useful in case you want to decide on selling your share or buying more shares if they're available."
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4i15rx | how can half of american workers make less than $30,000 a year, but the median household income is $51,000 a year? | It's mathematically possible, if most households have two earners but the demographics must then be crazy. I can't get my head around it. So median salary is $30,000 and 85% of households contain two average workers? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i15rx/eli5_how_can_half_of_american_workers_make_less/ | {
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"Therein lies the issue with averages. Most households with only one income have a single high earning income, driving up the average. Households with two earners tend to both have lower incomes. \n\nThat said, in the US: \n\n13% of households have 1 male earner w/kids.\n\n31% have 2 earners with kids.\n\n25% have 2 earners with no kids.\n\nThe remaining 31% are non traditional households, where only the mother works or at least on of the members is retired.\n\nSo 85% of households may be a little high, but 2 income households are definitely in the majority.",
"You're comparing apples to oranges. Specifically your \"half of American workers make less than $30,000 a year\" number is based on something put out by the SSA called the \"National Average Wage Index\" and only counts stuff that gets reported on W-2's. \n\"Household income\" includes other sources of income, including things like child support, disability, unemployment, etc.",
"Think of it this way...\n\n1+1+10 = 12. \n\n12/3 = 4. \n\nSo the \"average\" of these = 4 even though more than half of that equation are \"1\"s. You can substitute those numbers into your question to make it read:\n\n > ELI5: How can half of American workers make less than 2 \n > a year, but the median household income is 4 a year?\n\nDoes that make sense?\n\nBasically, it is further evidence of the wage imbalance by the top 1% of the wealthiest Americans (the \"10\" in the equation). \n\nThe average may work out to 51k, but that doesn't mean the majority of workers make that. "
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6l0w86 | what exactly is that feeling when you dry swallow a big pill? | I took some moderately sized pain relievers in the middle of the night without water, and the entire day I've felt like I have something stuck in my throat. Why is that? I've drank water all day and I'm positive I don't have anything stuck in my throat. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6l0w86/eli5what_exactly_is_that_feeling_when_you_dry/ | {
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"You should be careful, picture a mostly dry cup, and pouring flour in it, the flour adheres to the moisture on the walls, and that's the same with the chalk residue or gelatin on the outside of the pill. I use to not care, and take pills mostly dry, until I heard how common it is for a pill to stick to the side of your esophagus and actually give you chemical burns depending on the type of pills.\n\nLong story short, always chug some water with a pill, water after it's stuck will just wash over it.",
"Please don't dry-swallow pills. because the surface of the pill is causing it to adhere to the inside of your throat and maybe it's stuck. Some medications can actually burn the inside surface of your throat and cause a dangerous ulcer to form. [here's](_URL_0_) and article that can go over some of the hazards. Now the article recommends a full glass of water. I don't actually do that, but I usually drink at least 2-4 oz of water for pills."
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1phzxn | how come some artwork seems to be extremely simple, yet is highly touted? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1phzxn/eli5_how_come_some_artwork_seems_to_be_extremely/ | {
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"If a complex work of art invokes emotion or thoughtfulness in you it is a testament to the artists abilities and passion. If a simple work of art does the same thing, it shows that the artist is capable of making a statement in a much more subtle way. In some ways it can be more complicated to create a single line that it is to create a beautiful masterpiece."
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4imbnk | why can oriental grocery stores charge so much less for groceries than typical american chain grocery stores? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4imbnk/eli5_why_can_oriental_grocery_stores_charge_so/ | {
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"Cost of labor is smaller. Cost of marketing is nonexistent. Profit margins are lower. Cost of non premium produce is lower.\n\nSame reason why Mexican/polish grocery stores are cheaper than whole foods/Mariano's/etc"
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9mq2bf | how can two different observers see the same event happen at different times? or the same two events happen in different orders? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9mq2bf/eli5_how_can_two_different_observers_see_the_same/ | {
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"In astrophysics this can happen often due to gravitational lensing. For example, we can see a supernova twice sometimes. Say a super nova goes off 2 million light years away from us. The light takes 2 million years to reach us and we see it. Ooh, pretty.\nBut, light also goes in every other direction, not just towards Earth. If there's a large mass (galaxy, black hole etc) between us and the supernova, but not directly between, some of the light that would miss us normally, gets bent around the mass and can hit us anyway. But because its path was curved, and therefore longer, it takes longer to reach us, and we see the supernova again.\nBasically, we would be able to see the same star in two locations, normally. One view novas, then later, the other one. ",
"I assume you're talking about relativity here.\n\nA simple way to think about it: the light signals coming from the two events are moving through space, but the observer may also be moving through space — zooming away from one object's signal, while zooming toward the other object's signal. Meanwhile, a second observer might be going the other way, and/or in a different position.",
"Because every observer measures the same speed of light.\n\nLet's do a thought experiment.\n\nImagine you're on a train, driving through the trainstation. Your friend is standing on the platform. You claim that you can do a headstand for 5 seconds, but your friend doesn't believe you! To make matters worse, both you and your friend have forgotten your watches at home. But, you on the train happen to have with you: two mirrors and a laser pointer. You come up with the brilliant idea that you can use this as a watch: plant one mirror on the floor of the train and one mirror on the ceiling, and send a flash of light that bounces in between them. You both know the speed of light, and the distance between the mirrors, so counting how many times the light bounces while you're performing your headstand gives you how long you lasted upside down.\n\nSo, you go stand on your head, count, and you fall pretty quickly. You only counted 1 bounce. Ouch, not quite 5 seconds (light is really fast). Your friend was standing on the platform, counting as well. But for him, the light didn't just travel up and down. It traveled along with the train as well. The distance the light traveled is a diagonal motion up and down, since the train is moving. This distance is greater than the distance from the floor of the train to the ceiling and back, which is the only distance the light traveled for you. But the speed of light is the same for both you and your friend! That means that when he does the calculation, he says that your headstand took longer because the light had to travel a greater distance. In fact your train was traveling so quickly that for him you *did* a 5 second headstand.\n\nYou're now pretty excited not only because your friend thinks you can do a longer headstand, but also because you have learned why time is relative (hopefully).",
"Light travels a finite speed. It takes over 8 minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth. Don't look at the sun obviously, but you're in effect seeing the sun from \"8 minutes ago\" when you look up at it. That said, someone right next to the sun at the same moment you are is seeing it as it is now. So you see the same event, but you only get to see what he saw 8 minutes later."
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2a26rz | how information or behavior is passed down through dna / genes (instinct)? | Like how does a baby dolphin know to swim up for air ect. My mind is blown by how that could be possible. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a26rz/eli5_how_information_or_behavior_is_passed_down/ | {
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"When the brains is formed (based on the information in the DNA), it MUST have a default state right ? It can't be nothing, think about it.\n\nThis \"default state\" will include stuff like knowing how to breathe, making the heart beats and a lot more complex stuff that makes the brain actually work.\n\nWhen it comes down to it, knowing how to swim is simply a \"few\" molecules / cells at a specific place and in a specific state in the brain. \n\nEven your memories are not much different than that, it should also be theoretically possible to pass some through DNA."
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89vgnp | how did/do people train messenger or carrier pidgeons???? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/89vgnp/eli5_how_diddo_people_train_messenger_or_carrier/ | {
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"They fly back home by themselves, however, you cannot train them to fly anywhere else. \n\nThey were usually transported in a cage to the sender location. "
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3bdfvi | (a very mature 5)link inside. how is it possible to be shot through the eye and still have a chance to survive? | How is the person in the link below still appear to be functional to some degree?
NSFW/NSFL [Gif posted on r/wtf recently](_URL_0_) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bdfvi/eli5a_very_mature_5link_inside_how_is_it_possible/ | {
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"The brain can be an exceptionally robust thing. if you mean where the bullet never deflects off the orbital socket, then there will be extensive damage to the brain, but most of our critical brain function (for basic life) is in the area by the brain stem. \n\nSo they may be different, or brain damaged, but they'll live. ",
"I've never cross posted so to credit the gif or if want to comment on it, front page of r/wtf at the moment.\n\n/u/FluffyZebras thanks for the eye opening gif!",
"because different areas of the brain are responsible for different stuff. The bullet must have missed the life essential and coordination parts.\n\nPeople can live with half a brain even. \n\nGiven time the good parts of the brain can even somewhat compensate for damaged ones.",
"A lot of the more critical stuff is at the back and bottom of the brain. Your ability to move is mostly handled by the cerebellum at the lower back of the brain, memory is in the weird middle of the brain, and the two hemispheres on top handle stuff like thought, language, patterns, vision, hearing.\n\nThis guy has a lot of trauma and is certainly in shock but missed any section immediately critical to survival."
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1hmfq9 | what is the actual ideology of the men's rights movement? | I only see it contrasted with tenants of feminism. So, in the simplest way possible, can someone explain to me what the heck this movement is all about? What does it seek to achieve? When did it start and why? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hmfq9/eli5what_is_the_actual_ideology_of_the_mens/ | {
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"Well Men's Rights Movement (MRM) branched off from Men's Liberation Movement in 1970 due to rejection of Feminism. MRM is considered to be a backlash to the Feminist Movement\n\n\nSo Men's Liberation Movement, or the **pro-feminist men's movement** and then you have Men's Rights Movement, or the **anti-feminist men's rights movement**.\n\nWhat does it seek to achieve? Equality, much like any other rights movement.",
"Shut down the ridiculous and encroaching ideology of a double standard promoting, corrupt feminist movement whose agenda is less equality, and more male shaming.",
"The simple fact of the matter is many men were brought and raised to be chivalrous and caring, treating women like they did back in the day.\n\nWomen, however, have become *empowered*. They have money, they have opportunity, they have the potential for growth. The problem is that many women, both culturally and subconsciously, still feel that men owe them, and must treat them like they did before the feminist movement. For a time, it was almost like it was considered wrong to be a man, and men should cater to women for that. \n\nThe feminist movement feelings, and the furor it caused, made many men to back down. They basically stopped being \"manly men.\" The problem was that women no longer liked the un-\"manly men.\" They would walk all over them, not treat them with respect, and basically treat them like garbage. \n\nSee [this reddit article here](_URL_0_)\n\nI also have personal stories of incidences such as a friend who was super excited he got a new job, and bought the 5 people after him his coffee. The last two were cute girls and basically trashed and talked shit about him being a stupid creep. My friend was also very shy, and didn't know how to react. He was quite upset over it.\n\nThe men's rights movement is about making men feel comfortable in their masculinity, about giving them back equal power, and letting them feel confident in being who they are. Some men never lost this skill, and as such are not really part of the Men's Rights movement, but rather as types of guys who either helped others get it going, or were examples to be emulated. \n\nIt is somewhat similar to the tenants of feminism, in that it hopes to regain a sense of power in who they are, and make them feel confident and capable with the opposite sex.",
"To try to improve areas that men are worse off in, the same thing that feminism is (supposed to be) about, but with genders reversed.",
"Like Feminism, the \"Men's Rights Movement,\" doesn't have a single ideology, because it isn't a single concerted political front. It's many different ideologies, many different groups, many different movements, with many different goals. The broadest general ideological tie is simply that all of the groups have interest in securing or protecting rights for men and advocating for social advancement.\n\nThese things are all enormously varied. Mens Rights Activists come in all shapes and sizes with different goals. Some MRAs see the MRM as being allied with Feminism, and that both movements exist to fight against the status quo which keeps people of either gender down. Some MRAs believe that Feminism is evil, and they believe that the MRM should exist to combat Feminism. Some MRAs believe that the movement should be all political. Other MRAs believe that the movement should be all social. Some MRAs believe in intersectionality, and that the movement naturally should also address issues tied to race (like police profiling of Black men), LGBT, class, and so forth. Some MRAs don't believe in intersectionality, and believe the movement should only exist to work on issues that affect ALL men, not just SOME men (black men, gay men, etc.).\n\nSome key issues that the MRM is concerned with: Circumcision, Divorce law, Child Custody, Adoption, Military Drafting, Paternity Fraud, Domestic Violence & Rape against men (which are often under-reported), \"Misandry\" (opposite \"Misogyny\"), and cultural stereotypes and expectations of men.",
"You're stepping into very dangerous territory here on reddit.\n\nUltimately it's a very fragmented social movement. Some elements believe in equality between the sexes and feel that men are without rights women do have, and vice versa. While others believe that feminism is something of an attack on the right's of men."
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26azc5 | what has the australian government done to attract so much criticism? | I read a bit about cutting education funding, plans to expand a coal terminal that could damage the Great Barrier Reef as well as the winkgate. Appreciate if someone could lay out what Abbott's budget is about and what went wrong.
Edit: thanks for the responses! Very informative. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26azc5/eli5_what_has_the_australian_government_done_to/ | {
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"Please someone correct me if I have it wrong. From what I understand about the Abbott budget is that it was created under shady conditions. 95% of the nation was against this change but they released the poll for it during a heat wave in Australia, knowing perfectly well that people would not make it out of the house for it. They made promises of what the budget was going to be used for and then proceeded to do the complete opposite, including an 80 billion dollar budget cut in education and health alone. The fact that Tony Abbott made claims to take a serious stand on climate change and than proceeded to ax the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), quickly determined that was a lie. \n\nTL;DR - People are pissed because Tony Abbott lied about what the fuck he was doing. ",
" > I live here I can do this.\n > Explain like you're 5.\n \nThey bent the truth (lied) more than is usual for politicians.\n \nThey did both good and bad things that normal people (the loud minority) did not expect.\n\n",
"Won the election by promising savings but no new taxes and no changes to health, education and government benefits (old age pension in particular ). \nFirst budget, massive cuts to health, education and government benefits plus new taxes. Seemingly broke every promise, not just the usual few/half that most new governments do. ",
"Long story short, Abbot has attacked the very core of the egalitarianism that Aussies pride themselves on. No-one in Australia ever has to worry about hospital bills or university - we have public health and subsidised uni+interest free loans. These two things above all else allow social mobility (No costs from serious illness, minimal student loans to further one's education and skills).\n\nNow, they're introducing co-pay to visit the doctor, deregulating university fees (and cuting funding), charging interest on student loans, while cutting taxes for mining companies (which are making obscene profits and aren't paying much tax), and spending on fighter jets + new taxes, defunding world class internet infrastructure to focus on roads.\n\nSo not only does Abbott promise to never introduce taxes, not touch education and health (the last two being our holy grail), he also slams the opposition for broken promises (which were relatively minor). And then 6 months after election, he goes back on everything in a complete betrayal of what his mandate was. He's justified it by claiming a debt crisis, despite Australia's debt being one of the world's lowest. The budget is unnecessarily cruel to poor people (who are the big losers), and the cuts to spending make no sense.\n\nNow you have a complete liar, attacking the core of the Aussie concept of the \"fair go\", manufacturing budget crises to push his agenda, winking at stories of pensioners having to work on sex lines to make ends meet, a daughter who's won a scholarship that no-one knew existed, spouting nonsense constantly in charge. There's one set of rules for him and one for everyone else. That's why we're mad.\n\nI have always been relatively passive in politics (voting centre left but with little involvement), but I'm as anti-Abbot as the Tea Party is anti-Obama, going for my first rally ever, making my first political donation and writing my first letter to my MP and Senators. He will leave behind an Australia bereft of a \"Fair Go\", and that's something worth fighting to keep. ",
"Imagine if you were told you could pick your family, a new set of parents and an old one.\n\nYour current parents are in a bit of a mess. They keep changing who is incharge, and changing people, but the family name stays the same. They also lied to you when they said they were not going to charge you for a fee for cleaning your room, but changed this when the maid threatened to help make the foster parents your parents.\n\nSo you decided to go to your foster parents, as they promised (with big help from tv) to not change how you see the doctor, to make sure you got to read books, make sure you got to keep learning new things every day, and you got to see the doctor when you were sick. They also told you your parents were liars, cause they promised not to take money from you, and we will never take money from you.\n\n\nAs soon as you say ok, everything changed. They said you had to pay for the doctor with your allowance, if you got one, an which would be cut down. They stopped getting new books, and just kept the old ones. They stopped taking you places to teach you new things. They also stopped the new internet, which your parents were setting up, and said \"It's to expensive, and you don't need it anyway.\", when you were trying to setup a system where you could sell gum to your friends and find out how much they wanted. They told you one things, and after they changed it, they said it's because your parents spent all they money, but we shouldn't have to change what we do, just you.\n\n\nBit of a wall. [Here is a link of the promises broken.](_URL_0_)\n\nTL;DR, They told you one thing when they were just foster parents, and then changed it all, and did the same things your old parents did on a larger scale and they said they were wrong for doing.\n\n",
"\"Tracking Tony Abbott's Trail of Destruction\". A look at how he fucked up his first few months as Prime Minister:_URL_0_",
"[Dat wink says it all](_URL_0_)",
"People who don't like conservatives elected a conservative government.\n\nHilarity ensued.",
"'The criticism started before they were elected.\n\nIn opposition, all they seemed to do was block bills and be negative towards the then-government (now-opposition).\n\nWe had a female prime minister and the now-PM Tony Abbott posed along side a sign which said \"ditch the witch\", which can easily be seen as a bit of a misogynistic move. Really easily.\n\nThis, by the way, is one of a long line of misogynistic things he's said. He hasn'r said outright sexistist things, but things that clearly shows how he views women. \n\n* During the election campaign he visited the seat of one of his ministers up for election (a female one) and refereed to her as the foxy one or something ridiculous like that (as opposed to her male opposition).\n* When letting people know right before the election, when telling people who to vote for, he said If you want to know who to vote for, I'm the guy with the not bad-looking daughters.\"\n* He said something \"blah blah when the housewives of Australia are doing the ironing\"\n* He's said that it's only natural that women can't achieve in the same high paying jobs as men\n\nSo the misogynist trend is clear. He's elected PM and **makes himself the minister for women**\n\nHis cabinet (which he chooses) only has one female.\n\nHe got elected by appealing to the lower class and less educated folks by repeating these phrases again and again and again\n\n* **\"stop the boats\"**. He for some bizarre reason made it his top priority to cut off asylum seekers from coming to Australia by boat. There's a whole country to do with what he pleases, but his main message/priority is \"stop the boats\". He basically appealed to racist Australians.He made sure to refer to them as \"illegals\" despite it being legal to seek asylum.\n\n* **\"Axe the tax**. His other big policy was to undo the carbon pricing scheeme put in place by the opposition party. This again appeal to poorer Australia who were more interested in the supposed \"$500 per household\" saving then saving the world. After being elected, he introduces new policies costing low income families $3000\n\nSo that's all we heard during the election.\n\nHe doesn't believe in climate change.\n\nHis party has made it their duty to replace Labor's proposed australia wide Fiber optic network (which was mid-rollout) with a network that's 40 times slower.\n\nThe other big way he got in was complaining non-stop about how the now-opposition has put us into huge debt and our country has a \"debt crisis\". We actually have tiny debt and a AAA credit rating and most economists say \"so what? The australian economy is in great shape. the debt is no problem\". to the average uneducated person, \"the massive debt\" sounds like a big deal when repeated every 5 minutes.\n\nOh, and since the election he's broken half of his pre-election promises.\n\nThere's a famous quote from before the election \"no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS\". Each of those promises were broken. \n\nThat was a single fucking sentence and it had 4 lies in it\n\nMore recently he's increased the cost of going to uni for all students. Then it gets discovered that his daughter had her uni for free with a $60,000 \"scholarship\" from someone who just happens to be:\n\n* a donor to Tony Abbott\n* someone who has benefited from Tony Abbott's new election.\n\nBasically it was a $60,000 bride to Tony to get him to put in new laws to benefit the donor.\n\nOf course, Tony didn't declare the $60,000 \"scholarship\" as a donation due to it \"being awarded on merit\". This is despite the fact that\n\n* it has only ever been awarded to one other person. This is not an educational institution that hands out scholarships every year. This was a very special handout\n* His daughters work is mediocre at best.\n\nThen the person who gave the scholarship hired his daughter.\n\nHe's in bed with big business. His new budget is costing poor people a fortune while putting a smile on the face of the rich.\n\nOne of the things we pride ourselves on in this country is free healthcare and free education.\n\nHe's now made healthcare no longer free. He's increased uni fees\n\nTL;DR - Toxic opposition, got elected by pandering to the uneducated, who he's stabbing in the back. Misogynist, in bed with big business, at the expense of middle and lower class Australians and the rich\n\nedit: oh, and the entire election was basically a massive smear campaign against the now-opposition by Rupert Murdoch. Abbott's policies benefit murdoch, or course.",
"He spent his entire time as opposition leader attacking labor for broken promises and then in his first budget broke every promise he made. \n\nAustralians are a stupid people, but not that stupid.",
"Uni student here, Abbott basically broke all his promises which basically makes all of us have to pay more money on things that were cheaper/free before. \n\nA good example would be the 200-300% university fee increases (from around 8k per year to 20k + a year). To add to the fire, his daughter just recieved a $60 000 scholarship for tertiary study which portrays unfairness in every aspect. Theres a bunch of other promises that he's broken such as health insurance policies and so on. \n\n"
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"http://www.news.com.au/finance/money/tony-abbott-caught-on-camera-winking-and-smiling-when-confronted-over-budget-b... | |
311kxs | if it was not meant to discriminate against gays, what was the intended purpose of the indiana law? | Giving the governor the benefit of the doubt, what was the purpose of the new law? Who was being forced to serve people that conflicted with their religion? And could a christian now be able to not serve Jews? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/311kxs/eli5if_it_was_not_meant_to_discriminate_against/ | {
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"Laws such as this, and there are many, are intended to protect people against law suits for refusing to promote something which they find distasteful, either for religious or other reasons.\n\nA sign painter may refuse to paint a sign praising Hitler or proclaiming \"God is dead\", etc. \n\nA pastor may refuse to marry a single gender couple for religious reasons.\n\nGays and lesbians are already afforded freedom of expression. The Indiana law and others like it are put in place to preserve the freedom of expression of others.\n\nSimply stated, such laws are designed to protect people from a court system which is dysfunctional.",
"the bill passed in Indiana essentially makes a federal act passed in 1993 (the religious freedom restoration act) apply at the state level. the federal act was passed because of a Supreme Court ruling in 1990 that set a precedent that many feared essentially gave government the power to regulate how religion was practiced (I believe the case before the Supreme Court was whether the government could prohibit a Native American group from using hallucinogens in their religious rituals).\n\n\n\nSCOTUS ruled in favor of the government, and to correct for a precedent many feared could go haywire, congress passed the RFRA, which does two things. first, the bill requires that the federal government demonstrate a compelling interest in the matter at hand. second, if there is a compelling interest, the government must intervene in the least restrictive way possible.\n\n\n\nmany states passed their own version of this law in 1993, and after the Supreme Court ruled the RFRA applies only at the federal level, several other states did the same. before Indiana, 19 states had laws such as this on their books.\n\n\n\nrewind to last year, and the RFRA was actually invoked in the decision of Burwell v. hobby lobby which ruled that \"closely held\" companies who object to birth control on religious grounds do not have to provide coverage for birth control to their employees because the government had already made exceptions for religious organizations in the same position, therefore the requirement was not the least restrictive means of furthering their compelling interest.\n\nsince then, the RFRA has come under fire as a shield for bigots, because the fear is that a restaurant owner could object to serving a gay couple citing religious beliefs. in reality, plaintiffs don't fair too well such as in AZ last year where a wedding photographer who did not want to photograph a lesbian couple lost.\n\nbut hey, headlines.",
"Here are two example cases to explain the original intent of RFRA laws:\n\n1. Native Americans get fired for a failed drug test, and cannot get unemployment payments because they were fired with cause. However the drugs were part of a religious ceremony.\n\n2. A Jehovah's witness needs a blood transfusion-less organ transplant. While this is available in another state (and cheaper to boot) the state run medicare refuses to grant it. She eventually won under RFRA, but it took two years and she was unable to get the transplant (and died in 2012).\n\n",
"Son, its so store owners in the state don't have to give young women medical stuff if they say it goes against their religion to give them it. It's also so very religious people wont be fired if they fall into prayer while working. I love you son."
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84dw77 | what is grey matter of our brain? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/84dw77/eli5what_is_grey_matter_of_our_brain/ | {
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"The cell bodies of neurons. The white matter is the axons (or the thread like parts they use to communicate), and is covered in myelin, a protein which is white. Myelin helps get the messages along faster. Because the cell bodies aren't really transmitting messages long distance (they just create them) they don't need myelin and thus appear grey. Grey matter is on the outside of the brain, white matter on the inside",
"Most (this is a dangerous word to say here) of the brain is made up of neurons. I'll start with a quick once-over of neuroanatomy. Check out [this](_URL_0_) image of a neuron. \n\nA simplified way of explaining how a neuron works are is that the dendrites of a neuron are in charge of receiving a message. The dendrites then \"send\" the message down the length of the axon, and then the axon terminals (the \"terminal bulb\") then \"connects\" with the dendrites of the next neuron. The axon is covered with a substance called myelin, which speeds up neurotransmission; it also makes neurons appear white.\n\nThe dendrites and the axon terminals (which are not covered in myelin) appear grey, and are called grey matter. The axons are called white matter. They are arranged in a way such that the outside layer of the brain (called your *cerebral cortex*) is a layer of grey matter, which \"project\" white matter tracts into deeper areas of your brain. You also have bundles of grey matter below your cerebral cortex called \"subcortical grey matter\".\n\nTypically, studying grey matter is a lot more interesting than studying white matter, since grey matter is where things actually happen. If people talk about a \"fear center\" in your brain, they're usually talking about your amygdala, which is basically a ball of cell bodies (grey matter) that send out projections to other parts of your brain (white matter).\n\nAs for meditation benefiting grey matter, that's probably some pop-science bullshit. While meditation does have benefits, saying that it boosts \"grey matter\" is an incredibly stupid way to put it. \n\nEdit: just to be clear I'm not calling OP stupid\n "
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2gjj2i | why do i sometimes get a stomach ache when i need to poop and other times i don't? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gjj2i/eli5_why_do_i_sometimes_get_a_stomach_ache_when_i/ | {
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"Here's why an intestine gets \"irritable.\" To have a bowel movement, the muscles in the colon and the rest of the body have to work together. If this process is somehow interrupted, the contents of the colon can't move along very smoothly. It sort of stops and starts, doesn't move, or sometimes moves too fast. This can hurt and make a kid feel awful. Doctors also believe that people with IBS may have more sensitive bowels, so what might cause a little discomfort in one person causes serious pain for someone with IBS.\n\nsource: _URL_0_",
"Crohn's Disease checking in. I got a bunch of ulcers all up in my large intestine like \"what up!\" (and a couple in my small) so when I and others like me get aches it's because the movement of the muscles and everything passing through my guts is irritating them. It also means I get stomach aches as soon as I eat sometimes, because the act of eating kick starts the rest of the digestive system a bit. ",
"Also, the gases getting pushed around as your body's moving things along can be pretty painful if there's a buildup.",
"Stomach pains - nauseousness, can be caused by a number of things.\n Diet, Not enough fiber in your diet, Minerals in drinking water [local to certain areas] , lactose issues, nerves, stress, Health issues. \nYou should get a check up... get scoped out, just in case. \n\n\nAny 'Gastro' will tell you, to take a tablespoon of pure Psyllium Husk mixed with juice, once or twice a day. Not that meta crap either. I have been using Psyllium Husk for over twenty years. It doesn't cause Diarrhea, contrary to popular beliefs. Your stomach will thank you.\n\nA good shit, is key to good health and well being."
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39g9s5 | why does the translucent water in my bottle cast a shadow comparable to the one created by my solid body? | Edit: perhaps a better word for 'solid' would be 'opaque' in this instance | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39g9s5/eli5_why_does_the_translucent_water_in_my_bottle/ | {
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"The light is being bent by the water in the bottle, like in a prism. water has a different refractive index than air does so it bends light differently than air does. if you put a water bottle up to light there's probably a few patches where the bottle has focused the light somewhere else\n\nalso, the shadow probably isn't comprable to a fully opaque object. the shadow it makes is probably darker than you anticipate because of the translucency of the bottle but the shadow won't be completely dark, i guarantee it. the bottle shape probably isn't a very efficient prism and not all of the light is being bent away from behind the bottle. \n\n\n",
"Shadows are made when light is prevented going forward with all its neighbors. This can occur in 3 ways, the light is absorbed, the light bounces off (reflection), or the light is bent (refraction).\n\nThe water is causing refraction. The light is being bent away from the path it would follow in the air, and so less light is hitting the spot 'behind' the bottle than otherwise. Your brain sees this contrast between the 'less light' and 'more light' around it as a shadow, even though some light is still hitting that spot. \n\nYou can also observe this effect in things like eye glasses, and even air itself, like those road mirages where the street looks wet on the horizon, but isn't. \n\nThe important factor is the angle of the refraction is changing from one spot, to another, i.e. hot air vs cool air, water vs air. \n\nWith your bottle, this creates a non-uniform change in the light from your light source to the 'wall' behind you, which you see as a shadow. "
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7dhogd | what's intel optane? | Extra questions:
- How does it work as a memory?
- Can my laptop use it? (Lenovo Legion Y520) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7dhogd/eli5_whats_intel_optane/ | {
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"It's a memory technology announced by a joint venture of Intel and Micron. They have been a bit cagey about saying *exactly* how it works. It's not quite as fast as DRAM, but close. It's denser than DRAM. It's non-voliatile like Flash. It's more expensive than Flash. \n \nThe only place that I've read about it being deployed so far is in some high-end servers. I believe (but am not certain) that they stack the memory chips and mount them on a multi-chip module substrate with the processor. This reduces delays between the processor and memory, which is where the biggest performance gains are to be had in computer architecture. \n \nIt's a pretty cool technology, because right now computers use about 5 levels of memory. The first three, the fastest, are inside the microprocessor die itself. After that, you go out over the system bus to DRAM, which is cheap and fairly large and fairly fast, but volatile. But the bus is incredibly slow compared to the first three layers (the cache layers). The fifth layer is either a Hard Disc Drive or Solid State Drive, which are large and slow but non-volatile. \n \nIf they can make it at a reasonable price point, it could squish the last two layers of memory into one, making system performance much faster. I'd *love* to see it in a laptop. ",
"It's a kind of solid state storage like flash (SSD) only it works differently. Specifically it's **really** fast. Not necessarily in terms of bandwidth (how many MB/s you can read or write) though it's pretty good there too, but in terms of response time and how many operations you can have running at once. It's currently more expensive then an SSD of the same size.\n\nNow if you're doing linear reading/writing of big files then bandwidth is going to matter more (which means there are already SSDs that are faster) but for situations where you are doing a lot of small random reads or writes it becomes secondary to latency. If you want to read a 1KB file then the difference between a 100MB/s drive and a 1000MB/s isn't as important as the latency between requesting the data and when it starts being sent back; With small files it can take more time to find it then to send it. This is one of the reasons SSDs feel so much faster than HDDs, because they don't have to physically rotate a disk into position to start reading a file which gives them roughly 1/100 the latency of traditional hard disk drives - a basic SATA SSD might only be 2-4x faster in terms of bandwidth but it can find things 100x faster.\n\nBut Optane isn't just an improvement in latency, it completely blows the latency of permanent storage away by having response times approaching that of DRAM. While SSDs may be 100 times faster then HDDs in this respect they are still 10,000 times slower than DRAM. Optane by comparison is only about 10 times slower then DRAM despite being permanent storage - it's so close that one of the potential applications of Optane is to extend the memory of enterprise systems cheaper then DRAM (this is for systems that want hundreds of GBs of RAM).\n\nSo what can you do with Optane right now? (this is the **TL;DR;** part)\n\nIf you are a consumer you can buy a 16GB or 32GB Optane cache drive in the M.2 form factor. This drive only works with specific Intel chipsets (I believe your laptops HM175 chipset is not compatible) and requires a seperate harddrive (HDD or SSD) that it will act as an accelerator for. For example if your laptop had the latest 200 series chipset then it might be possible to install a 2.5\" harddrive plus a 32GB Optane M.2 to speed it up by caching the most frequently used files.\n\nIf you are a big company you can buy Optane drives (on PCI-E cards) for servers that need really responsive storage for things like high use databases. These are not compatible with any laptop and cost more then most laptops too.",
"Simply, it's a massive cache. It saves the dsta of your most used programs, including windows, onto a near RAM speed drive. Makes booting into windows and programs much faster without going full SSD. I believe linus made a video on it",
"IntelOptane technology provides an unparalleled combination of high throughput, low latency, high quality of service, and high endurance."
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1ojxs9 | who are the good guys in syria? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ojxs9/eli5_who_are_the_good_guys_in_syria/ | {
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"If you side with the US Government and say the side that Obama is sending arms to, you could be arrested on terrorism charges for answering this question. ",
"Pretty much only the civilians caught in the crossfire now. Assad has killed most of the rebels that you would support, leaving only groups like those that are favorable to Al-Qaeda left."
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5g1d2w | what is the difference between dark/gritty and edgy/angsty? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5g1d2w/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_darkgritty/ | {
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"Dark and gritty is an attempt to take less desirable elements of reality and amplify them so that they stand out. It's just a way of crafting a setting, theme or mood. It's having the weather almost always be bad, it's having crime be more rife, it's having urban decay be way more prevalant than it really is, that sort of stuff. There's nothing inherently wrong with having those things in a story, of course.\n\nEdge is an attempt to do that just to get a gut reaction of \"you can't do that!\" rather than as a careful part of the setting, pushing the boundary of taste purely for the sake of getting a reaction. It's like a jumpscare, compared to atmospheric horror. It's having the more prevalant crime be really shocking stuff, all violent rape and torture-murder, solely for the immediate emotional response of \"that's a bit much.\"\n\nAngst is an attempt to amplify minor negative issues into huge emotional dramas that are not justified as a reaction to something so minor. A teen's girlfriend of 3 months left him and he's talking about how his life will forever be ruined and he'll never know love again? Yeah, probably going to come across as unwarranted and thus angsty."
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44u3ex | why do open-back headphones sound better? | So a friend and I have been messing with headphones recently, and we found that open-back headphones just sound... better. It's hard to explain exactly how. There's a few things.
First of all, the sound is just crisper.
Second of all, the sound just feels more... There. Present. Closed-back headphones sound like you have headphones. Open-back almost sound like you could close your eyes and a real band is just there.
Could anyone explain why as to both of these? And, if possible, extend to why some headphones sound better than others in general? Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44u3ex/eli5_why_do_openback_headphones_sound_better/ | {
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"Because the sound the driver produces doesn't get reflected back to your ear by the back of the cup. Better headphones typically have more thought put into how sound interacts between your ear and the headphone, and the drivers are made out of lighter and stiffer material. /r/headphones if you want to fall down the rabbit hole"
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eyb0le | how does a wi-fi extender work? let's say if a certain location has a signal of -50dbm, how does adding an extender at that exact location boost the signal around it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eyb0le/eli5_how_does_a_wifi_extender_work_lets_say_if_a/ | {
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"You add it before the signal drops, then it repeats the signal so it can be accessed further away.",
"The equipment in the extender is better quality than a standard device. It might have a more sensitive receiver and/or powerful broadcaster. While a phone might have trouble receiving signal to the router and broadcasting back, the extender can. The extender then broadcasts a network with the same SSID as the router. This identifies it as the same network as the router. Your phone then connects and transmits to the extender, which relays those packets through its link to the router.\n\nIf you move closer to the router or a different extender so much that your original link weakens, your device will swap over and send to whichever endpoint with the same SSID can receive. This gives you a seamless experience as you move around as if it were one big signal.",
"The way I understand it is, the extender acts as a radio repeater. It receives the signal from the router or access point. From there, it re-transmits the signal on a different channel that is capable of being received further out.",
"going on your example, say your location has a path attenuation of -50dBm, and the repeater (which is really just an amplifier) has a gain of 30dBm, and it's placed at the location where the signal of the original signal reaches -25dBm (not actually physically halfway due to the inverse square law). the signal attenuates -25dBm from the router to the repeater, gets amplified back up to +5dBm, and then travels from the repeater to the target, losing 25dBm, and arriving with -20dBm, a saving of 30dBm. This is significant because most coding schemes scale non-linearly in efficiency against SNR. \n\nAs for how they work, they essentially create a new network with the identical SSID of the router, so that any connected devices can't tell the difference between the router and repeater. it accepts traffic as if it were the router, and just passes the messages over to the router.",
"WiFi isn't one radio channel, it's several. The Extender listens on one channel, with a very sensitive receiver, and transmits on another, with a powerful transmitter. This makes the same network available on two radio channels. Since devices have algorithms to choose the most powerful signal, they will connect to the strong extender rather than the weak primary. For devices that are constrained in their radio antenna geometry, like a cell phone, this can be a big improvement.",
"It's a repeater. Every WiFi signal it receives, it broadcasts again. So, you put it at the end of your range, and your device transmits as \"loud\" as it can and it gets as far as your repeater, but the signal dissipates before it gets as far as the access point. That's fine, because the repeater then transmits the signal again, and since it's much closer to your access point, the original message reaches the destination. The reverse occurs when the access point transmits it's response.\n\nThe problem with repeaters is that it generates more signal traffic. Understand that there is ONLY 1 electromagnetic spectrum. Every device using the 2.4 GHz band HAS TO TAKE TURNS, because if two devices transmit at the same time, it's like two people talking at once - the receiver, WHICH IS EVERY DEVICE IN RADIO RANGE, all hear garbled noise and you can't tell one signal from the other. The more devices in range, the slower everyone goes. It doesn't matter if you divide things up by network, you're still all using the same radio frequencies. If you're close to your neighbors, then ALL your devices are picking up their noise, it's just silently dropping the data because it's not meant for them. WiFi, is a shared medium, it's like if every device were wired, and sharing the same wire - you all have to take turns.\n\nSo a repeater is just one more participant, one more device vying to take it's turn, meaning everyone has to wait that much longer to send their next packet. And more devices means more chance for collisions, meaning everyone has to wait even longer as data has to be resent.\n\nThe better thing to do is wire in all the devices you can. I recommend Cat-5e or Cat-6 STP with the proper grounded connectors. The thing is all conductors are antenna, so a long run of copper can pick up a lot of RF noise, so by shielding your runs, you'll get far better performance. Anything you wire in means you free up the air waves, making your whole WiFi network, and that of all your neighbors, that much faster. It also cuts out the need for this repeater.\n\nBarring that, the next best thing is to change your antenna to something with higher gain. This makes the most sense for stationary devices, like desktops or televisions, which may have an external antenna. A higher gain antenna simply means a directional antenna pointed directly at the access point. Instead of wasting electromagnetic energy sending your signals in all directions - all directions your access point ISN'T, you can direct all that energy to where your access point IS. This is a \"passive\" solution, in that it doesn't require additional electronics or power. You're not repeating your signal, you're concentrating the energy and sending it in a focused beam. This solution isn't practical for things like laptops or cellphones, especially since these devices almost universally don't have external antenna. You can still prop the thing in front of an old DirectTV dish - which is the right size for WiFi, but that would be cumbersome.\n\nBarring that, I would recommend moving your AP closer to where you use it most, and consider how to configure your home network more efficiently for your most common use cases.",
"It's like if you got your friends to stand in a line 50 metres apart\nA friend at one end can yell something loud enough for the second friend in the line to hear, they can then yell it to the next person in line"
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7gx0sd | a few genuine questions about depression. | Hi, first time posting here, sorry if this is a dumb question. I read a post earlier saying how it was near impossible to function with depression. It said it was hard to talk walk and concentrate. Is depression a thing we're born with or does it develop overtime? If it develops over time, for what reason will it develop? Also, can depression be avoided? As in, does it develop in your brain or what? Sorry if these questions are stupid, but I legit have no idea. Thanks if anyone helps. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7gx0sd/eli5_a_few_genuine_questions_about_depression/ | {
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"No such thing as a dumb question.\n\nSo, depression can be confusing because we use the word \"depression\" and its' alternate forms to both describe a psychological disorder, and to describe an emotion that we all go through.\n\nThe key difference is in the outside stimuli... You will naturally feel depressed about a loved one dying, but if you're neurotypical, you will eventually pull out of that. Chronic depression, conversely, show these same types of helpless emotions in people who aren't going through a devastating loss.\n\nTo go through some questions:\n\n > Is depression a thing we're born with or does it develop overtime?\n\nIt's a little bit of both, as far as scientists could tell the last time I did any research on the subject; Depression tends to run in families, and correlations are stronger the closer the family tie, which tells us that some of it is hereditary, but another predictive factor is how many \"minor depressive episodes\" (or: times you felt down about a big devastating loss but pulled through on the other side) people go through before hitting a certain age, which indicates an environmental factor at play. This also goes into the next question, I think, and I don't have much more of an answer for it, so:\n\n > Also, can depression be avoided? As in, does it develop in your brain or what? \n\nWe don't have an effective prevention or cure for depression that I'm aware of, other than \"try not to suffer too many minor depressive episodes before you're in your mid-20s\" but that's a toss of the dice. It can be treated, but not fully cured.\n\n[This video](_URL_0_) I found to be really helpful as an overview on depression and what we know about it, and from there you can read more contemporary papers."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc"
]
] | |
3m9rui | how was the first straight edge ruler made? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3m9rui/eli5_how_was_the_first_straight_edge_ruler_made/ | {
"a_id": [
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"score": [
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"text": [
"I can speak from a machining perspective. Your question seems to be parallel to something I find interesting. That is, how were the first precision machines made, when you need to already have precision machines to make them?\n\nThe answer is, they weren't very precise at first. Machines were made by bootstrapping, starting off with something that was very imprecise by modern standards, but that was adequate to make a slightly better version of itself. Then that version could make a slightly better version still. A few generations later, you have the high precision machines you started out looking for.\n\nI would imagine that making a straight edge was probably similar. I can imagine you would start out with a bit of string stretched tight between two points. That gives a pretty close approximation of a straight line.\n\nBy comparing a stone or piece of wood to that, you could shape something that was pretty darn straight. Once you had several fairly straight surfaces, you could use them as guides for cutting new straight edges. \n\nIf you were really clever, I can even imagine using a jig where a cutting tool was supported at the ends by two straight edges, while cutting a new piece in the center. That would have the tendency to average out any imperfections in the two original straightedges, leaving you with a new piece that was significantly straighter.\n\nAll that said, you'd be amazed what you can do by just with your eyes and simple hand tools. I've heard that some machine shops used to ask potential employees to machine a perfect cube as a test before hiring. Size didn't matter, but the edges had to be perfectly flat, and square to each other. It took some people weeks to do it, but they did it successfully."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
4epcft | what's the difference between a narcissist and somebody who, naturally, looks out for their own well-being? | From a standpoint of natural selection wouldn't it be beneficial to care that much about one's own well-being? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4epcft/eli5whats_the_difference_between_a_narcissist_and/ | {
"a_id": [
"d225oyn"
],
"score": [
6
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"text": [
"Like many disorders, the answer is: when it's a disorder. When it becomes pathological, uncontrollable, and negatively impacts your life. What's the difference between someone who is hyperactive and someone who has ADHD? When they can't control it and it negatively affects their life.\n\nSomeone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder isn't just someone who cares about themselves, it's someone who literally is incapable of caring about anyone else, who is pathologically unwilling to accept criticism. Caring too much about yourself might make you narcissistic, but that doesn't mean you have NPD.\n\nLike ADHD, there are benefits when it hasn't become a disorder. Being about to pay attention to a lot of different things quickly is certainly beneficial, but being unable to focus is not. Likewise, protecting yourself is great, but humans are social creatures. We have evolved to work together. Someone with NPD hurts the people around them. How long do you think such a person would last in a subsistence tribe where everyone has to work together? Everything becomes about them, which makes cooperation exceedingly hard. Evolution is going to walk that balance, where being narcissistic occasionally pays off (see: Kanye), and occasionally it doesn't (see: afluenza kid). That balance will keep it around, but it won't be common. And it isn't, most people aren't narcissistic.\n\nFun fact, you can very accurately determine how narcissistic someone is by asking them to honestly rate how narcissistic they are on a scale of 1 to 10. True narcissists don't see it as a bad thing: to them, they really are the greatest so why *wouldn't* they be obsessed with themselves? The more narcissistic you are, the more likely you are to not care and rate yourself higher."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
213pek | why is cheese sold in wheels? | It makes more sense to me that cheese would be made and sold in blocks that would be easier to store and portion out. The only answers I have gotten were about "curing". So why wheels? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/213pek/eli5_why_is_cheese_sold_in_wheels/ | {
"a_id": [
"cg9az2q",
"cg9azg0"
],
"score": [
4,
3
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"text": [
"A lot of cheeses were (and still are) made in presses, which are easiest to make in circles. Then, they're wrapped in cheesecloths and left to cure. The amount of extra you would get in storage by doing rectangles instead of wheels wouldn't have been much of a concern to the people who pioneered cheesemaking, and we've just kept the tradition around. That being said, a lot of commercial, production-scale cheese does get made in blocks. When I was a child, a nearby college has a dairy plant for the ag students, and their cheese was made in huge rectangular molds.",
"It is made in circular tubs in many cheese-making traditions."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] | |
8lw44z | why don’t humans have any real fur, and why does the fur we have feel different than animal fur? | I mean like, why’d we lose it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8lw44z/eli5_why_dont_humans_have_any_real_fur_and_why/ | {
"a_id": [
"dziv7pv",
"dzivaag"
],
"score": [
5,
28
],
"text": [
"We do not have fur, we have hair. They are different things. \n\nWe do not fully know why we lost a lot of our body hair. \n\nSome think that it occurred when our ancestors moved from the trees to the plains as a method to keep us cool by allowing us to sweat and cool off faster. Few animals with fur or lots of body hair can sweat, and those that can tend to sweat on the bare portions of their body such as hands and feet. \n\nA second theory is that during the ice age we started to wear skins and furs to stay warm and this actually prompted the loss of hair as spending the resources to make our own insulation was no longer advantageous. ",
"Ancient humans where endurance hunters in Africa. We would run our prey down over incredible long distances until they inevitably tired or overheated, and then we would beat them to death with our buddies. This means that humans have evolved things like less fur to prevent overheating and the ability to sweat to cool ourselves while running. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] | |
4creyc | the music of frank zappa | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4creyc/eli5_the_music_of_frank_zappa/ | {
"a_id": [
"d1ks0m8",
"d1ks2kw"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"He made his own genre, really. He definitely had all kinds of influences in jazz, doo-wop, pop, modern classical, and virtually everything else. I've seen it called porn rock, avant-garde rock, and so on.",
"Frank Zappa transcended genres. A lot of his stuff was rock, a lot was jazz, a lot was a mix of a bunch of stuff and a lot was plain ol' experimental/avant-garde/whatever you want to call it. \n\nOne factor you'll frequently find in his music, though, is unapologetically holding up a mirror to American Society. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
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