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1lbuuq | if you were standing on the edge of the dark and light sides of the moon, would the dark-side look like a black abyss? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lbuuq/eli5_if_you_were_standing_on_the_edge_of_the_dark/ | {
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"No. The dark side of the moon refers to the side that never faces the Earth. The moon revolves around the Earth at almost exactly the same rate as it rotates around it's axis, so the same side of the moon faces the Earth always. The other side gets as much light from the sun as the near side, it's just that we cannot see it from Earth."
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2kbvq7 | what purpose does the usmc serve that the army doesn't? |
It's not like they only use the navy to get around, and the army deployed by sea at normandy.
Why don't I ever hear about marines fighting in europe or the army fighting in the pacific? (WW2) What was different about their combat doctrine at that time that determined who got what job?
What do they actually do differently now?
I don't think the marines sailed to Afghanistan; how are they different from the army? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kbvq7/eli5_what_purpose_does_the_usmc_serve_that_the/ | {
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"The idea is that the USMC can serve as a fast reaction, forward deployed force. The army isnt neccesarily set up to have forces of various, but usually smaller size forward deployed at bases around the world. How have MAGTF's (Marine Air Ground Task Forces) of various sizes, at the smallest it will be an infantry battalion, along with some armor, some logistical, and some air support, which you can all load onto a couple of USN ships and sail around until needed.\n\nThe USMC is set up both structurally(all branches within one, and strong cross training with USN), and doctrine wise to do that (focus on warrior ethos/smaller more multi task units), to go into situations with minimal outside support, and to make do. The Army meanwhile is the big shock and awe force which comes with everything you can imagine and then some. The USMC is then the smaller faster sword, to the USA's giant 105mm howitzer.",
"The Marines are the United States expeditionary projection force. They move hard and fast but they are not designed to hold areas for long periods of time. The Army, on the other hand is the United States' force of occupation. \n\nIn simplified terms, the Marines bust in and take an area. After that, the Army comes in to hold it. While both forces are capable of the forced entry, the Marines are always at sea and relatively close by. It takes them hours to respond to crisis where the Army (in general terms) can take days or weeks (specific units aside- global reaction force, SF, etc.) \n\nYou could, hypothetically, get rid of the Corps. You would then have to keep a large number of Army troops at sea on naval vessels to serve as the initial entry force that the Army would eventually relieve. \n\nTL;DR the have different purposes on the battlefield and it keeps the world safe to have both. ",
"That's actually a really interesting question, which should be clear by all the discussion already in this thread. I won't try and explicate here what the mission of the Marine Corp actually is, I'm sure that's written done on their website somewhere, and that it provides no clear explanation on what they actually do. Historically, the marines have been an organization in search of a mission. The truth is that Marines are a remnant of a much older form of combat, and as such have carried over a legacy which doesn't perfectly translate into modern armed conflict. This has resulted in the Marine Corp finding themselves on the budgetary chopping block a number of times throughout Americas history, and is part of the reason they have always made do with very little, and out of date equipment, especially when compared to equivalent U.S. Army units. This is because congress allocates funding to the different military branches based on what missions they fulfill. No one wants to get rid of the marines ( at least not right now), but it's hard to validate their budget when they only do tasks that everyone else already has covered. As a result, they have become a sort of jacks of all trades, taking on any mission they can get there hands on and filling in the gaps left by the other branches. For them, every armed conflict is another opportunity to validate their existence, and as such, it is hard to truly nail down one specific mission statement, or even one over-arching theme that can be used to describe their purpose.\nNote: I'm using the word mission the way the war in Iraq is a mission, on a very large scale. Not like a single james bond style mission. ",
"Chesty Puller is rolling in his grave with half these comments. ",
"Marines were originally envisioned as naval infantry, whose purpose was to engage in boarding actions or to carry out amphibious operations. They provide force projection and can be rapidly deployed to hotspots by sea since there's always marine expeditionary forces at sea where the navy is. \n\nDon't get it yet? Ok, what's a sailor? A crewman who has a specific job or role aboard a ship. You can't detach a sailor from his ship and tell him to go take part in an amphibious assault operation, cause then his ship will be lacking someone to fill his roll. Also every sailor has been trained to do a specific role on his ship, like communications, radar control, ship weapons, electronics, the CHEF. \n\nThis is where marines come in. They fulfil the infantry combat element the navy needs without taking away from the ships crew. This is what the marines were originally created for, to carry out boarding actions at sea, or amphibious landings. Over time, as certain nations' navies became more powerful, the marines became an essential asset for force projection at sea. \n\nIf say, Singapore were to be suddenly invaded by Malaysia or Indonesia, a fleet in the region could be rushed to it's defence, and a several thousand strong Marine force attached to that fleet could be quickly deployed on the tiny island to bolster it's defences. This is something the US army would not be able to perform with the same speed. No, the US army would take weeks or even months to build up forces and move it's heavy units to the region before it could actually engage in any combat."
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bg3lck | what causes bacteria that resides in our bodies to become pathogenic and cause infections? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bg3lck/eli5_what_causes_bacteria_that_resides_in_our/ | {
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"On rare occasions it is because that bacteria in your body mutated into a more virulent strain. But more often than that, it will be either because a more virulent strain got introduced to you, or because your body suffered an immune system problem which calls the weaker strain to be able to become more virulent.\n\nThe bacteria that exist on and inside your body don't refuse to eat you because they don't want to eat you or anything like that. it is constantly trying to eat you all the time. But your immune system is strong enough to hold it back. As your immune system gets weaker, a whole bunch of different bacteria that you previously were able to coexist with peacefully suddenly start to get the edge on you and are able to consume you better."
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1ja77p | 1.what happens when you move a file to the recycle bin? 2.what happens when you clear your recycle bin completely? where do the files go? | . | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ja77p/eli51what_happens_when_you_move_a_file_to_the/ | {
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"1) The files are marked as being in the Recycle Bin and are locked off from access by most programs.\n\n2) The entry for the file is removed from an index of what files exist in the directory tree, and the information for where all the different parts of the file exist on the disk is overwritten. The file data itself remains unchanged until that space happens to be overwritten by something else, as it is marked as free for use.",
"VSauce did a really great episode on this recently.\n\n_URL_0_",
"When you move a file to the Recycle bin, you're not deleting the file, you're removing it from the usable files. The computer still fully remembers the file, but sets it aside.\n\nWhen you empty the recycle bin, it still doesn't delete the file. It simply \"forgets\" where the file was. This means that later on down the road, the place where the data was at will be overwritten. \n\nThis is where defragmentation comes into play. When you hear that, it's a process of reorganizing the data on your machine to have it fit properly and therefore be more easily accessed. \n\nSome programs such as CCleaner and DBAN have the ability to fully wipe drives by going through deleted files and copying \"blank data\" (Random 1s and 0s) over them over and over and re-wiping them, so if you tried to get access to the original files, at most you could only find the blank data."
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u7djz | how can you tell whether one graphics card is better than another? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/u7djz/eli5_how_can_you_tell_whether_one_graphics_card/ | {
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"Graphics cards are complicated things. Simple stats like clock speed, and core count are not useful. In fact there are no simple stats that can be used to judge a graphics card.\n\nThere are many review sites out there that test graphics cards in real world conditions (they use benchmark software, and play sections of games to see how well they perform) and produce graphs comparing different cards.\n\n-----------------------------------\n\nOne of the simplest ways to generally compare cards is by their series and number. NVidia is currently releasing cards under the branding GForce ~~GTX~~ G, GT, or GTX (G = Bottom end, GT = Can be used for gaming, GTX = Enthusiast). That branding is followed by a 3 digit number. The first digit is the series, the second digit is the level within that series. My card is a GTX560, its a 500 series 60 card. With NVidia 60 is usually a decent gaming card, 50 is ok for gaming, below that is budget. 70 is high quality and the 80 is usually their highest.\n\nI am not so familiar with the AMD numbering, hopefully someone else will fill you in on that.\n\n--------------------------------------\n\nTL;DR Part 1: Graphics cards are complicated, go to a computer hardware review site to see information on each.\n\nTL;DR Part 2: With NVidias current line of GTX cards the 600 series is the newest. If the card ends with 50 or above its an acceptable gaming card, if its below 50 its a budget card. 60 is about what most people buy.\n\n------------------------------------------------\n\nEDIT: Different parts of a card are useful for different things. If you want to run a multi screen set up with a high resolution you will need more graphics RAM. You will also need more RAM on the card if you want to turn texture quality up high. I find 1 gig is good enough for a single screen with textures up high on all modern games I play (Skyrim is the latest game I've played. 1920x1080 resolution).\n\nSome cards are compatible with different versions of DirectX. New cards will all support the newest version of DirectX.\n\nSome cards have two GPU's on the same card. This essentially cuts your graphics RAM in half, but will allow for more screens (therefore you will need much more RAM on the card), and faster graphics processing.\n\nEDIT 2: Dual GPU cards are almost always the highest card, the GTX590 is two 580 chips on the same card. I don't think NVidia do dual GPU cards except the 90's. They are also the most expensive in each series (We are talking £800 to £1000. Stupid Expensive).\n",
"Also this\n _URL_0_ \n\n",
"Nobody's linked to this yet. I used [Passmark](_URL_0_) when I wanted to buy a card. just do a Ctrl+F on the card you saw.\n\nGraphics cards really go down to the benchmarks. as CopperMind Mentioned, you can't tell by traditional stats. In addition, although Nvidia has a numbering system, I saw PC world ranting about how even that was kind of illogical.",
"If you check the show desktop and notebook gpu button then you can see frames per second on a lot of popular games [here](_URL_0_)",
"In a theoretical sense (as in, e-peen measurement) there are tools like 3DMark 2011 to measure an abstract number of points, and the graphics card that gets the highest number of points will be the \"fastest\". Overclockers use these to indicate their system being X percent faster than the standard clock speeds.\n\nIn a practical sense (you're looking to buy / get one and want to know what to get) find out which technical level you need. This is (simply put) what DirectX version it supports. Your graphics card has to support at least the DirectX version the game uses. If it supports a higher one, it'll support the ones below it. If it doesn't support that level, it just plain won't work.\n\nThen, look up how fast the graphics cards are for the games you actually want to play. Keep in mind that you can play games on higher or lower settings and on lower or higher resolutions. Take the resolution you're actually going to use and (preferably) high settings. If it makes 60fps it's good enough regardless. If it makes 30fps on non-twitchy games it's still good enough. If it makes 15FPS on slow games (think Civilization or Plants vs Zombies) it's still good enough. Then, take the cheapest card that is fast enough for the games you're going to be playing. Typically this will be a card between 30 and 150 dollars.\n\nSo then why are there graphics cards of 500 or 1000 dollars? There are people who play with extra fixes that others make on those games to make them look extra crispy and awesome, which are a lot slower than the regular games are. This can reduce the performance by a factor of 10 or more! Also, some people have really high resolution screens or play across multiple screens which also reduces performance by a factor of 3-8. For these uses it's possible to take a fast graphics card and to use multiple ones of the same kind at the same time. When you do end up going in this direction keep in mind that the power consumption also explodes and that you may end up with a 1.5kW computer, requiring extra cooling..."
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1zn1d4 | what are the laws for putting your child up for adoption? must they be younger then a certain age? | (not a parent) But say someone had a kid who was just the worst type of person who was like 16-17 years old, could the parents just put that kid up for adoption? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zn1d4/eli5_what_are_the_laws_for_putting_your_child_up/ | {
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"You certainly could, but the parent remains responsible for the child until someone agrees to adopt it or the courts terminate parental rights. Realistically, if you have a shitty teenager no one else is going to want to take them off your hands. \n\nChild abandonment is generally illegal in the US once the child passes a certain age (usually 1 or 2) so you can't just dump your kid on the state. "
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cxbyqi | what is the difference between allocative efficiency and productive efficiency | Please no big words | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cxbyqi/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_allocative/ | {
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"Allocative efficency: \nPeople sell more stuff when prices are high, people buy more stuff when prices are low. \nAllocative efficency is when stuff is sold at the price where the people selling stuff want to sell the exact same amount of stuff people want to buy. \n \nProductive efficency: \nThere are two or more things that can be made. \nThey are making as much stuff as possible, so if they made more of something, they'd have to make less of something else.",
"Allocative Efficiency - Let's say you working in a fast food restaurant. Your customers mostly demand hamburgers, and a select few want cheese burgers. You are going to focus your time towards making hamburgers, and not cheese burgers. You would make X amount of hamburgers to fulfill the demand and nothing else. You also would only make enough hamburgers to fill the demand, or at least try to without having extra unwanted burgers.\n\nProductive Efficiency -Ideally you want to make as many burgers as you can without high costs. Turn around and sell your hamburger at a price that also benefits the customer while fulfilling the demand, and keeping your cost low. \n It costs you 3 dollars to make a hamburger. You turn around and charge the customer 16 dollars. Customers do not feel your hamburger is worth 16 dollars, so they pass. Whereas charging 5 dollars for a burger the customer finds this reasonable."
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32556l | why do many golfers wear odd pants? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32556l/eli5_why_do_many_golfers_wear_odd_pants/ | {
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"To honor the history of golf, when those odd pants were what everyone wore. "
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1y2sbu | as a pedestrian, if a vehicle collision with you is imminent, what is the best way to "brace yourself for impact"? | In lieu of two close calls in the past week, I've been curious on what the best method would be, if it is unavoidable, to take the hit. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1y2sbu/as_a_pedestrian_if_a_vehicle_collision_with_you/ | {
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"If you can, jump to avoid being hit by the bumper head on. If you can roll over the hood and windshield you won't get nearly the same impact as you would if you got mowed down by the front of the car.\n\nIf that isn't an option, and you are going to have to take the full force of the impact, being limp might save you. Babies and really drunk people often fair better in accidents and falls because they don't tense up and their bodies deflect better. Try to not be run over by the car, though.",
"jumping on the hood is ideal, I've had the chance to do that once. the other time I got hit, I was on a bike about to turn into a road. a large van came out too fast, wasnt looking where he was going (on the phone) and rammed right into the front of my bike. I kept my bike upright for as long as I could, while the van was still pushing forward, then very quickly put my hands on the hood to lift my weight off the bike. he rolled over the bike before stopping. "
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2ahjvi | why are bear grylls and les stroud able to kill animals for their reality shows, while fiction shows/movies are prohibited from doing so? | What difference does it make to the animal that is being killed?
Note, I'm a meat eater, I just don't really understand why it's considered more ethical to kill an animal for "reality" purposes than for "artistic" purposes. At the end of the day it's all entertainment. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ahjvi/eli5_why_are_bear_grylls_and_les_stroud_able_to/ | {
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"I suppose the argument would be that Bear Grylls and Les Stroud eat the animals they kill therefore it's \"hunting\" rather than \"abuse on set\".",
"There are a few differences.\n\nThe first being that the animal is eaten/used in such a way that it's hunting rather than abuse. The second being that they often get permission from the local authorities to do such a thing, as they are supposed to be for educational purposes.\n\nBut most significantly, it's for survival. Most countries which the series are filmed in have laws that essentially say \"If it is a matter of life or death survival, you won't be tried for certain crimes\" it's the same basis that the idea of killing in self-defense stands on.\n\nAlthough it doesn't really count for Bear Grylls since he never actually put himself in danger to the point where he needed to eat anything to survive, Les Stroud has mentioned this rule a number of times, most notably on his survival episodes in Norway.\n\nIn those episodes he broke into two properties, a hunting cabin and a coastal summer home. In the hunting cabin he simply stayed a night (or two, I forget) and took some leftovers from a caribou that had been killed and left by the hunters some time prior. In the coastal home, he stayed for a night (or two) and used some of the stocked firewood to build a signal fire. Both times, he even left notes explaining the situation, who he was and his contact information in case they did want to be reimbursed, but he asked the authorities and lawyers if he did anything wrong, and they all said no, what he did was completely allowed.\n\nNot to mention that the animals that they kill and eat generally aren't endangered, and are commonly hunted and killed animals, and they try not to show the gory bits.",
"Our society still recognizes hunting as sport - it relies on the hunter's skill & wits, giving the animal a chance to escape. On a movie set, however, you're dealing with captive, often trained, animals that don't have any chance of escaping.\n\nIt'd literally be shooting fish in a barrel."
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aee7uo | in the u.s. how are residential roads designated: street, avenue, drive, court, place, etc. ? they seem to follow no rules to me. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aee7uo/eli5_in_the_us_how_are_residential_roads/ | {
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"You are correct. There are no rules. There used to be rules, like a boulevard being a large road with trees in the middle, but nowadays you can just do whatever you want.",
"No rules, every city is different. For example where I am right now most of the 'streets' run east west and the 'avenues' run north south... Except the ones that don't. Some of the most prominent east west streets are avenues.",
"Interesting fact. 2nd street is the most common street name as \"1st\" street is typically named after a person place or thing"
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9ohccl | why didn't ukraine attempt to defend crimea back in 2014 when russia started its annexation? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ohccl/eli5_why_didnt_ukraine_attempt_to_defend_crimea/ | {
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"They did. The Ukranian soldiers stationed on Krimea were simply caught off-guard and got completely and utterly overrun to the point where picking up a firearm was suicide. That combined with the fact that russian propaganda convinced the majority of the krimean population to join russia (before the invasion) lead to Ukranian soldiers getting hindered by their own people, who wanted to join russia. Ukraine did send soldiers to the front (and still is btw) but its a stale war right now. No advances on neither side pretty much.\n\nI just yesterday saw a video of a few journalists inside the last Krimean Ukrainian-Controlles military base. The soldiers just watched, completely unarmed, as russian soldiers surrounded them, until a Tank broke through a wall into the compound. The Ukranian soldiers just stood and watched as it was just suicide even looking at a gun.",
"The Russians were already in Crimea as Ukraine rented out the major port in the area to the Russians so that the Russians could have a warm water port. This meant that thousands of heavily armed Russians were in Crimea along with massive naval support and Russian reinforcements were rapidly brought into the area. ",
"Others have some good input, my two cents: because it happened so fast. \n\nThe Ukrainians were caught by surprise. By the time their government and military high command had figured out what was going on, the Russians had a lot of troops on the ground and were fortifying their position. Any counterattack would have been very ugly (for the Ukrainians) and probably would have failed. They realized this and tried diplomacy instead.\n\nWhen the soviet union broke up, Ukraine found itself the slightly surprised owner of a large navy base and nuclear arsenal. In return for giving all of this back to Russia, Ukraine was given several security promises by the US and NATO. When Putin invaded Crimea, the Ukrainians invoked these promises and asked for help. Unfortunately, these promises turned out to be worthless. \n"
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1tkfj9 | what are those additives they try to sell you at gas stations for "better gas mileage" or a "cleaner engine?" do they actually do anything other than waste your money? | edit: To clarify, I'm asking about the stuff they try sell you AT the pump, that they mix in with your gas when you pump it. "Additech" is one that I can think of.
Like this: _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tkfj9/eli5_what_are_those_additives_they_try_to_sell/ | {
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"They do clean the engine. But the thing is, the additives are federally mandated, and all gas stations get their gas from the same refineries, so there's no difference between what one brand claims and another.",
"What about the shit that boosts your octane levels? Does that help?\n",
"As I understand, the additives remove water from the system. This creates a hotter burn, and higher efficiency engine.\n\nAlso having a clean engine means that some of the impurities that were 'gumming' up your engine will also burn up.\n\nWhenever my car would run bad I would put in a bottle. Obvious difference.",
"What about \"fuel injector cleaners\"? Most gas contains a percentage of ethanol which turns to a nasty sludge in gas starting as quickly as fuel only a few weeks old. Further I've read articles that suggest there's has been a large increase in car servicing needs because the Fed was trying for some time to push this percentage as high as they could.\n\nDo \"Fuel Injector cleaners\" help reduce this sludge build up?",
"ITT: terrible terrible YouTube mechanics.",
"Most cleaners are acetone and/or xylene. Water removers, such as HEET, are just ethanol (which we don't need since most gas these days is up to 10% ethanol). The additives they add to the gasoline in more expensive branded fuels do work but are used in such low quantities that they are mainly effective for maintenance. Claims for maximum mileage are grossly over exaggerated. With long term use, there will be less build up in your engine. However, such long term use results in considerably higher fuel costs and you'd be much better off to do a one-time intensive cleaning or just save that cash for later. \n\nMost commonly used method is to pump those additives directly into the fuel line (i.e. 100% additive, 0% fuel) and let it sit for awhile. \n\nIf you have a non-fuel injected car, I like to use a 50/50 mix of acetone and automatic transmission fluid. Dump it down the carb and let it sit for awhile then run the car to get all the mixture out. Be prepared for more smoke than you've ever seen, however. I would only do this in a rural area. ",
"One thing that I've been wondering is is there a difference in brands of gasoline? is there really a difference in the quality of gas of Chevron compared to Arco? ",
"All gasoline produced has to meet certain specifications. Additives are just marketing gimmicks trying to differentiate between brands. \n\nWorse are companies that try to sell premium or midgrade blends to people that don't need it. Some cars need and run better on higher octane premium gasoline, but if it's not recommended by the car manufacturer, it's a waste of money. It costs refiners about 6 cents a gallon to make premium instead of regular. Gas stations mark it up a lot more. ",
"In Canada there are gas line deicers or fuel deicers or water eliminators which all add up to a smallish can of overpriced ethanol to add to a tank of gas. What the ethanol does is bind to the water and then burn in combustion. Sort of like a weak gasohol mix.\n\nMost retailers add up to 10% alcohol to the winter blend to eliminate water problems from the storage tank and / or the car gas tank. It is even added to diesel for the same reason.\n\nI also found it worked pretty good as an injector cleaner, without getting the extra pricy injector cleaner.\n\nSo every fall I would buy a 4$ gallon of alcohol and use it to refill the tiny bottles of gas line de-icer, and refill my little $1.98 one ounce squirt bottle of lock de-icer (which should live in your pocket not the glove compartment.)",
"My car has a 87 and a 91 option in the gas door. It says I will get better mileage and performance with the 91. This is from Nissan saying the car'a computer will adjust ",
"Ph.D. Chemist at Chevron who works on developing fuel additives here... Very few fuel additives work, most can actually reduce performance... Here's as simply as I can break down the retail gas industry for you:\n\n-All similarly octane/ethanol rated gasoline that is delivered to retail stores is essentially the exact same. What we're discussing in this thread is purely the role of \"additives\" in the gasoline. This is one of the few places retail gas brands can identify a niche and diversify themselves from competitors (only second to the cleanliness of bathrooms). \n\n-There is often a government mandated minimum \"nitrogen\" or additive content in consumer grade fuel, but in low grade gasoline, this can be a detriment to performance. Because the government has created minimum content instead of minimum performance standards, low margin, low quality retailers simply add shitty (cheap) nitrogen containing molecules that when ignited, don't combust completely. This leaves residue that can gunk up your fuel injectors etc. and kill your gas mileage. \n\n-So how do \"effective\" fuel additives increase performance you ask? Great question. What high quality gasoline additive producers have created are nitrogen containing detergents that solubilize deposits (ash, polycyclic aromatics, acids, and other byproducts of combustion) in engines, almost completely removing them. While doing this, it fully exothermically combusts in the cylinder and leads to an increase in heat, more complete burning of fuel, and greater energy output. However, each fill up, you may only see an increase in performance/efficiency of 1-4%. Almost invisible to the average consumer in the short term, but legitimate gains in lifetime efficiency are made and usually realized by the high volume consumer more readily (taxis, trucking, other transport, etc.). \n\n-What should the average consumer do? I was the biggest skeptic of \"additives\" coming into the industry from a pharma background... I mean this has got to be a marketing ploy just like saying \"all-natural\" or \"full of antioxidants\" in other consumer products. Unlike those scenarios, data exists here and I've seen it. High quality additives work (really only speaking for Techron here). Chevron is legally allowed to proclaim that Techron has unsurpassed engine cleaning and performance boosting ability. The paradigm here is that it works too well. The premium you pay on each fill up isn't really justified (unless you're in it for the bathrooms) because Techron is so good, it can remove any crap lower quality gasolines leave behind. If you want to maximize your value, I suggest using the shitty cheap stuff and filling up with a Techron laced gasoline every 5 or 6 times to the pump. \n\nEdit: The first comment I ever make on Reddit goes gold... These are some mighty lofty expectations you have set for me. THANKS! Now to figure out what this actually means...",
"The company I work for makes an \"additive\" like that, i put it in commas as additive to me, means you put it in every time you fill up, this just goes in once every 3/4 months. \nThere's like, 10 years of independent testing done on it, and are sales are pretty good, so I know it works, and so do all the people that buy it. \n\nEdit - Sorry, read the thread a bit more, this isn't sold at the pumps, you just buy it in a bottle and put it in on a quarter tank. \n\nEdit 2 - A bit of background on how it works. When mixed with the petrol/diesel/whatever, it's pushed through the fuel system, it turns into a vapour which adheres to the carbon in the catalytic converter, and allows it to be burnt off at much lower temperatures that you would normally need to get it to burn off. We advise putting it in, and going on a 15 minute drive, and that's literally all it takes. It's also pretty handy at degunking valve heads and cleaning the DPF in diesel cars.",
"In the US, all gas is the same when the truck arrives at the station. This is because it all goes through the same transport pipeline. Similar to how all electricity on the grid is the same. You buy electricity from X but might receive a mid of X Y & Z's electricity. Now, when the truck reaches the station, additives are put is as it is being put into the underground tanks. These vary by brand do make a difference in engine cleaning. I don't know about extra additives at the pump as I've never seen that. However, if you've ever seen the way many gas stations are maintained, I can't imagine it would always be good or even consistently there. Unlike the gas (if it's gone, it's gone), you may still pay for the additive even is it's empty. "
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2io1m3 | if electricity travels at the speed of light (or close to it), then why aren't computers and the internet virtually instant? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2io1m3/eli5_if_electricity_travels_at_the_speed_of_light/ | {
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"Electricity doesn't travel at the speed of light. It's much slower. (But still basically instantaneous by human standards.) Speeds vary by medium.\n\nYou can send signals from here (North America) to China and back inside 30ms just fine. \n\nWhat takes most of the time in that 30ms is each router on the way receiving the signal, deciding how to best forward it and retransmitting it. ",
"In copper wire the signal generally travels at over half the speed of light (0.5-0.8c) which is still really really quick. \n \nIf you were just flicking a switch, then yes, the person on the other end would detect that really really quickly. But you usually want to send a lot of information. \n \nSay I want to send you the letter 'a'. In binary ASCII, that's 01100001. So I need to send a low signal, then a high signal, then a high signal, and so on. \n \nBut how do you know if I've sent you two high signals, and not just one long one? The simple way to do this is if you have a clock, and I have a clock, and we agree that each bit lasts a certain time. This is the baud rate, and a higher baud rate means more bits are sent every second. \n \nYou can get each bit really quickly, but we're limited by the baud rate. Higher baud rates need better electronics to read this stream of 1s and 0s faster, but you are eventually limited by how fast you can both send and receive signals. "
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7gzbfh | why are companies always trying to push their web browser? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7gzbfh/eli5_why_are_companies_always_trying_to_push/ | {
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"Web browsers gather browsing data which is very valuable for consumer research and targeted advertising. Having the browser also gets you in to the company's system of apps, extensions, etc. People who are already used to Edge are more likely to use the tools that integrate with it like Office, Bing, Windows Mobile, etc.\n\n"
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4xkpub | why is it possible for us to accidentally bite our cheeks? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xkpub/eli5_why_is_it_possible_for_us_to_accidentally/ | {
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"[This search](_URL_0_) shows that others have been puzzled by this in the past.",
"Your cheaks are used to push food in to your teeth and hold it in place while you chew. This is why it can be extended inwards to your teeth and even further in your mouth. People who have been able to move their cheeks as far in as we can today have not had any problems staying alive or procreating. You have a lot of nerves in your mouth and will try to avoid hurting yourself. This have not been a big issue in the past."
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2f9150 | why can't we replicate some of nikola tesla's work a century later? | Was his knowledge of electricity simply more extensive and intimate than everybody else that's been on the planet since? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2f9150/eli5_why_cant_we_replicate_some_of_nikola_teslas/ | {
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"Probably because he was both a genius and a fraud. ",
"We know far more about electricity today than Tesla ever did. It is not this big mysterious thing. Tesla was a very smart guy, but this woo-woo cult of personality that surrounds him is basically bullshit. ",
"Do you have a single example of any of Tesla's work that can't be replicated?\n\n[EDIT](_URL_0_)",
"First, he was fair to middling nuts.\n\nSecond, he did not record most of his research, so we only have vague claims for the results.\n\nThird, he was marketing his ideas to get financial backing to scale them up, so some may have been \"exaggerated\".\n\nFourth, what notes he did make were seized by the government when he died. Some have since disappeared, and others held for nearly 10 years."
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2pkhps | how/why there is a difference between 4/4 time and 2/2 time in music | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pkhps/eli5_howwhy_there_is_a_difference_between_44_time/ | {
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"Hey guys, I've struggled with time signatures for years, I just don't understand them. It's like some weird mental barrier keeping me from understanding.\n\nSo explanations that are *literally* aimed at a five year old would be great for me.\n\nEdit: thanks for the explanations guys. I'm reading them all but am now too drunk to respond coherently so here's your en masse gratitude.",
"Music notated in 4/4 and 2/2 time could be played identically, but you'd count out the beats differently which should affect the feel and cadence of the music.\n\n4/4 = **up**-and-**down**-and-**up**-and-**down**-and-\n\n2/2 = **up**-a-and-a-**down**-a-and-a-\n\nSame number of eighth notes, same tempo, but half as many beats per measure.",
"There isn't really much difference. It's functionally identical to 4/4, or to 2/4 (if you halve the note lengths).\n\nSo why do it?\n\nThe advantage over 2/4 is that longer notes are often easier to read. If you have a lot of notes shorter than a quaver (or an eight-note to Americans) you have to start counting the ticks on each note which is not fun to do at speed. By switching to 2/2 instead you reduce the number of ticks and make it easier to read at speed.\n\nBut why not use 4/4?\n\nThe answer, as far as my research goes, is convention and personal preference. Some types of music have historically used 2/2, and other types have historically used 4/4, although you might want to use 2/2 if the music uses a lot more minims (half-notes) than crotchets (quarter-notes).\n\nEDIT: I wrote semi-breve where I meant minim. Oops.",
"They create 2 different feelings. You're most familar with 4/4 already. Just about every song on the radio is in 4/4 time.\n\n~~2/2 can be used for marches where one foot takes one beat and the other foot takes the other beat.~~\n\nEdit: I like to smoke crack.",
"2/2 is more like 2/4 than it is 4/4. The top number only represents how many beats per measure. The bottom number represents which note gets the beat. In 2/2 time, there are 2 beats per measure and the half note gets the beat. In 4/4 there are 4 notes per measure and the quarter note gets the beat. \n\nI agree with Wazowski up to a point, except I would count this way:\n\n4/4= Down-and-up-and-down-and-up-and\n\n2/2= Down-e-and-a-up-e-and-a\n\nWhere the word down falls, should be where you feel the big beat. :)",
"It changes the phrase structure. If you think of music as language, and musical phrases as sentences it changes the emphasis of the words and syllables in the sentence. In that analogy time signatures are kind of like regional accents. \n\nImagine you have 10 people who are going to recite a poem at the same time, like a Greek chorus. If they all speak with the same accent, and same emphasis on the same syllables the words will come out clear. If 2 of them have a Boston Accent, 1 has an English Accent, 3 have French, 2 have Indian accents, and 1 has a Brazillian accent and they all try to recite the poem with their normal voice it will not sound anywhere near as clear or easy to understand because each type of accent will bring a different kind of sentence structure. \n\nIn response to some of the comments below- At times it can absolutely be arbitrary, you're right. Don't let time signatures stress you out. They really are just there so that large group of musicians can be counting the music on the page in the same way. \n\n\nSorry, this got more complicated than I intended, but I hope it helps? Time signatures are just there to help the musician know how to phrase the music that is written. If you're listening you may not be able to tell what the time signature is right away unless you've trained in music theory.",
"I'm not a music pro, but I've always learned that in 2/2 the first beat is accentuated, the second is not. In 4/4 the first is also accentuated, the second is not and then the third is also accentuated, the fourth. BUT the third is not as strongly accentuated as the first is. This gives another feel than just 2x 2/2. Am I wrong or does this sound reasonable too?\n",
"There is a system of pulses in music. In common time (4/4) it goes strong weak medium weak (as in: \"OLD mac-Don-ald | HAD a Farm\"). Any sort of duple time is strong weak (as in: TWINK-le | TWINK-le | LIT-tle | STAR)",
"Math is the least important part of music.\n\n4/4 and 2/2 are not (meaningfully) mathematically different. But they *feel* different. You impart a different feel to the music written in 2/2 time than you would in 4/4 time.\n\nIf you were sitting in a concert hall and listening to an orchestra play, even a musical novice would hear the difference between 4/4 and 2/2 time. They might not be able to express exactly how the music was different, but it would *feel* different to the listener.\n\nThat is because the musicians themselves would impart a different feeling for the different time signatures.\n\n*(As a bass player myself, if I saw the music was in 4/4 time, I would play right on the beat. If it was in 2/2 time, I would race the beat ever so slightly, to give it a bit more of a feeling of urgency and make it feel faster paced, or edgier. Just like if the notation says \"Funky feel\", I will lay back a bit and play slightly behind the beat to make it feel funky.)*",
"What's 4/4 and 2/2 time?\n\n-Dream Theater",
"Ok there are lots of totally wrong answers in this thread and a few almost right ones. \n\nTime signature only affects how the music is written. It has nothing to do with speed (tempo) or style (march/waltz/jazz/rock) or counting style. \n\nTime signature is beats per measure over the beat note.\n\n1. 4/4 means 4 beats per measure, quarter note is one beat\n2. 2/2 means 2 beats per measure, half note is one beat\n3. 3/4 means 3 beats per measure, quarter note is one beat and so on\n\nThere are styles of music that traditionally use certain time signatures but you have to also look at the tempo (speed in beats per minute, or in Italian...) as well as the composer/arranger notes. \n\nIf you don't know how to read music, here is a helpful tip for finding the beat and then determining the time signature. \nListen for the drummer. Most pop/rock songs will have a regular patter on the bass and/or snare drums. Generally pop and rock are in 4/4 and the most basic pattern the bass kick on 1 and 3, and the snare pop on 2 and 4 (with infinite variation).\n\nMany times, the melody or vocals will begin at the end of a measure with a short lead-up to the first down beat (the 1) called \"pick-up notes\". My favorite example is Never Gonna Give You Up: in the chorus, \"Give\" is on the 1 and \"Never Gonna\" falls in the previous measure as sixteenth notes starting on the 4. \n\nSEGUE\n\nCounting the beats generally follows a common trend universally. I've played with a few international concert and pep bands and even non-English speaking musicians use this method. \n\n4/4 time, whole note: 1 - - -\nHalf notes: 1 - 3 -\nQuarter notes: 1 2 3 4\nEighth notes: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & \nSixteenth notes: 1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a\n\nOnce you practice counting the beats, go listen to *Iris* by the Goo Goo Dolls and see if you can catch when it changes back and forth from 4/4 to 3/4. \n\n*Hey Ya!* by OutKast follows a pattern of four measures in 4/4, a measure of 2/4, and then two more measures of 4/4. After listening, most people can hear or feel the unusual time change. Also this means the song has an odd seven-measure phrase. Normally phrases are even in number but this makes the song playful and relatively easy to sneak in breaths.\n\nFor 6/8 time, listen to *We Are The Champions* by Queen, or *The House of the Rising Sun* by various artists. Generally songs in 6/8 have a beat that feels like 2/2 with just an on beat and an off beat. Since the actual rhythms and notes played in these slower songs can still be quite complex, they are written in 6/8 so the score isn't filled with thirty-second and sixty-fourth notes. This also gives the music the feel of two 3/2 measures back to back when you count it out.\n\n6/8 time, emphasis on the on beat and off beat:\n*1* 2 3 *4* 5 6 or\n*1* - - *2* - -\n\nThis is also polka music time signature. Hah.\nOom Pom Pom, Oom Pom Pom\n\n\n9/8 is compound triple time and my favorite examples are *Blue Rondo à la Turk* by Dave Brubeck and *Ride of the Valkyries* from Act 3 of Wagner's *Die Walküre*\n\n\nLemme know if you have more music questions!\n",
"This thread is comedy gold! The OP is drunk and has very little understanding of music notation and simply cannot grasp the concept. And the responders are seemingly all trained musicians trying and failing (epically) to explain what (to them anyway) is a completely elementary concept.",
"The top number is how the music FEELS. That's the number of strong beats until the strongest beat comes around again. The bottom number only relates to how we decide to write it down. Is each of those strong beats written as a quarter note (4 on the bottom), eighth note (8 on the bottom), half note (2 on the bottom)?\n\nSo, 4/4 and 4/8 would really sound the same - also, 2/2 and 2/4 and 2/8 would sound the same. Incidentally, 12/8 sounds much like 4/x - the only difference is that the beat is divided in triple when it's divided, rather than in half/quarters/etc. And 6/8 has a feel of being in 2, like 2/x.",
"Dammit! I've been on this sub for a while, and I finally see one I can answer, and it already done got answered.\n\n\nSuch is life.",
"The topic of time signatures is a really big one. Probably too complex for a five year old. But since a lot of people have tried to give you an answer and most of them have been misdirected or flat-out wrong, I will try to explain just the question you state in a way that might makes sense.\n\nFirst let's discuss **how** 2/2 is different from 4/4? First you have to understand how to read a simple time signature. As long as the bottom number isn't 8, you have a simple time signature. With a simple time Sig, the bottom number indicates what **note length** fills one **beat,** and the top number indicates the number of those notes at fill one measure. The bottom note values are 4=quarter note, 2=half note, 1=whole note. So, in a standard song in 4/4, when you count 1 2 3 4, you are counting quarter notes. If the song is in 4/2, you still count 1 2 3 4, but the notes you are counting are half notes. In 2/2 you would count 1 2 for each measure, and each of those beats is a half note length.\n\nExample. Picture 4 quarter notes. In 4/4 (four beats in a measure/quarter note gets one beat), they take up one whole measure and are counted 1 2 3 4. Now, if you have four quarter notes in 2/2 time (2 beats in a measure, half note gets one beat), the measure would look the same (because 2 half notes are the same length as 4 quarter notes) but those four quarter notes would be **counted** 1 + 2 +, because quarter notes only count as half a beat in 2/2 and there are only 2 beats per measure. \n\nNow, **why** does 2/2 exist, if it is the same as 4/4 only counted differently. Mainly to make it easier for musicians to read. Think of a March like stars and stripes forever. There are lots of quick notes in that song. If you wrote it in 4/4, the measures would be full of 8th, 16th, and even 32nd notes, making the measures really long and hard to read. If you write it in 2/2, the notes are replaced by the next biggest size (8th notes turn into quarter notes, quarters into half notes) and the measures themselves are cut in half (2 beats in a measure instead of 4). If you don't read music, take my word for it that it is much easier to read music when one measure doesn't have 32 notes in it and stretch all the way across the page. \n\nHope that helps. There is a lot more that I typed and then deleted for clarity, so if you need something explained better, just ask and I'll try again.\n\n",
"There isn't, really, but musicians like to pretend there is! It has to do with beat patterns. In 4/4, generally we count **1** 2 *3* 4, where 1 is strong, 3 is medium, and 2 and 4 are weak. However, you still *feel* each beat. All four of them are very clearly there! Sometimes you even put your stresses on the weak beats. In anything even remotely jazzy, for example, the higher percussion goes on 2 and 4. So 1 and 3 are \"down\" beats and 2 and 4 are \"up\" beats, in a sense, with 1 being stronger than 3.\n\nWhen you have 2/2, it's basically the same thing except that beats 2 and 4 aren't really beats. They're, like, half-beats. They're weaker than weak. They get *almost* no emphasis whatsoever, while in 4/4 they get weak emphasis but they get some. So you can *feel* that beats 2 and 4 are there, but you don't actually feel the beats themselves. The conductor counts in 2 instead of in 4, but it may be a subdivided 2. Let me try to give you an example. Count this out loud, keeping the beat constant:\n\n1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 2, 3 4, 1 2, 3 4\n\nNotice the difference between the first two measures and the last two? The first two measures are 4/4 and the last two are 2/2. Same beats, same tempo, but you feel them differently.\n\nNow, there's one teeny little problem with this: composers are very inconsistent. They really just write whatever they feel like. So they can easily write 4/4 when they want the 2/2 feel and vice-versa, and some poor musician or conductor is going to have to figure out which is the right one in any case. Some composers write 2/2 to sound exactly like 2/4. If I write 2/4, I usually want there to only be 2 beats that aren't subdivided like in 2/2. Some conductors actually conduct fast 2/2 in 1 and barely even emphasize beat 3, much less beats 2 and 4! So *really*, it could be anything, but *usually*, it's how I explained it."
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2ox4o8 | does the pirate bay own servers everywhere in the world or how do they manage to jump from one country to another in a single day? | ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ox4o8/eli5_does_the_pirate_bay_own_servers_everywhere/ | {
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2ywa5y | why can't greece, in the event of exiting the euro, fix their currency to the euro value, like argentina did with the dollar in 1991? | In April 1991, Argentina adopted a rigid peg of the peso to the dollar and guaranteed convertibility under this arrangement. That is, the central bank stood by to convert pesos into dollars at the hard peg.
What would be different for Greece if they tried to do something similar? Why would leaving the euro be disastrous for the country then? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ywa5y/eli5_why_cant_greece_in_the_event_of_exiting_the/ | {
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"Because if they tried to fix it to the Euro they would need to buy Euros to affect the transfer and would be bleeding value with every exchange. They wouldn't have enough money to buy the Euros and would need to print it, devaluing an already mostly worthless currency into nothing (which is called \"hyperinflation\" and is what Argentina experienced too). They would go bankrupt almost instantly.\n\nAlternatively if they just tried to peg the value by fiat then they would essentially halt all currency exchange.",
"in order to maintain a peg, there are two main scenarios. In the two scenarios the government must respond in opposite ways:\n\n1. People are buying your currency for the pegged rate. These buyers are pushing up the value of your currency. In order to push it back down to the peg, the government needs to sell the currency. If they want, they can do this by just printing more money and selling the new currency they just created. Since the government can print an unlimited amount of money it can do this indefinitely if it wants to. It is important to note that this is not the scenario Greece is likely to be under if they exit the Euro. \n\n2. People are selling your currency at the pegged rate. These sellers are pushing down the value of your currency. In order to push it back up to the peg, the government needs to buy the currency. This means that they need to sell some other currency and convert it to their own. The government must sell some foreign reserves it is holding. Unlike scenario 1, this cannot be maintained indefinitely if people keep selling the currency. If the selling does not stop, then eventually the government's foreign reserves will run out and it will be unable to maintain the peg. This is the scenario Greece will likely experience if it leaves the Euro.\n\n\nBasically, the Greek government is in tons of debt and has no cash. So, they have very little reserves of foreign currency they can sell in order to prop up the value of the Drachma. If they had the Euros to do that, they would be already be using those Euros to pay off their debt. Since they don't have enough foreign reserves to prop up their currency, it is impossible for Greece to maintain a peg unless it is at an extremely depressed value."
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6ef9wy | why do americans eat ground beef medium rare? | I took my food service course here in Canada and it's illegal to serve ground beef that is not fully cooked. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ef9wy/eli5_why_do_americans_eat_ground_beef_medium_rare/ | {
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"A medium burger or steak is a very specific texture you are going for, where the outside is charred and seared so it holds in all the 'rare' juices... and I'm refering to them as juices rather than blood since it is a protein called myoglobin. \n\nA good rare burger or steak, properly salted, has a wonderful contrast between the 'raw' and 'charred' and the 'crunch' and 'juice'. \n\nThis is coming from a guy who grew up eating everything well done in Mexico but quickly acquired a taste for rare meat once introduced. ",
"That explains a lot about why I cant get a decent burger in Canada. I travel on business up frequently, the chain restaurants in Canada really have shitty food. \n\nE1- > Oh - Because they taste better! ",
"Aside from just preferring the taste, ordering a hamburger medium-rare when possible can be an attempt to force the restaurant to use somewhat better quality and/or fresher meat. \n\nFood service workers have told me a few times that if you order a well done piece of meat, you are sometimes getting the oldest meat they need to get rid of quickly.",
"Most don't. If you try ordering a medium rare burger at McDonald's you might get laughed at or stared at blankly. The only places I've seen burgers medium rare are higher end places, where they will use a different cut of meat, like /u/goingrogueatwork pointed out. ",
"because ***'merica***!!!\n\nAlso, because freshly ground beef (like, on premises ground) as long as it and the grinder are properly handled is as safe to eat as a medium rare steak. And, like a steak, rare beef tastes better to a lot of people. Personally, I am a \"walk it though the kitchen, show it the fire, and put it on a plate\" person myself (actually, I like medium rare. Still pink to red, but definitely want it warm)\n\nThe issue comes in when the cleanliness of the grinding process cannot be controlled or verified and contaminates are allowed to enter the process. In that case, the meat needs to be brought to a safe temperature, which can still be medium rare, if held at that temperature long enough. Problem is, that is a lot more work than a lot of kitchens are willing or able to do, so they just go ahead and cook it to a higher temperature.",
"If you get your ground beef at a Sav-a-Lot or Walmart, you probably don't want to eat it at that temperature. The real danger in eating undercooked meats comes them being contaminated by parasites and bacteria. Budget grocers buy their ground meat from producers who process thousands of animals per day. In this case, one bad apple can really spoil the entire batch when they are all ground together. \n\nIf you go to a middle of the road or high end grocer, they are typically grinding their beef on site, which limits the cross-contamination opportunities from sick or diseased animals. It doesn't insure anything, but the drastically reduces your chances of getting ill. "
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5c32bu | what happens to open and pending law suits on someone who was just elected president? | I'm not entirely sure I know of a case where a president who got elected has law suits against him and his company. Not trying to incite anything, but genuinely curious | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5c32bu/eli5_what_happens_to_open_and_pending_law_suits/ | {
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"Clinton v. Jones was a supreme court decision that made it clear the president had no immunity.",
"Some people consider _URL_0_ to be the first and definitive case of the limits of the President's and the executive branch's immunity from lawsuits. Although the case was decided in favor of the executive branch, the Supreme Court established that it had the authority to decide such cases.\n\nI realize this doesn't really answer your question (which is a little different), but this is the landmark case that allows the President to be sued."
]
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison"
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1f6vu8 | the derivatives market, and why so many people are afraid that it will "collapse." | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1f6vu8/eli5the_derivatives_market_and_why_so_many_people/ | {
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"Well, the question has been answered already, but I have something to add. I know you didn't mention fear of derivatives in general and instead mentioned fear of collapse, but I think this bit is relevant to understanding derivatives from a broad angle.\n\nIn regards to the fear of derivatives, derivatives themselves aren't inherently dangerous or malicious. As explained in other comments, they're excellent hedging tools to offset potential losses due to a commodity's price fluctuations (for one). \n\nPart of the fear of derivatives is part of the market has such exotic derivatives that very few people are even able to decipher how the derivative works. Financial engineers have jobs to create new ways to make money and ridiculously complex derivatives are the answer in a lot of cases. Again, these aren't inherently evil or anything, but there's a certain bit of understandable suspicion about an investment with such complexity that only the creator and counterparty understand fully how it works (from a regulatory perspective especially, when there are a lot of regulations placed on what types of investments can be made by different types of firms). I linked a Wikipedia article below that touches on what exotic derivatives are.\n\n_URL_0_"
]
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_derivatives"
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49pexq | how are the iq's of historical figures measured? | Recently, I watched a video on a man named Chris Lagan with an IQ of 200. To put his IQ into perspective, they compared his IQ to other notable, historical figures like Newton (who supposedly had an IQ of 190).
Anyways, how did they measure this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49pexq/eli5how_are_the_iqs_of_historical_figures_measured/ | {
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"I guess that from your question you understand that it's nonsense; there is no way to measure Newton's IQ, and that's not even debating how useless high IQ numbers are. What's even more surprising is that a person who claims to be very intelligent would mention it as a fact.",
"There is no way to measure a dead person's IQ as accurately as you can measure it in a living person, but there are certain \"historometric\" methods that you can use to make an estimation that is better than a total guess. These methods can vary, as does their quality. The basis of these methods is to measure things about the person that we know to be true, and which we know relate to IQ. One of these studies from about 10 years ago estimated the IQs of American presidents. They used information like the educational attainment, writing complexity, etc. They even looked at the number of hobbies the presidents had, which is an indicator of the personality dimension \"openness to experience,\" which correlates moderately with IQ.\n\nThe results of these studies do not necessarily produce data that have external validity. That is, they found, for example, that President Harding had an IQ of about 108. This score doesn't necessarily allow you to compare Harding to a person with a directly-measured IQ of 108, but it allows you to say that he was probably not quite as intelligent as President GW Bush, who had an estimated IQ of around 110. "
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1zmmsj | why is american music so popular in other countries, but not the other way around? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zmmsj/eli5_why_is_american_music_so_popular_in_other/ | {
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"This is isn't really true. AFAIK most of the music played in the US is either R & B or people just say \"bands\" without any genre modifier, which I assume must mean something like \"hard rock bands\". I would argue that Europe is much more electronic music oriented. R & B definitely bores people here. \n\nIf you look at the history of electronic music, techno was invented in Detroit and house in Chicago but did not get popular. Philadelphian or Pennsylvania (forgot which oe´ne) DJ Josh Wink said around 1994 whenever he comes to Europe he is treated like a star, back in Penn nobody has any idea who is he or what is this duff-duff-duff music. Techno, house, \"rave\" got cultivated for 10-12 years in the UK and Germany, and then imported back to the US after 2000 and AFAIK now it enjoys a limited popularity. Bands still seem more popular.\n\nAs for rock or \"band music\", American blues etc. influenced The Beatles. Then this happened: _URL_0_\n\nNote: half of the old time big bands the world thinks are all American, are in fact British. The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin Black Sabbath, AC/DC etc. etc. are all British. Slash of G'N'R fame too. (Interestingly, the vast majority of famous British musicians are English. Can anyone name a world famous Welsh rocker?)",
"Oppan gangam style?",
"pretty, sure the Beatles, The Who, Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols are some pretty big bands that were not from America",
"English Language: English is currently an international trade language. Therefore it is understood by more audiences.\n\nVaried and Individualistic Culture: America has more distinct cultural groups to cultivate different musical styles. America culture is more individualistic, which means artists experiment with new styles more frequently.\n\nLots of Money and Capitalism: America has a lot of money, meaning American artists enjoy home field advantage in the marketplace. America is also capitalistic, meaning that sales are reinvested in producing more music and marketing American music in other countries.\n\nTechnology: Inventions from Thomas Edison, Westinghouse, RCA, Bell Labs as well as inventors who later immigrated to the United States gave broad distribution of American music a head start through recording and transmission equipment innovations.",
"The three largest music labels out there are American: \n\n1. Sony Music (Yes, I know Sony is a Japanese company, but Sony Music is based in NYC).\n2. Warner Music Group\n3. Universal Music Group\n\nIt's easy for them to use their resources to promote their clients into markets beyond the US. It is less easy for international labels to make their way into the US market. \n\nAlso, British music has been incredibly influential in Rock and metal music, so one doesn't necessary think of the Who or Rolling Stones or Black Sabbath as \"international music.\""
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5rfgc2 | why do we gain weight faster on a daily 500-calorie surplus and lose weight slower on a daily 500-calorie deficit? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rfgc2/eli5_why_do_we_gain_weight_faster_on_a_daily/ | {
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"You don't. For every 3500 calorie surplus, you gain one pound. For every 3500 calorie deficit, you loose one pound. So, if you have a 500 calorie surplus every day for a week, you will gain exactly one pound (500 calories * 7 days = 3500 calories total). The same math works for a 500 calorie deficit.\n\nIf someone is not seeing this, one of two things are probably happening:\n\n1) Their weight is fluctuating due to water weight. Among other things, the amount of salt you eat can greatly affect this. You really need to look at long term loss to completely smooth out these fluctuations.\n\n2) They've miscalculated what their base metabolic rate is and/or miscalculated how many calories were burned from exercise. Perhaps their metabolic rate is not as high as they think it is. Let's imagine they overestimated by 400... When they think they've finished the day with a 500 calorie deficit, maybe it was actually just a 100 calorie deficit. Likewise, when they think they've finished with a 500 calorie surplus, perhaps it's a 900 calorie surplus. ",
"Your digestive system is not 100% efficient. If you eat fewer calories, your digestive system increases its efficiency to pull more calories from the food you eat. \n\nAs a crude example, if your digestive system normally works at 66% efficiency, then it pulls 800 calories out of every 1200 you eat. If you diet and eat only 1000 calories, you're body needs more than your normal efficiency will provide, so the efficiency may go up to, say, 80%, and you still pull 800 calories out of the food you ate. Thus, no weight loss, even though you ate less calories.\n\nOn the other hand, if you eat 200 more calories, for a total of 1400, your body pulls out 1400*.66=~933 calories. So you gain weight.\n"
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770i3w | why is maligant tumour always painless? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/770i3w/eli5_why_is_maligant_tumour_always_painless/ | {
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"Malignant tumors are not always painless, however, many cancers lead to lymphadenopathy, or growth/swelling of lymph nodes, when the tumor invades the lymphatic system (a key component of your immune system). Lymphadenopathy can also be seen in infectious diseases like mono, but the accompanying inflammation that occurs as the body attempts to fight the disease can cause pain, whereas many malignancies do not elicit the same effect."
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36ud01 | why doesn't the us treat the nsa spying the same way as watergate? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36ud01/eli5_why_doesnt_the_us_treat_the_nsa_spying_the/ | {
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"Because its completely different. In simple terms watergate was a president illegally wire tapping a political opponent. There was no pretense of legality. It was not condoned by any government agency, it was not some huge program, and it was clearly illegal. No matter what reddit thinks there is SOME legal justification for the NSA programs. It has been approved by presidents and attorney generals, and is an absolutely massive program conducted by multiple agencies. Now it may well be unconstitutional, and if the supreme court rules against it, it will be partially or fully shutdown. But at the end of the day it is a government program not a criminal conspiracy. When the supreme court ruled the Agricultural adjustment act unconstitutional it got shut down, they didn't cart FDR off to prison. ",
"Watergate was a crime. While the NSA is completely legal.\n\nAnd by completely, I mean completely. What they do to foreigners (spying on them) is their entire job. It's what they're paid by Congress to do. Every nation has a signal intelligence program like this.\n\nFurthermore, what they do to Americans is the equivalent of reading the outsides of their mail envelopes. (And using subpoenas to get this information from phone companies.) Plenty of lawyers do exactly the same thing. In fact, in the old movie \"Clueless\", the lawyer father is in a lawsuit going through subpoenaed phone records.\n\nIf the Supreme Court decides that mass subpoenas of public information is an intrusive search, then it will stop being legal. But it isn't even close to being Watergate.\n"
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6zlkki | why is watching things move in unison more satisfying than when they move normally? | For example, if you watch a bunch of metronomes ticking and they end up ticking in synchronisation it's just more pleasant. Why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6zlkki/eli5_why_is_watching_things_move_in_unison_more/ | {
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"Our brains just love patterns, and our pleasure mechanisms reward us for discovering interesting things.\n\nIt's very similar to how we program AIs, really: you have a goal to reach, which is to notice patterns in the world, in order to get information from them that can help you survive, and in order to \"motivate\" you, we give you an indication of when you get it right, which is an actual chemical reward in the case of us humans. \n\nNow, we don't really totally understand how these things work yet, but these videos are tailored basically to hack those reward mechanisms. "
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419hpz | if someone was born in a territory that was not yet owned by the u.s, once the u.s buys that territory and makes it a state would people living there be full u.s citizens? | For example, once Hawaii was bought do all the residents of that territory become U.S citizens or do they have to go through the naturalization process? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/419hpz/eli5if_someone_was_born_in_a_territory_that_was/ | {
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"That would depend on the wording of the Organic Act passed by Congress. In the case of Hawaii, for example, everyone living there before August 12, 1898 became a citizen.",
"This [CGP Grey video](_URL_0_) talks about citizens in US territories that could help you out."
]
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cgugxb | why do some deserts have cracks on the ground? | Does it involve changes in temperature? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cgugxb/eli5_why_do_some_deserts_have_cracks_on_the_ground/ | {
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"The sand in deserts absorbs water then as the mud dries it shrinks and the edges curl up",
"This is called desiccation. Deserts are pretty varied environments, and one such environment are large flat plains which are kind of like evaporation basins. Now, sand and clay particles aren't perfectly shaped. When you pack them together, they leave air spaces between them, kind of like balls in a ball pit. These air spaces can collect water, and when they do the water pushes the particles apart slightly, causing the sand basin to take up more space. Then, the water evaporates slowly, causing the spaces between particles to shrink. The particles move closer to one another, and they don't do so evenly due to electrostatic forces (basically, very small particles of rock, such as sand and clay particles, have a tendency to stick slightly to other particles) which causes the formation of cracks and lumps rather than an even bed of sand."
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25fes3 | why don't progress bars move at an even pace? | I understand download speeds change based on bandwidth available etc, but what about things such as defraging, deleting large files, or installing a game off a CD (not that anyone does that anymore)?
Furthermore, why can it take so long to determine the time until completion? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25fes3/eli5_why_dont_progress_bars_move_at_an_even_pace/ | {
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"text": [
"Simply because it's impossible to predict the future. Computers can only guess how long something will take based on how fast it's going right now, but if that changes, so does the estimate."
]
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3nb56k | why is planned parenthood forced to participate in a hearing? | I guess what I'm really asking is who and how or what is the authority that forces them to actually sit and answer questions? Are they under arrest? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nb56k/eli5_why_is_planned_parenthood_forced_to/ | {
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"text": [
"Planned Parenthood is a private organization that receives money from the government for providing a public good. They stand accused of working against the public good, so if they want to continue receiving benefits, they have to answer to allegations.",
"Congress has the right to compel people to appear before them based on a law they passed in the 1930s. If you don't appear or if you appear and refuse to respond (unless you utilize your 5th amendment rights) or if you appear and lie or you refuse to give documentation requested, you can be found in contempt of congress and given a 12 month prison sentence."
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3bimew | why do polarizing issues seem to turn so many people into hypocrites? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bimew/eli5why_do_polarizing_issues_seem_to_turn_so_many/ | {
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"Here are the examples that go along with the original post:\n\n\n**The Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriages last week:**\n\n\nChristians (whom I would assume follow the Bible, including all the verses about loving others) have such hateful posts about the same-sex marriage decision (Search twitter for \"Supreme Court Sin\" for an example).\n\n\nI have seen so many posts with the hashtag #lovewins hating and mocking their opponents (Search twitter for \"#lovewins homophobes\" for an example).\n\n\n**Tim Tebow/Caitlyn Jenner:**\n\n\n This one cracked me up and irked me at the same time. There were 4 people (that I was able to find) on my Facebook timeline that were involved with hypocritical posts about Tim Tebow and Caitlyn Jenner. When Tim Tebow was in the national news a lot, there were 2 people who had many posts about Tim Tebow needing to keep his beliefs to himself, and 2 people who praised him for standing up for his beliefs. When Caitlyn Jenner was in the news recently, there were a lot of posts on my Facebook timeline, and I looked back through their post history and found that 4 of the people commenting about Jenner also commented about Tebow. The 2 who praised Tebow were blasting Jenner for the announcement, and the 2 who said that Tebow should keep his beliefs to himself said the exact opposite of Jenner.\n\n\nI'm not taking sides or trying to get people to defend either side in the examples above. I am using these examples to illustrate that people tend to make hypocrites of themselves when defending a hot topic.\n\n\nI also realize that not all Christians are posting hate about the Supreme Court decision and not all #lovewins users are posting hate - my intent is not to lump people into groups.\n\n\nWhy do people throw logic out the window when battling about a hot topic?"
]
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3ghs5f | why can't we see a fan blade that is moving really fast? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ghs5f/eli5_why_cant_we_see_a_fan_blade_that_is_moving/ | {
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"Your retina actually acts a lot like a continuously refreshing camera sensor chip. The retina collects light information and when it hits it sends that information to the brain, processing isn't light speed so your brain interprets the blade as being multiple places at once, kind of, and also computes information from what is behind the blade as well. \n\nThe faster it goes, the more places it is when your brain processes the information, and the less visible it is, and the more visible the objects behind it are. "
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42j85o | if the minimum wage is increased to $15 what would stop businesses from just charging us more accordingly? | When minimum wage in my home state of Nebraska went from $8.25 to $9 on January 1st at my job (where I make min wage) they hiked prices by a few cents on every item to make up for it. If minimum wage goes up and prices go up just as much, what point would it serve for min wage to change at all? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42j85o/eli5_if_the_minimum_wage_is_increased_to_15_what/ | {
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" > ELI5: If the minimum wage is increased to $15 what would stop businesses from just charging us more accordingly?\n\nCompetition.\n\nWages are only a small part of costs, and many large companies have huge profit margins that could easily accommodate higher wages without raising prices while still making a profit.\n\nConsider that companies like costco pay an average wage of $21 to their employees. And they have some of the lowest prices around.\n\n > If minimum wage goes up and prices go up just as much,\n\nIf they did go up. The only prices that would go up were the ones most affected by minimum wages. Meaning no everyone would have more money, just the poorest. Prices wouldn't need to go up on everything.",
"Some businesses would have to raise prices to a level that most people would not pay. If a McD's hamburger went up to $3.50 each, you wouldn't bother going there any more. ",
"Businesses can't set prices at whatever they like. If the prices go up too much, people will stop buying their products. The extent to which demand for the product shifts due to changes in its price is called *elasticity of demand*. Some goods' demand is very elastic, like luxury products--if the luxury is too expensive, people will just make do without.\n\nSo the minimum wage will not be \"cancelled out\" by an increase in prices. We can expect prices to go up somewhat, particularly in sectors with mostly minimum-wage employees, but experience shows that usually the effect of an increased minimum wage is higher real wages for the employees, with more modest gains for people earning a low wage but above the minimum, and the cost being borne primarily by the middle and upper class.",
"Businesses use supply and demand analysis to determine the price to set for optimum profits. An increase in minimum wage would not increase the optimum price by so much that the wage increase becomes pointless.\n\n Also, so long as the value an employee produces for the company is greater than minimum wage, an increase in minimum wage will not cause a decrease in jobs.\n\nGenerally, prices increase very slightly (as low-end income people will have a bit more disposable income, increasing demand in some markets), and the guys at the top who were underpaying their workers take a hit to their profits.",
"Increasing the minimum wage increases the buying power of the poorest workers. If prices only go up a few cents on everything, the net effect is less poverty, and slightly less income inequality (because some of those profits going to business owners will be paid to employees instead). \n\nIf you're suddenly making 30% more and prices go up by 10%, you're doing better off unless you lose your job. ",
"I have a secondary job at a \"mom and pop\" family owned retail gift shop business. They maybe do $300,000 in gross sales annually. I work there because I know the family for the last 20 years. They pay me $12.00 an hour because that is what they can afford. $15.00 an hour would put them out of business. People would not buy their goods at higher prices when there are places like Costco and Walmart in this world.\n\nWhat none of you are taking into consideration the multitude of small businesses that would go out of business because you are here preaching that since Costco can absorb an increase of minimum wage it should be a national increase. You would put millions of workers out of work due to these increases posed against businesses that can barely afford it as it is now."
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4595y1 | how come wikipedia has very reliable information although anyone can edit pages? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4595y1/eli5_how_come_wikipedia_has_very_reliable/ | {
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"With so many people keeping an eye on the entries, the bogus information tends to get removed pretty quick. For everyone putting up false information there are many many who are waiting to correct it. \n\n",
"Okay, lets pretend you have a niche area of information, whether it's popular or not, and you see that there isn't enough publicly available information. Some of those people will feel obligated to educate others on this subject.\n\nAlternatively, if you know something is blatantly false or ambiguous, wouldn't you correct it? Wikipedia articles are generally read by people 1) interested in the subject or 2) have to research a subject. Some of the people interested in a subject may be versed enough to see inconsistencies and false information, and actively edit it to remove false information. This happens on a daily basis, sometimes hundreds of times per day for certain pages and topics. Incorrect information rarely lasts long on Wikipedia.",
"Many articles are vandalized, especially on controversial topics and there are mistakes that can stay for a while but most of them are quickly repaired.\n\nFor a more complete view on the subject, [there's a thourough article on Wikipedia about its reliability.](_URL_0_) \n\n*edit: spelling*",
"I love it when someone sneaks something in. A while back I was reading about the race car driver \"Fireball Roberts\" and his tragic death on the race track where his car was consumed in flames. Someone sneaked in this phrase in the middle of the text: \"The irony of being nicknamed Fireball was not lost on anyone.\" It remained there for a few days.",
"_URL_0_\n\n\nI came across it yesterday, it is a user account on Wikipedia that is actually a computer program put in place by Wikipedia. It gets told when someone makes a change to any wiki page and determines if it is vandalism! Apparently it currently fixes 55% of all human generated vandalism to wiki pages.\n \nThought you might find it interesting ",
"In short, because of [Cunninghams Law](_URL_0_), which says \"The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer.\"\n\nPeople are more eager to correct mistakes than they are to intentionally post bad information. So that means *if* something is posted incorrectly, it's most likely an accident, and anyone who recognizes it's incorrect is likely to correct it."
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273lje | what's the difference between "mac" (as in macarthur) and "mc" (as in mcdonald)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/273lje/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_mac_as_in/ | {
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"'Mc' is just an abbreviation of 'Mac'. That's it.",
"They are just different ways people can spell their names, for instance my last name is McArdle, where it was once spelt and can still be found as MacArdghail.",
"Don't let people tell you one's Scottish and one's Irish. There's no difference, \"Mc\" is just a shorter version."
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6avbxl | why are replays on sports so blurry? | We can capture a bullet in mid flight but when I watch baseball or football replays they are always blurry. Can't they use the same high frame rate that people doing high speed motion capture use? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6avbxl/eli5_why_are_replays_on_sports_so_blurry/ | {
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" > Can't they use the same high frame rate that people doing high speed motion capture use?\n\nNo. Those special cameras require special high intensity lights that would blind any athlete on the field. Also, they can only record like 1 second of footage, so you can't have them going the entire time. I think the slow mo guys have behind the scenes stuff about getting their shots. Look at all of the crazy lights and equipment they need to record 1 second of something that is planned."
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2g4dn4 | during the ice age, how did glaciers travel hundreds of miles over land? | I get how glaciers can move down mountains, but how could a mile thick sheet of ice move over more or less level land? I remember seeing a boulder in Northampton, MA, with a sign on it that said it had been transported from Canada by a glacier. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g4dn4/eli5_during_the_ice_age_how_did_glaciers_travel/ | {
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"Very very slowly ",
"How can a river flow over more or less level land? It's the same principle, just that glacier water is slower.",
"From my understanding:\nGlaciers exist where the snowfall is greater than the snowmelt. Over time, they grow into the giant ice/snow walls we see some places around the world. As more snow falls on the top, the downward pressure creates cracks, fissures, etc in the underneath. Some of those collapse, others deform, the snow and ice settle. Gradually this results in movement outward. In places where there are mountains or other landforms, the ice will flow around or over. In places where the ice is unrestrained, it will expand outward in all direction, like on the polar ice caps. \n\nThis happens over centuries with occasional dramatic events."
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fzma0p | how come music in tik tok videos don't have to deal with copyright the same way youtube videos do? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fzma0p/eli5_how_come_music_in_tik_tok_videos_dont_have/ | {
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"The legality is the same. The question is: do they care about it, are other companies paying attention, and can TikTok's hand be forced?\n\nGoogle doesn't take the measures they do because they want to, but because they're forced to by the legal system. TikTok, being Chinese may care much less about what US copyright holders want.\n\nAlso, Google is a much bigger target. It always takes time for agencies, organizations and such to catch up with new systems. The big movie studios and such probably keep an eye on Youtube, but may not yet have systems to keep watch on TikTok."
]
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15mcce | what is league of legends, how is it similar to awesomenauts, and why does it have a reputation of being hostile to new players? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15mcce/what_is_league_of_legends_how_is_it_similar_to/ | {
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"League of Legends and Awesomenauts can both be described as MOBA games, which are team games where the goal of each team is to destroy the other team's base. The bases are located at either end of several lanes protected by turrets that shoot enemies within range, and by computer controlled creatures that try to walk from one base to the other, attacking anything in the way. Awesomenauts does this in side-scrolling fashion, with one base on the left and one on the right, while League of Legends is three-dimensional, and from a top down perspective. In all, the two games have similar goals and ideas, but Awesomenauts is a bit more simplified.\n\nAs to why it is known as hostile to new players, think for a second about most team games. In most games, if you perform poorly the other team can gain points that help them win. However, your team mates can still try to stop them even if you fail. In League of Legends, performing poorly also makes your opponents stronger, and harder for your teammates to stop. One bad player on a team could make it impossible for the others to win, so people tend to get very angry if they think someone on their team is worse than they are.",
"I can't explain the first part of how is it similar to awesomenauts but I can shed some light onto the second part.\n\nLeague is a competitive game and some people take it really seriously, even at low levels. Since each team comprises of 5 players you need to rely on teamwork (for the most part to win). This tends to create a hostile attitude to people who aren't 'holding up their end. \n\nThere is also a very ridged meta game. For example, I've had people go AFK or feed (Die on purpose to the enemy team to give them gold) because me and a friend didn't want to play a certain role (I, crazily enough, like to play games for fun) and that's apparently frowned upon even in unranked solo queue. This used to be a high level issue but due to it's size even new players are expected to follow this. \n\nSmurfs are another reason. A smurf is someone who has a lot of experience with the game and creates a new account to be matched against newbies. When I started (Just after beta) this wasn't an issue but apparently it's pretty bad now and there tends to be a few in each game which makes it damn hard for new players to do well.\n\nI've played around 2000 games of league since I started and I've recently stopped playing because the community (in game, the forums aren't too bad) are full of people who rage and it's just not a fun environment to be in.\n\nTL:DR - A mix of highly competitive gameplay, semi-steep learning curve and smurfs. Oh, and it's always a case of your team sucks and not that the other team is better. "
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99ob9u | why do motorcycles have gears in this order? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/99ob9u/eli5_why_do_motorcycles_have_gears_in_this_order/ | {
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"While driving, you rarely need neutral, so making it easy to find isn't important. By putting 1st gear at the bottom, you can always easily find it when you come to a stop by shifting all the way to the bottom. Sure, with the old pattern, you could shift all the way down then one up, but that just adds a step. ",
"From learning how to ride a dirtbike, 1 down, 4 up stuck with me. I never really thought about the why though. But it works well. I think its just so first is easy to find when you need it. "
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23iacf | how do "are you a robot" codes work? | Like when you sign up for something, you have 2 distorted/blurred images of numbers or letters, and they tell you to type in what you see. How does that work? How is it a security measure? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23iacf/eli5_how_do_are_you_a_robot_codes_work/ | {
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"These images are called \"captchas\". They make it difficult for automated scripts to sign up or sign in to do whatever malicious practices they want to do. A bot will have problems reading the captcha, and thus is not able to log in or sign up.",
"they are called captcha's its not so much a security measure it just stops bots creating false accounts because they cannot read the image as it is not in a plain text format. ",
"One thing robots are not very good at yet is analysing pictures and reading whatever text might appear in these pictures. This is especially true when the characters are warped and some random shapes and lines are added into the mix. So the basic idea behind CAPTCHAs is simple: if you can correctly read the characters, chances are you're a human.",
"It's very hard to make a machine interpret something. Human brain excels at that kind of stuff, especially recognizing patterns.\n\nA computer can be taught that a certain arrangement of pixels means \"n\", but if you stretch and twist the letter the program would have to recognize and revert the distortions which is very hard.\n\nThat means that you can't write a bot/script to perform actions which require a captcha.",
"The \"captcha\" (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) were inspired by Alan Turing (hence his name in \"captcha\", a really smart guy who figured out what computers were good at/not good at. Basically, Turing figured out that computers are very bad at recognizing things that are CLOSE to what they are looking for. The reason that the letters are distorted/blurred is because computers have lots of trouble reading things that aren't actually letters. Humans, on the other hand, are great at this stuff! For example, barely any two people have the same handwriting. Yet, humans are able to read almost ANY person's handwriting, provided it's in the same language. The exact same principle is applied here, as the numbers/letters work much like somebody's handwriting: Not perfect, but legible.\n\nTL;DR: Computers suck at reading handwriting, but humans rock at it!"
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3mc8k4 | why do people use terms like right-wingers, left-wingers, liberals, and conservatives instead of republican/democrat? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mc8k4/eli5_why_do_people_use_terms_like_rightwingers/ | {
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"Demo/Repub are specific parties, while the political spectrum is an idea. The parties fall somewhere on the spectrum. Left to right:\n\nLiberal (Communism, Socialism) --- Democrat --- Moderate --- Republican --- (Fascism, Nationalism) Conservative",
"Theyre not the same thing. \n\nRight wing and left wing are pretty similar to democrat / republican, left wing being democrat, right wing being republican.\n\nLiberal tends to mean you take a liberal understanding of the constitution. You treat it more like a living document that can be changed and have an open ended view of some of the things it says. Conservative on the other hand would generally believe that it is written in stone. They say changes shouldnt be made to it. \n\nThere are conservative democrats who support democratic party ideals, yet who believe the constitution is pretty much in stone, and there are liberal republicans who would like to rewrite half the constitution to fit their agenda.\n\nConservative is likely one who doesnt want things to change. In a lot of cases, thats how republicans are. They dont want gay marriage legalized, they dont want drugs legalized, they dont want any of this new generations stuff to come about and change the way theyve been living and doing business their whole life.\n\nYoung people are often the ones coming up into an old system and theyre the ones who have a problem with it and want to change it. As it stands, democratic ideals are currently the ones that say things like lets legalize gay marriage, etc. Thats what the younger people want, so a lot of younger people (not all) are generally left leaning or democrats. \n\nIt is possible to be a right leaning democrat. That would mean in general, you see yourself as a democrat, but you also agree with a few republic issues.\n\nWhen you explain it, especially when you read that last sentence, you start to realize why the two party system is absurd. The idea that a person is going to fit into one of two categories with every single belief is stupid. Politics would be much better if we could all just ignore parties and look at everyone as an independent. \n\nFrom the perspective of a candidate though, having a party is really sort of essential. A democratic candidate virtually guarantees themselves the votes of every democrat out there. The party system hurts us as voters since it forces us to lean one way or the other and eliminates independent candidates from serious runs ",
"Republican and Democrat are essentially the national clubs. Left-wing and liberal are basically synonymous just like right-wing and conservative are synonymous. If you think of political views as a linear scale you can say someone who is left wing is liberal, someone who is in the middle is centrist and someone who is right wing is conservative.\n\nNot everyone wants to be identified by a party. For example, I have conservative fiscal views, but I'm socially liberal. I don't want to be classified into either bucket. I've voted for Democrats and Republicans.\n\nThink of it as religion. You can be religious without wanting to join a church and become part of their club.",
"Because while Europe and the UK have right- and left-wingers, they don't have Democrats or Republicans. The world is bigger than you seem to think. For that matter, here in the American South, there are right-wing Democrats, known as \"Blue Dogs.\" The Democratic Party is traditionally a big tent."
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1bs9lw | what is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bs9lw/eli5what_is_a_randomized_doubleblind/ | {
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"Let's say we wanted to do an experiment to see whether giving people 1000mg of Vitamin C every day for a month would improve their math performance. To do such an experiment, we would have two conditions, an Experimental condition in which subjects will receive a pill containing 1000mg of Vitamin C for a month and a Control condition in which people will receive a placebo pill that contains no Vitamin C (but people in the placebo condition will be lied to, and told they are also receiving 1000mg of Vitamin C, even though they are not). That is what it means to have a placebo control: one of the conditions in the experiment is a placebo condition meaning that it does not contain the treatment we are testing. \n\nFor the experiment to be randomized, it means that if we want to have 20 people in the Experimental condition and 20 people in the Control condition, each of the 40 people who are going to be in the experiment must have an equally likely chance to be in the Experimental or the Control condition. \n\nFor the experiment to be Double-Blind it means that neither the subjects in the experiment nor anybody having contact with the subjects knows which condition the subjects are in. To make our experiment double blind, we will have somebody prepare bottles that contain the pills that the subjects are supposed to consume that month. To make it randomized, our bottle preparer will flip a coin before preparing each bottle, and put Vit. C pills in a subject's bottle if the coin comes up heads and put Placebo pills in a subject's bottle if the coin comes up tails. The bottle will then be given to another person (who will not know whether the bottle contains Vit. C. pills or Placebo pills) who will actually deliver the bottle to the subject and give the subject the math test at the end of the month. All subjects will be told they are receiving Vit. C pills even though only half of them are. The double blind procedure prevents the researcher from giving the subject verbal or body language cues that might let them know which condition they are in.\n\nAfter the subjects take their pills for a month, we will give all the subjects a math test. If the average score on the math test for the Vit. C group is statistically significantly higher than the avg. math test score for the Placebo group, it provides good evidence (indeed, a well controlled experiment can be considered the best possible evidence) that taking 1000mg of Vit. C for a month improves people's math performance.",
"You are a scientist, you need to test a treatment (X) to see its efficacy to see if you can give it to sick people. In order to do that, you must test it out in the most unbiased fool-proof manner we have come up with, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment.\n\nPLACEBO CONTROLLED: \nyou're going to have to test the treatment X against \"doing nothing\" to see how much of an improvement it provides over \"doing nothing\". For that, you are going to compare two groups of people. group A is going to be administered the treatment you're testing, group B is going to get placebo (\"do nothing\").\nNote: for some studies, especially long ones, it is unethical to treat some conditions with placebo, in this case, we'll test out the treatment X with current methods of treating the patients. Group A still gets X, but group B will get the treatment we already have.\n\nRANDOMIZED:\nYou have 30 people (fictional number) to allocate into two groups, how are you going to divide them up? \nwhy no putting old ones in one and young and the other, or females in one, and males the other? if you did so, when it is time to interpret the results, if the results differ from group A and B, you wouldn't be able to tell if the treatment X was the \"source\" of that difference, or if it was something to do with the intrinsic reason you divided them. i.e. maybe women get better spontaneously, and them getting better had nothing to do with fact they got treatment X.\nin order to make sure there are no other \"difference inducing\" qualities to each group, especially some that couldn't be anticipated, the 30 people are divided into either group A or B, and that's usually done by a computer.\n\nDOUBLE BLIND:\nYou now have two groups of fifteen people that are going to be compared post-treatment, but first they have to be treated. Here we'll assume you're the one giving the treatment. A person, one who won't be giving the drugs to either groups, chooses which group gets which treatment, either placebo or your treatment X, only one per group. He won't tell you which is which and will make sure to make either treatment undistinguishable to you while you administer the drug. While you give the treatment, you will know if a person is in group A or B, and give the drug that that other guy told you that group is getting. All you know is \"that person is group A, so he gets the treatment that that guy put in the \"group A\" box\" , but you won't know the nature of that treatment. In short: while you treat, you know a person's group and give the treatment for that group, but you don't know what's in that pill. But all the people from the same group get the same treatment.\nWe call this DOUBLE BLIND because: 1 the patient doesn't know what treatment she's getting (single blind), 2 the person giving the treatment doesn't know what treatment she's giving (\"second blind\" - > double blind)\n\nThe person giving the treatment (you) will collect the data during, the treatment, then analyse the difference between group A and B to see if there's any difference. When you're done comparing, it is revealed to you which group got which treatment, you'll then know which group, A or B, got the placebo. Once you know which group got which treatment, you'll be able to start interpreting the data and see if the difference between the two groups are the result from the treatment X.\n"
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4fn2kq | is it possible for me to satisfy myself, using first principles and no specialist equipment, that the earth is a sphere? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fn2kq/eli5_is_it_possible_for_me_to_satisfy_myself/ | {
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"Aristotle did it and described his reasoning in *De Caelo* over 2000 years ago. So yes, you can do it too. You could also follow in Eratosthenes' footsteps and calculate the vital statistics of the Earth as well. It's just math.",
"If you watch a ship sail away, you'll notice that it disappears from the bottom up, instead of shrinking to a dot. This indicates that the surface of the Earth is curved. Since this effect happens everywhere and in all directions, the Earth is spherical.",
"_URL_0_\n\nAbove is a photograph posted to /r/funny in January that shows the moon being \"upside down\" in New Zealand.\n\nThe original proof for the curvature of the earth involved measuring shadows in a well at known times, at different places on the globe.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nHere is an explanation for how to do something similar: to watch the sunset over the ocean while standing then while laying down. The change in height allows you to measure the curvature.\n\nThe law of gravity and our observation of spherical planets and stars gives a pretty good idea that the earth must be spherical. Gravity is an attractive force and with no other forces interfering will product spherical bodies."
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1o4czv | who benefits from class-action lawsuits. | I just heard about a class-action lawsuit against TGI Friday's for using cheap liquor in their drinks when it was advertised that a fancier/more expensive liquor was being used. Who would benefit from a class-action lawsuit like that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o4czv/eli5_who_benefits_from_classaction_lawsuits/ | {
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"It depends on the lawsuit. In any case, lawyers will take anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 the payout as fees, so more than likely, they will make out best.\n\nFor things like that, the payout is small for each person, but not all claims are like that. Many are larger, and there are cases in history where the people made out with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars each, such as the famous \"Erin Brockovich\" case against PG & E.\n\nI personally have gotten $80 from a class action suit against Skechers, basically the cost of two pair of shoes, for misleading claims. I also got $40 from General Mills where they misrepresented something having to do with whole grains in their cereal.",
"You can argue that everyone benefits from the culprit being punished. It may be a deterrent for others to follow suit.",
"Lawyers usually benefit the most financially. They get rich off it. I use to think how ridiculous they are. However long term, they often stop abuse of large corporations, such as when a drug causes side effects the company knew about but hid under the carpet. Some cases really are bullshit where the company did something illegal and the damage is minute per person but adds up big. I think corporate lawyers are shit heads for the most part, they drive up the cost of everything with frivolous litigation of other companies. If you can't win in the marketplace fairly, try the courts or be a patent troll.",
"Literally everyone involved benefits from a class-action lawsuit:\n\n* Lawyers get paid well for their work\n\n* The original plaintiffs who took it to court in the first place get a fair amount for the effort they took\n\n* Other members of the class, who probably wouldn't have bothered to do anything about it anyway, get a small amount; probably not as much as they lost in the first place, but more than they would have gotten if the suit hadn't been filed in the first place\n\n* The company defending the suit, if they settle, gets indemnity against further action. They don't have to worry about needing to respond to millions of $5 lawsuits; they can just pay $5 million now and be done with it for good; what's more, members of the class (the group of people who were injured) can typically only exclude themselves from the suit (and protect their right to sue individually) by providing specific personal information, so the company has a list of who might still want to sue them at some point in the future.\n\nEveryone wins."
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a3urcl | why do english speakers say “uhm” to fill gaps? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a3urcl/eli5_why_do_english_speakers_say_uhm_to_fill_gaps/ | {
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"It has to do with us thinking and filling in that gap. A lot of people don’t want just silence so they’ll say uhm or uh while thinking ",
"It's called a hesitation noise, and many other languages have them. It's a natural part of casual speech.",
"Yeah, in German It's 'na ya'. You'll notice that posh english speakers dont do ums, they instead talk more slowly and deliberately to avoid them.\n\n This is because saying 'um' can sounds like you haven't thought/prepared. Speaking more slowly giving you time to plan ahead without sounding like you don't have a clue."
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3v3pod | how to pick the best tasting wine. | I just want to like wine so badly, but have no clue what's good or how to tell what's good. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3v3pod/eli5_how_to_pick_the_best_tasting_wine/ | {
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"Taste it. \n \nSeriously. The only way to be sure you'll enjoy it, is to try it. Don't be fooled by labels, etc. \n \n_URL_0_ \n \nEven the 'experts' who thought French wines were the best were shown that it's really about taste, not heritage. (Not saying these don't play parts in a 'good' wine, but taste is king.)"
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5ykouo | why are there different scents to the time of day? like morning has its own smell along with the evening | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ykouo/eli5_why_are_there_different_scents_to_the_time/ | {
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"I used to live near an industrial sized bread bakery/manufacturer. Every night would smell like freshly baked bread. \n\nPerhaps you are getting smells from different businesses nearby which work on different schedules. Perhaps not something as recognizable as bread.",
"Two sides to this; whatever you're smelling is changing, and your own nose is also changing.\n\nWhen you wake up in a house, if that house is insulated from the outside environment, the smell inside the house should be the same no matter what time of day it is. \n\nOf course, your *nose* isn't the same. Our bodies go through cycles, based on circadian rythm. When you experience a moment of \"super smell\", as some people do, what's happening isn't that the sense itself became more powerful. Rather, for whatever reason, maybe a difference in hormones, a spike in norepinephrine - your mind *pays more attention to the signals coming from your nose*. \n\nSome people get very congested in the morning, which means their sense of smell is dulled. They may find themselves much more clear-nosed near the end of the day. So the same room may smell different to them based on time-of-day, but it's because there nose is different, not the room. \n\nThe flip side is that nature changes based on time of day. So, let's say you live in a temperate zone, like the Northeast US, and its Spring time. \n\nYou go outside in the morning, take a big sniff. Smells thick, earthy, maybe a little grassy. You take the same big sniff at night - smells a little different, more subdued. \n\nAs /u/Shatners_Balls pointed out (hee hee), moisture has a big role to play. The air tends to be more moist in the morning in the NorthEast. That moisture helps carry particles from the plant life through the air, producing a more rich array of smells for your nose. \n\nAt night, the moisture in the air may have decreased. You don't get the full-on wet grass smell, so maybe you smell some more subtle smells that were buried, like flowers, shrubs. If you live near a road, you might be smelling a little asphalt and burned fossil fuel mixed in. \n\nIf you're in the city, again, factories have production schedules, which is going to affect the smell in the air. Large concentrations of people around rush hours are going to make the air smell distinctly sweaty. Early in the morning, when bakers are starting their daily bread, you get the sweet smell of baking bread. \n\nSo, TL;DR because you're only five; your nose changes based on time of day, but nature and your surroundings *also* change based on time of day. "
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14njpg | where are some things called pairs? when they are one thing. | For example why are they a "pair" of shorts, or a "pair" of scissors? I understand a pair of shoes, they are two individual items, but I have never gotten how the "pair" thing made since. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14njpg/where_are_some_things_called_pairs_when_they_are/ | {
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"shorts and scissors are made up of two identical halves or counterparts put together in some way.",
"Pants used to come as two pieces that you would lace up at the crotch. So, you literally had a pair of them.\n\nLikewise, scissors can be taken apart at the hinge. So, they are two distinct objects."
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2iymi8 | why do i feel so icky if i don't shower for a day but not so long ago humans went long periods without bathing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iymi8/eli5_why_do_i_feel_so_icky_if_i_dont_shower_for_a/ | {
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"Everything and everyone smelled absolutely dreadful back in the day. If you were lucky (i.e. wealthy enough) you could get some sort of perfume to help cover your stink",
"I think it's probably a matter of being used to things. Like, you're used to being squeaky clean because you shower everyday. Back in the middle ages people weren't around baths much so they were used to living in stinky b.o or whatever, you know? ",
"I think the whole \"Everyone used to stink back in the day\" thing is a myth. Sure it was a lot harder to take a full on shower. But people took care of their bodies just like they do today. They just used more primitive means to do so. \n\nFor example when we used to go on field exercises in the army we used baby wipes to \"shower\". It doesn't make you perfectly clean but it is a lot better then doing nothing. I am sure our ancestors had their own tricks to keep themselves mostly clean throughout. "
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8oq5sv | the relationship between mbps/gbps and mhz/ghz | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8oq5sv/eli5_the_relationship_between_mbpsgbps_and_mhzghz/ | {
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"This relationship is most relevant in telecommunications, or in general, communication theory. MHz represents bandwidth in the radio spectrum. It's the amount of spectrum that a signal occupies. Mbps on the other hand represents the rate of information transfer. Now comes the interesting part. MHz is analog whereas Mbps is digital in nature. So how do we relate one to the other?\n\nThis is where the concept of digital modulation comes in. Digital Information is in the form of bits. The bits are used to modulate an analog signal by changing the latter's amplitude or phase or both. Once modulated, the modified analog signal is transmitted. So the analog signal will occupy a certain bandwidth \\(MHz\\) and will carry a certain amount of information \\(Mbps\\). Spectral efficiency: Mbps/MHz: higher the better. Spectral efficiency is measured in bps/Hz.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_1_)"
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3dgczw | if you have a single kidney failure, but we can live with only one kidney, why would you need a kidney transplant? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dgczw/eli5_if_you_have_a_single_kidney_failure_but_we/ | {
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"The decision that someone needs a kidney transplant is based on how well the kidneys they have are working, not the number of kidneys. It's entirely possible to live with one fully functioning kidney, but if the overall kidney function is too low, then a kidney transplant is necessary.",
"The remaining kidney may not be functioning at 100%. Also the remaining kidney is having to do double the work. This limits the physical capabilities of the person.",
"Most kidney diseases damage both kidneys simultaneously. Unless there is actual physical trauma to one kidney it's unlikely that one kidney would fail while the other remains healthy. People who get kidney transplants do not still have a working kidney, both of them have usually failed together."
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34lf5t | how come it takes my bank 3-5 days to transfer money from my checking account to my pay pal account but when i pay my water bill with my debit card linked to the same checking account, the water company gets it instantly? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34lf5t/eli5_how_come_it_takes_my_bank_35_days_to/ | {
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"because the bank makes its own rules. with todays current technology, it takes seconds to clear a check, but they still tell you it takes however many business days they say it takes.",
"You're comparing an ACH transfer to a debit card transaction.\n\nDebit card includes security features. The card is present and a PIN is entered. The card is not present, but the card number is given along with a security code. Authorization is acquired from the recipient, they are responsible for ensuring the transaction is secure and also carry responsibility for returning stolen funds.\n\nACH transactions are requested from your bank. The bank takes time to authorize, process, and move the funds. The recipient may also have a processing time.\n\nPayPal is notorious for holding funds longer than they should or need to. It's a big game of holding your funds and gaining interest with everybody's combined funds.",
"The water company *doesn't* get it instantly. They get the notification that you have paid, but they still don't get their money for a few days."
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fruoen | why does vision in darkness have grain? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fruoen/eli5_why_does_vision_in_darkness_have_grain/ | {
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"You have two types of receptors in your retina. Cones are good at picking out fine detail and color while rods are better with picking out contrast and movement. In low-light settings, differences in light coming to your eyes are much more subtle and the cones don't function well. So you don't get fine detail, and what you do see can have some variance, causing your brain to register a grain.",
"I am not sure about the human eye, but for digital cameras this can be due to shot noise: [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\nBasically, very low light conditions mean that the random fluctuations in the light measurement for each pixel get noticeable compared to the signal. That random noise between neighbouring pixels then creates a grainy effect."
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4iu7sb | besides mars, is there any other planets where sending humans out to colonise it is being considered? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4iu7sb/eli5_besides_mars_is_there_any_other_planets/ | {
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"Heck, all of them, moons and asteroids too. Those other ones are just not being considered as the primary target and for many, as targets in the short term though. \n\nMars is the planet we know the most about beyond our own, is as close to Earthlike in terms of conditions as you can get (which really isn't very Earthlike at all), and has captured the romance of space travel that would help garner public support for establishing a permanent base, if not an outright self-sufficient colony.\n\nWe have to successfully get a human there first, and then colonization could come later. (Or we could just send Jason Bourne and get both at the same time.)",
"There are ideas and plans for just about any piece of rock in our solar system.\n\nMars is a favorite because it looks like it would not be a lot of work compared to the others.\n\nThe moon is another favorite, but unlike Mars there aren't any good ideas about terraforming it.\n\nVenus, while much more like Earth than Mars is, has a very inhospitable atmosphere, but the idea of floating cities have been considered and much more ambitious terraforming concepts have been thought about.\n\nMercury is too hot, but people have looked at the polar regions and wondered if might be possible to built an outpost there that humans could survive on.\n\nThere have been ideas for habitats on asteroids and minor planets that wouldn't be too different from those that could be built on the moon.\n\nQuite a lot of the moons of the gas giants look promising but the most promising ones have the downside that we should first make sure that nothing else is already living there.\n"
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2kq2sh | why do the japanese, who are known for having a conservative culture, seem to have such outlandish media? | Video games, T.V. shows, music, etc. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kq2sh/eli5_why_do_the_japanese_who_are_known_for_having/ | {
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"Living in a rather stiff culture often drives those who decide to break out do so with gusto.",
"I believe it has to do with the Westernization of the country. The younger generation feels more free, and tries stuff that they wouldn't do otherwise, as a way of expressing themselves. Think Taiwan, quite rebellious in a way ever since China lost complete control of them. They don't really know how to handle that freedom and they try to create their image to the world of being creative and different. Feel free to correct me.",
"Japan has always had humor and advertising that is loud and obnoxious. It's in contrast to everyday society from where people are forced to repress themselves. ",
"A couple of reasons: One, They had a pretty much isolated culture for all of their history, but then WW2 happened and America jammed ourselves straight into their ports and refused to leave, causing all sorts of our pop culture to mix with theirs, but with none of the context behind any of it, so you get stuff like eating KFC on Christmas being such a strong tradition you have to order your christmas chicken months in advance. Second, while they are a lot more conservative on paper, the Japanese tend to be a lot more comfortable with letting people endulge in whatever weird stuff they enjoy than a lot of the west is, as long as it's kept mostly to the people it concerns. Third, most of the stuff we see is deliberately cherrypicked to be the weirdest stuff they have to offer. For every weird-ass tentacle porn video, there's plenty more fully normal things we just don't see. If you want to know more about this sort of thing, you should check out Gaijin Goomba (_URL_0_), he makes a lot of videos about these sort of things."
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7kfcg8 | why does it get hard to breathe when the heater is on? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7kfcg8/eli5_why_does_it_get_hard_to_breathe_when_the/ | {
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"I have never experienced this. But some people find the smell annoying, and others find it hard to breathe with something blowing in their face.\n\n [ELI5: Why do we find it so hard to breathe when there's wind blowing at our face? ](_URL_0_) ^(_42 comments_)"
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3q1mc9 | how come in court shows like judge judy, why is it that lawyer is not required ? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3q1mc9/eli5_how_come_in_court_shows_like_judge_judy_why/ | {
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"This comment has been overwritten by an open source script to protect this user & apos;s privacy. \n\n If you would like to do the same, add the browser extension [GreaseMonkey](_URL_1_) to Firefox and add [this open source script](_URL_0_). \n\n Then simply click on your username on Reddit, go to the comments tab, and hit the new OVERWRITE button at the top.",
"Firstly, even if it was a real court of law, a lawyer is still not required. In most countries, you have the option of representing yourself and in small cases (e.g. dispute over a parking ticket, or dispute over a $100 purchase) you typically do represent yourself without a lawyer because the cost of a lawyer would be prohibitive and it basically wouldn't make sense to bring the matter to court with lawyer present unless they're working for free.\n\nSecondly, the TV show is *not* a real court of law. It is a place of binding arbitration where the rulings do have some legal weight. Basically both parties mutually agree to have their case aired on TV and mediated by the 'judge' who will make a final decision on the matter. Both parties agree beforehand to accept whatever the final judgement is and not to take the matter to a 'real court' after a ruling has been made.\n\nIn reality, both the winning and losing party on these TV court shows get paid, so neither party actually loses anything. That's why so many people agree to go on these TV shows because not only does it mean they get to be on TV, it also means they get paid and other expenses (e.g. travel expenses, hotel expenses, etc.) may get covered as well. So, for some people it's basically like a paid vacation with the added benefit of there being the potential to get back whatever they're supposedly owed."
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lstzw | the difference(s) between fermions and bosons? | Are fermions matter? And bosons not? Or is this the wrong way to think of them? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lstzw/eli5_the_differences_between_fermions_and_bosons/ | {
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"As a starter, fermions are the little pieces that make up the stuff around us (matter), while bosons are the little pieces that carry messages (forces) to the stuff. Matter interacts with other matter (fermions with fermions) through the messages forces (bosons) carry.",
"Additionally, bosons can \"stack\" on top of each other. You can't have 2 fermions with the same amount of energy and spin in the same place at the same time, but bosons are not as picky. Check the Pauli Exclusion Principle. ",
"As a starter, fermions are the little pieces that make up the stuff around us (matter), while bosons are the little pieces that carry messages (forces) to the stuff. Matter interacts with other matter (fermions with fermions) through the messages forces (bosons) carry.",
"Additionally, bosons can \"stack\" on top of each other. You can't have 2 fermions with the same amount of energy and spin in the same place at the same time, but bosons are not as picky. Check the Pauli Exclusion Principle. "
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5sseuj | why does "hugging the left wall" work in a maze? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5sseuj/eli5_why_does_hugging_the_left_wall_work_in_a_maze/ | {
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"Simply put, a traditional maze only consists of 2 walls that are intertwined to some degree. By \"hugging\" either of the two (it doesn't necessarily need to be the left one) you will arrive at the end eventually."
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5uv46h | what can the president go to jail for? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5uv46h/eli5_what_can_the_president_go_to_jail_for/ | {
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"He could, but as president he can pardon himself. It sounds like a huge conflict of interest, but the constitution clearly states the president \"shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.\" So he can still be removed from official capacity, but he would not serve any punishment. ",
"The President of the United States of America is in general immune from both criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits, although there are limits to that immunity and some unresolved legal questions.\n\nHowever, the President may be \"impeached\" by Congress. This is a way for Congress to remove the President from office. It's similar to a trial in some ways, but held by Congress (the legislative branch) as opposed to by the courts (the judicial branch). Once removed from office, the ex-President would no longer have immunity from prosecution for crimes they committed while President."
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7e90he | how does codeine work as a cough suppressant? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7e90he/eli5_how_does_codeine_work_as_a_cough_suppressant/ | {
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"We really don't know. Opioids, in general, have a cough suppressing effect but exactly how that works is not well understood. \"Heroin\" was originally a brand name for the drug that was marketed as a cough suppressant."
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19px1m | why is there not an anonymous bit-torrent protocol? | I know about things like TOR and TPB's anonymous download, but why is there not a client that prevents the peers from knowing its true IP address? Is a seedbox and VPN 100% secure? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19px1m/why_is_there_not_an_anonymous_bittorrent_protocol/ | {
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"There is, sort of. It's called [Freenet](_URL_0_), but it can only be accessed using their client software (not your regular torrent client), and it is extremely, extremely slow. Proper anonymity is extremely difficult to achieve, especially in a peer-to-peer context like bittorrent. "
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1zxrzg | why can i "hear" perfect pitch in my mind, but when i try to sing i sound like a walrus giving birth to farm equipment? | When I say "in my mind" I'm referring to my thoughts/imagination. I'm not talking about hearing myself when I'm actually singing. For example, I can think/imagine singing a song with perfect pitch, yet if I were to try and actually sing it, I would sound horrible.
**UPDATE #1** Several people are comparing this to imagining something visual, such as a beautiful painting but not being able to paint it. However, is this the same as imagining audio?
**UPDATE #2** Apparently a lot of people really enjoyed my walrus analogy. Then someone suggested I start a subreddit called [/r/stanisms](_URL_0_). So I did, and it exploded! I'm having so much fun with this - thanks for making my night, Reddit! :D And thanks to the person that gave me gold!! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zxrzg/eli5_why_can_i_hear_perfect_pitch_in_my_mind_but/ | {
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"text": [
"Your vocal cords are not inside your brain. Like any and everything, they need training to work well.",
"Find a Vocal Teacher, Chorus Teacher, need to learn and practice with that instrument. ",
"Same reason why I can see myself smashing a pitch at 90 miles/hour, while IRL a pitch at 50 mph is a blur!",
"This \"hearing\" is called audiation. While you might believe that the pitch you are audiating is perfect, in reality it takes training and practice to really sing on pitch well (although talent can do a lot for that) as the human ear can really only hold onto a pitch like that for about 7~10 seconds. For instance, many amateur/novice singers when holding a sustained pitch will tend to go flat (the pitch gets slightly lower, enough to go out of tune) unless they are aware of this and compensate for it. There is also much pedagogy on vocal technique to make sure your singing voice produces a clear tone, much of which might not occur to one on instinct.\n\nEdit: Many of you wish to improve your singing or wonder why you can whistle or play pitches perfectly on another instrument and yet be unable to sing pitches accurately. I am a music ed major in college currently enrolled in eartraining and voice methods classes, which is where my knowledge comes from. For tone production with singing, the main thing is air support. I don't mean just getting louder, I mean using your diaphragm to push more and faster air through your vocal chords. As for why you may not be able to sing on pitch but whistle, it is a different form of muscle memory, of knowing how to shape the throat and lips to produce a certain pitch, and most of you probably practice whistling a lot more than you might sing in public. Talking won't do it, as singing uses much more air and shape the mouth and throat much differently. One last thing, many pop singers use unorthodox technique to achieve their tone which is considered 'incorrect' as my training is in a more classical choral style. If you would like to learn more about singing technique, [here](_URL_0_) is the text I use in class. I hope you guys find all this helpful!\n\nEdit 2: The question of whether or not just anyone can learn to sing keeps popping up. The text I use expresses the belief that anyone can be taught to sing with the right amount of eartraining and the correct vocal technique in the choral sense. That's not to say that with enough training everyone could go make a competitive audition for a musical on broadway, as some aspects of singing such as range and the actual timbre of your voice are genetic, but they could realistically learn to sing in tune with a pretty decent tone.",
"It's the same as seeing the image you want to draw in your head, but when you try to reproduce it, it looks like a walrus drove farm equipment across the page.",
"I was told by someone with a fair bit of knowledge that there are two types of people who don't sing well. \n\nThe first type doesn't sing well and knows it. They can hear in their mind what they should sound like, and recognize that they're not hitting the mark. They know they sound bad. \n\nThe second type doesn't sing well and doesn't know it. They think they're wonderful singers, but in reality are awful. This group cannot hear in their mind what they should sound like, or there is a disconnect between their mind and ears. \n\nThe first type, who doesn't sing well and knows it, can learn to sing well with proper training and effort. There's hope for those in this group.\n\nBut the second type, the person who sings poorly and doesn't recognize it, they're out of luck. They have no frame of reference by which to improve, and will always sing poorly, no matter how hard they try. But, I suppose, ignorance is bliss, because they'll never know it. ",
"it simply requires learning and practicing which vocal chord position matches which pitch. I have worked with \"tone deaf\" children and adults on this. As with most things the children learn it better, but it is possible to learn to do it. Basically you are developing the muscle memory that enables the pitch coming from your mouth to match that entering your ear. Being able to maintain the pitch (keep it from going flat or sharp is something that can be learned with formal voice lessons once you have mastered producing an initial sound that matches what you hear. ",
"You can't hear it is the answer. Sorry. I'm a classical musician and I see this all the time with students. They say \"I can hear it but I can't play it.\" Then I ask them to sing it or tell me information about it and they can't do it. \n\nTo elaborate on everyone else's comments:\nI can imagine a program that can detect cancer, but somehow I can't make it in real life. ",
"Cause you have a shitty voice",
"Same reason you can see a bullseye, but not hit it with a dart. Practice.",
"Hearing sounds in tune and pitch control of your voice are two separate things. I'm a professional musician with perfect pitch, and I've studied many many years on viola, yet I've really only started singing about a year ago. When I was first starting, I had to concentrate a ton in order to maintain pitch. Nowadays it's not that hard. It's really a matter of becoming familiar with your voice.",
"How come when I sing falsetto, I'm able to stay in key, but if I try to sing \"normally\", I'm usually all over the place struggling to make my voice find the right note?",
"\n\nYou can learn some basic things to improve yourself. Cupping your hands to direct sound to your ears for example. \n\nYou just need to learn how to adjust the sound you're making to the sound you're \"hearing\" in your head. Think of it like any physical ability. If you were in a fist fight, and you were a terrible untrained fighter: you could probably think of everything you SHOULD do as you're doing all the wrong things. You need to practice syncing your mind to your body. ",
"Depends on what you think \"perfect pitch\" means.\n\n\"Perfect Pitch\" means that you can tell what note a song is on a scale, or tell me what note a toilet flushes at, or know when a singer sings if they're out of tune.\n\nSomething like 3-5% of people have perfect pitch, it's a rare musical talent.\n\nNow, being able to vocalize a pitch is a bit different. You can hear a note in your head, but singing that not is different. Singing a constant pitch, even with an external reference, is difficult (that's why singing is hard). Perfect pitch helps, but if you can't sing the exact pitch you hear, that's just a matter of not having the technique down.",
"I have perfect pitch. I really don't think it's much more than memory built over years of practice, though I did have a couple years of violin lessons from 4. When I'm thinking of 'C' I think of one or two songs I know that start in C. I 'recognize' the pitch by comparing it to the memory.",
"Same reason you can hear someone's voice in your head but you can't copy their voice.",
"This will probably be buried but I just want to point out that \"perfect pitch\" is a skill to be able to sing/recognize any note accurately without hearing the key first, such as if someone played a single key on a piano and you were able to say \"that's a C\". The ability to accurately sing a note that you hear (in your head or out loud) is called \"matching pitch\", as in \"these singers are trying as hard as they can but they just can't match pitch\". So perfect pitch doesn't mean what you think it means.",
"What you're hearing isn't perfect pitch, perfect pitch is hearing a tone and being able to name it, i.e. you hear a 440 Hz drone and identify it as A. People with perfect pitch can also generate tones themselves.\n\nWhat you are really hearing in your mind are the intervals associated with a song. If you have a reference tonic you might be in the same key, but what you're calling \"perfect pitch\" is more likely just hearing intervals. ",
"If it's okay, I have a follow-up question. I can whistle the pitches I hear in my head without any trouble at all, and I'm actually pretty good at it, but I can't sing the pitches for shit. Why is this?",
"i can imagine myself doing a flip, but i can't actually do one. if you don't have practiced control of your vocal chords, you won't be able to sing on pitch, just like i don't have practiced control of my leg muscles.",
"Thanks to the person who gave me gold!! Thanks to everyone for the compliments on my analogy, I'm glad I was able to make you laugh! Also, a **big** thanks to everyone who subscribed to [/r/stanisms](_URL_0_). I can't believe how quickly that exploded! You made my night, Reddit! :D",
"Your voice is an instrument, and you have to practice in order to make it sound good all the time. Just because you can hear the music doesn't mean you can play the instrument.",
"I have spent so much time on this and this is what I can tell you:\n\n-Pitch (or what you are \"hearing\") is nothing more than a vibration of waves. These waves can vibrate harmoniously or clash against each other. Whether or not they vibrate harmoniously is entirely measurable through simple mathematics. Chords or notes that will match up with each other are (generally) going to have frequencies that share denominators. This is a very easy thing for most people to hear (i.e. when something is out of tune). They realize this not because they are musicians but because something is PHYSICALLY wrong. Just because you are able to hear this does not necessarily mean you are able to project it.\n\nI would not differentiate this much from being able to tell that something is wrong with my car and being able to fix it myself. Being able to use and control the voice with musical intentions isn't something you are going to be able to do overnight.",
"you only think u hear perfect pitch.",
"Do you actually hear in perfect pitch? Or are you using 'perfect pitch' out of context. If you mean that you can remember how the song sounds, ie, the melody or the words then you're just using your memory, which isn't very impressive, we all have one of those. If you can distinguish and quote each note as its happening thats perfect pitch. If you can distinguish each note as you hear it but can't mimic it, you just have a shit voice i'm afraid. Imagine someone sitting down with headphones and a blank music sheet, then listening to Mozart, then writing all the music down as they hear it, if this is what you mean by perfect pitch, and you can actually do this, then i wouldnt worry about sounding like a walrus, the hearing is the hardest part and this is a talent not many people have. I think maybe you just misunderstood what 'perfect pitch' means, i want to be wrongon this one. If i am, you need to do an AMA ",
"Up voted for wording :]",
"When I was in college I had a friend who was a music major (she played the piano) and she had a similar problem. She had near perfect pitch in that she could hear others fine, but when she tried to sing it sounded right to her but sounded terrible to others... when she recorded what she sang and played it back she could hear how terrible it was. So she sort of learned to compensate, by intentionally singing off-key by a bit to try to match the amount she was off by. \n\nIt turned out she had excessive wax in her ears that distorted how she heard her own voice. She eventually cleaned her ears with a hydrogen peroxide solution and poof -- problem solved!",
"*\"I sound like a walrus giving birth to farm equipment\"*\n\n -/u/minecraftstan ",
" > UPDATE #2 Apparently a lot of people really enjoyed my walrus analogy. Then someone suggested I start a subreddit called /r/stanisms[1] . So I did, and it exploded! I'm having so much fun with this - thanks for making my night, Reddit! :D And thanks to the person that gave me gold!!\n\nhave I witnessed reddit history?",
"Scrolling down while sipping coffee annnnnd I saw this title",
"I had an ear infection once and EVERYTHING was out of tune. It made me wonder if that's why some people sing so out of tune, because their ear canals are different and so they THINK what they hear is correct, but it's not. I've been told I can sing in tune, not a great voice but in tune so I know my hearing is OK. ",
"Because you have an untrained voice. You should practice scales, as a singer that is the easiest way to practice hitting the right notes. Also, get a microphone and listen to your voice projected. Hope that helps. ",
"because you are bad at singing",
"\"walrus giving birth to farm equipment\" immediately added to my lexicon, excellent.",
"I laughed to tears a full minute with that analogy",
"I got nothing to ocontribute. Just wanna tell OP, the title held me laughing happily. Thanksgiving. \n\nEdit: ngehhh leaving thanksgiving.",
"No answer, but I had to say this question is phrased incredibly",
"Because our brains are better at recognition than replication. Without practice, your brain literally does not know how to tell your muscles (eg: your vocal chords) how to create that sound.\n\nIt's like saying 'I can picture myself lifting 250 pounds, but I when I actually try to do it, the weights won't budge.' You need to train.",
"I have nothing to contribute; I just wanted to say that the way you described your problem had me laughing until I shed actual tears.",
"Upvote for descriptive title",
"Sketch request /u/AWildSketchAppears",
"It's called *practice*. Anyone can look at an athlete and picture themselves doing the same thing in their mind. It doesn't matter whether it's music, or art, it's anything you can imagine. You're going to suck at it until you practice and get better. That's just how life works.",
"Being one of the walrus guys, I just came here to say how much i lol'd at the way you asked this question."
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jdvev | federal reserve interest rate | What does the Federal Reserve interest rate affect and why did it have such a big affect on the market when they announced they would keep it 'exceptionally low' until 2013? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jdvev/eli5_federal_reserve_interest_rate/ | {
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"The interest rate is known as the rate used between banks. It's used when say a bank is low on funds, what they're charged when they borrow from another bank. \n\nThe Fed lowers this rate by purchasing bonds or any assets from banks (any member auctioneer). This provides more money for the banks to lend out to each other, and for business. The Fed is doing this because they want to encourage spending. Calculating the interest rate is not an exact science, but the close-to-zero planned interest rate is the *target* interest rate. They have a goal to drive it down to.\n\nLikewise, if the Fed ever wanted to raise interest rates, they'd bid off bonds, and halt purchases. The Fed drastically did this in the early 1980's under Paul Volcker to halt inflation.\n\nThe market likes this because it gives businesses access to more money to spend. Many of them are very much dependent on the easy money. If they halted it, many of them would likely go under. So it's an encouragement for them that they can knowingly invest with these low rates for the next two years. \n\nThe criticisms that you'll hear (including myself) that are popular on the internet from guys like Rep. Ron Paul and other Austrian economists that oppose the Fed are that the low interests rates are mostly causing inflation, and that their system's unsustainable. That it's also a protection of failed business measures, and not a workable plan to rebuild an economy. Their theory is that interest rate manipulation is also a contributor of the business cycles (another lesson for another day).\n\n\nHope that helped. No lemon stands in mine :/\n\n",
"The interest rate is known as the rate used between banks. It's used when say a bank is low on funds, what they're charged when they borrow from another bank. \n\nThe Fed lowers this rate by purchasing bonds or any assets from banks (any member auctioneer). This provides more money for the banks to lend out to each other, and for business. The Fed is doing this because they want to encourage spending. Calculating the interest rate is not an exact science, but the close-to-zero planned interest rate is the *target* interest rate. They have a goal to drive it down to.\n\nLikewise, if the Fed ever wanted to raise interest rates, they'd bid off bonds, and halt purchases. The Fed drastically did this in the early 1980's under Paul Volcker to halt inflation.\n\nThe market likes this because it gives businesses access to more money to spend. Many of them are very much dependent on the easy money. If they halted it, many of them would likely go under. So it's an encouragement for them that they can knowingly invest with these low rates for the next two years. \n\nThe criticisms that you'll hear (including myself) that are popular on the internet from guys like Rep. Ron Paul and other Austrian economists that oppose the Fed are that the low interests rates are mostly causing inflation, and that their system's unsustainable. That it's also a protection of failed business measures, and not a workable plan to rebuild an economy. Their theory is that interest rate manipulation is also a contributor of the business cycles (another lesson for another day).\n\n\nHope that helped. No lemon stands in mine :/\n\n"
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5bq3sv | for a non-native english speaker, what is the proper article "a", "an", "the", or nothing should be used? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bq3sv/eli5_for_a_nonnative_english_speaker_what_is_the/ | {
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"\"A/an\" are generic/indefinite articles. So if you're just talking about any ordinary store and not a specific one, you might say \"It's 8 AM, there should be *a store* open around here somewhere\".\n\n\"The\" is a definite article, which is used when you're talking about a specific or particular noun. If you owned a store, you might say to an employee, \"I want *the store* to open at 8 AM\". This means you want *your particular store* to be open at that time.\n\nI want to drive a fancy car = Any fancy car will do\n\nI want to drive the fancy car = I'd like a specific fancy car\n\nFurther confusing things, we don't use articles before so-called uncountable nouns--someone would say \"water is wet\" when referring to generic water, not \"a water is wet\".\n\nAnd even FURTHER confusing things, we often use \"the\" before generic nouns when we're trying to turn the noun into a concept. So someone might say \"I want to learn to play the guitar\", which means they want to learn to play any guitar, not a specific one (even though I told you \"the\" is for a specific noun). And there are even more exceptions. Yes, English is a mess.\n\n[There are a ton of examples here.](_URL_0_)\n\n---\n\nAs far as whether to use a/an:\n\nCheck the word that follows and determine if it starts with a *consonant sound* or a *vowel sound*. \"A\" is used before words that start with a consonant sound, \"an\" is used before words that start with a vowel sound.\n\n\"I want the store cleaned *an hour* before closing.\" (*hour* starts with *ow*).\n\n\"This is *a unique* store.\" (*unique* starts with *yoo*, a consonant sound).\n\n**Other quick a/the examples:**\n\n\"I want to read the book\" = I want to read a specific book.\n\n\"I want to read a book\" = I want to read any book.\n\nIf someone asks me to do something at 3:15 PM, I might say:\n\n\"I'll finish within *the* hour.\" = I will finish before 4 PM (this specific hour).\n\n\"I'll finish within *an* hour.\" = I will finish before 4:15 PM (a generic period of 60 minutes).\n\nNote that hour has \"an\" before it--it starts with a vowel sound even though the word starts with a consonant."
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10ipm5 | what causes my vision to distort/bend around an object (ex:pencil eraser) that is close to my eye when my other eye is covered? | Maybe because the cones/rods that are able to see around the pencil have different angles? I doubt its gravity impacting the light given the small mass of a pencil, but I'm not ready to rule that out. Also, would this effect also appear when an object is held up to a camera lens? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10ipm5/eli5_what_causes_my_vision_to_distortbend_around/ | {
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"Do you have a few minutes?\n\nThen, follow me in this experiment. don't just read this, or it won't make any sense. you should actually follow the steps I will give you.\n\nLook at this dot: _URL_3_\n\nif you place your eye close (VERY CLOSE, like touching the screen with your forehead) to the screen, at a certain point your eye won't be able to focus any more and your vision will be blurred.\n\nWhat happens when it goes out of focus? \n\nYou wont be able to see a dot, you will see a small cloudy circle.\n\nBUT WHY A CIRCLE ???\n\nIt's a bit difficoult to explain, but the reason is BECAUSE YOUR PUPIL IS A CIRCLE\n\nif the dot is very close to the eye, the \"lens\" of your eye won't be working as a lens .... let's pretend your eye has no lens.\n\nthis is the situation:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nthe light coming from the dot projects a circle on the bottom of your eye, because that's the \"shadow\" of the hole of your pupil.\n\nto convince yourself, (always keeping the eye VERY close to the monitor) slide a piece of cardboard in front of the eye. at a certain point the carboard will start covering part of your pupil, so that the light won't be able to go through all the circle but just a portion.\n\nlike this: _URL_1_\n\nthe \"shadow\" on the bottom of your eye won't be a circle any more, but portion of a circle. and the image you will see will be a portion of a circle.\n\ndo you see this?\n\nnow, make a pinhole in the cardboard and repeat the experiment. What will happen?\n\nthe hole will now be very small, and the light projected on the bottom of your eye will be a small dot. (it will also be much less)\n\n_URL_2_\n\nThis has a few interesting consequences!\n\nfirst of all, what this little hole is doing is helping your eye to focus on very close objects. the luminosity will be very little, but being able to look at things so close will help you see VERY small things. Like a magnifying glass!\n\nalso (and we get close to your question) if you move the cardboard the pinhole will move, and the \"shadow\" on the bottom of your eye will move too. What your eye will see is THAT THE DOT MOVES! Actually, all the image moves!!!\n\nwhat happens is: \n\nin \"correct\" vision, the lens in your eye focuses all the light from the point in a single point in your eye.\n\nin \"out of focus\", the lens isn't able to work very well, the every point of your pupil makes an image in your eye. there are many points in the pupil, and they are placed in a circle (because the pupil is a circular hole)\n\nSo, the circle you see is the sum of many many images of the dot, where all the images are in a different position, drawing a circle.\n\nThe pinhole allows you to see just a single one of these images. That's why the dot is in focus again, and that's why it's very dim (it's just ONE of all those images)\n\nyou select on image, and this helps you focusing the dot.\n\nwhen you move the pinhole, you select another image that's in a different position and you that's why you see the dot move.\n\nnow repeat the experiment with a pencil instead of the cardboard. Instead of looking at the dot, look at a page of text (this text).\n\nYou will realize that the effect is the same effect that we were experimenting before: the image is blurred, but near the pencil it's somehow more focused, it's darker .. AND IT MOVES.\n\nthe pencil's edge is \"selecting\" some of the points of the blured image, making it darker, more focused and MOVING IT . being a more complex case (a full image instead of a dot, and a pencile's edge instead of a pinhole) the result is less clear but it's obvious that the effect you see is just a more complex case of the experiment we were doing.\n\nthis effect is a particularly strong case of the effect you were describing. \n\nthe object behind the pencil is never EXACTLY in focus, and by placing the pencil in front of you eye you will see the slight darkening of the image, the slightly better focus, and the slight movement\n\nexperiment by varying the distance between the eye and the screen, and you will see the very strong effect I have shown you become the slighter effect you described.\n\n**TL;DR**\n\nThe image is slightly out of focus. Each dot is actually a small circle. The pencil in front of the eye helps you selectively focus in a better way part of the image. the movement is caused by the fact that you only see a fraction (the top or the bottom) of the each small small circle. The dots nearer to the edge of the pencil are darker, better focused, and more displaced.\n\nedit: image links, and spelling\n\n\n",
"Okay, imagine this.\n\nYou are standing on a hill. A few feet in front of you, two of your friends, Mary and Rebecca, are standing shoulder to shoulder. Both of them are standing with their arms outstretched with their fingers pointing at your friend Jim, who is standing on another hill. It looks roughly like [this](_URL_2_).\n\nFrom this vantage point, both Mary and Rebecca are pointing roughly straight ahead.\n\nBut now Jim starts walking straight toward you. Mary and Rebecca keep pointing straight at Jim as he walks. Because their arms are outstretched, you can [see](_URL_1_) Mary and Rebecca's arms slowly moving closer and closer together. It starts slow at first, but their arms are orienting noticeably less 'straight ahead' over time. And their fingers gets closer at an exponentially-increasing rate as Jim gets nearer, until every inch he approaches results in their fingers getting several inches closer together. [Like so.](_URL_0_)\n\nMary and Rebecca really have two different vantage points than you, but if, in that first picture, *all three* of you were pointing toward Jim, you'd all be pointing in roughly the same angle, right? Well, as he gets closer to you, all three of you would begin to point in radically different directions, even though you're all oriented toward Jim from your own perspective. This is how organisms with two eyes see things. It works great when you're viewing distant things, but it gets exponentially worse when things get super close.\n\nNow, this does the job of explaining why, say, when you held a pencil close to both (opened) eyes, you would see two pencils. Your brain isn't used to combining the images being reported by the two eyes when the images are so radically different (like when Mary and Rebecca's arms are at radically different angles).\n\nBut what about if you cover an eye and just bring the pencil closer to ONE eye? Presumably you'd see it clearly the whole way in, right? Nope. Because really, your eye isn't a single \"seeing thing.\" It's tens of thousands of \"seeing things\"--thousands of tiny rods and cones viewing light from the back of your eye, and not all of them are physically in the same place within your eye--they're spread out over the entire back of your eye. So just like in our earlier analogy, your cells are so close together that they usually agree on where something is, but, like Mary and Rebecca, they have exponentially more disagreement as the subject gets closer. \n\nSort of like how when you have both eyes open and you see two pencils, you are really seeing *tens of thousands of pencils* that the brain \"blurs\" into a single image. And that's why pencils at very close distances appear thinner--because some of your rods and cones are oriented to see past the pencil on its left side and some are oriented to only see past the pencil on its right side, so your brain combines them and you can *sort of* see past BOTH sides.\n\nTL;DNR: It's not light bending. You have tens of thousands of observers that your brain is trying to coalesce into a single image--which makes the image blurry. This is a very simplistic way to think about how rods and cones work, but it gets the job done."
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3ndbxq | boxing titles and franchises | Why there are so many (WBC, WBA, WBO, etc)? what are the most prestigious ones? What title do I need to win in order to be the best boxer in the world?
General ELI5 would be great! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ndbxq/eli5_boxing_titles_and_franchises/ | {
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"It's incredibly long and complicated and it's been answered [here on reddit] (_URL_0_) in r/boxing if you want all the details. Basically it comes down to money and how may fights each sanctioning body can squeeze out of a champion. "
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jll13 | how does super-fluid helium make an infinite fountain? | Here's the youtube link: _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jll13/how_does_superfluid_helium_make_an_infinite/ | {
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4fjmpy | where did the idea of people becoming angels when we die come from, considering that bibically angels are another species altogether? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fjmpy/eli5_where_did_the_idea_of_people_becoming_angels/ | {
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"I'm not familiar with this concept of people becoming angels, so I'll tell you what I know from the \"Luther Church of the Missouri Synod\" (LCMS) perspective.\n\nAngels are indeed a different species altogether. They are in fact soldiers. They're job, so far as we know, is to defend heaven. There is no section of the bible, that I am familiar with, stating we are transformed into angels upon our death.",
"Nothing to do with bible based facts. It is a man made tradition people use to cope with loss, usually. Like someone who has a miscarriage calls her baby an \"Angel baby\". \n\nIt's funny as it is stated directly in the bible that when you die you are \"conscious of nothing\" and that the dead will be resurrected to a paradise earth. Never does it say you will become an angel. Crazy times, folks. ",
"Its just misunderstanding. Because the origins of the angels is rarely discussed. Honestly most people never talk about those early parts of the bible that explain the angels place in things because its kind of embarrassing.. Like how angels would rape human women because seeing their hair made them super horny. It led to a hybrid race of giants! Yeah... That's where the whole women covering the hair thing comes from...\n\nI think this causes some discomfort in discussing them in any detail so people just make up their own shit about them. Basically angels exist to serve. They are tools for God like a screwdriver would be for a person. They rank lower in the heavenly hierarchy than humans so becoming an angel would actually be a step down for a human.",
"Saints are thought of as particularly holy people (generally dead ones). Because they are so holy, some doctrines think they have a hotline to God - their prayers are more likely to be granted. Angels, on the other hand, are not human. They carry out God's directions, including performing miracles. But both dead saints and angels are nebulous spiritual beings who are often credited for miracles, so it is easy to see why they get conflated.\n\nThat's the theology behind it as I understand it, at least.",
"While it may not have been invented by cartoons, the idea of people becoming angels was made more popular because, in cartoons like Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, characters that died became angels.",
"Biblically, there is no mention of people becoming angels. However, like Jesus becoming white and the image of angels as fat little cherub babies it comes from Renaissance art. Loved ones depicted as angels, saints depicted as angels, popes... you get the picture. And now fast forward to modern times and there is a whole selection of children's books and movies depicting deceased family members and even pets as angels.",
"The Bible talks about Angels, but it appears over time people have interpreted them differently. An Angel is considered to be a beautiful, happy being in Heaven, therefore it is easy to see why people would consider lost family/friends as Angels or 'with the Angels'.",
"There is one verse that could have been misinterpreted to mean this.\n\nIn the Acts of the Apostles, there is a time when Peter is in prison and an angel breaks him out. The other apostles are having a prayer meeting for him, praying he gets out. There's a knock on the door and the servant girl answering tells them it's Peter. They say, \"That's impossible! He's in jail! That's why we're praying!\" When she insists it's him, they say, \"it is not him, it is his angel.\" One could read this as saying they thought he died in jail and it was just an apparition at the door. (Acts 12:15)",
"They don't. Catholic upbringing, here. Being with the angels is as close as you get. They are a separate creation from man, without the benefit of free will. You cannot become an angel any more than you can become God. \n\nVarious faiths which have separated from the mother church may couch their elders as becoming angels when they ascend to heaven, but that is, frankly, blasphemy. \n\nHuman politics and the use of money may get a church to angel-ize someone, but that would be a bastardization of the original great gift to mankind, that of free will. An angel with free will is not an angel at all. The only one that has had such was Lucifer, and you remember what happened to him? ",
"I'm not entirely sure but the glorification of the dead has been going on since forever. Notice how many people change how they refer to someone once that person has passed. It's as if they're afraid they'll be haunted if they don't speak well of the person.\n\nI find it interesting to consider what the bible has to say abut Lucifer. Supposedly he was the best and brightest angel and when he rebelled he took 1/3 of the angels with him from heaven. What if we're one of those 1/3 and this life is our chance to get back to heaven? \n\nPerhaps someone else in history thought the same and developed the idea that once you die, you get your wings. ",
"The Bible never says that when people die they automatically go to heaven or hell. The concept of hell is even a misunderstanding. \n\nEcclesiastes 9:5 says \"For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.\" \n\nThe idea that people die and go to heaven is a man-made idea. According to the original scriptures, only a select few people go to heaven. ",
"It is a common American folk belief and is doctrine of the Mormon church (_URL_0_), which may be why it is common in America to think this (The Mormon church being based in the US). However, I do not know how common this idea is abroad. There are several TV shows and movies that have portrayed it as such. These are just the three I can think of off the top of my head. \n\nThe Messengers (2015) \nHeart and Souls (1993) \nAlmost an Angel (1990) \n\nIt may also be because angels are often portrayed as having very human appearances and personalities. See It's a Wonderful Life (1946). This tendency goes back as least as far as the Renaissance in Europe and probably further (_URL_1_). This is likely due to the difficulty of portraying something like an angel as simultaneously weird and beautiful, or trying to tell a moving story about a creature with few human personality traits. Several angels in the Bible were literally portrayed as looking like men.\n\nLacking greater clarification, one can understand why someone who is not steeped in theology might think these humanistic angels were once humans.\n\nTl;DR: They often look and act like humans in stories, and some people believe they were once humans. It is not a huge leap to make."
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j3hgc | - how a llc (limited liability company) works and why i need one to open a business. | My friend and I are trying to start a business. I realize we need an LLC. I kind of understand the part that it protect me as an individual in case the company gets sued...but beyond that, I'm not really sure. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3hgc/eli5_how_a_llc_limited_liability_company_works/ | {
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"I got this. I took a class on introduction to business, and we talked about LLCs. \n\nBasically, an LLC is where if you're company is sued, you have limited liability. You personally can not get sued until you're broke, just like in a corporation. If you take out a loan and can't repay it, the individuals can't get sued. \n\nAlso, at the business level, there are no income taxes. ",
"If your business is not incorporated as an LLC, it is usually called a single proprietorship (if you own it by yourself) or a partnership (if more than one person shares ownership).\n\nUnder these arrangements, the business is just an extension of the owners: any income the business makes is considered personal income of the owners (for tax purposes), and any debts the business incurs (either through borrowing or if someone sues and wins) are the debts of the owners.\n\nThe key bit is that second thing: if the business goes under and can't pay its debts, the owners are on the hook. If the *owners* can't pay these debts, they will be forced to declare personal bankruptcy, which is not something you want to go through.\n\nAn LLC, on the other hand, makes your business its own separate entity. If the business makes money, that's considered income of the business, and the business pays tax on it directly. If, after paying income tax, the business pays out the leftover profits to the owners, the owners then pay personal tax on that income. As a result, in an LLC, income is taxed twice (you may have heard the term \"double taxation\"), which is the principal downside of LLCs.\n\nOn the flip side, if the business goes under and can't pay its debts, the owners aren't on the hook. The business declares bankruptcy and that's the end of it. This is the principal *advantage* of LLCs.\n\nEDIT: As others have noted, the tax rules regarding LLCs are not as I've written above. The liability aspects I discussed are true at a 5-year-old's level (although courts can and have overruled the limitation of liability in some cases, so you should obviously consult a lawyer if you're setting up a business)."
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21laay | why can companies and/or public places discriminate who is allowed in by gender but not by race | For example, Why can a gym have a Women Only night, but not a White People Only night. There are many other examples that i'm sure you will debate among yourselves, the question I want answered is why can a company legally disclude a gender from taking part in an activity or from using facilities on certain days etc but they can't disclude a race from the same thing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21laay/eli5why_can_companies_andor_public_places/ | {
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"If you want to start an \"All White Guy Gym\", you're welcome to -- gyms aren't protected under the Federal Civil Rights Act.\n\nHowever, they might violate state civil rights acts -- [California has repeatedly ruled that women-only gyms are illegal](_URL_0_). Plenty of other states don't care though, and if they did, someone would have to take them to court and prove their case.",
"under federal law, there's actually a lower standard for gender discrimination than racial discrimination. Racial discrimination gets \"strict\" scrutiny, but gender discrimination gets \"moderate scrutiny.\" \n\nAnd, I would add, there are places where things like women's only nights have been banned under state law or judicial interpretations of state constitutions. ",
"Its more the number of men who are going to argue are few and far between. "
]
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5h7fr3 | why do governments allow car makers to advertise diesel cars as co2 friendly (less than 100 g/km) if they pollute far more than similar petrol engines? | These days you often see these small diesel engines with emission levels under 100 g/km. That's lower than most 1.2l or 1.4l petrol engines.
How can official emission levels for a diesel be smaller than for a similar petrol engine?
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5h7fr3/eli5_why_do_governments_allow_car_makers_to/ | {
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"Diesel engines are generally more energy efficient than petrol engines, i.e., they are \"CO2 friendly\" as you put it and so contribute less to global warming. What's wrong with being able to advertise that?\n\nDiesels do have more of a problem with some types of pollution but that's in many ways a separate issue."
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alutxc | why does ice cream in a store (cold stone, baskin-robbins, etc.) not get "freezer burn"/accumulate ice over its surface when sitting in the freezer? | In my freezer at home, my ice cream gets freezer burn just one day after opening the container, and I just don't get why.
& #x200B;
& #x200B; | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/alutxc/eli5_why_does_ice_cream_in_a_store_cold_stone/ | {
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"Because it's in an air tight environment, so no latent moisture from the air can freeze onto the surface and create the ice crystals that create the \"grainy\" texture. ",
"Freezer burn is the result of air coming into contact with food. When food is frozen, a bunch of water molecules within the food form ice crystals. \n\nOne of the reasons why you are experiencing this while the ice-cream shop is not is likely due to the ice cream slightly defrosting on its journey from the store to your freezer; releasing more water to then freeze into crystals. \n\nIce cream shops get their ice cream delivered (if made off site) in a refrigerated truck, thus preventing any chance of defrosting. ",
"Keep in mind that ice cream places are going through a lot more ice cream than you do at home. For their most popular flavors, they're constantly taking that top layer out and serving it to people before crystals have a chance to build up."
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8koy1r | why does it feel cold to enter the pool, but then once you're adjusted, it's fine, but then it feels cold to get out? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8koy1r/eli5_why_does_it_feel_cold_to_enter_the_pool_but/ | {
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"It feels cold getting in because a) the water is colder than you are and b) the water is really quite effective at taking heat away from your body.\n\nWhen it comes to getting out the coldness is mostly going to be from evaporative cooling - it's the same principle as why sweating cools you down. Your skin is covered in water and as the water evaporates it takes energy away from your skin to do so, cooling you down.",
"Water actually absorbs heat. This is the most basic principle behind refrigeration. When water evaporates it cools the atmosphere. The area around a pool is actually cooler than the ambient environment. \n\nAfter your body adjusts using homeostasis: a process where it gets used to it's environment, you don't notice the cold. \n\nImagine you are in a room where the heat turns on and gets stuck. If the temperature raises gradually you wouldn't notice the difference. That's homeostasis at work. \n\nThe cold area around the pool eventually became normal and then getting out your body has to adjust the other way. Water evaporating on your skin acts like a personal ac"
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2eegaa | what is a mechanical keyboard? aren't they all mechanical? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2eegaa/eli5_what_is_a_mechanical_keyboard_arent_they_all/ | {
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"It has clicky-things in it instead of soft pads like you would find upon taking apart a tv remote. ",
"A mechanical keyboard has a mechanical switch below each key, where a spring is freed to make electrical contact and trigger the key. A \"regular\" keyboard has layers of material where pressure can force the layers together, completing a circuit between them.\n\nConceptually all of these are mechanical actions if you get technical, but a \"mechanical keyboard\" has a different switching action from the sort of bubble contact of other keyboards. Mechanical keyboards usually have an audible and tactile click associated with the triggering of their keys due to their design, while normal keyboards do not.",
"Once you go mechanical you never go back. The feeling and response is amazing, from gaming to simply typing. Its well worth the price tag if you spend a decent amount of time on the computer. I use a Filco Majestouch and its lasted me over 4 years without a single problem. "
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b9ub0b | how developed are other animals' sense of taste? is it just primal notions like bitter=bad and sweet=good or similarly as complex as ours? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b9ub0b/eli5_how_developed_are_other_animals_sense_of/ | {
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"Canines have an evolved sense of taste. Put a piece of raw beef liver next to a piece of raw beef steak on a plate, a dog will have a preference.",
"Depends on the animal. Cetaceans like dolphins have very little sense of taste; they can taste saltiness, that's all. Other animals have a wider palette for their palate, and definitely favor some foods over others.",
"cats can't taste sweetness (the story about them enjoying the sweet taste of antifreeze is a lie, they like it for some other reason) because they're obligate carnivores and have no need to detect the ripeness of fruit. our taste buds allow us to detect sugar, salt, acid, poison, and amino acids because those are the things that we need or could kill us. it depends on the animal and what it lives on"
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2uix44 | if feeling good is due to certain neurotransmitters being released why can't we influence these chemicals so we feel good all the time ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uix44/eli5if_feeling_good_is_due_to_certain/ | {
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"That's what drugs do. But, the brain often readjusts what \"normal\" feels like so you have to take more and more of something to feel the effects."
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ct6gof | how is it that when you follow the left wall of a maze, it will always lead to an exit? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ct6gof/eli5_how_is_it_that_when_you_follow_the_left_wall/ | {
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"This also works with the right wall. But it only works on mazes that are \"simply connected\". This means that all the walls you touch need to be connected to the outer edge of the maze.\n\nIf that is the case, following the left or right wall you will always end up at an exit, because these mazes are \"knotted strings\", which if stretched out will result in a simple circle with 2 holes (or more) which are the exits.\n\nIf the maze is not simply connected, and the goal is in the middle of the maze, then you can't use this technique, as you'd have to release the wall at some point to get to the other walls which are not connected to the outer edge of the maze."
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2dpp0f | how is suicide considered "selfish"? | I want to start by saying I am not suicidal. This kind of stems off of Robin Williams recent passing and some of the things I have heard said about him.
I understand the concept of killing yourself causes a lot of grief for friends and family that have to continue to live after you cut your life short.
What I **DON'T** understand is how it is not considered selfish for us to want someone to continue to live just so we ourselves don't have to go through the pain of loss and grieving.
I had a friend once who wanted to end her life and I told her that I am here for her and that I don't think it's a good idea, tried to explain to her that everyone would miss her and that it's a selfish and cowardly act (I am not a therapist obviously and I did try and get her help other than me). She responded with "Isn't it selfish for you to tell me not to do it just so you don't have to be sad?" Ever since then I have not been able to come up with an answer to that. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dpp0f/eli5_how_is_suicide_considered_selfish/ | {
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"It's considered selfish because it makes everyone around you unhappy... Whereas you get to escape what makes you unhappy. It's just one way people look at it, it's not necessarily right or justified, but it's how it makes people feel sometimes.",
"From the point of those who are depressed and see the future as dismal and horrid, or just people who think those who want tho die should be able to, it would be selfish for friends and family to ask them to continue to live their current shitty life in order for them to avoid grieving their death. \n\nPersonally, I see both sides. It's a lose-lose situation unless they get a medication that works for them or they get better via whatever means. ",
"It is a selfish act. Because when you are that down, all you can see is a way out of the pain that you are in. And you cannot contemplate how others might really feel about it. It is only selfish in the way that others see it. The person doing the thinking cannot possible be held responsible for how others are feeling. ",
"It's a lot of babble. Maybe Robin did it because of all the selfish people demanding things of him. \n\nLook, it's clear that he didn't enjoy having to do movies or TV anymore. At 63 most people want to retire and do what pleases them. I'm thinking that he wanted to do that too, but people keep on wanting something from him. Be it a movie or just a selfie or autograph. Maybe his most enjoyable moments were riding his bike in town or talking to his neighbor. But the lingering weight of everyone else wanting your talents when you are tired of it become too much.\n\nEveryone else was selfish and Robin decided enough of you all. This is my only escape. This could be said for many who commit suicide. They are stuck is an unhappy situation, as silly as it may seem to others, and it is the only way to escape it.\n\nI think Robin's situation gives us a lot to learn and understand about suicide.",
"Selfish people call it selfish.",
"Imo the people calling it selfish are even more selfish. They're basically telling someone to stay miserable so other people don't lose him. ",
"Because to your family or anyone who cares for you or depends on you its no different than suddenly and without telling warning running away to some foreign land and never contacting them again. ",
"People will call suicide selfish as more of a tool to talk less serious people down from it. The issue is that if someone is actually suicidal, they believe that their friends and lives ones are better off without them anyway. Calling someone's suicide selfish or cowardly after the fact is just stupid. ",
"Things that help you, to the detriment of others are generally considered selfish.\n\nSuicide \"helps\" you, in that you don't have to feel the pain anymore, but hurts those around you.\n\nThere are many other things that follow similar logic. If you're poor and you steal, you're selfish, because you're caring more about your own well-being than that of the people you're stealing from.\n\nYour life may suck, but hurting others to make yourself feel better is selfish.\n\nBUT, humans are innately selfish, and we have to be to some extent, and talking badly about someone's who's committed suicide isn't helping anyone, either...",
"There is some social stigma surrounding mental illnesses. Most people have trouble wrapping their minds around the fact that severe depression is a mental illness and not just some personality flaw. They see it as \"selfish\" and \"cowardly\" because they believe that the suicidal person is making the decision to kill themselves with a clear mind... but they actually aren't.\n\nIf untreated, depression (like any other mental disorder) can really screw with your mind, making you mentally exhausted and desperate, which can trick you into believing things that go against your basic instincts of survival. Worse, they can even push extremely good people into believing that hurting themselves is actually a good thing.\n\nBasically, these people are sick. It's just like any physical illness, except that it affects the mind; if untreated, it can become fatal. They aren't being selfish, they are just hurting so much that they can't see clearly anymore.",
"It is only \"selfish\" in the same way that schizophrenia is \"selfish\", or insomnia is \"selfish\", or OCD is \"selfish\". None of these things are within the person's control. If they were, they wouldn't stay around for long.\n\nA mental illness by definition must be called an \"illness\" if it is harmful to the patient. And I do not see why suicide would be anything other than harmful.\n\nIt seems to me that those who say it is selfish are in some way saying that the person wants to deliberately bring on his own feelings of depression upon himself. That he/she wants to feel horrible. How messed up do you have to be to say that? As if they deliberately want their family and friends to suffer for the rest of their lives from their suicide. \"I think you just WANT us to cry over your grave!\" To say that to the face of somebody suffering from a hard-to-cope-with illness? That takes a special kind of asshole.\n\nThis mentality of \"it's your OWN FAULT\" makes me sick. And exists in the most backward ways: _URL_0_ These people need to walk up to Samaritans' offices and tell them to \"stop being so damned sympathetic towards selfishness all the time\" if they really want to follow through with their mantras. ",
"I am the son of a father who committed suicide when I was 13 and my sister was 17.\n\nI fell into deep depression, began to question everything about our already shaky father-son relationship. I ended up almost dropping out of school, barely pulling it together before I joined a martial art school, and picked up an interest in health and exercise. I slowly combatted my way up and out of depression but still suffer from social anxiety and often cannot express myself outside of anger. \n\nMy sister eloped the following year after his death, essentially became homeless before moving in with a stranger she met on the internet. Luckily he wasn't a rapist, but they did not last together and after they split up, she came back home to attempt to manipulate myself and the rest of my family. \n\nMy mother had it the worst. She was not the healthiest woman, and he nutrition took a severe plummet. She essentially stopped eating, stopped getting out of bed. In a way I had also lost my mother on the day I lost my father. A year after his actions, she suffered from a stroke, was hospitalized, and passed away overnight. \n\n\nAll of this pain throughout my immediate family could have been lessned, if not avoided altogether. If only we had my father around to provide the help that he could have. This is why suicide is a problem and never a solution. ",
"It is unbelievable I wake up to this post. A close friend of our family shot himself and upon learning this news, I saw mom break down immensely asking \"why why why\". Suicide hurts everyone around the victim. Its a grey area and taking either side is foolish. The people mourning don't understand the pain. The victims don't understand the impact they have on lives of others. It might be slightly selfish on both ends, but an immense pain of helplessnes front those alive still linger on.",
"It's also selfish of the people who want you to stay.\n\nSelfish is a harsh word with a lot of negative weight attached to it. We all do things and make decisions to make ourselves happier in life.",
"Suicide by itself is not inherently selfish. Its motivations could be selfish or not. \n\nIn case of depression, people do it not only to stop their unbearable pain, but are also often under the impression that everybody would be better afterwards (toughs like _in the long term my family would be better with me dead and the money of the life insurance than with me alive and completely broke_). Others, they may just have had too much; thinking about what their loved one will suffer have probably helped them to live through some previous down times, but now the suffering is too much.\n\nWhen you say \"it would be selfish\" to someone suffering from depression the internal answer is \"either you are not really understanding how much I'm suffering or you don't care\". It just increase the impression of not being understood, of being unable to get help -- and speaking about their suicidal thoughts is asking for help --, of being a failure.",
"Its reverse psychology.\n\nPeople got the generall idea that you are less likely to commit suicide if it is burried in our society, philosophy as selfish, the easy way out, cowardly, weak, pathetic etc..",
"People who say people should be \"forgiven\" for suicide might as well say people who die of cancer should be forgiven. Obviously they have never had to fight depression every minute of every day. They are at best misinformed and at worst disgusting. Please educate yourself because it is a real tragedy.",
"It's considered selfish because the survivors write the narrative which is for obvious reasons very one sided. ",
"You're absolutely right in my eyes. Who are we to judge suiciders just because they make us upset? Aren't we the selfish ones then, to want someone who cannot handle the emotional pain they are in to stick around and live in that awful pain?"
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1i5gke | what is this almost invisible thingy on the surface of the tea | I'm always wondering what is this thing forming on the surface of the tea when it's hot and why tea is producing that | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1i5gke/eli5_what_is_this_almost_invisible_thingy_on_the/ | {
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"[See here.](_URL_0_)\n\n**TL;DR:** Complex mix of organic/inorganics that are produced/resulting from making up tea with hard water."
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"http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2005/nov/04/foodanddrink.features"
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1xl99h | are photons really a particle? | I'm learning about Physical Optics in my Physics class (really basic) and I decided to look more into what a photon actually is. What I found out is really confusing me. People talk about photons as if they're actual particles but what seems to make more sense to me is that photons are just the representation of the excitation of the electromagnetic fields and the wave representations of them describe where the electromagnetic field is just most excited. And please don't reply saying its wave-particle duality, can you explain what that is? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xl99h/eli5_are_photons_really_a_particle/ | {
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"Neither describing photons (or anything else, for that matter) as a particle, nor describing them as waves, tells the full story. The full story involves some extraordinarily ugly math that you're very unlikely to be able to understand, the somewhat simplified version is that depending on what you're doing, it can be convenient to think of it as either (in the same way that it's sometimes useful to think of a ball as being a rigid point mass)."
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660ata | is there a root oriental language | ELI5: as western languages have a Latin or Greek root, do Asian languages have a root language? Most Asian countries have a fairly rich history, so it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't. But why are Asian languages so structurally different to western languages? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/660ata/eli5_is_there_a_root_oriental_language/ | {
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"Maybe. Almost certainly, especially for nations and regions that are geographically close. Whether or not they're related to *European* languages is even more uncertain.\n\n[Xidnaf has a good video on this.](_URL_0_)",
"none of your assertions are correct, but that's fine. \n\nthere is only a single language with a greek root: greek. modern greek evolved from older greek forms.\n\na subset of western languages, called the romance languages, came from latin. those languages are, among others, french, spanish, italian, portuguese, and romanian. these languages evolved from latin. \n\nenglish does not come from greek or latin. it's related to those languages, and it's notable for having borrowed a lot of words from latin, greek, and french (which DOES come from latin).\n\nlatin and greek are related, which means they share a common ancestor. however, the only real similarity between latin and (classical) greek is grammatical structure and some cognate words. most latin and greek words are, for our purposes, completely unintelligible to each other (consider the latin root 'aqua', the greek root 'hydro'; they both mean water).\n\nto answer your question: do asian languages have a root language? we must actually look at what 'asian languages' mean.\n\nasia is really fucking big. it's the biggest continent, after all. asia has languages that are related to english (like hindi, persian, and punjabi). asia also has languages that are related to hawaiian (tagalog, indonesian).\n\nwhoa whoa whoa. all this 'related' and 'evolved' talk may be making your head spin. what does it mean?\n\n'related' means that the languages are likely to have a common ancestor. we demonstrate this by looking at similarities and looking at how certain features of the language (pronunciation, grammar, tones, etc.) came to be in their present forms.\n\n'evolved from' means that the language is actually a NEWER form of that language. languages change, a lot. think of new slang words that didn't exist 10 years ago. think of the way some people may 'misuse' grammar in english (i ain't got none of that!) well, imagine that happening multiple times over thousands of years. that's how languages change and evolve.\n\nso... asian languages. some asian languages are related. others have evolved from older forms of a pre-existing asian language.\n\nbut i'm gonna wager a guess: you're thinking of chinese, japanese, vietnamese, and korean. \n\nnone of these languages are related as far as we know. \n\nwe have been unable thusfar to establish any sort of common ancestor between these languages. \n\nhowever, because of the point you brought up about rich history, there are somethings that are very similar.\n\ni don't know if you've ever studied chinese or japanese. but chinese is structurally very similar to english. this is a coincidence. \n\nchinese and vietnamese are structurally similar to each other, as well. this is less likely to be a coincidence, because while chinese and vietnamese cannot demonstrate a common ancestor, they still have something like 60% of their words in common.\n\njapanese and korean are structurally similar to each other, but completely alien to chinese and vietnamese. however, both japanese and korean have many words (again, something like 60%) in common with chinese.\n\nhow can this be the case? well, the answer is, essentially, empire. the chinese were very good at establishing spheres of influence throughout their 4000 year long history. they took with them ideas, language, and the written word to places where writing had never even been attempted.\n\nchinese writing, though, is very restrictive. so the japanese and koreans came up with their own solution. the vietnamese, which actually fits the chinese characters a lot better, just decided to listen to the french and write their language with the roman alphabet.\n\n(you might be asking about the mongols, where do they fit into this? well... they don't, either. their language is just as alien to the rest of the east asian languages. they had their own writing system, unrelated to that of the chinese. they now write their language in the cyrillic script, which you might know as the 'russian alphabet'.)\n\nlong ass history lesson. why are they do structurally different to western languages? well, in the case of chinese and vietnamese... they're not. in these languages, the order of words is the same as in english. grammar is very similar (if you've ever taken a french, spanish, german, or god forbid latin class, you'll know that these languages have relatively complex grammar compared to english)\n\nbut their sounds might as well be alien to us (seriously, go do a vietnamese lesson and try to pronounce those words. that language might be one of the hardest to pronounce for english speakers.)\n\njapanese and korean are very different to english structurally. the words are not said in the same order as english. expressing ideas is a little bit 'backwards' in these languages. but they do demonstrate similarities with turkish, hindi, and several other languages.\n\ni know i'm skirting your question. you're asking why.\n\nthe answer is an unfortunate... it is what it is. they evolved differently. the east and the west had basically no contact until the persian empire. that's millennia upon millennia of language evolution. \n\n**tl;dr no**\n\nEDIT: when i say 'chinese' i do mean mandarin, but everything applies to the chinese dialects that derive from middle/classical chinese.",
"There is a indo-european language that is thought to have been the root for not just almost all European languages but also many Asian ones.\n\nThere is also a Sino-Tibetan language family that includes Chinese languages and several similar ones that are thought to have a common origin.\n\nAdditionally while the languages are not closely related the Chinese script was adopted by several people and is still used by the Japanese today.",
" > as western languages have a Latin or Greek root\n\nIt's not quite like that.\n\nMost languages now spoken in Europe, and many languages now spoken in western and south-western parts of Asia, all appear to have descended from the same language which was probably spoken around 6,000 years in a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. We have no records of this language, so we're mostly making educated guesses about it, but the evidence is pretty strong. Linguists call this proposed language \"Proto-Indo-European\", and languages descended from it are called \"Indo-European languages\".\n\nA lot of languages spoken in eastern and south-eastern parts of Asia -- including all the Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese languages -- are thought to be part of a Sino-Tibetan family, but here linguists aren't so sure. Currently, they're arguing over whether or not there could have been a common Proto-Sino-Tibetan language.\n\nThe Korean language seems to be what's called a \"language isolate\", meaning that there's no other language it appears to be related to. On the other hand, it may or may not be an Altaic language, a group that includes Mongolian and Turkish -- and may or may not include Japanese.\n\nSo, the south-east Asian languages may have descended from one, two, three or four proto-languages -- we simply don't know.\n\nWe also don't know whether all the proto-languages in the world descended from a single language (sometimes called \"Proto-World\"). It seems plausible, but we've not found any good evidence."
]
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcc40AowXPQ"
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dz0iw1 | why does sadness comes and go in "waves" when you have reasons to be sad, for a while everything feels normal, bearable and sometime later your whole life seems to be falling apart? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dz0iw1/eli5_why_does_sadness_comes_and_go_in_waves_when/ | {
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"Blood sugar levels (and other dietary stimulants) play an important role in mood regulation. These levels fluctuate with what and when you eat and drink, so our moods will fluctuate with it, to a greater or lesser extent depending on what we eat. For instance, if I drink a strong cup of coffee (caffeinated and sweet), I feel like a million bucks and feel like I could conquer the world, in a word, happy. When the caffein is digested and leaves my system, I feel like complete trash, and the simplest tasks seem insurmountable, in a word, sad. Needless to say, I try to stay away from strong coffee."
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[]
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1z1dvm | why should i hate the 1%? | How are they screwing me?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1z1dvm/eli5_why_should_i_hate_the_1/ | {
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"You shouldn't hate them, people who do are just jealous. I'm not saying they don't have unfair advantages; I'm just saying if you were given the choice you'd be rich too.",
"BECAUSE IT'S NOT FAIR THAT THEY HAVE MORE THAN ME!!\n\nTAX THEM NAO!!! \n\n1% VS 99%!!!!\n\nTHEY CAN AFFORD IT BECAUSE THEY HAVE MORE THAN ME!!!\n\nDURRRRR",
"There is no reason to hate all of them. But some of them are bad and need to be stopped. They are powerful people, and some of them abuse their power to make things miserable for others. Some of them use their money to subvert our democracy. They basically pay for politicians.\n\nThe reason that they are sometimes referred to as \"the 1%\" is because the top 1% of income earners are the only people who can afford to buy a politician. That's all. It's not having the money that makes people bad, it's just that sometimes bad people have money and they will use it for bad things.",
"Because it's much easier than facing the issues of general population complacency, overpopulation and under regulated immigration. Plus it makes pushing tax increases over budget reform sound downright moral. ",
"You shouldn't. Life isn't fair. The 1% worked for their money, either their fathers, grandfathers, or themselves, and thus set up a prosperous life for themselves or their offspring. \n\nDo some abuse that money and power? Yes. Do some do good with it? Yes! Don't hate, use them as motivation for yourself to become the best at what you can do. ",
"There's nothing to hate. Most of the people in that income bracket got there because of dumb luck. Either they had the right parents, or were born with a drive to do something that made them a lot of money. They just need to pay an amount of taxes commensurate with the resources consumed to make their wealth possible. The act of concentrating wealth and maintaining resources costs the public a load of money, so their tax rate needs to be higher, and it usually is. A dam is a good analogy. Building a small damn is pretty easy, building and maintaining a big damn requires a big supply chain, and that supply chain uses public resources to exist.",
"You shouldn't hate anyone. Accept responsibility for your life, do the best you can and do not compare yourself to others. Envy or hatred of someone based on their possessions will lead to nothing but personal ruin and always feeling screwed when that very likely isn't the case. \n\n"
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b7pxjk | why is teflon so little reactive? | From what I know, it is generally used to store chemicals like hydrofluoric acid because they would react with glass or ceramics. What makes Teflon such a stable molecule? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b7pxjk/eli5_why_is_teflon_so_little_reactive/ | {
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"Teflon is a chain of CF2 groups. The carbon-fluorine bond is exceptionally strong with the fluorines shielding the carbon-carbon bonds. That combination makes it very resistant to reaction or chemical attack."
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31ybk1 | why do friends "bully", put down, or physically fight all in good fun to show their friendship? | It seems like people who are best friends often say the most hurtful or rude phrases to one another, even though they aren't perceived that way. Me telling someone they are an idiot is interpreted very differently depending how well I know the person. So what makes friends allowed to be obnoxious to their friends? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31ybk1/eli5_why_do_friends_bully_put_down_or_physically/ | {
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"For me it is just because all my mates are wankers.",
"I think you answered your question already, it's \"all in good fun\". Although, sometimes it gets out of hand and some people start getting salty lol",
"Because if I dont call my best friend a jackass, who will?",
"I come from a very sarcastic family and make friends with very sarcastic, facetious people. As best as I can explain it... just about everyone is nice to everyone else, regardless of whether or not they mean it (be polite to friends/family, be polite to strangers... or, at least, not outwardly mean to them).\n\nBut there's a whole subset of humor that is, inherently, offensive. Words, jokes, puns... saying them to someone you don't care about risks that person thinking you're sincere and being hurt... but when you have a really good relationship with someone, so much that you each know you have unquestionable respect/love for one another, then it can add an enjoyable layer to your relationship to pick on each other.\n\nHeck, these relationships have made me have a pretty thick skin to. I'm unoffendable, laid back, and am pretty grounded in my strengths and faults. \n\nAs an odd consequence, though, I am quite uncomfortable in relationships where such humor isn't reciprocated... because then I feel like I am being offensive instead of playful."
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dne90z | what are the benefits to planting so many trees worldwide? are there any negative consequences to this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dne90z/eli5_what_are_the_benefits_to_planting_so_many/ | {
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"Only *real* negative outcome is a full blown Treefolk rebellion, but as long as we keep them happy and maintain the child sacrifices they will clean the air to the best of their ability.",
"One of the benefits of planting many trees is that it sequesters carbon. Excess carbon in the air is causing global temperatures to rise. We dig it out of the ground and burn it. To planting trees helps reverse this process. But it takes a lot of trees. \n\nThere aren’t many disadvantages to planting a lot of trees, but there is a problem if you plant too many of one kind of tree and non-native species.\n\nToo many of one kind of tree leaves the area vulnerable to pests, and reduces biodiversity. It’s often done for agriculture or logging. Planting too many trees in a fruit orchard, for example, makes the entire area vulnerable to disease, which can kill the entire orchard. \nNon native trees that grow faster than native ones can outcompete other trees for space, making it more difficult for animals that depend on the native trees to survive.",
"Trees have literally dozens of benefits, but I’ll name the big ones:\n\nTheir roots keep soil from being eroded away, also reducing loss of nutrients and water as a result. This makes for better soil and in some places fewer landslides.\n\nBut sucking up that water and releasing it slowly by evaporation they cool their surroundings. \n\nA moderately large tree siphons the carbon out of an entire football stadium’s worth of air, a pursuit the whole of humanity should have an interest in right now\n\nThey create better conditions For this to happen around themselves, kicking off a multiplier effect of every benefit I just named by sheltering new growth and providing habitat to animals that benefit the process\n\nAlso studies show green spaces (which means many trees!) in places inhabited by humans benefit our mental health\n\nAre there negative consequences? Depends on your definition. I consider the land, time and money this would require to be a worthwhile trade. Mostly though it’s a lot of work which means cost, which I consider short term pain for long term gain",
"One downside is wrong type of tree for the ecosystem. It is important that you plant trees which naturally belong to the area.\n\nA deep rooted tree among surface rooted can prevent other trees from getting water from the soild. Or destroy roots of other trees.\n\nPlants have defense mechanisms like chemicals they make. These can disturn microbes, fungus, and insects in the area.\n\nAnd saplings can bring disease from other area to where it is s planted, and it can cause great destruction.",
"If you are referring to the [_URL_3_](_URL_1_) campaign that have popped up on the internet the last few days with a goal of 20 million trees by 2020 that not a lot of trees. It might have a huge effect if it is planted in in urban environment but compared to planting that is done by the forestry industry the number is minimal.\n\nJust in Sweden there are 200 000 hectare of forest cut down each year and replanted with 2000-2500 trees per hectare. IF you use a a average of 2250 trees per hecatre you get a total of 450 million trees planted per year. A hectare is a square with 100 meter sides that is equal to 2.47 acers. \nThere is estimation of 87 billion trees just in Sweden.\n\nYou can plant 3000-5000 tees per day if you do in like it is done in the forestry industry. [_URL_2_](_URL_2_) P A single worker might plant 75 000 trees during a few weeks work in the summer. Planting trees in a urban environment is not exactly the same.\n\nThere was a program of planting 350 million trees in a day in [350 million trees day in Ethiopia](_URL_0_)\n\nIf you plant the right trees that have a positive effect as you trap carbon dioxide, help to bind the the soil and reduce erosion. Forest can also bind more water then open land and it and the soil binding can stop desert growth.. In a city it provide shade and result in energy saving because of reduced need of cooling, it also rescue the wind in a city. There is also a lot of other positive effect. \n\n\nWhen trees are cut town the provide a a resource to be used for a lot of stuff and the whole tree or just the part you cant use for other stuff is a carbon neutral energy source."
]
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"https://timefortrees.org/",
"https://youtu.be/PiOVRhOaEXE?t=204",
"timefortrees.org"
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r7jmw | how in the hell a brawl like this is legal? [nhl fight] | _URL_0_
Anywhere else these people would be arrested and locked up for acting like this. How come they're not?
I can't create a sport where smoking crack is part of it and take a break every now and then to take a hit of off of my crack pipe because it's "part of the sport" so what gives? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r7jmw/eli5_how_in_the_hell_a_brawl_like_this_is_legal/ | {
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"True, but you could say the same thing about Boxing and MMA. It's legal because Fighting is an accepted part of the game and you accept this when you decide to play the sport of Hockey.\n\nThe merits of fighting in Hockey are among the most discussed issues in Sports. Traditionalists point out that there is a very strict unwritten code to fighting which all players observe. Others believe that as ingrained as fighting is to hockey's past, rules of sport are always evolving. Recently, this has turned into a very grave issue as hockey's problems with concussions are hitting critical mass and [storied fighters of the past have been dieing prematurely](_URL_0_), either from substance abuse or mental health issues.\n\nThere very well could be a later date at which the NHL just decides to weather the fury of it's fanbase and just ban it. The evidence is mounting in all sports that such violence is starting to cost people their lives and well being.\n\n > \"I did it because it was my job but I hated it,\" said Georges Laraque, one of the most successful hockey heavyweights in his 12-year NHL career. \"I hated to fight. I hated the pressure. I hated to be called a goon, and an animal. I hated promoting violence.\"\n\nI've never heard that quote before. Frankly, it's heartbreaking.",
"Laws are not automatic things. When you commit a crime, you are not instantly sent to jail. The police and the prosecuting lawyers need to charge people with crimes, and they can simply choose not to. For Hockey, and other contact sports, it has been decided to let them get away with assault. They do so because they realize that everything is consensual, that all acts (well, most acts) of violence are done in the spirit of the game and not as a personal attack, and that just about every team sport would collapse if people could be charged for assault. Imagine if you could get sent to jail or sued for every tackle, body check, shove, and charge; no one would ever play sports again. Your example of crack is different. First of all, you would never be able to convince anyone that crack is a part of the sport. No sport that currently exists depends on the consumption of a specific substance. Secondly, fighting is not exactly a high crime, nor is minor assault. Possession and distribution of crack is a serious felony. So, you would not be allowed to rape, kidnap, or deliberately murder during any sport as well.\n\nTL/DR: It's legal because we allow it to be, because laws are flexible."
]
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"http://edition.cnn.com/2011/SPORT/09/01/nhl.enforcers.deaths/index.html"
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89s0ph | how do solid air fresheners work? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/89s0ph/eli5_how_do_solid_air_fresheners_work/ | {
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"So states of matter are mostly based on energy (pressure too but in open air its pretty constant). Energy we normally measure by temperature. Temperature is average kinetic energy, basically how bouncy the particles are.\n\nBoiling/melting/freezing/condensing all happen when the average energy level is above/below whatever level is needed to break out into a different phase. Gas is high energy (particles zip around and don't touch eachother). Liquid is the middle ground (they still move around but all stick close to one another). Solid is the lowest (everyone is stuck in their place)\n\ntemperature is an average thing though, so there will always be some high energy particles and some low every ones. thats why puddles evaporate when it isn't boiling out, some particles can make it, just not all of them.\n\nSo sublimation is when some particles have enough energy to escape straight from the solid phase to the gas phase. Usually because it takes them so much energy to get out of solid phase they have enough left over to just skip liquid.\n\nSome compounds do it pretty consistently at room temperature, and that is what those solid air fresheners are doing."
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35od3t | why can't video games on different medias play together? | Why can't PS4, PC, and Xbox One all play with each other in one place? Regardless of console choice?
Edit: spelling | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35od3t/eli5_why_cant_video_games_on_different_medias/ | {
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"They can. Nothing is technically stopping them. In fact, some games do have PS4 and PC players playing together. \r\r\rWhy most don't is two reasons. One, the companies don't want to do it as they'll make more profit otherwise. They want you to buy their platform to play with your friends. Microsoft doesn't allow cross platform play. I'd assume Sony doesn't want it with Xbox, but they allow it for PC. Secondly, due to control inputs there are unfair advantages that would make online play horrible in some genres. A first person shooter for example would see bad mouse players out shooting the top controller controller players. "
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281gft | the difference between anologue and digital signals. | And what are their different uses? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/281gft/eli5_the_difference_between_anologue_and_digital/ | {
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"Digital signals are discrete. Think of volume on your television. You have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., but nothing in-between.\n\nAnalog signals are continuous. You can have 1.3974... with an analog signal.",
"Digital signals are always conmprised of the lowest form being 'off' or 'on' - binary. There are many com;plex ways to bundle digital bits to represent virtually any value you desire - but the fundamental values being expressed can always be restored to a simple 0/1 state.\nAs mentioned - there are no other states - so if a raw digital signal is corrupted - then (without error correction techniques) the data is lost as soonhj as the first bit is misplaced.\n\nAnalog signals are a continuously 'scalar' (analog) value, which unfortunately may be degraded by gain or loss during transmission - which in turn may interfere with the 'information being received. There are techniques to minimise this problem (diversity, embedded reference values etc), but the nice gthing is that a misplaced 'bit' of information may not corrupt the message entirely - think of poor analog TV reception vs poor digitsal reception."
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3okhza | if a qubit can have multiple spin states but still has to be measured in order to do useful work then what's the point. | I understand that effectively the single electron transistor can have multiple theoretical states but as soon as we measure it, that settles down to one value. So how are quantum computer's better? Because they use only a single electron i.e. greater efficiency? Or is there some element of superposition that allows a deeper level of data encoding to be delivered by only one transistor?
EDIT: The easy answer is that you need more than one qubit for anything useful. I guess my question wasn't well phrased. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3okhza/eli5_if_a_qubit_can_have_multiple_spin_states_but/ | {
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"It's more about being able to have many potential answers to a problem and being able to then select the one that you want. You're able to store more potential answers using those qubits. One of the best explanations I've heard about this basically said that it will do almost nothing for normal computing, but it will do wonders for a very specific set of problems."
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1ct191 | who is layman? and why are we all saying things in their "terms?" | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ct191/who_is_layman_and_why_are_we_all_saying_things_in/ | {
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"[Wikipedia](_URL_0_):\n\n > A layperson or layman is a person who is not an expert in a given field of knowledge. Originally, the term signified a member of the laity, i.e., a non-clergyman.[1]\n\n > The concept of describing something \"in layman's terms\" has come into wide use in the English-speaking world. To put something in layman's terms is to describe a complex or technical issue using words that the average person (so that someone without professional training in the subject area) can understand.\n\nMight not be a fully \"like-im-five\" explanation, but I'd say it's actually pretty close.",
"there was a time when the educated people were clergy, and the people who were not clergy were called lay, or lay people, or laymen... the people not in the clergy. So to express things in laymen's terms means to explain it like I am five."
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2rel10 | facebook privacy and does that disclaimer i'm seeing actually do anything? | I've been seeing a lot of people put up a disclaimer (skeptical that it even does anything) but why exactly are people flipping out? What's the worst possible outcome and are my kittens in danger? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rel10/eli5_facebook_privacy_and_does_that_disclaimer_im/ | {
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"No post you make on facebook has any legal standing. It's the user agreement that you consent to every time that you log on that is legally enforceable\n\nThis happens every time Facebook changes their terms of service or whatever. Some armchair lawyer (or troll) convinces a few friends that they can post their own terms regarding use of content on their feed. They then convince a few friends, who convince a few friends, who...",
"It is bullshit. You \"electronically sign\" an end user license agreement and a privacy policy which trump this ignorant attempt at legal disclaimer. You just signed something then said something that says you don't agree. ",
"The disclaimer is a good way of discovering who in your friends list has a high school level understanding of contracts and End-User License Agreements, Terms of Service, etc. \n\nLegally it holds as much ground as going outside and saying, \"I declare bankruptcy\" does to ease your debts. ",
"It definitely does something. It easily identifies which of your Facebook friends are idiots, over the age of 40 and/or believe anything they read on the internet. ",
"Followup: What disclaimer are you all talking about?",
"_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThe list goes on and on but the answer is no it doesn't do anything.",
"I declare REDDIT is mine!\nWell, that doesnt work either. Damnit.",
"There's no outcome as it doesn't affect anything. The only thing it accomplishes is making you look like a fool."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://hoax-slayer.com/bogus-facebook-privacy-notice.shtml",
"http://gawker.com/5963225/that-facebook-copyright-thing-is-meaningless-and-you-should-stop-sharing-it",
"http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/people-need-to-stop-sharing-that-facebook-copyrigh"
],
[],
[]
] | |
8ijfc0 | what causes rewinding a vhs to create visual distortions on the screen instead of playing normally in reverse? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ijfc0/eli5_what_causes_rewinding_a_vhs_to_create_visual/ | {
"a_id": [
"dys9ir2",
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"score": [
9,
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2
],
"text": [
"I'm going to assume you're talking about \"scanning\" backwards during playback, since \"rewinding\" means stopping playback to rewind the tape to the beginning.\n\nIt actually has to do with how the signal is recorded onto the magnetic tape. It's referred to as helical scan method (both recording and playback). So you might imagine the signal is recorded this way on a tape:\n\n||||||||||||\n\nbut it's actually recorded this way\n\n////////////\n\nthere's a variety of reason for doing it this way, but how it pertains to your question is that the scan head also reads in a helical pattern, so when you're scanning forward or backwards it gets misaligned and results in the scan interference you're talking about.\n\n[Here's the Wikipedia page for VHS which explains perhaps more than you want to know about VHS.](_URL_0_)\n\n[Here's the page for Helical scan.](_URL_2_)\n\n[And finally here's a question on the Video Production StackExchange that's the same as yours.](_URL_1_)",
"Most video tape, and certainly the consumer types, used a technique called \"helical scan\" to put more information on smaller and smaller tapes. Basically it recorded the information in diagonal lines along the tape, instead of just straight. So when you scanned the tape backwards it was really hard for the machines to read the information. In the later days of video tape they developed tape machines that could play backwards smoothly. \n\nRemember that regular rewind just pulled the tape off the heads so it could go really fast and save wear & tare.\n\nThere's another thing called \"vertical blanking\" it was information recorded on the tape outside of the part with the image. When you played the tape backwards a lot of that would show up in the picture, distorting it even more.",
"During normal play, the heads are rotating rapidly, scanning a path diagonally across the tape. At the same time, the tape is moving slowly forward. The heads record one frame^\\* with each diagonal stripe across the tape. The exact position and angle of the stripe is affected both by the spinning head and by the tape speed.\n\nIf the playback tape speed is different from the recording tape speed, then the angle of the stripe made by the heads won't line up. Some of the playback will be from one frame of video and some from one or more following frames. In between there will be static that comes from the narrow gap between the recorded stripes.\n\nThe basic issue is that the heads are forced to always spin at a speed that matches your video standard, e.g., 30 & #8239;Hz (1800 & #8239;RPM). If the tape speed changes to do fast forward, pause, or rewind, then the frame rate on the tape no longer matches the frame rate of the spinning heads and you see stripes of multiple frames with thin, horizontal stripes of inter-frame static in between.\n\n\\* We'll ignore the frame/field interlacing issue here for simplicity."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS",
"https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/20190/what-causes-the-vhs-rewind-effect-and-how-did-rewind-preview-work",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helical_scan"
],
[],
[]
] | ||
99gw8o | how bad is it for president trump that cohen pleaded guilty? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/99gw8o/eli5_how_bad_is_it_for_president_trump_that_cohen/ | {
"a_id": [
"e4nkdyu"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"**Please read this entire message**\n\n---\n\nYour submission has been removed for the following reason(s):\n\n* Recent/current events are not allowed on ELI5. First, these are usually asking for factual answers or opinions. Additionally, information about these events is usually still developing , making objective and accurate answers difficult (Rule 2). \n\n\n\n\n---\nIf you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](_URL_1_) first. If you still feel the removal should be reviewed, please [message the moderators.](_URL_0_?)"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Can%20you%20review%20my%20thread",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules"
]
] |
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