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agm87u | how are there apples from canada in the grocery store that are still “fresh”? | Isn’t apple season far from over? Why aren’t they mushy? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/agm87u/eli5_how_are_there_apples_from_canada_in_the/ | {
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"There are more than 7,000 varieties of apples but not all of them come to harvest at the same time. In the course of a year, there are actually three apple harvests: an early-season harvest, a mid-season harvest, and a late-season harvest.\n\nThe harvest for early-season apple varieties begins in mid-summer and peaks in late summer. The harvest for mid-season apples begins in late summer and peaks in early autumn, and the harvest for late-season apples begins in early autumn and peaks in late autumn–and sometimes runs right into early winter.\n\nLate-season apples are the best keepers. Keepers are apples that can be set aside at cool temperatures just above 32°F (0°C) and will stay fresh right through the winter and into spring. For that reason, late-season apples are sometimes called winter apples.\n\nWhile some cookbooks like to divide apples into those that are eaten out of hand (the early- and mid-season apples) and those that are set aside and used for baking and cooking (late-season apples), it’s not really that simple.\n\nLate-season apples–just like apples from the early and mid-season harvest times—have a variety of uses. An apple’s use depends upon the variety of apple.\n\nSome are right for eating out of hand; they are usually firm, juicy, crisp, and sweet to sweet-tart tasting.\nSome are best for pies; they are more dry than juicy and will have a slightly acidic flavor.\nSome are great for baking or cooking whole; they will be sweet but firm and will not disintegrate in the oven easily.\nSome are suited for jellies; they will be more acidic but juicy.\nSome are best for sauce; they will be sweet to tart and will not discolor easily.\nIf you want a sweet tasting winter apple for eating out of hand, choose the Pink Lady. If you want a winter salad apple that is crisp but not too sweet, choose the Sierra Beauty or the Newtown Pippin. If you’re making a late-season applesauce, choose the Rhode Island Greening. If you are planning to bake a tart this winter day, choose the Winesap.\n\nIf you really want to appreciate fresh apples, get to know the varieties that grow in your region. There will be early-, mid-, and late-season apples growing close by, and there will be an apple in each season right for the use you have in mind.\n\nLate season or winter apples are great for cooking and are also the best keepers. Most will last through the winter until early spring if chilled at just above 32°F (0°C).\n\nChoose apples with tight, smooth, unblemished skin with good color for the variety. Apples should be firm to hard. The scent should be full and fresh. Avoid fruit that is slightly soft, the flesh could be mealy and mushy. To test the degree of ripeness, give the apple a flick close to the stalk–a dull sound indicates ripeness, a hollow sound is a sign of over-ripeness.\n\nTaste is always more important than looks when it comes to apples. Get to know the varieties that grow in your region. Taste several to discover which ones you favor.\n\nWINTER OR LATE-SEASON APPLE VARIETIES:\n\nHere are some of the winter apples you will find at the farm market this week:\n\nArkansas Black: from Benton County, Arkansas; very dark color; crisp, juicy, slightly acid; good for eating out of hand, for desserts and applesauce; good storage keeper.\n\nAshmead’s Kernel: heirloom that is highly regarded in the UK; yellow with orange-brown blush; great flavor fresh or juiced–intense nutlike flavor with a balance of sweet and tart; tart when tree ripe, mellows with storage.\n\nBaldwin: from Wilmington, Massachusetts since 1740; bright red and streaked with yellow; sweet-tart with sharp full flavor; juicy; crisp texture; great for munching, baking pies, cider, and applesauce; good to store for winter eating.\n\nBlack Twig: heirloom found only at farmers markets; dark red, almost purple; hard, juicy, fragrant; golden flesh and grassy, intense flavor; great for eating out of hand.\n\nBraeburn: from New Zealand; medium size, mottled red and yellow skin and orange red over yellow; crisp, sweet-tart flavor, aromatic, firm texture; stores well for up to12 months; eating out of hand, applesauce, pies, baking.\n\nBrown Russet: heirloom before 1870; very late harvest; with patches of green and red; good fresh, stored, or use for sweet apple cider.\n\nCortland: from Geneva, New York since 1915; large, round, smooth, shiny red with flat ends; fine-grained very white juicy flesh, crisp, fragrant, sweet; flesh resists browning; fresh eating, perfect in salads, good for cooking and oven-baking, remains firm when baked, perfect for pies, desserts, applesauce. Does not store well.\n\nCox’s Orange Pippin’: from Bucks, England about 1830; found in farmers markets in U.S.; skin is clear yellow with orange and red stripes; crisp juicy, excellent flavor; for eating out of hand, applesauce, or blended with other varieties for pies; good keeper.\n\nEnterprise: medium size, red blush; firm, sweet; keeps well.\n\nEsopus Spitzenburg: from Esopus in Ulster County, New York since 1790; medium to large, bright red with yellow dots; crisp, sweet tender pale golden flesh; rich complex flavor, tangy and spicy; choice for dessert, good all-around.\n\nFuji: cross between Ralls Janet and Red Delicious; esteemed in Japan and China; introduced into the U.S. from Japan in 1980s; medium to large, green to yellow with under color blushed with red; flesh yellow green with red strips; firm, crisp, juicy, fragrantly sweet, excellent honey-like flavor; stores well; use in applesauce blends, eat out of hand; too hard for pies but holds texture well when baked.\n\nGolden Russet: unknown origin before 1870; hard to find outside of farmers’ markets; small or medium size and round; skin russeted redish-brown and golden; flesh is firm and yellow; flavor rich and aromatic; excellent eating out of hand, cooking and making fresh cider; keeps well in storage.\n\nGold Rush: medium size, yellow; dessert quality, excellent fresh or for baking; best after storage.\n\nIdared: from Idaho since 1942; large, dark red with greenish-yellow spots; firm, juicy, fragrant, tangy-tart flavor, aromatic flesh; all purpose, excellent baked, remains firm when cooked or baked; for applesauce; keeps well.\n\nMelrose: from Ohio, the official apple of Ohio; cross between a Jonathan and a Delicious; medium to large, round; skin yellow with bright red blush; white flesh, mildly tart, aromatic; good for storage, good dessert apple.\n\nMutsu (Crispin): developed in Japan as Mutsu; renamed Crispin in Europe and America; large, round, harder than Golden Delicious; pale yellow skin with light red blush; cream colored flesh, crunchy, moderately sweet to tangy; eat out of hand, excellent in pies and for dessert; long storage life.\n\nNewtown Pippin’ (Yellow Pippin’, Yellow Newtown): developed in the Borough of Queens, New York before the American Revolution; large; skin is pale green and soft yellow with occasional red streak; crisp, faint citrus scent and complex sweet and tart taste; excellent for cooking, pies and applesauce.\n\nNorthern Spy (Red Spy): from East Bloomfield, New York about 1800; skin bruises easily so seen usually in farmers’ markets; large, round shape with pale yellow pink to red blushed skin; tender, fine-grained flesh; juicy, sprightly flavor, aromatic; excellent dessert, baking, and cooking apple; eating out of hand and applesauce.\n\nPink Lady: crisp fall nights bring the bright pink color to the skin; sweetly tart taste with hints of kiwi and raspberry; for snacking and baking.\n\nRhode Island Greening: yellow-green grassy colored skin; distinctive sweet-tart spicy flesh, sometimes sour and hard; for eating out of hand, pies, applesauce; intensifies in flavor when cooked.\n\nRome: from Rome Township, Ohio; older than the Rome Beauty; large, round, yellow-to green skinned with mottled red overtones; crunchy texture and tangy flavor; best as a baked apple; mealy and flavorless when stored too long.\n\nRome Beauty (Red Rome): from Ohio; medium to extra large, round, smooth red, tough skin; firm greenish-white flesh; juicy, crisp, slightly tart, firm; outstanding for baking, keeps its shape with sweet flavor; use for whole baked apples; fair for eating out of hand; season from September to early November, holds until June.\n\nSierra Beauty: intense sweet and tart flavor, crisp and juicy.\n\nStayman (sometimes mistakenly called Winesap): cross between Red Delicious and Winesap; grown mainly in the southeastern United States; rich red color with green undertones, russet dots; fine-grained, firm flesh, juicy with lively, complex flavor; all purpose, excellent cooking apple.\n\nTydeman’s Late Orange: full flavor around Christmas; excellent for storage.\n\nWinesap: small, bright red sin with areas that look almost purple; fine grained, firm , juicy with lively, slightly fermented winey flavor; good eating out of hand, good for applesauce and pies, apple cider; stores into June.\n\nYork or York Imperial: from York County, Pennsylvania since the 1800s; off-center, lopsided shape; light red or pinkish skin dotted with yellow; yellowish flesh, crisp, moderately juicy, mildly sweet; good for drying, cooking, or baking; add to pies or applesauce.",
"The average apple in grocery stores is about [14 months old](_URL_0_)... they have ways of picking them, treating them with wax, storing them at specific temperatures and in spaces with specific mixtures of gases to prevent them from going bad for long periods of time."
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3fzgm1 | why is chess so popular? what made it "better" than other board games? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fzgm1/eli5_why_is_chess_so_popular_what_made_it_better/ | {
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"1. Chess is really old, so it has a lot of time to gather followers, which made it popular.\n2. Chess is a typical \"easy to learn, hard to master\" board game, which makes it both popular and \"better\" than many other board games.\n\nEdit: It's kind of funny people keep mentioning Go here offering both these qualities, but no one Xiangqi, the Chinese version of chess which does too and is the board game played by most people overall in the world (Chinese stuff tends to have that quality ;)). I recommend taking a look, it's great - personally I prefer it to chess.",
"The top two board games in the world are Chess and Go. Both involve spatial reasoning, cause and effect thinking, branched decision making and, to a certain extent, psychological warfare.\n\nChess is a lot more structured than Go, and so then, Go is a lot more open and expansive than chess. Both challenge the mind in different ways and are great games to be played.\n\nBut they key concept is the right balance of an ease to learn and a complexity to master.",
"Good answers already, but one key factor not yet mentioned is that chess is a game of skill, not chance. As opposed to any games which require dice or cards to be drawn: those games require good luck as a big factor.\n\nChess is a \"fairer\" game because the person who plays with more skill wins.",
"I think it is because every game is different, so a lot of experience is needed to master it. And in very few board games does skill and even \"style\" influence the game as much as in chess..",
"[Avid board gamer here](_URL_0_). (Come visit us at /r/boardgames some time) \n\nChess has been around for a long time. It's probably the third oldest board game that is still played (after Backgammon and Go). A lot of people already know how to play it, so they teach new people how to play it, and the game continues to be popular. (This is, incidentally, why awful games like monopoly continue to exist.) \n\nSecond, Chess has a relatively simple rule set. There's very few rules beyond explaining how each piece moves. \n\nThird, Chess can be played in a reasonably short amount of time. (Most amateur games take only an hour or two) \n\nFourth, it's reasonably cheap to play. A plain plastic chess set probably costs around 10 dollars. \n\nFifth, it doesn't require many players. You only need two players to play. \n\nLastly, there's really no \"better\" here. It's completely subjective how \"good\" a game is. I find Chess interesting, but I can name 100-200 games I'd rather play before I played Chess. ",
"I played chess all through high school and what I learned later in life is that it is not limited by socioeconomic boundaries. It wasn't like other sports where your competition had the best coaches and equipment. Your ability to succeed was only limited by your potential and work ethic. I came from an extremely poor family and chess made me feel normal.",
"While Chess is old, some say 1000 AD but ~1845 is when it really came to the public. Actually Chess wasnt that big of a game until Checkers, the most popular game of the time, was perfected. Yes Checkers was far more popular than Chess, but when the \"perfect\" Checkers game was discovered many people moved away from it due to it becoming formulaic. Checkers tournaments basically became a scripted event so Chess came in an Check Mated Checkers and became a world sport.",
"Depth and easy to pick up and play.\n\nSame reason why MOBAs and fighting games are popular. ",
"A Few Reasons:\n\n* [It's virtually unsolvable](_URL_0_). There's more moves/board positions than there are atoms in the universe (~10^123 upper bound to ~10^48 lower bound). This makes the skill cap nearly limitless, even to computers.\n\n* There's no random elements in the game. Apart from who goes first, there's no dice roll or random number generator that affects the outcome of the game. Since there's no luck component, it's purely a 1v1 mental duel of skill.\n\n* Low barrier of entry. It's cheap and easy to learn. However since the skill cap is ridiculously high, it is very difficult to master.\n\n* Infinite replay value. Since there's so many board configurations, virtually no two games are identically.",
"What I don't understand, and I own no less than 50 chess books, is there are a finite number of moves- particularly openings. People of skill tend to play the same handful of openings with slight variations. So chess seems to be more about *memorization*- book lines than actual innovation or skill. Much like *Scrabble*.\n\nI'm sure I'm missing something. It's probably in the area of endgame difficulty but I don't think most games end that way (at least not at my rating). Feel free to enlighten me.",
"I don't see you guys rating\n\nThe kind of mate I'm contemplating\n\nI'd let you watch, I would invite you\n\nBut the queens we use would not excite you.",
"Chess is not a war game, Poker is a war game. Chess is about court intrigue, about usurping the king and putting your own person on the throne. The queen is protecting her liege or usurping the liege, it manipulates the church (bishops), the Military (Castles), the nobility (Knights), and the commoners (pawns) in their struggle to control the court. Everyone, including the Queen may be sacrificed and replaced, position of the pieces is only relevant as to the position of the king. ",
"A significant difference between chess and many other games (like card games for example) is that in chess there is no hidden information. At any time during the game you know exactly what is going on and the only educated guess you have to take is regarding the other player's decisions.",
"I'm a westerner and I prefer go over chess. With that said. I usually go with 9x9 or 13x13 game though. 19x19 takes forever to finish. I think prefer the diversity that go offers over chess. Chess has limited number of moves and even finer range intelligent moves which is why building an ai with a good dictionary isn't particularly difficult. However a good go ai that can challenge a low level professional player has yet to be seen.\n\nAs to the original question. When a strong player is playing a game of chess, within the time it takes to start and finish that one game, that player will have played as many as 400 hundred chess games inside their head.",
"I think mostly it has to do with the perception of chess as an academic endeavor. Sure, there is perfect information, a ton of different possible games, etc. but here is the thing; a lot of newer games have that too. The only reason that people by-in-large play chess over a lot of those other games is that those other games are seen as recreation whereas chess is seen as academic."
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10zup3 | how does the tor network guarantee complete anonymity? | and how does this network really work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10zup3/how_does_the_tor_network_guarantee_complete/ | {
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"It does not *guarantee* anything, but it is a network of computers just like yours, that route traffic for each other, hiding the original source."
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3c39kl | why can some businesses swipe my card without any verification(pin/signature) from me? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c39kl/eli5_why_can_some_businesses_swipe_my_card/ | {
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"There is usually a threshold set by the card companies above which a signature is required. Small purchases are less likely to be fraudulent since people with a stolen card are going to run the card up as fast as possible before it gets reported. Now that cards are more common than cash, not requiring a signature for every purchase adds convenience for the consumer and efficiency for the retailer. Security is great, but it adds more work and people are always looking for that balance.",
"In the UK, we have contact-less payment. They limit is £20, going up to £30 in September. There is a chip in your card, which can only be read from a distance of a few centimetres, which the card machine reads to obtain your bank details. Cards with this chip on have [a symbol on them] (_URL_0_)\n\nWhen you make a payment, you tap your card on the reader and it takes the money - no need for a PIN. However, I think you may be talking about a different system where you live."
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46wqph | how sports video game scoring works. | Does the computer know that you are successful as soon as you hit the buttons or is there more chaos involved before the goal is made?
For instance, when playing single player golf games, does the game know you made the ball in as soon as you hit the buttons because you found the magic position to be in, or is there an element of chaos because of the terrain or whatever else until the ball actually goes in the hole? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46wqph/eli5_how_sports_video_game_scoring_works/ | {
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"That totally depends on the game and how its programmed. For example, in First Person Shooters there are 2 type of games. In one type the bullets reach their target instantaneously. As soon as you fire the game decides weather its a hit or miss. In other games the bullets travel at more realistic speeds, they are affected by gravity and so on.\n\nHere is a random BF4 sniping video:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAs you can see sometimes it takes 1-2 seconds for the bullet to reach its target. If the target moves than its a miss.\n\nIn a hypothetical Golf game the wind may be dynamic, as in it changes from second to second. So while the ball is in the air the wind keeps changing and the game keeps recalculating where the ball will go. Or the wind may be consistent and the game calculates immediately where the ball will go.",
"In X-Com2 (turn based squad shooter), the outcome is calculated as soon as you start the action. For example, doing one of missions i pressed \"end turn\" and got various promotions and achievements pop up instantly. Afterwards, the computer spent ~5minutes actually making his turn, resulting in returning fire from my units etc etc, and actually showing what happened. But the result was calculated long before that.\n\nBut it is different for every game. Some games like xcom calculate everything at start, others do it \"as it goes\"."
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4aoy7w | why does a little bit of water/saliva increase the traction of a basketball players shoes? | You would think that the liquid would make them slip.
Also, not sure if this applies anywhere else. If it does, then where? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4aoy7w/eli5_why_does_a_little_bit_of_watersaliva/ | {
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"Its not their saliva that increases traction.\n\nIts getting the dust off their shoes that increases traction. Dust sticks to your shoes causing you to slide. Licking your hand and wiping your shoe gets this dust off. The liquid actually drys very quickly"
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8p54uu | why is there depth in reflections? | This might be a dumb thing to ask (or a genius thing, idk) but it hit me and I've been thinking about this since.
So lets Take [This image](_URL_0_) for example. There is quite a distance from the house and the pond. Why is the house' reflection in the pond also in focus? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8p54uu/eli5_why_is_there_depth_in_reflections/ | {
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"Reflections preserve the angle of the light which strikes them. So as far as the light rays are concerned, they start diverging from the actual object, continue to diverge, strike the reflection remain diverged, and continue to diverge as they reach your eye/camera/etc. \n\nThis means for the purposes of focusing, you can treat the reflective surface like a window, with the reflected object as far behind it as the reflection is from the object (e.g. House -100 feet- > puddle - 10 feet - > you = 110 foot distant object). \n\nThis is unlike a photograph, where the camera has focused everything beforehand. So when you look at the picture, the light rays diverge from *the photo* (e.g house - 100 feet - > camera - > photo - 10 feet - > you = 10 foot distant object).",
"To see how an image looks to an observer, you can look at the light rays being reflected off the mirror, and then pretend that the mirror isn't there, and ask what kind of object would have emitted light in such a way.\n\nThe absolute simplest example is just a point source of light (imagine an LED). [This diagram](_URL_0_) shows how the light off such an object would propagate. As you can see, different photons hit the mirror in different places, and they reflect in different directions. However, the way the photons end up moving after reflection is *exactly* the same as if they had been emitted by the 'image' - the image is where we can place an imaginary object that would produce the same patterns of photon emissions through an empty hole where the mirror is. Our eyes have no way of differentiating the two situations, so we see them as identical unless there are additional clues (e.g. dirt on the mirror).\n\n\"Depth\" in an image comes from the fact that our eyes perceive photons coming out from the object in different directions - in the example, we could collect both the top and bottom ray, record their relative angles, and our brain does fancy trigonometry to figure out where the light must have come from. Since the reflection produces the same relative angles as an actual object, we see the reflection as if it were behind the mirror.",
"Just to make the question a bit more complicated: Taking the original poster's example, let's assume I am shortsighted and I can only see as far as the puddle in front of me, everything behind it is out of focus (for me). Can I use the reflection in the water as a sightseeing device to get a clear view of the reflected house?"
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2acgzd | how did brazil, one of the best soccer teams in the world, end up losing to germany 7-1? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2acgzd/eli5_how_did_brazil_one_of_the_best_soccer_teams/ | {
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"Germany also has one of the best soccer teams in the world. "
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30ab69 | if war is so horrific, why would so many veterans go back and do it again? | I have talked with quite a few veterans (family, friends etc) about their experiances in the military and have found most would do it all again if they were young enough and got the chance. My grandfather in particular says it held some of his most harrowing memories yet he would repeat the whole experience again if he got the chance. I don't like to push the subject too hard with individuals because it's obviously very personal. wondering if somebody could give me an insight as to why this is the case, or if the men I know happen to be in a minority. Thanks. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30ab69/eli5_if_war_is_so_horrific_why_would_so_many/ | {
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"A lot of people who have been through a hard, painful experience can look back on it and see how they grew because of it, or the people they met and things they got to see. Few experiences in life are wholly negative, even the \"bad\" ones.",
"Those I've spoken with about this have said that, in part, its to prevent others from having to experience it. They already know what they're in for.",
"I don't mean to sound like I'm on a high horse, I really don't, but without experiencing it, you'll fully never understand. That's part of why many vets won't say much to people who haven't been there. I could talk until I'm blue in the face, and you might have a general idea, but you'll never really *know*. \n\nThat said, for me, I had friends I had fought with who were still there. It wouldn't be fair if I were at home on my ass while they were risking everything. I had a chance to go home early, and I didn't. I had a chance to stay longer, and I did. I'd do it all over, too. \n\nThe bonds you build between each other are stronger than many you'll find any where else. I would have literally rather have been killed myself, than seen anyone else get hurt. There's no way for that to happen if I'm not there. \n\n[Sebastian Junger explains it way better than I can, here.](_URL_0_) \n\n > Most societies through human history experienced tribal cultures, with people sleeping shoulder to shoulder in shelters and hunting together and raising children together. Everything was communal, and we just don’t do that, and I don’t think it works well psychologically. Soldiers actually do have exactly that experience in combat, and then the reentry into this alienated society we’ve created is extremely hard.\n\nEdit: I suck at typing on mobile. "
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1rqvhw | why, when i'm sick, does it seem like no matter how much i blow my nose, there's always more? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rqvhw/eli5_why_when_im_sick_does_it_seem_like_no_matter/ | {
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"The mucous in your nose your first line of defense against bad germs you breath in. When you get sick, your body makes more mucus to flush out the bacteria. It's your immune system working to make you better.",
"There's more space in there, and therefore way more mucus, than you realize.\n\nSame with earwax. I got my ear syringe flushed once and couldn't believe how much crap fell out.",
"/u/_moops_ is right about mucous being one of the big lines of defense.\n\nHowever, another thing to keep in mind is that there are two reasons your nose gets stuffy. One is plugged with mucous, and the other is inflammation of the nasal membranes. If you blow your nose too hard, you'll irritate them further, and they'll become even more inflamed. If you're blowing your nose and not getting a ton of mucous, it means your nose is probably plugged due to inflammation, not mucous, and you need to stop blowing it. Warm compresses or steam are good for soothing it, and stay hydrated."
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7yd8wu | how far does gravity from any given object reach? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7yd8wu/eli5_how_far_does_gravity_from_any_given_object/ | {
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"Technically an infinite distance, although the force exerted quickly become negligible. The force of gravity has what is known as an inverse square relationship with distance, so for every unit of distance the the force drops by the square root and that’s why it never actually drops to zero.\n\nThis is assuming there are no other objects with other gravitational fields to account for.",
"Put simply, there is no limit, the gravitational pull of an object will just get immeasurably tiny. Gravitational force is calculated using a calculation where distance-squared is the denominator of the fraction, so as the distance increases 2 units, the gravitational force reduces by 4 units and so on. So it really depends on how many decimal points you are willing to consider to be a limit. The calculation is also affected by the mass of the object, so less massive objects would reach your self-enforced 'limit' at a closer point."
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44b0wq | what would happen if i am sued and don't have the money to pay? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44b0wq/eli5what_would_happen_if_i_am_sued_and_dont_have/ | {
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"If they win the suit, they get a judgment against you. This lets them garnish your wages and attach your bank accounts. However, you could declare bankruptcy and pay only a percentage of the judgment."
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4fp1e5 | why do black people have increased health risks? | a the doctors office i read through like 5 pamphlets and all of them said heart disease more conman in black people, prostate caner black people be checked 10 year earlier, high blood pressure black people are at higher risk, cholesterol black people have higher levels, and after i read it i thought to myself is this something cultural that black people are eating or are there bodies just more supportable to these diseases ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fp1e5/eli5why_do_black_people_have_increased_health/ | {
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"Those are all diseases associated with poor eating habits. I'm actually curious to see a breakdown by race *and* income level because I would bet that the high percentage of black people who live in poverty accounts for a lot of that. ",
"A lot of it is cultural. There's a certain amount of distrust for medicine in the black community because of a history of malpractice against black people. Even if they can go to the doctor, they may choose not to. \n\nSome is genetic. Different ethnicities have different genetic predispositions towards certain diseases. \n\nThe rest is socioeconomic. Black people are more likely to be poor or lack access to healthcare. Being poor usually means not eating healthy, which can cause health problems. Lack of access to healthcare means minor problems can go undetected and become more severe. ",
"It totally depends on what disease process you're talking about.\n\nAfrican-Americans have higher rates of acral lentiginous melanoma.\nCaucasians have higher rates of superficial spreading melanoma.\n\nCaucasian and Asian women have higher rates of osteoporosis.\nBeing moderately overweight can decrease rates of osteoporosis.\n\nShort answer: some of it is genetics, some of it is lifestyle or environmental...just depends what you're talking about.",
"I did my graduate thesis on a similar topic, and can provide some insight.\n\nFirst, those issues you listed are more prevalent in African Americans, not Black people in general. They are predominantly related to diet and lifestyle. \n\nMembers of the African American community are more prone to skip preventative medical screenings (like prostate exams and colonoscopies), be overweight, and eat less nutritious diets.\n\nRecent immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean have much lower rates of heart disease, high blood pressure, and lower cholesterol due to higher activity levels and better diets. However, I don't know about prostate cancer.\n\nHumans weren't designed to be fat. Our colons can't handle high levels of throughput and low fiber, hence the higher rates of colon cancer. Our vasculature can't survive excess cholesterol, so arteries harden. \n\nYour body is like only owning one car in your lifetime. You can either drive it carefully and follow the maintenance schedule to maximize its lifespan, or drive it hard and skip your oil changes until it something breaks.",
"Genetics are influenced by some strange factors. Black people (Africans/descendants) are more likely to have sickle cell, because genes that can cause sickle cell actually protect against malaria... White people (Europeans/descendants) are more likely to have cystic fibrosis, because genes that can cause it protect against tuberculosis.\nOn their own those genes and diseases are terrible, but when 3/4 kids would die of malaria it's beneficial to give 1/4 sickle cell if the other 3 then survive malaria.\n\nThe cultural/economic factors other people mentioned are probably most of it, but genetics could be super varied and I wouldn't be surprised "
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3gicct | how do people who parkour practice without injuring themselves? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gicct/eli5_how_do_people_who_parkour_practice_without/ | {
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"In a gym, where padded equipment exists. \n\nOutdoors, practice on small things close to the ground, like jumping from a concrete barricade bollard to another. Eventually increasing the height and risk as confidence and skill increase. \n\nHaving said that, there are plenty of parkour enthusiasts who have fallen and injured themselves multiple times. It's like asking is there a baseball player who has never struck out?",
"[Here is a good example of practice in a gym with mats, practice in the real world with mats, and straight up real world stuff.](_URL_0_)"
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25dcbh | why do mormons get so much shit? | My girlfriend is mormon (I'm not), and I just want to know where is the hate coming from. I've been over to her parents' and seen their prayers, they're literally just like all the Christians I've encountered in my life.
Is it legitimacy due to how the sect is somewhat young and modern? This deals with the philosophy of religion, but it's their beliefs. To me their common beliefs are like 95% or more the same as other Christians.
Is it legitimacy due to questions on Joseph Smith?
Is it because people fear the unknown?
What exactly is the reason(s)?
Edit: I'm extremely unsatisfied with the answers given below, there are seriously problems with consistency and bias (granted, I have a huge amount of bias as well).
There are generally 3 complains I see, 2 I listed: the Church leadership, flaws in the past and Joseph Smith.
-Flaws in the past
/r/broadwayguru: "There's been a conscious effort to "mainstream" the church by glossing over or simply eliminating a lot of the stranger teachings."
Other religions have done the same things, people's beliefs change over time; while the statement makes it sound like they really still believe the crazy stuff, we just want more people in, so we can convince them of the crazy stuff, I dont believe this is the case. Again, people's beliefs change, and I think there is hardly a case on gaining acceptance while still believing the crazy stuff... the level of conspiracy is too high up in here.
"You do know about the polygamy, right? Contrary to what they'll tell you, it wasn't just because of the male/female ratio in 19th century Utah."
This is no longer mainstream belief.
/r/KahBhume: "Things like polygamy and declaring black people to be marked with sin are still in living memory even if the official church has since changed its stance."
Other religions have extremely awful stances as well, justifications for inhuman acts; is it more okay that those past beliefs are a lot time ago?
-Church Leadership/Strange Ritual
/r/KahBhume: "The men are basically required to go on a missionary trip in young adulthood, and these missionaries often comes across to others like door to door salesmen with it too)."
So a methodist on college campus asking me if I've heard the word of God, a baptist that came knocking on my door, etc. Those are okay, but the LDS Leadership strongly encourage youth to perform activities for the church and for God is not okay?
"The church has a more strict stance on the behavior of its followers than most other Christian denominations (such as avoiding any substance which might influence the brain at all, including caffeine)"
So Amish saying no technology, very strict about dress and attire, mennonites having similar beliefs, in fact I see mennonites in my hometown's college downtown handing out flyers about all of us going to hell. Those are okay. But the LDS leadership saying no drugs, that's not okay? Doesn't most Christian sects say no (with varying levels) to any substance, alcohol, weed, everything? By the way, my girlfriend drinks (coffee and alcohol), it's not a strict rule... it really has more to do with the leadership's sway on its members due to its past prosecution, pushing its members to band together.
/r/FX114: "They also pull stunts like posthumously baptizing all the Jews who died in the Holocaust into the church."
They, like all Christians, honestly believe that people that are not in their religion are going to have a really horrible time after death. My peers, during middle school, tried so hard to get me to be a methodist, because they were really worried about my well being. So that's okay, but this is not okay? Granted, yes, it's very over the top, but I'm convinced that the United States need to have some classes in anthropology to understand it's meaningless to judge another culture by the person's own cultural standards. Also stunts like that are not mainstream beliefs...
-Joseph Smith
/r/bleedingjim: "Many of their beliefs are wacky. The South Park episode does a decent job explaining everything. Additionally, they place Joseph Smith on the same level as Jesus Christ which is directly against John 14:3."
Do you know how pissed the Jewish leadership was at Jesus back then? Jesus literally said he's the son of God and God, at the same time. Granted those arent not the same religion, but are you implying different parts of the Christian Bible do not contradict with itself? Because there are certainly examples of such cases. If the Jews with the Torah (A New Hope) doesnt give Christians with their Bible (Empire Strikes Back) any shit and Muslims with their Quran (Return of the Jedi), why should Christians give Mormons (Phantom Menace) any shit? If you want to say Christians want to consider Mormons as a separate religion, I'm not convinced they are, not when the sects are so different.
/r/Concise_Pirate: "In addition to the other reasons given here, a big reason is that the founder of the religion was a known con artist, and made some rather outlandish-sounding claims (like: God sent all these messages in writing, but He took them back after no one but me saw them) which sound like they could be fictional."
Jesus literally said he's God; Moses talked to a burning bush; Muhammad talked to Gabriel, kill a bunch of people, burn down a city, stuff with pedo or whatever. But Joseph Smith is a con-artist. Fine, so he is; but that doesnt change the conviction of mormons' beliefs. They believe in Jesus and God, they believe Jesus is the savior, etc etc.
-Misc
/r/Crawdaddy1975: "This might be a start _URL_0_"
This is both misinformation and/or not mainstream beliefs.
If the answer to my question is because people are inconsistent and fear the unknown, then so be it, consider this ELI5 answered. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25dcbh/eli5_why_do_mormons_get_so_much_shit/ | {
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"It's scientology for christians.",
"Check out /r/exmormon they are very friendly and supportive...and answer all questions without judgement.good luck",
"I don't think it's as much the individuals as it is the LDS church itself. The church has a more strict stance on the behavior of its followers than most other Christian denominations (such as avoiding any substance which might influence the brain at all, including caffeine). Things like polygamy and declaring black people to be marked with sin are still in living memory even if the official church has since changed its stance. The men are basically required to go on a missionary trip in young adulthood, and these missionaries often comes across to others like [door to door salesmen](_URL_0_) with it too).",
"You should do some serious research - online is fine - on the history of the Mormon church and Joseph Smith especially. He is the definition of a con-man. Past that, look into the last 50 years of the church, the goals of the missions and the treatment of the church members while on those missions, the role of women in the church, and any other idea you may have questions about. The information is all there. Then reconcile whatever feelings you have with the particular sect you interact with. Some modern Mormons stay with the church because it is easier than being ostracized from the only social circle they've ever known.\n\nYou should make your own decisions on the topic.",
"I dated a Mormon girl for a year and went \"down the rabbit hole\" of research. Mormonism is a fascinating study for those who want to discover how a religion develops. Eventually, what I discovered broke us up. Mormonism is not mainstream Christianity, despite what you may think.\n\nA lot of the members are in the dark about the weird stuff. There's been a conscious effort to \"mainstream\" the church by glossing over or simply eliminating a lot of the stranger teachings. (You *do* know about the polygamy, right? Contrary to what they'll tell you, it wasn't just because of the male/female ratio in 19th century Utah.)\n\nStart by looking at [this story](_URL_1_) from someone else in your situation. [Richard Packham](_URL_2_) also has a lot of good information, but you have to scroll down to get to the Mormon material. Finally, be sure to see the pro-Mormon side at _URL_0_.",
"The unconventional practices that others have mentioned certainly attract a lot of mockery, but the truth is that many religions with equally unusual practices are on the receiving end of a lot less animosity or suspicion than Mormons.\n\nIt seems likely that that animosity has its roots in Mormon communities having a history of armed conflict with the United States government and non-Mormon communities in its early days. Obviously, that dynamic is gone, but it’s not hard to imagine it morphing into a general distrust that people then attribute to other perceived differences.\n\nOn a doctrinal level though, I do think the differences with mainstream Christian denominations are a lot bigger than 5 percent. The LDS church tries to play down those differences specifically because of what we’ve all been discussing here, but their core doctrines are considered to be completely heterodox (or worse) by the vast majority of the Christian church.",
"Mormons get hate from two communities specifically, political progressives and conservative Christians. For political progressives, the Mormon community represents the complete contradiction of their worldview. Mormons' history is that of an oppressed minority. They were poor, uneducated, and persecuted by both state and federal governments. All it took was the government to leave them alone, and they became a great people. Mormons are now better educated on average than other Americans, are more likely to be in the middle class, give more to charity, live longer, have lower crime rates, etc. In short, Mormons on average outperform Americans in nearly every category of human development. And they achieved this by picking themselves up by their bootstraps, rather than through government help. \n\nConservative Christians, on the other hand, dislike Mormons because they are a proselytizing people who preach what Christians would call a distortion of the truth. You commented that the belief structure is pretty similar, and that is precisely why Christians find it so dangerous. It is just similar enough to convince people that it is normal Christianity, while being different enough to lead people from the \"true\" Jesus and His salvation. ",
"Many of their beliefs are wacky. The South Park episode does a decent job explaining everything. Additionally, they place Joseph Smith on the same level as Jesus Christ which is directly against John 14:3. ",
"This might be a start _URL_0_",
"In addition to the other reasons given here, a big reason is that the founder of the religion was a known con artist, and made some rather outlandish-sounding claims (like: God sent all these messages in writing, but He took them back after no one but me saw them) which sound like they could be fictional."
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d6u0i3 | how do recycling factories deal with the problem of people putting things in the wrong bins? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d6u0i3/eli5_how_do_recycling_factories_deal_with_the/ | {
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"Here in Singapore, the items are sorted at the recycling center. There is only 1 type of bin and it takes everything.\n\nFrom an efficiency standpoint it makes sense. Millions of people spending minutes organising their garbage is less efficient than hundreds of people spending hours.",
"Hi :-) \n\nIn addition to what had been said (manual sorting, or just burning it in a cogeneration plant) there are a lot of methods to sort automatically.\n\nMagnets: Get all can lids, nails and stuff out of the garbage.\n\nAir: Lighter stuff will be blown onto a different path. Also, electro static.\n\nLasers, light: By shining light or lasers on/through plastics, you can determine what plastic it is. To some extend.\n\nOptical recognition: Especially in bottle recycling, cameras and computers will check if bottles are damaged or still contain dirt.\n\nSoak it: Some things float or dissolve. Think paper vs plastic, wood vs metals.\n\nBurn it: When you burn stuff, you can not only use it to heat water and drive a turbine (generate electricity). Things like metal will melt and can be retrieved later. Depending on the metal, they have different melting points and density, so this way you can seperate many different metails.",
"They don't really deal with it. In theory they is people separating the different material on a conveyor belt, but there is basically no quality control so we mostly ship mixed garbage to other country where they should use that recycled material to do new stuff. These countries are getting piss off at our inability to provided them with useful material, so some of them shouted until we took our garbage back.\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_2_) \n\nChina banned recycling material, and now a good portion of it is burned.\n\n [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) \n\nSo ya they don't deal with it at all.",
"I went to a pint all on this lat week.\nIt's are sorted by hand, by magnets, by centrefugral force and also there are cameras and shots of compressed air. \nIn Holland or Belgium (I forgot what country they said) there is no home recycling it all goes to a recycling plant and is sorted there",
"They send it to a third world country, which in turn just buries it in the ground or burns in it an open fire.",
"They sell it to the far East and it doesn't get recycled. People earn money by sifting the massive mountains of trash.",
"The sorting centers that I have inspected (environmental inspections) have a line of low-wage workers working on an elevated conveyor belt station, manually picking out the obviously cannot recycle stuff and tossing it onto the floor, where it eventually gets scooped up for landfilling. Automated air and magnet separation systems are used for additional segregation.",
"There are many correct answers about how things are sorted, but I want to talk about recycling of packaging and what happens to the wrong items, because that's what I know about: in Germany companies who produce packaging pay for its recycling. Wrong items in this bin belong in these categories:\n\n* Recycle-able but not put in the bin correctly - e.g. you have to separate metals and plastics (think yoghurt cups) beforehand: everything is burned\n* Recycle-able plastics, but not packaging (not paid for): it's recycled anyway\n* Black plastics: theoretically recycle-able, but infrared sensors used in some (many?) plants can't recognise these, so they get burned\n* Dangerous items may stop or destroy parts of the sorting machinery: they have to be removed manually. VHS tapes, large batteries and gas containers are part of these",
"We're so terrible at it that the countries we send our recycling to aren't accepting it anymore. People just use their recycling bin as a second trash can. Nobody rinses anything out. People don't pay attention to oil stains. Nobody actually pays attention to which # code of plastics they can and can't recycle. People don't take the lids and rings off of bottles and containers like they are supposed to. Its too much to sort through with too little useable recyclables. It just gets thrown away or sent back to us. It's better to not recycle at all than to recycle incorrectly.",
"I've been to several recycling factories on business and it's like u/mrslugo said, they put everything on a conveyor and then there's people sorting out the trash. In some factories the workers need to take special vaccines to work there. Pretty fucked up job in my opinion, but the smell isn't comparable to the stench inside chicken farms.",
"It's pretty straightforward in my county. The recycling truck dumps recycling into the landfill. The garbage truck dumps garbage into the landfill. There is no demand for recycling, and never has been in this particular facility.",
"I work in a paper mill that runs partly on recycled paper. We have a bunch of different systems in place to get rid of stuff that shouldn't be there.\n\nA lot of it is based on density. Plastic floats, sand/stone/metal sinks. Very simplified, you swirl it around in hot water, plastics get skimmed off the top, heavy stuff taken out at the bottom, paper dissolves in the water and ends up as pulp again, ready to be made into new paper. \n\nOrganic stuff is killed with heat, mostly to avoid mold spores getting in the finished paper. I've seen live rats fall in there though, so it's not just microscopic stuff lol.\n\nI've found engine parts, kitchen knives, rubber boots, hard drives, and lots of other weird things. We have routines in place for what to do if we find guns or grenades.\n\nI've heard stories of much crazier stuff, but they may just be urban myths.",
"They pretty much just throw it in a landfill. Often times the wrong material will contaminate the whole batch, making unable to be recycled",
"In Calgary we have a one bin system - you put all your recyclables in the bin and then the city does all the sorting. It’s a highly automated system, here’s a video which shows how the process works! [Calgary Recycling: How Recyclables are Sorted](_URL_0_)",
"Here in Belgium I visited a recycling plant about 7 - 8 years ago. The assorted waste is put on a conveyor and first a computer controlled process is performed. The waste stream is analysed with camera’s and the ‘wrong’ pieces of junk are ejected from the conveyor by blasting them with air pressure. Sometimes that’s not enough so there is another step with humans removing the wrong items from the conveyor. There was an docu about it on our national TV earlier this week and it is still being done the same way. IT an machine learning is still not good enough to take humans completely out of the loop. It is a stinky job. Especially in the summer.",
"In lots of places they just throw away glass jars with food left in it. Same for broken glass. If some is contaminated they may even throw out the stuff close to it. It is too dangerous for their employees.",
"In Georgia, it's community service to sort it by hand via a conveyor belt. Also, prisoners and halfway house folks worked there too.",
"Do you mean garbage in the recycling bin or bottles in a can bin? \n\n\nMost agencies are moving to single sort recycling, where you dump anything that's recyclable in one bin. Recovery rates per volume are lower but total volume recycled is much, much higher. It's a lot less work to just keep your garbage and recycling separate than to also subdivide your recycling into a half dozen different bags or containers. \n\nWhen single sort recycling enters the facility it goes down the conveyor belt where large things that are obviously garbage like TV sets, poopy diapers, and dead bodies are separated out by workers. The recycling then goes through machinery where paper, glass, and metal are pulled out by an automated process leaving nothing but the small garbage",
"I worked for waste management and it all goes on a conveyor, then you pick out the stuff that shouldn’t be there basically. Got a lot of cool shit from that job.",
"In the recycling business, items from the same bin are called \"single stream\". In the US, there's facilities called a Material Recycling Facility or MRF for short (pronounced like \"murph\"). These facilities use a mixture of many different methods to sort material. Here's the process from the MRF my company had:\n\nAll material gets loaded onto a belt. The primary sort love has 4-8 people on the line that manually pick unsuitable material (stuff too large to send down the line or stuff that doesn't belong like tires.\n\nLighter material like paper and cardboard tends to float on top of the pile, so we have three barrel tumblers that pull that lighter material into a belt. That belt is further split into plastic and paper using optical scanners and compressed air. Then each category of plastic is separated further by more optical scanners and compressed air. \n\nThe heavier material usually consists of glass and metals. The glass is almost always broken and in shards by this point, so the stream goes over grates and the glass falls into a dumpster to be hauled to a glass recycler. The metal products are separated by type (tin, aluminum, steel) and sent to the bailer. Everything left is trash and taken to the landfill\n\nThe end destination for most of the material is to be bailed, loaded on to a container and sold.\n\nIt's actually really hard to sort it out with a great degree of contamination. When I worked for a waste company, our goal was 95%. For those that have heard about China sword, their requirement was 98% pure. It's very difficult to achieve that in a single stream environment, so China is effectively saying, only send me the valuable stuff. Good on them but made a lot of our material produced, near worthless.",
"i once saw a recycling bin where it had 3 holes, one for paper, one for cans, one for bottles. they all went in the same bag...",
"I was watching the news one day and they did a piece on recycling and they were showing a facility where they have these robot arms that quickly identify non-recyclables out of the items coming through on a conveyor belt. It was really interesting and crazy to think a machine could do that.",
"I can personally confirm /u/mrslugo's statement. One of my college buddy's Father owned a recycling operation (in the US) and I worked there a few times for extra cash on the weekends (really good money for a college kid!). They ran everything down a conveyor belt and gave us garden rakes. We used the prongs on the rake to grab the shit that wasn't supposed to be in there. It was a wide conveyor belt so that's why we used a rake. The long handle and metal prongs worked perfectly for the job.",
"Recyclables are sent to material recovery facilities. The facilities typically have equipment that can automatically sort different materials based on size, density, conductivity, and other physical properties. Most will try to eliminate any large non-recyclable materials on the front end using either people or additional equipment, but the inclusion of such items is a huge problem and can damage sorting equipment, which drives up costs and hurts the viability of recycling programs.",
"They don't, the vast majority of trash sent to be recycled (in the US at least) is just sent to some landfill in China because of the cost of not only filtering out the unrecyclable elements but also recycling the usable parts is too high. Recycling centers are ridiculously underfunded so as much effort as the average person puts into recycling, it's not really doing much for the environment.",
"Most recycling companies ship all recyclables to China for a fee where it is then dumped into the ocean",
"My city shut down its recycling program due to rising costs. They dump both bins into the same truck. They will however still fine you for putting non recyclables in the recycle bin. They're also still charging the citizens for recycling that they're not providing.",
"I'm sure this has already been answered so I won't waste anyone's time, but you all should know if you live near a recycling facility there is a good chance they will give you a tour if you call and ask!\n\nWastewater and water treatment facilites are the same way! Take field trips!",
"You ever hear the thing about mafia crime organizations being in waste management as a way to launder money?\n\nWell recycling centers just throw away most of the things they get. They put them in shipping containers and send them to China or Africa and dump them there.",
"The best thing to do is reduce consumption of plastics and put pressure on companies to use reusable packaging. Every container should be reusable: produce, distribute, collect, and re-distribute over and over. TerraCycle will be piloting a similar program, Loop, in NYC. _URL_1_\n_URL_0_",
"I work at a recycling facility. We are supposed to have someone outside standing around making sure people put things in the right bins. I end up having to pull stuff out of the bins as best I can. Some of it can be bailed up together though. Paper with the cardboard then it goes out as mixed paper. Crinkle wrap in the soft plastics thats fine too. At the facility I am at the conveyor belt is too short and we do are best to grab what we can but we are allowed 1-3% contamination.",
"I can tell you! I worked at a recycling facility in Portland, OR, for several years, and it was my job to take care of the public drop area. This was before mixed curbside recycling was the thing, and our recycling model was based on pure materials (we were one of the earliest recycling facilities in the US, Sunshine recycling).\nWe had bins for clear glass, green glass, colored glass, newsprint, mags (glossy), OP, Computer, and scrap papers, aluminum, and tin. \nPeople were constantly screwing it up or mixing in trash with their recyclables. It was a constant task to go out and monitor the drop-off area, including catching known perpetrators who would mix used diapers in the news bin and other things like that. \nOne of the worst parts was the aluminum can bins. People don't know the difference between cans made of tin (ferrous metals) and aluminum - basically cat food cans. So a constant task was to go through the 50 gallon drums full of mixed tin and aluminum cans, and sort them out. Usually they had been rained on, so it smelled to high hell of wet cat food. Made a shorter that was 4 strong speaker magnets arranged around a collar - ferrous metal would stick to the sides, allowing the aluminum to drop through. I called it the alumisort 2000. However, it had to be cleared of tin cans often to remain effective. So that was an ongoing job. You got to know your customers, and what to look out for, when you needed to get the hell out there to manage it.\nOtherwise, it ran pretty well and made money.\n\nWe had a gorilla suit that we got from somewhere. Occasionally someone would slip it on and run out making \"angry gorilla\" sounds and motions. This was reserved for diaper-dumpers and other notorious customers.",
"Materials recovery facilities. They are becoming much more common in the US. I worked for a company in KS that bought a state of the art one from Germany. \n\nThere are human pickers on the front end for organic stuff that shouldn’t have made it in, then everything is sorted by air jets and super fast cameras that can detect the density/variety of the plastic, paper, aluminum, glass, etc. \n\nThe jets blow the material to the correct conveyor, which then bales the recyclable material for shipment.\n\nPretty dang neat.",
"I work for a company who has just commissioned the United State's first MBT facility using patented HeBioT technology which produces an EPA-recognized solid recovered fuel (SRF). Our tech diverts 80٪ of solid waste & recyclable material from landfills every year (using just the one facility). \n\nThe solid recovered fuel material that is produced from the HeBioT is used to supplement coal with the fuel to power cement kilns. This helps in the reduction of greenhouse gases. \n\nThis is also an almost completely automated process with employees operating the plant from a control room. There is a lot more to it but the technology is going to be the new standard for how we deal with waste & recycling in the future. \n\nWe are in the process of obtaining permits for another HeBioT in the New York area.",
"Recycling doesn’t work. 90% of plastic winds up in landfills or as trash.\n\nJust heard on NPR today that plastics recycling peaked - *peaked* - at 9.5%.",
"Finally! Something I can answer! I work for a large Northern California recycling company. Up to 25% of the material we receive is “residual”, or unable to be sold to a company that will recycle it. We have manual sorters, aka humans, that pick off large items and other things that could impact the sorting line. Then various mechanical processes separate materials based on their weigh, size, and rigidity. For example rotating arms keep paper on top but heavier plastics and glass fall down to a different belt. Some facilities have optical sorters that shoot lasers at the material and identify the material type and treat it differently based on which material. Ultimately the metals plastics glass and paper are separated from each other, and there’s a large pile of leftover material that we send to the landfill. Ultimately, this is all at a tremendous cost that falls on the ratepayers, so make sure you only put acceptable items in the recycle! I absolutely love this topic so shoot any questions my way!"
]
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93Philippines\\_waste\\_dispute",
"https://www.wired.com/story/since-chinas-ban-recycling-in-the-us-has-gone-up-in-flames/",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93Philippines_waste_dispute"
],
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71bysk | how are insect respiratory systems different from our own? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/71bysk/eli5_how_are_insect_respiratory_systems_different/ | {
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"We suck air in from the atmosphere into our lugs where there is great surface area to the blood vessels so that air is exchange between the atmosphere and our blood. The blood is then pumped around to all the cells in our body so that the oxygen and carbon dioxide is exchanged between the cells and the blood. With insects on the other hand there are tiny channels that go from the skin and in to all the cells so that the cells exchange gases with the atmosphere directly. As there is no blood system this is more efficient. However it does limit the size of the insects. If the insect becomes too big they can no longer get enough air to the inner most cells and they suffocate."
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f2rcaq | why are standard world maps considered to be inaccurate? | I remember being told this in high school and being totally confused. My teacher told us that a standard map, or even a globe, is inaccurate. She explained why but I didn’t understand. Why is this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f2rcaq/eli5_why_are_standard_world_maps_considered_to_be/ | {
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"I'm not sure why they would say a globe is inaccurate, but normal two dimensional maps become more inaccurate the further away from the equator you look because it's taking an area much smaller than the equator and stretching it out to be as wide on the paper as the equator itself.",
"A globe is definitely accurate.\n\nThe standard maps are inaccurate because the world is round, and maps are flat. There's no way to project a spherical map on a flat surface without stretching or tearing parts of the map. In the former case you get maps like the [Mercator projection](_URL_1_) which makes areas closer to the poles huge, and in the latter case you get odd things like [this](_URL_0_).",
"I hope this is allowed. [The West Wing](_URL_0_) had a great, informative bit about why maps are not always correct. I believe the visuals are especially helpful",
"If you map a curved surface to a flat surface, you can't do this accurately - in effect, you're scrunching things up. You have a chance to what kind of inaccuracies you get.\n\nIn a standard Mercator projection, you keep local angles and shapes accurate. This is useful when you want a map to tell you where to go.\nOn the other hand, it distorts distances. Things near the poles look much larger than they are - compare Greenland on a standard (Mercator projection) map and on a globe.\n\nIn another context, you may prefer a map that keeps relative sizes or distances, but distorts shapes. There are quite a few different projections available, but none of them are perfect.",
"You can't take a round map and make it a rectangle without squishing or stretching parts. This is fine, it's not evil that it is that way.\n\nBut it is worth knowing about, it's pretty obvious that \"we\" picked the standard map to be the one that centers on the western world and enhances it's size. North America grows, Africa shrinks, Alaska gets to be bigger than India, europe gets to be giant, Etc. Like no one sat down and said \"ha ha, lets make white dominated countries the biggest!\" but it sort of did work out that way, the standard map is really focused on making america and europe bigger and more central to the map and putting some other countries into the \"it's fine if this ends up distorted, who cares\" bucket. And it's worth thinking about how that could be different and the map we happen to use is just one possible map.",
"All flat maps are inaccurate, there is no way to transform the surface of a sphere into two dimensions without distorting, size, shape, or relative direction. This is old news, they pointed this out to us in grade school.\n\nEvery now and then, people get political over it. Developed countries, like those in North American and Europe, tend to be in the higher latitudes the popular Mercator projection makes too large, while less developed countries tend to be more tropical and appear smaller by comparison. Some people think this perpetuates bias or is even a part of some grand conspiracy.",
"Remove an orange peel all in one piece and lay it flat. Points on the surface of the peel are the same size and distance from each other as when they were on the sphere. But then stretch out the peel to make it rectangle (like a map). To do that, you have to stretch the peel. Points get farther from each other. Imagine doing that the surface of the Earth. Realize that where you choose to do the stretching has an impact on things' relative size and relationship to each other.\n\nOr do it in reverse. Take a sheet of paper draw a map on it, try to wrap it around a sphere-like object. Notice all the ways it doesn't quite fit. Those are inaccuracies.",
"Globe is accurate but not flat maps, I'll give you a simple experiment: take a beach ball and try to cut it so it goes into a flat square with one side up, no winkles either, it's impossible unless you deform it, or cut it into an odd shape",
"Get a tangerine and peel it all in one piece, then try and squish it flat and you will understand"
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326pi0 | men's razors and deoderant vs. women's deoderant and razors | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/326pi0/eli5_mens_razors_and_deoderant_vs_womens/ | {
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"The difference between men's razors and women's razors is they put pink plastic in the injection mold with women's razors, blue for men's.",
"Some women's razors have built in lubricating strips so you don't need shaving cream... \n\nSource: I borrow my wife's razor to shave my legs"
]
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7dtbay | why are there posts on facebook that are just pictures but they are actually 30 second videos of that picture? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7dtbay/eli5_why_are_there_posts_on_facebook_that_are/ | {
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"Facebook sometimes run pre-roll ads on videos, some of the money from these ads can go to the creator. Also I believe Facebook algorithms prefer videos to photos and photos to text posts so more people will see it.",
"With videos you can select preffered audience and target demographics better.\n\nAlso facebook has reported 135% increase on clicks on videos versus pics advertising webpages so it might be people thinking they are gaming the system and not understanding why they are clicked on more.\n\nIf anyone has a better answer listen to them. I just did a quick google search",
"Facebook’s algorithm allegedly prioritizes video over other types of content, so if you post a video, it’s more likely to show up on people’s news feeds than if you post a text, link or image. People try to take advantage of this by posting a video of an image so they can get more likes and comments than they would if they just posted the image itself.",
"Thanks all! I just find it extremely annoying and I only noticed cause some videos have those stupid triangles floating across the image. ",
"Is that why some of the videos now have flying paper airplane triangles for a filter? So there is actual movement?\n\nEdit: just noticed op posted the same response.... mah bad. Gotta leave it up and accept my shame. ",
"Adittionally, when you post a video, you can see how many people have watched it, but you can't see how many looked at your picture unless they liked it, which is a very small amount of the audience",
"Why arent gifs supported on there yet?"
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3zl970 | how did game devs create games in the 70s/80s? | I understand the process for making games as it is right now, with all the legwork done in a physics engine and such. In fact, I am an amateur programmer myself so I understand the basics.
However, I don't see how these clearly genius game devs built games without these pre-made engines...For example, how would you make a game for an Atari console back then, using only the equipment available then? What did they *use?* Same thing for NES and such. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zl970/eli5how_did_game_devs_create_games_in_the_70s80s/ | {
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"Assembly language up until the SNES days, I think. You might find [this guy's videos](_URL_0_) interesting... in this first one he actually shows how you'd manually design a sprite, literally bit by bit on paper. Also he addresses how you'd display color images with tiny amounts of memory and other early problems like that.",
"You can make games without a game engine. A game engine is just a collection of common things you'd do in a game. You could do all those things without the engine, but it saves tons of time when it's already done.\n\nAtari probably used assembly (a very low-level programming language). At the lowest level, a programmer uses math to draw things on a screen using a coordinate system. If you have a square room, for example, you'd draw 4 lines on the screen.\n\nSimulating physics is also done with math. If you want a character to jump 5 feet up and fall at a normal rate, you use math to calculate where to draw the character each time the screen refreshes. If the character starts at (x,y) 5x5, then the next refresh you draw it at 5x6 then 5x7 until it starts falling. ",
"Originally, games were hard coded onto chips using digital logic. This could only produce simple games like Pong. Every calculation and decision was soldered onto a chip. Then they started using microprocessors and the coding was done in assembly language, which is directly telling the processor what to do. All of the physics had to be manually written, although the physics they used was minimal (gravity was really the only thing). This is still what game engines make underneath, the programmer today just never sees it. This style of game development lasted through most of the eighties. (Games could be written for the NES in C, but most developers prefered assembly because at that time the convenience did not outway the larger game size). ",
"Highly recommend watching [David Crane's postmortem on creating Pitfall for the Atari 2600](_URL_0_) (one of the first platform games).\n\nEDIT: super cool part, using a polynomial counter to create all 256 screens of the game in just 50 bytes of code"
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1pkb8a | what is the difference between sympathy, empathy, pity and compassion? | Can anyone explain in the terms of how they would react to someone based on sympathy, pity, compassion and empathy if they saw someone stealing bread because they were homeless and hungry?
If you have a different way of explaining, I am completely open to that as well! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pkb8a/eli5what_is_the_difference_between_sympathy/ | {
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"They blend together a lot.\n\nPity and Sympathy are nearly identical. You acknowledge that the bread thief is in a bad situation, and you feel some sadness for their plight. \n\nEmpathy and Compassion are similar to Sympathy with the added detail that you have felt the exact same hunger that the bread thief feels.\n\nJustin Timberlake can be sympathetic to a bread thief or an illegal immigrant or a parapalegic, but not empathetic (or at least his claims of empathy would seem overblown).",
"* Sympathy - seeing someone is in pain and wanting to help\n* Empathy - understanding someone's mental state and perspective\n* Pity - realizing someone is in an inferior situation to yours, and feeling sorry for them\n* Compassion - helping someone because they need it with no ulterior motive\n\nNote these are not mutually exclusive. I can empathize with someone who has lost a loved one because I've been through it and understand, sympathize with the pain that it causes them, pity them because the don't have the family support structure I do, and act with compassion by taking them out to dinner so they won't be alone."
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b83ygq | if water become a gas in a vacuum, wouldn't it be more efficient to build a steam engine inside a vacuum chamber ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b83ygq/eli5_if_water_become_a_gas_in_a_vacuum_wouldnt_it/ | {
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"Yes. If something is making water boil, then there must be a flow of heat. You can build a heat engine that extracts useful work (e.g., to generate electricity) from that heat flow.\n\nCould this be possible in some way using a vacuum chamber to boil the water?\nVacuum doesn't make water boil. Heat makes water boil.\n\nWhen water boils, the vapor carries heat away. If you suddenly expose an open container of water to vacuum, two things will happen: (1) the water will start to boil, and (2) the water will get colder as it boils. When the water gets cold enough---maybe cold enough to freeze solid---the boiling will stop.\n\nIn order to continuously boil water, at any pressure, you must have a continuous supply of heat.\n\nSo, what you didn't ask was, would pulling vacuum on the outlet of a steam turbine improve its efficiency?\n\nWell, here's the kicker: In large thermal power stations, that is what they actually do.\n\nThe working fluid in a large thermal power stations is de-mineralized water that flows in a closed loop. There is nothing but water in the loop (i.e., no air), so at the cold end of the turbines, where the temperature may be as low as the temperature of the cooling water that they draw from a nearby river, the pressure can be much less than atmospheric---almost vacuum.",
"A vacuum chamber would be a completely sealed environment and there would only be a limited amount of work that could be performed by it. Once you've extracted that much work, it becomes useless and you'd have to replace it. And, almost certainly, the amount of energy required to depressurize the chamber in the first place would outweigh the amount of energy you could get out of it.\n\nNot to mention the engineering feat of having a chamber which is both a vacuum but also has moving parts that allows you to transfer energy outside of it"
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49ue7d | what's the deal with the rotating red & blue thing outside barbershops? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49ue7d/eli5_whats_the_deal_with_the_rotating_redblue/ | {
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"Barber's used to do more than just cut hair - hundreds of years ago they served as doctors and dentists at times. They would hang their bandages outside to dry, so you could identify shops by the clean and bloody bandages hanging out front.\n\nThe pole is just a symbol of those times.",
"Barber Surgeons practised a hundred years or so ago, clients would get medical procedures such a blood letting or teeth pulling at these shops along with their hot shaves. The white represents the bandages, the red the blood and the blue represents veins. Modern barbers have kept the symbolism behind this going via the poles you still see today.\nSource-Wife is a licensed barber, this is like chapter 1 of every cosmotolgy text book. "
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14xvt4 | why is the world in debt to itself? why not just reset the economy with certain rules like how america has the amendments? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14xvt4/eli5_why_is_the_world_in_debt_to_itself_why_not/ | {
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"There isn't a global constitution that regulates the economy, nor is there a single organization that could enforce such a reset, so that's impossible right off the bat. For another thing, it's not as simple as \"the us is in debt to china\". The us is in debt to Chinese banks, American banks, other foreign banks and treasuries, as well as American citizens. If you own a us government bond, you personally are contributing to the US debt. I hope you are happy with yourself /s. In addition many banks, citizens, and governments are in debt to the US government through various loans and such. But the people who are in debt aren't exactly the same as those who the US is in debt to. So if you reset the debt, a lot of people would just lose money. ",
"Countries are sovereign; ultimately, their assets cannot be seized (even by force; it's illegal under international law). Therefore, when countries simply cannot pay their debt, they default, which is a sort of a reset of their debt. They tell their creditors: \"I cannot pay you all that I owe you, but I can pay (for example) fifty cents on the dollar. Do you agree?\" Creditors usually don't have much option other than agree. They can try to sue; Argentina has defaulted and some of its creditors are suing, but this takes ages and is significantly harder than suing a private debtor.\n\nWhen countries do default, however, that makes it virtually impossible for them to get new loans for a long time, for the obvious reason that they are seen as bad (untrustworthy) loan-takers. So they have to weigh all the costs and risks.\n\nEdit: when I say \"by force\", I mean a stronger creditor *country* invading its debtor to take what it is own. That's illegal.",
"The world isn't exact in debt to itself. It's more like there are a bunch of creditors (people who loaned out money) and debtors (people who owe money). The amount of money loaned from creditors and the amount of money owed by debtors zeroes out. \n\nYou try to reset that, and suddenly all the creditors get screwed. All the income they had planned coming back from debtors doesn't materialize, and that ruins the economy. \n\nThen the debtors say \"Hey, how about you loan us some more money again.\" The creditors either say \"Not a chance\" or they say \"Sure, we'll lend you money again, at triple the interest rate.\" And this further ruins the economy. \n\n"
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464mai | white males accounted for 7 of 10 suicides in 2013, is that why a state like montana has such high suicide rates? | White males accounted for 7 of 10 suicides in 2013 and According to [This](_URL_0_) site Montana has a very high "White alone, percent" being 89.4%. Montana supposedly has the highest suicide rates or atleast they did in 2014 according to the CDC. So, Is it simply that many white males live alone there that is causing such a high suicide rate? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/464mai/eli5_white_males_accounted_for_7_of_10_suicides/ | {
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"Correlation doesn't equal causation but it would be a good hypothesis to test.\n\nOther factors like income, job stability, etc. that are known or suspected to impact suicide rates would need to be controlled for.\n\nEdit: Specifically you'd want to see how Montana compares to a more racially diverse state that is similar in other regards.",
"Not to mention the weather has a big impact on people.\n\nLook at the suicide statistics for similar geographical locations.\n\nAlaska, for example. "
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31ivhi | what is my money doing when it is removed from my bank account on day 1, but doesn't show up in my paypal until day 8? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31ivhi/eli5_what_is_my_money_doing_when_it_is_removed/ | {
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"cause the banks are making money on interest on day 2 thru day 7. ",
"A few things:\n\n1. to the model of paypal this is \"the float\" - they can make a little money by maintaining a predictably large pool of cash that they can make interest on. This isn't much these days, but sometimes it is.\n\n2. they are waiting for a period of time to pass where the transaction can't be reversed. Paypal doesn't want to give you what is liquid-funds to buy stuff with if it can't be sure it _really_ has a handle on your cash. The wait gets them outside the reversal window of the transfer. ",
"Planet Money did a great episode on this a couple years back. In the United States, we use an older system that involves a clearinghouse for transfers. \n\nThere's also a previous ELI5 on it here: _URL_0_",
"In Mexico, we call that practice \"jinetear (wrangling)\" the money. Money lenders do it all the time, banks, stores, syndicate leaders, etc. They use the liquidity to make an easy profit with someone else's money.",
"Contrary to popular belief, banks don't hold back your money for fun or to deliberately make intrest. Inter-bank money transfer is actually quite complicated. But since this is ELI5, I'll try to keep it simple.\n\nWhen you transfer money within the same bank, by all sense the transaction should be instantaneous. If both sending and receiving accounts are managed by the same system, it should be as simple as \"substract X from account A, add X to account B\" in one transaction. The only limit here is when X is above a certain amount. In that case it can be that your bank will withhold the transaction for a day or two because red lights went off. Large currency transfers can be indicative of fraud or similar illegal stuff after all, and they must be investigated. In my country for example, any transfer of 5000€ or more will automatically trigger this.\n\nNow, transfer between banks, tons more complicated. See, every bank can't know every other bank. This is why there are sime intermediate parties involved, such as so called \"clearing houses\", that help with the transaction. Money gets transfereed from party to party untill it reaches the destination, and this can take quite some time depending on how often the involved parties process transactions. (some do it ad-hoc, others do it only with nightly batch processing). Here too, any party along the way can decide the transaction triggers a red light (source, destination, amount, transaction history, etc) and decide to hold the transaction for further inspection.\n\nSource: work for a bank, and although I don't work in the payments department, I've gotten a crashcourse of how inter-bank payments work.",
"For an additional entertaining way to learn more about this topic, watch/read Catch Me If You Can.",
"Ok so step by step:\n\n1.) you tell paypal to pull some money\n2.) Paypal tells your bank\n3.) your bank marks a \"pending\" transaction. This removes the money from your account and they then queue the payment for processing.\n4.) Usually the next business day the payment \"Posts\" This is the point your bank tells paypal \"Hey, we have these funds to you\"\n5.) Paypal usually takes another 1-2 days to confirm they payment\n6.) then paypal takes another 1-2 to \"post\" them to your account. 7.) This when you can use the money.\n\nAs a note, NONE of this occurs on weekends, it is all delayed which adds another 1-2 days."
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2ym3qn | how come we can't decrypt encrypted stuff even if everyone knows how the encryption works like the advanced encryption standard? | Say i have an encrypted file, and i know how the AES encrypts stuff, How come i can't decrypt it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ym3qn/eli5how_come_we_cant_decrypt_encrypted_stuff_even/ | {
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"We just know how the AES uses the password to encrypt the data. Nowhere in the standard it says what the password is.",
"Encryption uses a key to basically start you off at a random point, and they key isn't part of the method.\n\nThink of it like this: \n\nI'm going to give you directions. Turn right, go to the end of the road. Turn left. Go straight through three intersections and then turn left again. After half a mile, turn right at the next available intersection. Your destination is in another quarter mile on the left.\n\nWhere did you end up? Well, to answer that question, you have to know where you started. The directions may be the same for everyone, but unless everyone also starts at the same point, they will not end at the same point.",
"The same way a safe lock works. You can Google the mechanics of it, but you don't know the arrangement of the tumblers inside it.",
"Knowing how it works isn't enough to break it, because cryptanalysis is still computationally expensive.\n\nThis isn't a perfect analogy, but it will make the point. Let's say I have an alarm system that can be deactivated by typing in a six-digit number on a keypad. You have all the details of how the system is installed, where the sensors are wired, which police station will respond and so forth. You know how the alarm system works.\n\nYou might find a flaw with how the system was applied. Maybe one tiny window in the basement doesn't have a sensor on it. Or maybe you can access the shed, and from there peek into the window. Maybe someone left a key under the doormat.\n\nBut if not - if it's a good alarm system and it was installed and operated properly - your only option might be to brute-force the PIN, and it's gonna take a long time. 000001, 000002, 000003...\n\nOr you could go next door. That guy leaves his door open."
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8717xp | why can’t you buy alcohol/enter a bar with an expired id in the us? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8717xp/eli5_why_cant_you_buy_alcoholenter_a_bar_with_an/ | {
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"I can’t really think of anything either but it must be to prevent *some* fake ID’s, cause you couldn’t get them renewed? "
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3lzr4q | how does nasa or other space agencies "discover" the space? | I want to know how NASA made the images of Pluto travel from the other part of the solar system (7.529.000.000) to earth and how they discover planets that are millions of lightyears away.
Explanation edit: Thanks for the info guys! It seems like millions of lightyears away is a bit far away :p. Thanks once more. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lzr4q/eli5how_does_nasa_or_other_space_agencies/ | {
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"We communicate with probes with radio waves which travel at light speed. At the speed of light, from Pluto to Earth, that takes over 4 hours, so there's a lag of a few hours.\n\nTo discover planets that are many light years away, we watch a star very closely. We can either see a planet pass in front of it, or we can see the star wobble due to the gravity tug-of-war that stars have with their planets.",
"They sent the images back from Pluto by radiowaves. They were then picked up by giant receivers. And no planet has been discovered that is millions of light years away. Millions of light years away is outside of our own galaxy and past other galaxies. The furthest planet we've discovered is something like 25,000 light years away but most we've discovered are a lot closer than that. They're detected by different methods. One is watching how the star moves. Planets will tug on it through gravity. Another is by watching for the star to dim. This can be caused by a planet passing in front of it. Another is to use powerful telescopes and try and see the planet directly. ",
"NASA sent a probe from Earth to Mars. It's called [New Horizons](_URL_2_) and it was launched already in 2006 so it has traveled nine years in our solar system. Then it flew past Pluto taking those images and sent them to Earth with radio broadcast. Kind of like traditional televisions receive images with radio waves.\n\nWhen it comes to finding planets outside our solar system, we don't actually discover planets *millions* of light years away. Our galaxy The Milky Way is about 200 000 light years in diameter, and all the planets outside our solar system are within our galaxy, in relative proximity to our solar system.\n\nThere are two main ways of finding planets outside our solar system:\n\nFirstly, planets orbiting their stars always make the star also wobble a bit because of the small gravity by the planet. It's like [this](_URL_1_). The smaller object causes the star to move a bit too. So when we look at distant stars and notice they move a bit, we can calculate from the movement that there is an object orbiting the star, and depending on how much the star wobbles, we can calculate the mass of the planet orbiting it.\n\nSecondly, if a distant planet moves in front of the star [like this](_URL_0_) (in this image it's Venus moving past our Sun), in Earth we see that the amount of light coming from the star decreases. From the amount of light decreased we can know there's a planet in front of the star and we can calculate the size of the planet going in front of the star."
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65qci0 | what is the advantage of our facial skin producing more oil than the rest of our body parts? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65qci0/eli5_what_is_the_advantage_of_our_facial_skin/ | {
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"Oil produced by skin, among other things provides protection from bacteria. Oil is important, too much is just as bad as too little though.\n\nThe skin on our face tends to be thinner than other areas of the body. The amount of sebaceous glands, hair follicles, etc. is therefore \"designed\" with this in mind. (\"Designed\" in quotes because it's a poor word for describing evolution)\n\nIt also won't necessarily produce more oil, some people(me) have an overproduction of sebum on more than just the face. The fun side effect being acne."
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95hk6f | why do printers use cyan instead of blue? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95hk6f/eli5_why_do_printers_use_cyan_instead_of_blue/ | {
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"The primary colors of light are red, green, and blue. Pigments though absorb light and reflect portions of the spectrum so their primary colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow. Printers have to use cyan because they aren't printing light, they are printing a substance which absorbs light.",
"Pixels on a screen work with RGB (Red Green Blue) because they emit light and as such can create the entire colour spectrum by changing the intensity of one single colour.\n\nThis is sort of how a printer works except since it's printed the colours don't emit light but **reflect** light and to create a colour by reflecting you need the colour to absorb all wavelengths except the colour you're trying to get.\n\nThis is why printers work with CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow Black\\*)It is with these specific colours in the intensity collaboration we can achieve the full colour spectrum on paper.\n\n*\\*The K stands for blacK because they didn't want to confuse people by making them think it stood for Blue or Brown*",
"You're probably remembering red, blue, and yellow as the three primary colors. I was taught that in elementary school, and it's good enough for 4th grade art class, but cyan, magenta and yellow work better. There are simply some tones RBY mixing can't come up with compared to CMY and black (Key, K, hence CMYK).",
"The actual color spectrum goes from ~350 nm to ~750 nm.\n\nHowever, the way you see is via 'cones' that have their maximum gain at center wavelengths ~475, ~550, ~700 (blue, green, red). So if I shine a light with a wavelength of ~515, you're actually seeing a dim blue light at the same time you see a dim green light - and you interpolate that it's somewhere between blue and green.\n\nInterestingly enough, you'd see the exact same color if I shone two dim lights - one @ 475 nm and the other at @ 550 nm. Your eye can't tell the difference between the two colors and the one color in the center.\n\nAs a result, it makes sense when projecting light to just match the emitters to our eyes. Because you're 'faking' the intermediary colors anyway, you might as well fake them with the same parameters as the eyes that will perceive them.\n\nHowever, when you're dealing with reflective light, you can't really do this all that effectively. If you tried to 'paint' individual pixels to mimic the RGB approach of monitors, you end up with something like: _URL_0_\n\nInstead, what we do is mix colors togethers and generate the true colors - and then let our eyes interpret them as they do any true color. When you're mixing colors togethers, it's far easier to work with roughly equal sized frequency bands in the color spectrum rather than trying to match the lopsided nature of human visual perception.\n\nNote: This also means that what appears true-to-life to us on our monitors will often appear bizarre to other animals with different color perception.",
"Everyone is saying it is about reflecting light, but there are blue pigments the same color of rgb blues that could be used. It is used because it allows a high color gamut. Four primaries are used as a way to increase or decrease \"lightness\" which is the amount of white in an equal-brightness, equal-color (metamer).",
"Because cyan is a primary color.\n\nThere are 3 (subtractive -or painting) primary colors: cyan, yellow and magenta. So, for printing where you need to be able to mix inks to produce as many shades as possible, using primary color inks gets you the best range possible with the fewest separate inks.\n\nBecause cyan is bluish, and magenta is reddish, when teaching young children, the primary colors, are often called blue, yellow and red to keep the names simple. ",
"So are the colors really mixed on papers or is the image made up of pixels of cymk colors?",
"If printers use cyan ink, they can print blue by mixing cyan and magenta. If printers use blue ink, they can't print cyan. \n\n_URL_0_",
"I just want to add that it's called the subtractive palette because cyan is basically -red (minus-red), that is, green and blue mixed. If you have white (as you have on a white piece of paper) and want to go to cyan, you have to take away the red colors of light, ie you subtract them. That's why it's called subtractive color mixing.\n\nA screen on the other hand is default black, so we add colors, like blue and green, to get to cyan.\n\nThis also means that the RGB color for cyan is rgb(0,255,255), for magenta is rgb(255,255,0) and for yellow is rgb(255,0,255)",
"As someone who has been in printing for over a decade, this thread pleases me. :)\n\nCMYKOVG/W or death.",
"**First a bit about how your eyes work:**\n\nYour eyes have three types of cones that are **most** sensitive to red, green, and blue light (color of light for each). However, it's not exact, so your red cones will activate for orange light and yellow light, but less so than for red light.\n\n All other colors are you see actually just an activated mix of those cones. Yellow light activates both the red cones and the green cones, which is why a TV can make you see yellow by showing you red and green pixels. Your eyes sense that something is activating the red and green cones and interpret it as yellow, because the signals to your brain for the mix of red and green are identical to the signals for yellow. The graph on this Wikipedia page - [Cone cell](_URL_0_) \\- that shows the ranges for each type of cone might help if you are confused about the overlap.\n\nThere are three colors that you can see that are straightforward mix of cone combinations:\n\n*RED + GREEN = YELLOW*\n\n*RED + BLUE = MAGENTA*\n\n*BLUE + GREEN = CYAN*\n\nAnd then there is this fun fact:\n\n*RED + GREEN + BLUE = WHITE*\n\nYou can see other colors by changing up the proportions, but every color you can see comes down to some mixture of these three cones activating.\n\n**Now, a bit about how colors in nature work**\n\nWhite light is all of the colors (that humans can see, anyway) mixed together. When that light hits an object, like your bluejeans, some of that light is absorbed and some bounces back at you. The wavelengths that get absorbed **don't** go to your eyes, so if you see blue that means that red and green are getting absorbed and blue is bouncing back. \n\n*See BLUE > > RED + GREEN absorbed*\n\n*See RED > > BLUE + GREEN absorbed*\n\n*See GREEN > > RED + BLUE absorbed*\n\n*See BLACK > > RED + BLUE + GREEN absorbed*\n\nBut what does that mean if you see cyan? We know that if you see cyan, you are seeing blue and green light, which means that red light is getting absorbed and blue and green are bouncing back.\n\n*See CYAN > > RED absorbed*\n\n*See MAGENTA > > GREEN absorbed*\n\n*See YELLOW > > BLUE absorbed*\n\n**So let's say you have some paint or some ink**\n\nIf you mix yellow and blue paint to make green, you will get pain that absorbs some red and some green and some blue, no matter what proportions you use. So it will be a dark color because while some green light can bounce back, some is also getting absorbed. Your green will look like you mixed some black paint into it, because that blue pain will absorb some green. \n\nNow what happens if you mix magenta and yellow paint? You are mixing green-absorbing paint with blue-absorbing paint and end up with red paint, and I do mean true red, the color that gets your red cones all excited. If you try it yourself with actual paint it will seem like motherfucking witchcraft, but that's eyes for ya.\n\n*MAGENTA + CYAN = \"TRUE\" BLUE* \n*MAGENTA + YELLOW = \"TRUE\" RED* \n*CYAN + YELLOW = \"TRUE\" GREEN (aha! that's how to do it!)*\n\n**So the reason why CMYK inks are used is so you can get ALL the colors.**"
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yaczu | explain how "currently in the us whenever someone without insurance uses emergency medical services to save their life, how do the taxpayers end up paying for it"? | Just how exactly does this work? The (in)famous court case kinda only cited it, didn't really explain how. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yaczu/explain_how_currently_in_the_us_whenever_someone/ | {
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"Let's say John Smith doesn't have health insurance. He runs into a medical emergency (maybe a car accident) and goes to the ER. He makes OK money, but he can't afford the $60,000 bill they slap him with. So, the hospital negotiates with him and waves all their fees. He just has to pay for the doctor, the medication, and the tests. The hospital still has to make money, but it waves or renegotiates fees with uninsured people all the time. So, they raise costs across the board for others. \n\nNow, let's say Fred Johnson doesn't have health insurance, and he is very poor. He's had some health problems but hasn't gone to the doctor to get them looked at because he can't afford it. He keeps putting it off until it's an emergency. He goes to the ER, and they have to admit him. Bills end up running about $100,000. He has no hope of paying those off, so he doesn't pay any of it. Well, if he had gotten preventative care and had gone to a doctor when the problems first started, it might have cost a couple hundred bucks. Now, the debt is $100,000. He's not paying for it, so who eats those costs? Everyone else who goes to the ER. The hospital, the doctors, the drug companies, etc... none of htem get paid for what was done for the patient. So, prices are raised on everyone else who can pay.\n\nThe new health care mandate is going to make it so both John and Fred have insurance. John makes enough money to pay for health insurance. Now, he has to. Fred does not make enough money to pay for health insurance. Before, single men (even if they were very poor) could not get Medicaid for insurance. Now, if they make under a certain amount of money, single men can get health insurance. Fred might get Medicaid insurance now, or he can buy private insurance, and because he doesn't make much money, the government will give him a credit on his taxes every year to pay for most of the cost of his insurance. Tax payers are basically paying for Fred to get insurance, but now Fred can get medical care when his problems first arise, when they're not expensive, instead of waiting to go to the ER when it is an expensive medical emergency.\n\nBefore, John Smith wasn't paying for health insurance. Now, he is. By paying the premiums as a healthy man, he is now helping insurance companies to pay for the preventative care of people like Fred Johnson. Initially, expenses might go up as Fred and people like Fred all go in for doctors' visits for the first time in years. Before long, expenses are going to go way down because insurance companies will be paying less money for emergency care. Hospitals are not going to have to write off almost any hospital visits because almost everyone will ahve insurance.",
"Hospitals can use unpaid services as a write off for taxes. When a patient has no insurance and cant pay, they are called indigent. The hospital and any doctors that treated indigent patients can write off a portion of their unreimbursed services when tax time comes.\n\nAdditional, but Not ELI5: A majority of most hospitals revenue comes from the government anyways. Medicare is the largest source of revenue for many medical providers. Medicare patients tend to be older, or have much more expensive medical conditions like kidney failure. \n\nThe government knows that it costs money to keep a hospital running. They also know that they are the largest source of income for a hospital. The feds estimate the number of patients treated by a facility and set reimbursement rates for different geographic regions. \n\nIts all very complex, and I have grossly over simplified things, but essentially the fed is keeping the hospital financially solvent. If a person who has no insurance racks up substantial bills, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions it still costs the hospital money to treat them. Drugs, electricity, maintenance, room/board etc. The feds are keeping that facility afloat financially and work out many ways to lessen the financial impact of indigent patients.\n\nTL;DR- Hospitals only in business because of government money. When the private sector cant pay, the fed picks up the tab."
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4hykr1 | does a cow's lifestyle affect the quality of milk it produces? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hykr1/eli5_does_a_cows_lifestyle_affect_the_quality_of/ | {
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" > I'm apparantly lactose intolerant. But it seems to me that I can tolerate goat milk, and even cow milk from different supermarket brands (Trader Joe's) than other brands.\n\nYou're probably not lactose intolerant, as lactose is the same from goats, cows or sheep (or any other mammal). \n\nEDIT: If you want to test this, buy yourself some [lactase enzyme pills](_URL_0_) to enable your body to break down the lactose and see if you still have the same reaction.\n \nYou may be reacting to the A1 beta-casein protein in milk. The average dairy cow produces approximately 60 per cent A2 and 40 per cent A1, but this varies a lot depending on what breed of cow is being used. Some dairies might be using cows that produce little to no A1 protein. This may explain why you react to some milk and not others.\n\nAs you say on your site, goat milk is A2 beta-casein protein.\n\n > I'm guessing that it has to do with the health of the cow, since you are what you eat AND cow's in the US aren't exactly cared for quality,\n\nThe milk quality does change depending on the health of the cow but I'm not aware of any scientific evidence for this causing any gastrointestinal discomfort upon drinking the milk. The cow's lifestyle may change the taste of the milk, and even its nutritional qualities, which may have long-term health effects but not any short-term symptoms."
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41zjwu | why is h202 called hydrogen peroxide whereas other combinations of anything with 2 oxide is called [x]-dioxide. | Iirc di is based on the latin word for the number two so it makes sense to me that they would be called dioxides. Why is that not the case for H202 ?
Example of what i mean:
H202 = hydrogen peroxide.
SiO2 = Silicon dioxide.
Is it because the the O are "linked" together ?
H-O-O-H as opposed to O-Si-O ?
Not sure if that last part is correct.
Thanks. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41zjwu/eli5why_is_h202_called_hydrogen_peroxide_whereas/ | {
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"\"Per\" also means \"For each\". One per person means one for each person.\n\nSo hydrogen **per**oxide means one hydrogen atom per oxygen atom. H2 and O2. Silicon **di**oxide means two oxygen atoms per silicon atom, carbon dioxide the same but for carbon. \n\n(edit: formatting)",
"As the AutoModerator decided to remove my first response please see below\n\nH2O2 has a single bond between the oxygen atoms and the Hydrogen, dioxides have 2. \n\nFor Clarity the bond in Hydrogen Peroxide is H-O-O-H where as Carbon Dioxide is O=C=O (= meaning dual bonds)."
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4bgyzg | how do streaming services analyze the success of their shows/movies? | With the strong influx of movies being created by streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, how exactly do they know if their movie was a success?
For example, if a studio like Warner Bros created a movie with a final budget of $10m, they can analyze their success based on the revenues. If they made > $10m...it was a success, right?
So how can streaming services deem their movie a success if they simply only provide revenues through subscriptions? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bgyzg/eli5_how_do_streaming_services_analyze_the/ | {
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"Netflix/hulu/shomi or all other good streaming services have an international database. It analyzes every movie and how many people watched it, and how many people rated it. The importance is more of public rating, rather than views. It also has an algorithm to group movies together for the \"For You\" section.\n\nBonus: 2004 movie \"Napoleon Dynamite\" was so random and crazy it broke the algorithm. You will never find it in the \"For You\" section.",
"They look at details like:\n\n- How many people watched it?\n- How many people watched it right after signing up? (Assuming that the show is what motivated people to join)\n- Did signup rates spike when the show was announced or became available?\n- How many people watched it as soon as possible? \n- How many people, after watching episode 1, went on to complete the season?\n- How quickly did people binge the whole season?\n- What did people rate it?\n- Did the enthusiastic viewers (completed entire season, rated highly, and/or watched quickly) fit into a neat demographic (18-29 year old men who watch lots of scifi) or a broad one?\n\nThere's one kind of surprising detail that Netflix and streaming services are looking for that traditional TV networks aren't: *enthusiasm*.\n\nWith a traditional TV network, supported by ads, the only thing that matters is the number of viewers. The more viewers there are, the more valuable the ad slots are. 1000 viewers who say \"eh it was mediocre\" are preferable to 500 who say \"I *loved* it.\"\n\nWith Netflix, enthusiasm can matter more than overall viewership. 500 people who *love* a show are better than 1000 people who watched it without really caring. Because they're not selling adtime, they're selling subscriptions, and people won't pay for a service that has ten mediocre shows but they *will* pay for a service that has their one alltime favourite. So Netflix's metrics aren't simple viewership rates (although obviously overall viewership matters) but also enthusiasm rates.\n\nOne area enthusiasm really matters is in demographic divide. In the TV industry, the goal is to have each show appeal as much as possible to the five key demographics (Males, Females, Teens, 18-49s, Seniors). When you pitch a show to a network you're expected to identify the two you're strong with (Breaking Bad: men 18-49, Pretty Little Liars: female teens) and then there are meetings on how to cater to the other 3. If you pitch an action series about street racing spies they'll want you to add romance for female viewers, tone down the violence for teen viewers, put some 60s/70s rock in the soundtrack for older viewers, for example. The aim is for the show to be tolerable to everyone, even if those changes make it less appealing to the core demo. This is less about drawing old/teen/female viewers to the show and more about making sure that nothing in the TV schedule is so unappealing to anyone that they'll turn it off, since people usually watch TV in multi-show blocks with other people.\n\nNetflix's goal is very different. It's better for their business model to have shows that only appeal to individual demographics, but which evoke intense \"I would pay $9/month for this show alone\" enthusiasm. You create these shows by doing the *opposite* of what the TV networks do -- you pick a demographic and focus solely on them."
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966nx1 | inductors, the electronic component (the answer to the one posted originally i found completely unintelligible). what do they do? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/966nx1/eli5_inductors_the_electronic_component_the/ | {
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"An inductor is just a coil of wire. When electric current flows through a coil, it creates a magnetic field. There's a law of the universe that says that if you try to change a magnetic field (either increasing it or decreasing), electric forces will kick in to try to prevent the change.\n\nSo, an inductor acts like the electrical version of a heavy object on wheels, which is hard to get moving, and hard to stop. It takes a lot of work to start current flowing through it, and once that's done it wants to keep going, and it takes a lot of work to \\*stop\\* current flowing through it.\n\nThey're useful for keeping electricity flowing at a constant rate, and also for the large electric forces (voltage) they can create if you try to stop their current from flowing suddenly.",
"A couple of things...\n\nThey act kind of like capacitors except they store energy in a magnetic field instead of an electrostatic field.\n\nThey work exactly opposite to a capacitor in that they cause current to lag voltage (meaning current peaks after voltage peaks) while a capacitor causes current to lead voltage.\n\nNow *applications* of inductors are a-plenty. Mainly inductors are used in conjunction with capacitors as filters and tuners. They can also be used to correct the phase drift in an AC power circuit carrying a primarily capacitive load, but the normal state of affairs in power applications is the reverse (i.e. using capacitors to compensate for a primarily inductive load.) "
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62ze4l | /r/place | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62ze4l/eli5_rplace/ | {
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"April Fool's event.\n\nIt's a giant canvas that everyone can modify but only with 1 pixel every 5 minutes. For that reason lots of subreddits \"compete\" by forming teams to make large scale drawings."
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qgq03 | how some headphones are higher quality than others. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qgq03/eli5_how_some_headphones_are_higher_quality_than/ | {
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"Some are made by Chinese babies while others are not.\n\nSome are endorsed by Dr. Dre while others are good.",
"Some have higher quality speakers, ergo higher quality magnets and heavier speaker coverings for a better sounding bass. ",
"Often this is in relation to the speed at which the speaker can move. To really understand this, you need to have an idea of what the speaker looks like on the inside.\n\nEssentially, you have a cone-shaped piece of paper (sometimes other materials) with an electromagnet suspended in it. At the pointy end of the cone, there is another electromagnet. The electromagnets are given electrical pulses, causing them to activate/deactivate/do their thing. When they do this, the paper cone vibrates intensely. The vibrating of the paper cone is what we hear.\n\nKnowing this, quality is often judged by clarity of sound, which can depend on the quality of the magnets, and quality/material of the cone. Another way that people judge quality is by the frequencies that can be reached by the speaker. Humans can hear from 12 Hz (12 vibrations per second), to 20,000 Hz (20,000 vibrations per second). Speakers that can vibrate at a very low or very high rate are often considered to be of good quality. The quality of headphones can also be determined by how they look, or their feeling. This is entirely dependent on the company and brand of headphones.\n\nI may not be entirely right on all of this, but I hope that I helped a little bit.",
"It's just like anything that has varying qualities of products. Lets take something pretty simple and universal. You know how some spoons bend when you use them to scoop hard ice cream and others don't? Even though they're made from basically the same materials, the person who designed the good spoon understands the material they're working with and the forces that will be applied to it so they can use their education to create a shape that leverages the materials strengths.\n\nThe person who designed the other one just tried to make something that looks and feels kinda like the good spoon, but since they don't really understand the science behind it, or don't care enough to design it well, then it only works kinda like the good spoon but doesn't measure up when it's pushed to its limit.",
"Headphones have the unique issue of having to create quality sound at low volumes, from small speakers. Additionally they have to compete with your surrounding sounds.\n\nThe size of the speakers (especially in ear-buds and canal phones) make it hard for them to recreate beautiful discernible lows (which you would normally feel over your body, but can still be heard by your ear) while still covering the highs most songs need to be recognizable. Because of this some headphone manufacturers use multiple drivers.\n\nSome headphones also employ noise-cancellation techniques. This can mean thick padding, but in expensive cases it means a microphone on the outside of the headphones actually listens to the sounds outside, then broadcasts the inverse of that sound in a low volume through the speakers inside, effectively cancelling out the ambient noise. This is very neat and I recommend reading more about the science of sound if it interests you.\n\nRemember though, your headphones are limited by your media player. Different devices have different ground noise levels and noise/signal ratios(I believe headphones also have this ratio and when buying them you should read the label for the info). If you plug great headphones into your laptop sound jack while the fans are running, you probably won't be able to get rid of that ground hum. Similarly front audio jacks on computer towers usually don't sound as good as rear audio jacks because they pick up extra electrical signal from other components in the computer.",
"the quality of the materials used to make them, and how well they work together, among other things",
"Headphones are usually judged along the following criteria:\n\n* soundstage\n\n* placement and separation of instruments \n\n* frequency range\n\n* sound coloring\n\n* comfort\n\n* durability\n\nComfort and durability are self-explanatory, so we'll ignore those.\n\n\nSoundstage is... imagine you were at a live performance with an orchestra. If you were in the audience, you would hear the strings coming from the left side of the stage, and the horns to the right, and the brass somewhere else, etc etc. Headphones w/ a good soundstage will make you feel like you are in the audience, whereas cheap cans will sound condensed and very \"in your head\"\n\n\nSimilarly, good cans will have the instruments/vocals clean and well separated, whereas cheap cans will sound like all of the different sounds are mushed together.\n\n\nFrequency range is often used as justification to charge higher prices, but is in fact usually more of a marketing ploy, as even most cheap cans feature frequency ranges that extend beyond that of human hearing.\n\n\nSound coloring is really what a lot of it comes down to in high quality vs low quality cans. Every headphone has it's own \"sound\" aka coloring. Ideally, at least in theory, you want to hear the song as the producer/sound engineer intended. Cans that feature a neutral sound emphasize the range of frequencies fluidly and relatively equally, or are \"flat\" as it is called (for the flat response across the frequency ranges if you were looking at a graph).\n\n\nHowever, it is hard to get a good response across all the frequencies, and costs money in components and r & d to get this kind of quality. That is why with lower/middle level cans you will hear about \"great mids and highs, but a bit lacking in bass,\" or \"tight clean bass, but mids are too recessed and highs are shrilly.\" It's hard to get it right across all frequencies.\n\n\nFurthermore, while a studio producer may want a neutral headphone for mixdowns, a hip hop head may want cans that emphasize bass a bit, a fan of singers may want a headphone that has nice mids and highs... so it's not all about being neutral necessarily\n\n\nAnother coloring issue is that of \"warmth.\" A warm headphone has a fuller sound that is nicer on your ear. Think of it like the sound of a vinyl record vs a cd. Getting a warm sound and a clean sound are often at odds with eachother as well, so getting a clean AND warm sound costs.\n",
"Well, assuming you have a good input signal (which with even the best headphones available can ruin the experience), a good pair of headphones will be able to more accurately reproduce that signal than cheaper ones.\n\nI say accurately, because as you start at the low end of quality, the characteristics of the headphones will usually affect the sound in a multitude of ways, sometimes uncontrollably. Perhaps positively to someone who likes thumping bass or crisp trebles, but if your goal is faithful reproduction of your source material, you have to construct your cans to more specific tolerances.\n\nMore science comes into play as well then, such as pressure, open versus closed cans, and the frequency response of the driver itself.\n\nAs an aside, remember that any captured audio signal has a certain amount of 'color' it can store. Think of 8bit versus 16bit vs 24bit color. As you go up in depth, you can more accurately represent subtle changes. At 8 bit, you might still get a general idea, but at 16 bit suddenly you're seeing colors you didn't notice before, like the buckle on a guy's belt or a character's hair color.\n\nAlso, the way it was captured comes into play. If you record a sound at too low of a volume, you're encoding that information with only a small amount of 'colors', even though you may have way more 'colors' to work with. It'd be like taking a picture with a 24 bit camera but only enough light that you can make out like 10% of the colors. Then later you bring it into photoshop to brighten it, but as you dial it up, suddenly there's all this noise in the picture, blurriness or washed out colors. This is because you didn't get enough light to properly 'see' all the 'colors' in the first place.\n\nThis applies to audio in the same sense, if you don't provide enough volume (light) to your recording, then when you go to amplify it later (brighten it), you'll get noise (washed out colors), instead of just a louder version of what was 'really there' (the original scene). On that same page, if it's TOO loud (bright), you overload the recording (film / image sensor), and it's washed out. In that sense you don't just lose clarity, you 'clip' entirely, which in audio sounds like distortion.\n\nHope this makes sense."
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5llk9q | nikola tesla's plan for wireless electricity | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5llk9q/eli5_nikola_teslas_plan_for_wireless_electricity/ | {
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"Imagine a guitar, the strings are the wardencliff tower and the guitar body is the earth. When the string is played it resonates within the body. The earth would resonate the power through the ground so it could be extracted at a distant location. ",
"To make current (flowing electrons) in a wire, you need a magnetic field moving across that wire (you can also have the field stay pit, and move the wire, relative motion is the key). \n\nMagnetic field do not travel very well though. They dissapate very quickly the further you go. An electromagnetic wave, on the other hand, will travel much further. The electric part of the wave reinforces the magnetic, and vice versa. \n\nThe key problem, is that the power of the wave drops off with distance. Given a transmitter of a fixed amount of power, say 100 watts, at 1 meter from the transmitter, that 100 watts is divided across a sphere that has a surface area of ( 4 * pi * r^2 ) call it 12 square meters. At 2 meters you have 48 square meters to divide the 100 watts. At 3 you have almost 120 square meters of surface are to 'fill' with the same amount of power output.\n\nTesla thought you could overcome this drop off by using resonance. If the field vibrated at the same frequency as the earth/atmosphere system, the transmission efficiency would be greatly enhanced. As far as anyone is aware, he was not able to make this work on a large scale. ",
"In one way, radio transmission is a form of wireless power; after all, a crystal radio is powered purely by radio waves, without external amplification. Of course, by the time it reaches you, the signal is very weak indeed.\n\nSignals from Wardenclyffe going through the ground would also experience huge losses. Tesla also misunderstood the properties of electromagnetic waves.",
"A Tesla coil when Tesla was building them, wasn't about generating lightning, the lightning was an unwanted side effect of his transmitting coil. A Tesla coil is like a swing, but with electromagnetic fields instead of mass, gravity and a pendulum. Energy is pumped into the coil at its resonant frequency, and like a swing set, swings further and further as you add energy at its resonant frequency. These swings of the electromagnetic energy sends out electromagnetic waves through the air. Tesla coils are very efficient at generating electromagnetic waves.\n\nBack in Tesla's day, electricity in the home was all about lighting. There weren't many home appliances and industry mainly still used diesel, steam or water for powering their machinery. With fluorescent lighting, energy put into the tube causes it to emit uv radiation. That radiation hits the white phosphorus coating in the inside of the tube and is absorbed and re-emitted as visible light. In the electromagnetic field given off by a Tesla coil, the tube will also give off light. Tesla wanted to build absurdly large Tesla coils to light up fluorescent tubes at huge distances instead of running wires from the generating station to homes.\n",
"Imagine you are on a trampoline. Around the edge, you put marbles. In the center, you drop a bowling ball. When it hits the tarp, the bowling ball makes all the marbles on the outside edges move. If you could dribble the bowling ball, or bounce it just right, you could get the outside marbles to move repeatedly. \n\nThe bowling ball is the tower, and the marbles are receivers. Basically tesla \"bounced\" energy in that tower, and the marbes felt it and were affected by it at a distance. \n\nThe problem is that tesla wanted to make the trampoline *really* big, so big that the marbles would be too far away from the bowling ball to feel it. \n\n***\n\nI stand corrected- I'm talking more about a tesla coil system here, where it appears the question was about his atmospheric power system. Refer to /u/wbeaty answer as I think that is more accurate. My answer applies more to wireless power via electromagnetic waves, wheareas his is more about making the sky and earth into a giant conductive sandwich. \n\nTo my knowledge the Wycliffe tower was intended to be a tesla cool type system, but I do not know for sure. ",
"It wasn't practical, sorry to say.\n\nA Tesla coil is essentially a huge radio transmitter, with no content, typically in the 2-100KHz range but it's unclear what frequency he was planning to use (plans may never have been settled to that level of detail).\n\nA normal radio receiver gets tuned to match the frequency of the radio transmitter and collect as much power as possible, but still, the signal is TINY (not enough to light an LED) and all the power to drive the speakers comes from the receiver's battery driving an amp. Even though the radio transmitter is tens of thousands of watts.\n\nTesla really didn't have anything new in that regard, but fantasized about impossibly huge radio transmitters and bigger receiver antennae. \n\nThere are many aspects which don't make sense here:\n\n1. The radio transmitter would have to be fantastically huge for anyone to receive a useful amount of power, even right next to it. It would be very inefficient and power ain't free.\n\n2. Strong RF flux is actually known to be *dangerous* to people and the environment. OSHA sets a limit of 10 mW/cm^2. The power levels needed to light a lightbulb are comically above that.\n\n3. It would not just be received by the intended antenna, it would be picked up in the wires of any circuitry not shielded in a metal box. It would cause massive interference.\n\n4. You could receive more power with less RF flux, but the antenna must be huge. If you have an antenna spread out across an acre to receive a few watts from a transmitter 1/2 mile away at 0.0001% efficiency, why wouldn't you just run a wire to the power source?\n\nYou may have heard the claim \"a major breakthrough in 1899 at Colorado Springs by transmitting 100 million volts of high-frequency electric power wirelessly over a distance of 26 miles at which he lit up a bank of 200 light bulbs and ran one electric motor!\" Also listed as 50W bulbs, 10kW.\n\nThat \"fact\" showed up in a 1944 biography of Tesla written by John O'Neill. There is NO source for the claim, in fact O'Neill was NOT a proper historian and said a lot of shit which doesn't correlate with history. Tesla took meticulous notes at Colorado Springs and he never documented anything like that. No one other than O'Neill said anything like this. Some people think \"well Tesla was being too secretive to record it, because it might be stolen\" but that's nothing like Tesla. Tesla was desperate for funding and into *grossly inflating* his claims. No one could \"steal\" his work, he was too far \"out there\" for others to even try to replicate. \n\nOne theory someone came up with: \"It is interesting to note the 1909 American Encyclopedia cites the first commercial transmission of AC on November 17, 1896 was from Niagara Falls to Buffalo, N.Y., a distance of 26 miles. Could this have been the historical event after which the questionable 26 mile Colorado Springs figure was derived?\" Plausible, IMHO. O'Neill was a kind of a confused guy.",
"Adding on:\n\nWireless electricity already exists in the form of conductive wireless charging, which is most often seen in phones as inductive wireless charging. \n\nFrom the Wikipedia page:\n\n > the use of an induction coil which produces an electromagnetic field via a charging station where energy is transferred to an electronic device which is also equipped with a corresponding induction coil.\n\nIt's essentially charging the device via electromagnetism. Standard charging methods rely on the conventional (and far more efficient) application of electricity: in a closed circuit, with electrons travelling in a loop from the negative terminal to the positive. ",
"People here keep referencing the tesla coil as his method of wireless power transfer. While partly true that was not his complete idea for low loss wireless power transmission across large distances. Most Tesla's ideas involved constructive resonance through a medium. \n\nTesla's idea was to use the earth and atmosphere as a medium. He believed that he could use the earth itself as a conductor by taking advantage of resonant frequencies and using the atmosphere itself as to complete the circuit. Essentially people would put a wire into the ground and a second \"antenna\" up into the air and they could power their home without wires connecting to a grid from his power station towers. \n\n\nWikipedia has a nice, imho, simple [eli5 explaination](_URL_0_) I will leave here: \n\n\"The theory included driving alternating current pulses into the Earth at its resonant frequency from a grounded Tesla coil working against an elevated capacitance to make the potential of the Earth oscillate. Tesla thought this would allowing alternating current to be received with a similar capacitive antenna tuned to resonance it at any point on Earth with very little power loss.[116][117][118] His observations also led him to believe a high voltage used in a coil at an elevation of a few hundred feet would \"break the air stratum down\", eliminating the need for miles of cable hanging on balloons to create his atmospheric return circuit.[119][120] Tesla would go on the next year to propose a \"World Wireless System\" that was to broadcast both information and power worldwide[121][122] and attempted in 1901 to construct a large high-voltage wireless power station, now called the Wardenclyffe Tower, at Shoreham, New York. By 1904 investment dried up and the facility was never completed.\"",
"In the simplest terms, electricity moving through a wire creates a magnetic field around it. If you wrap the wire around into a coil, that field gets stronger. (this is the basic principal upon which electromagnets and electric motors operate)\n\nSimilarly, the opposite is true as well. If you introduce a magnetic field to some wire, it will induce electrical current in the wire. (technically the change in magnetic field, but that's not super important for an ELI5 explanation) This effect is stronger with more \"coils\" of the wire. (this is the basic principal upon which generators operate)\n\nSo, to transfer power wirelessly, you just send a high frequency (meaning many times per second) alternating current (means polarity switches back and forth from positive to negative over and over) through a coil of wire, and put another coil close enough to be in reach of that first coil's magnetic field, and boom, you have transferred power wirelessly.\n\nTesla had the idea of scaling this principal up to a HUGE scale.",
"Thank you ! First time I've ever had a real answer when asking anyone. A lot of people I have asked believe that the government and/ or JP Morgan are the reason we don't use this energy. Because they can't make a profit off of it I guess. ",
"Today we know electricty is caused by the sharing of electrons between a conductive material (copper wire). Tesla on the other hand thought that electricty came from an invisible 'Ether' in which electrons are a free floating entity in space not attached to any atoms. He thought that by pumping electricity into the ground via the Wardenclyffe tower he would be able to send energy all over the world. Turns out he was just connecting to the largest ground system known to man and disscharging all of his electricity into the earth. \n\nHis Tesla coil does work for sending electrical energy wirlessly but it is not usefull for our needs. Imagine connecting a computer to WiFi and having the option to plug in an ethernet cable.",
"Make air electric so all electric things are powered by the air (hope this was a good ELI5, it seems many explanations tend to be ELI have a reasonable background in the topic and am around 20 and might not help the person for what they want)",
"Tesla believed that a spherical conductor (i.e. The Earth), can support *surface waves*. They look a little [like this](_URL_0_). They hug around the outer surface of a conductor, and in the case of the Earth would continually diffract around it. Surface waves (also called creeping waves, ground waves, Sommerfield-Zenneck waves) do exist.\n\nHe thought he could transfer power around the Earth using these waves - exciting them using his Tesla coil. It would create a standing wave around the Earth -the waves would be emitted from his transmitter, go around the Earth, converge at the anti-pode, and then come back. If you know anything about standing waves, they are caused by a transmitted and reflected wave, which is what would happen here.\n\n\n\n\n",
"How does tesla [the car company] use his inventions in their cars?",
"He wanted to make a low frequency, high power, isotropic antenna. Then shoot a low frequency, high power, continuous, radio wave from it. This wave would travel around the world. It would have so much power that any radio antenna could pick up enough energy to power appliances. ",
"well there's a thing about a coiled wire (called solenoid) which produces a current (electricity) in the presence of a moving magnetic field AND VICE VERSA. The direction of the current also depends on the magnetic field.\n\nIn short, if there a magnet moving across a solenoid, it produces current. A current across a solenoid makes it produce a magnetic field.\n\nIn theory, you can transfer current wireless through a manipulation of solenoids since magnetic fields can propagate through most things.\n\nI think tesla was thinking of building a LARGE tower that can tap to the earths ionosphere (its kinda where lightnings happen. with a special gizmos, you can get some electricity out of it) and get the current to pass through a large coil. This tower should produce enough magnetic field for a whole town. Each house then would have a receiver solenoid so that they can produce electricity.\n\n\n",
"The comments I have read so far indicate most people do not have a clue about what Tesla intended. \n\nTo understand Tesla you need to understand what his primary driver was. Almost everything he invented was based around resonance. \n\nKnowing that it is much easier to extrapolate what his intent was.",
"the [Schumann resonances](_URL_0_).\n\nHe thought if the Ionosphere has frequency that it resonated at naturally, you could add/load energy into it in-sync with the resonating waves (think a wave pool, and how the energy increases with each additional push). then theoretically devices would have a small antenna that would naturally ground out the device to the earth, thus creating a circuit.",
" Several of the explanations here are wrong. Beware!\n\n:)\n\nAs Tesla kept saying and saying, *it wasn't radio. It had nothing to do with radio. The inverse-square law did not apply, because radio waves weren't being sent from an antenna.* He wasn't using his giant Tesla coil in radio-transmitter mode. He wasn't broadcasting his waves into outer space like Marconi did. Anyone insisting differently, they're simply wrong, and remain clueless about Tesla's actual plans.\n\nBut, they're wrong for good reason. It's because Tesla kept secrets. Today we know quite a bit because Tesla did give many details in a private 1916 legal deposition (Marconi radio court case,) but that wasn't published until 75 years later. Much else being said about Tesla's wireless system was either uninformed speculation, or was taking Tesla's furtive and semi-misleading comments about secret inventions as being complete explanations. Before 1992 you had to go to the Tesla Museum if you wanted to know the truth. Instead, most authors just made s & 't up about Tesla. Or, they lifted their information from earlier books which made s & 't up about Tesla.\n\nUnfortunately, all this wrong speculation ended up in books. And if books clearly state Tesla's wireless plan, it must be true? And it's even more true when many books say the same thing? Nope. That's pure BS. It's \"game of telephone\" where books repeat earlier books with distortion, and the info in earlier books came from even earlier ones. And the original info was speculation to begin with! Instead, read original Tesla docs with Tesla's actual statements (which remained inside the Beograd Tesla Museum until finally published by \nLeland Anderson 1992 \"[Nikola Tesla On His Work With Alternating Currents and Their Application to Wireless Telegraphy...](_URL_2_)\"\n\n---\n\nOk ok, *WHAT WAS TESLA'S PLAN?* It was very simple: make a conductive path all the way up to the top of the sky, to the conductive ionosphere layer. Then power the ionosphere with a fifty million volts power supply, as if the entire sky was one giant plate of a capacitor. The ground serves as the other plate. The sky-plasma was his power-line, with the Earth being the return conductor. Giant tesla-coils with 100 megavolts on the upper terminal would create the vertical \"plasma tower\" to conduct current to the sky itself. They'd also supply power to every Tesla-type power-receiver on Earth.\n\nVery cool idea: we're in the gap of Tesla's giant capacitor, the size of Earth's atmosphere. It's as if all of human society was placed inside a microwave oven operating at low frequency. Hold up a fluorescent tube, and it glows wirelessly, anywhere on Earth. (Well, his planned power level wasn't high enough for that. Tube-lamps would need a few yards of vertical antenna and a small coil before it would glow wirelessly.) One engineering paper in the 1980s estimated that such a system would consume a millon watts entirely in wasted energy, but these losses would be constant. That means 10 megawatt system would be 90% efficient, while a 100MW system would be 99% efficient. Note that large power grids tend to be under 70% efficient < edit, wrong might be more like 94% > \n\nOnly one problem. HOW THE EFF DOES SOMEONE MAKE CONNECTION TO THE IONOSPHERE? Carbon-fiber space-elevators?!!! Tesla said he would \"break down the atmosphere\" between his tower-electrode and the conductive layers far above. So, a lightning bolt. Only needs to be 30KM tall. Roughly.\n\nSo, all the Tesla-skeptics were never able to properly scoff at his wireless-power system. Tesla had them all gnashing and frothing about inverse-square falloff and near-zero efficiency, when his system actually wasn't using radio waves at all. It was an invisible power line, an odd type of beamed-power using plasma. \n\nThey should have been scoffing about Tesla's ability to create the 30KM vertical spark needed for his system to work. Well, spark, or a glow-discharge.\n\n* [Artist conception of Tesla's system in operation](_URL_0_), from 2001 Serbian-language book from the Tesla Museum.\n* [Tesla's lab-scale protoype of Wireless Power xmission](_URL_1_), build for Patent model\n\nFrom the above diagram with the glass tube, we see that Tesla's system was based on conducted currents in glowing air, not on radio waves. Those current paths would glow at night. It was only \"wireless\" in the way that neon signs are \"filament-less.\" In modern words, Tesla was going to use tens of kilometers of glowing plasma as his power grid.\n\nInteresting trivia: when Tesla was discussing this in an interview, the reporter said why not just guide your lightning discharge up to the sky using ultraviolet spotlights. Tesla changed the subject! Decades later Tesla said that the UV spotlights placed atop Tesla Coils were his first goal, but he then tested it and found that the discharge-length remained far too short. He abandoned the carbon-arc searchlights, and instead discovered another method which he claimed was successful, and he'd fully tested it on his giant coils at Colorado Springs. A side-effect would be to make the entire sky above the transmitter glow like a vast Aurora.\n\nHe never said what this method was. Later he changed his mind about making it public, because he said it had major weapons possibilities. It could \"render uninhabitable\" any selected spot on Earth. \"It would be like giving a knife to an infant.\" Whatever was the trick was, or, whichever way Tesla was fooling himself, he took the secret to his grave.\n\nTherefore, don't laugh about Tesla's system being \"too inefficient,\" or because \"Tesla didn't even know about inverse-square law.\" That's just ignorant. Instead, laugh at Tesla for suggesting that he'd actually excited the Earth's entire ionosphere using a vertical gas-breakdown path many tens of KM tall ...late at night out in Colorado, so nobody would see the sky-glow aurora effects it created.\n\n*I saw that I would be able to transmit power provided I could construct a certain apparatus -- and I have, as I will show you later. I have constructed and patented a form of apparatus which, with a moderate elevation of a few hundred feet, can break the air stratum down. You will then see something like an aurora borealis across the sky, and the energy will go to the distant place. ...I came to the conviction that it would be ultimately possible, without any elevated antenna --- with very small elevation --- to break down the upper stratum of the air and transmit the current by conduction.* -N. Tesla 1916 \n\nWell, one thing's certain. Tesla was exactly right in insisting that, it wasn't radio.\n",
"I'm five days late to this question, and there are already a few good answers, so I assume no one will see this, but a big part of the complication in understanding Tesla's wireless power system comes from the fact that his wireless power system combined two very different systems. The first was a wireless power transmission system that used the earth as a resonator for ELF-VLF 'reactive' 'quasi-superconducting' energy transmission (for up to ~30 kHz), and the second part was a solar wind energy harvesting system. These systems were completely independent inventions, but he intended to combine both ideas in his global tower system. [Wardenclyffe](_URL_8_) was supposed to be only the first of many such towers. The first system was apparently his single-wire power system but using the layer of water (groundwater, lakes and oceans) as the resonator instead of a transmission line. The solar wind energy harvesting system was later developed in a much more limited local form using metal balloons instead of towers by Estonian inventor Hermann Plauson of the Fischer-Tropsch Otto Traun Research Corporation. Plauson is apparently better known as the inventor of the colloidal mill for making asphalt. Plauson put a lot of effort into developing this atmospheric energy tech for many years before patenting it in 1921 ([US Pat. No. 1,540,998](_URL_1_)).\n\nPeople found some things Tesla said about the combined wireless system impossible like especially how much power he said was available. In 1904, Tesla said he could produce 6 million households of energy from Wardenclyffe consuming only 6 households of energy—produce a 7.5 GW wave from only 7.5 KW input. That must have sounded especially unbelievable to people who were not yet even aware that the solar wind exists. Disbelief in that incredible claim might have contributed to the rumor that he had lost his mind. \n\nIf it is possible to harness solar wind like Tesla said, we aren't aware of how to do it yet. But no one seems to have investigated Plauson's research lately or this aspect of Tesla's research. Plauson claimed to harness tens to hundreds of KW using only tethered metal balloons. In his patent Plauson said the energy came from the atmosphere, which might be possible, but it seems more likely it would have been harnessing solar wind energy as it enters the atmosphere if only because extracting energy from the atmosphere like that seems more impossible. Here are some more links about it:\n\n- Tesla N. [The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires](_URL_0_). *Electrical World and Engineer*. Mar. 5, 1904.\n- [Cloudborn Electric Wavelets To Encircle The Globe](_URL_6_). *New York Times*. Mar. 27th, 1904. \n- [Quasi-superconducting single-wire electric power system](_URL_5_).\n- Hermann Plauson: [Wikipedia](_URL_11_) - Secor HW. [Power from the Air](_URL_12_). *Science and Invention*. Mar. 1922. - [Gernsback](_URL_7_) Feb. 1922.\n- [Tesla & the magnifying transmitter: passive circuits that multiply power like simple machines multiply force](_URL_3_)\n- Tesla N. [US Pat. No. 645,576: System of Transmission of Electrical Energy](_URL_10_) application: Sept. 2, 1897; published: Mar. 20, 1900\n- Tesla N. [US Pat. No. 649,621: Apparatus for Transmission of Electrical Energy](_URL_13_) application: Feb. 19, 1900; published: May 15, 1900\n- Tesla N. [US Pat. No. 1,119,732: Magnifying Transmitter](_URL_9_) application: January 18, 1902; published: Dec. 1, 1914\n- Palenscar A. [US Pat. No. 674,427: Apparatus for collecting atmospheric electricity](_URL_2_). application: Jul. 10, 1900\n- [Croatian TV show: long interview about Tesla's wireless power transmission \\(English subtitles\\)](_URL_4_)"
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23ilhw | how is easter's date determined? | And why does it change so much every year, sometimes from late March to late April? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23ilhw/eli5_how_is_easters_date_determined/ | {
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"It is always on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox in March. This is to make sure that it is always after the Jewish holiday Passover because you can't have his death and resurrection celebrations occur before his last supper which was on Passover.",
"Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.",
"It is actually the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, which is not exactly the same as the first full moon after the vernal equinox, but instead a standardized approximation of the first full moon after the vernal equinox, which can vary from the actual full moon's date by several days. "
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15u5sl | how a company can 'catch' you for pirating | - How can they trace who has downloaded what, and how do they gain access to that information?
- How can they prove that you actually downloaded their product?
I'm usually not so wigged out about pirating, but I may or may not (wink wink) be considering pirating an AutoDesk program for casual use (not for professional work). I can't afford to pay $7000 for any of their 3D modeling programs, but the high dollar amount freaks me out a bit. Can someone explain what the real risks are?
EDIT: Wow, a lot of great answers here! Thanks guys. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15u5sl/eli5_how_a_company_can_catch_you_for_pirating/ | {
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"[Autodesk programs are offered free for students on the autodesk website.](_URL_0_)",
"I'll be \"that guy\" who steps up and gives out some information that the content industry doesn't want you to know. The vast majority of this is found on google with the right key words, but since I'm pulling it from memory some details may be sketchy. ELI5 summary at the bottom.\n\nThere's several different ways that companies can catch you for piracy. Typically this occurs in the download phase, for any number of reasons. Here's a small handful of examples.\n\nHeader Probing: Header probing is more common in college campuses because they can get fined, heavily, if students abuse the college bandwidth to download copyrighted materials. Header probing basically entails an active engine on the network (your ISP backend) looking at the file headers for any files being transmitted. Since a staggering amount of files are transferred just to load web pages and associated images, the engine should be set to only look at the headers of files over a certain size. The captured header traffic is then scanned for keywords, often provided by a content provider or associated content provider protection agency, looking for specific movie, music or software keywords. Beyonce, Adobe, Star Wars, for example. If the scanner catches one of those keywords, an alert is given to the person in charge of content monitoring. They then can determine if you were just downloading a wallpaper pack, or if you were downloading an entire discography, and respond with cease and desist letters accordingly.\n\nTraffic logging: It's fairly standard practice to monitor the IP activity of all upload and download activity on a server. That means, any time that you're downloading or uploading a file to sites such as MegaUpload or other \"anonymous\" file hosting sites, your IP is being recorded. If a company files a copyright takedown notice on the file, typically only the user that uploaded the file experiences any backlash. Many companies these days excuse themselves from liability by baking \"not responsible for user uploaded content\" clauses into their EULAs, but depending on the nature and severity of the infraction, it is possible that a content provider may press the file share site for user details. Even if you never made an account, be sure that they have logged your IP.\n\nP2P Network sniffing: This method is what got napster and limewire users in trouble. P2P Network sniffing involves setting up an account and performing searches for what other people are sharing. In the case of Napster and Limewire users, this was all that was necessary for companies to go after users directly. Once a user name is associated with shared files, it's a few negligible legal hurdles to request IP addresses, and then request physical addresses from the ISP.\n\nTorrent Honey-pot: The latest and greatest method of pirate entrapment is the honey-pot torrent. This torrent may be either hosted directly by the content producer, or it may a pirated file they are aware of and are also downloading. When you're torrenting using conventional methods, the tracker provides a dynamic list so users can seamlessly transfer bits of file to other users. Using the bittorrent protocol, it's not difficult to see what users you're connected to have what percentage of the file. All the content producer needs to do at that point is confirm that the file is in fact their copyrighted content and to obtain the plainly available IP address of persons hosting the 100% complete file.\n\n\nHow to get around all this: Encryption! Proxies and protocol enforcement can also help.\n\nThe best way to get around header probing and traffic logging is to simply NEVER DOWNLOAD CONTENT FROM HTTP SITES. Not always practical, but a good way to avoid any violation notices to start.\n\nLikewise, a good way to avoid P2P Network sniffing is not to use P2P Networks and limit your downloading practices to the more stealthy avenues of torrenting and newsgroup binaries.\n\nThe best way to avoid Honey-pot torrents all together is to only torrent from private trackers. Private sites are sometimes difficult to get into and often require a 'share ratio' of uploading and downloading in harmonious balance, lest you be banned. While not fool proof, having private trackers dramatically cuts down on the number of potential content providers scanning for shared content as many private trackers have EULAs which absolve them of user provided content responsibility as well as ban law enforcement agencies from joining. While that means little to nothing up front, it *may* compromise the legitimacy of a court case.\n\nBut let's say you're using a public tracker and you're paranoid.. What to do?\n\nEnsure that you're using protocol encryption and that it is set to FORCED. Also, disallow legacy connections. This will dramatically reduce the chance of getting header probed as all data will be.. large encrypted chunks.\n\nDisable DHT. DHT allows entities outside of those using your tracker to join in on your share session, as long as they have the correct file hash. While this dramatically improves speeds on popular files, it also dramatically lowers security and exposes you to honey-pot browsers.\n\nYou can try to limit your exposure to honey-pot browsers and content provider bots by using \"PeerBlock\", or something similar. Utilities such as this have a list of known content provider IPs and block them automatically any time they attempt to make a connection to you. Without a connection, they can't determine how much, if any, of the file you have and they can't file a legitimate copyright claim.\n\nProxies are the ultimate solution, but can make things intensely slow. By routing your traffic outside of the US, typically to a country with loose copyright laws, you can make it appear that everything you're downloading is actually going to Norway or Madagascar, and that you're then downloading large chunks of.. something, from those country's servers.\n\nOf course, to be a good law abiding citizen.. you should probably not pirate at all. AutoDesk has a number of free learning software programs, and many good software vendors provide deep discounts for registered college students.\n\nELI5 version: In order to protect their stuff, the people who make stuff have hired lots of smart people to make programs that automatically scour your internet traffic for signs of mischief. If they catch you, they'll either send you a letter directly or they'll make a fuss at your ISP who will sent you a letter on their behalf.\n\nIt's a lot like having a nanny. Even though your mom is home, watching soap operas in the living room and can be easily snuck past, nanny is in the kitchen making sure you don't filch from the cookie jar. It'll spoil your dinner.",
"This might be a stupid question. But. Is it alright to download video from the net using download Helper for Firefox?",
"Back when I torrented heavily a couple years ago I must have downloaded over 100 gigs of stuff within a few months. Over 30 movies, entire 400 song discographies (Frank Sinatra, Chicago), the entire Seinfeld and Prison Break series, the entire Adobe Suite (Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, etc.). You know what I finally got caught for? One Beyonce album. My ISP sent an automated message to my home saying that they caught me for torrenting a Beyonce album. I was dumbfounded but not surprised since it was a recent album. Ah Single Ladies... you weren't worth the album download."
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51m7zw | why do we get along with some personalities much better than others? | Has there been different personality types scientifically recognized and known "matches" between personalities? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51m7zw/eli5why_do_we_get_along_with_some_personalities/ | {
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"I don't know about compatibility comparisons but there are definitely some personality classifications in social sciences. They typically are based on variations of key personality traits and classify based on a combination of which categories a person falls into. There are also psychologically recognized personality disorders, which are essentially personalities that are so extreme they impair normal relationships. Antisocial (sociopaths) and narcissistic personality disorders are the most famous, but excessive attention seeking, lack of affect or strong emotion, or strange and paranoid thinking are all examples of personality traits linked with personality disorders."
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46lcjz | why does boxing seem to have so many championship belts (wba, wbc, iba, the ring, etc.) that seem to change hands in one fight? why not 1 championship per weight? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46lcjz/eli5_why_does_boxing_seem_to_have_so_many/ | {
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"The history of why there are multiple belts started because there was more than one body sanctioning boxing in the USA. And when fights started happening between US fighters, and fighters from overseas, things got even more complicated.\n\nIt's easy to say that if the champion of the USA beats the champion of Europe, that he's the champion of both the USA and Europe. But what happens if he retires? Or if he moves to a different weight class? Different bodies might have different ideas on who becomes the champion when the current champion gives up the title without losing a fight.\n\nWhat happens now is there are all of these bodies that don't always agree on who is the top contender. Lennox Lewis lost his status as IBF Heavyweight Champion (and thus his undisputed champion status) in 2002 because he declined a challenge from IBF #1 contender, Chris Byrd. "
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3xnauo | how did the new and old world create and use the same technology? such as the bow and arrow. how could two different parts of the world create the same technology without coming into contact with each other? | I can understand both parts of the world creating the spear and other simple technologies. But how could something more complex like the bow and arrow be created by two sides of the world without making contact with each other at all? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xnauo/eli5_how_did_the_new_and_old_world_create_and_use/ | {
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"1) Many technologies are invented multiple times independent of each other. This is particularly true of our early technologies. \n\n2) Arrow and spear technology was in use before the Ice Age man entered North America. So they brought it with them from Asia. ",
"It is interesting that you mention the spear. The spear had two developmental forms one as a heavy thrusting weapon which would later become the pike. The other form was to become lighter and be a javelin bringing down people or animals at a distance, to get the javelin to go further and faster there was a spear thrower (atlatl) which then natural lead people to get the javelin to go faster by making it lighter and firing it from a bow.",
" > But how could something more complex like the bow and arrow be created by two sides of the world without making contact with each other at all?\n\nBecause bows and arrows are not that complex. So the same reason spears can be figured out by different people who never make contact, so can bows and arrows. They are a pretty straightforward and sensible thing to figure out when you have enough time and are trying to figure out ways to safely kill things from a distance.",
"Sometimes there is just a best way to solve a problem, so it will be arrived at independently by seperate people trying to solve that problem.\n\nSimilar to parallel evolution. eg, the porcupine, echidna and hedgehog all seperately evolved to be spiky, digging, omnivore/insectavores. This was the best solution to the problem each species was trying to solve independently (the problem of how to deal with living in similar ecological niches.)\n\nThe TV was invented independently by geographically isolated people, too. ",
"optimization. we're generally more interested in the *best* way to do something, and the list of choices there is very small.",
"Thing being invented at the same time independently is [surprising common](_URL_0_) most famously calculus and the telephone. ",
"Bows are not complex. They are essentially just spears with a different propulsion mechanism.",
"Leaving aside the question of whether the bow was actually invented twice (I don't actually know)....\n\nOk, so you've got a guy sitting in Asia somewhere (or wherever). He's a huntergatherer, uses a spear, lives in the woods. Maybe he's playing with a springy branch. Maybe he's thinking about how his atlatl works. Anyway, he gets the idea of a bow, goes out, and makes it.\n\nIf it could happen in Asia, the real question isn't \"how could someone in nearly identical situations on another continent come up with the same idea?\" But rather \"why would't they come up with the same idea\"",
"Different groups of humans encountered the same forces, the same problems and in the same situations. Given that only one solution is optimal to a given problem, it stands to reason that they'd invent the same tools to get the job done.",
"I think similar mythological tales are more interesting, like dragons. Everyone decided that there must be fucking fire-breathing lizards. \n\nI'm not a dragon believer or anything, I just think it's fascinating. "
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4xkbov | the importance of unplugging something for 10-15 seconds instead of just replugging it in when trying to fix an issue. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xkbov/eli5_the_importance_of_unplugging_something_for/ | {
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"A lot of devices have capacitors (they're like small, quickly discharging batteries) inside them. When power is removed, these capacitors may still provide enough electricity for a short time to keep the device from completely resetting. ",
"Aside from the capacitor reason, Tech Support people will ask for this step to ensure people do it rather than just say \"yeah I unplugged it and plugged it back in.\" Same thing as unplugging something and blowing on it. Blowing does nothing, but it ensures they actually unplug it.",
"As mentioned, stuff has capacitors which acts as little batteries.\n\nYour cellphone has a real battery, although made to last a very long time compared to those capacitors. unplug your phone from the charger and replug it immediately, did it restart?\n\nTo restart the phone this way (not recommended btw) you'd have to unplug it and wait for 1-2days before replugging it into the charger. Same thing with most electronics, just their \"batteries\" are extremely small. (Actually, the small \"batteries\" / capacitors are usually used to smoothen out disturbances and similar in the powerfeed)",
"Some routers and cable/dsl modems have a hard reset after certain intervals of no power... if powered on faster it would not do as deep of a reset and problems often would perist. And as others have mentioned the other connected devices need time to know they're gone in some cases.\n\nOther items such as laser printers it's not good to toggle power due to heated components and spinning components/robotics.\n\nVideo projectors shouldn't be power toggled due to the lamp needing a special sequence to warm up and power up, drastically shortening the life of the lamp and sometimes causing it to fail to start.\n\nSome things with big motors are dangerous to power toggle (motors with starting capacitors)\n\n\nIt used to be bad to power toggle computers due to the hard drive spinning down while getting powered on (blow your drive, controller or wreck the arms). \n\nTape drives/vcr's power toggling would jam/eat tape and wreck the robotics.",
"Most of the core reasons have been covered, but it's important to know that in your PC or router or whatever, there may be electrical subsystems in there that don't necessarily reboot if you hit the reset button or reboot from software. \n\nOften, these systems are connected to the power supply before the physical power button even gets involved, so switching it off is not the same as unplugging it completely. \n\nGoing beyond simply switching it off, capacitors are usually used to smooth out the incoming power as electronics are relatively sensitive, and raw power feeds like what you get at home aren't \"clean\" (the voltage varies, isn't necessarily a perfect wave etc.). But they are also used to keep some subsystems running in the event of a warm reset or short power blip. Therefore, unplugging something for say 15 seconds is enough time for almost everything to be in a completely off state and then perform a cold boot when you plug it back in.\n\nI say almost everything because there are plenty of things that have a proper battery in there to keep it running, for example the CMOS battery helping to keep your BIOS/UEFI settings and clock going, or some battery backup systems in RAID controllers.\n\n",
"You have to give it time for the capacitors inside them to discharge and for power to fully shut down. If you replug them immediately odds are power never actually stopped. ",
"Quick tip: if you are ever required to wait a certain amount of time for something to reset( routers, etc) a better alternative is to unplug and hold the power button. This tries to fuel the device from the draining caps instead of fhem disipating naturally.",
"Computer Engineer here,\n\nThere are a lot of answers in this thread, most of them touch on relevant points but otherwise fail to adequately answer the question.\n\nA common theme in this thread is that of the capacitor. A capacitor is an energy storage device that can be rapidly charged and rapidly discharged at the expense of low energy density. Whereas batteries store their electrical energy in two chemical reactions, capacitors store energy by charging two parallel metal plates separated by a dielectric. Capacitors are a key component in analogue and digital devices.\n\nCapacitors are essential to the construction of AC to DC converters as well as DC to DC level converters which can be found in almost all digital devices and/or power supplies. The design of most converters permits a transient interruption to the supply on the primary side of the converter (input) without creating a significant interruption on the secondary side of the converter (output). However, in most cases, this window is measured in milliseconds. That is, if power is not restored very quickly to the primary side of the converter, the secondary side will cease functioning.\n\nThe use of capacitors to power discrete components is rare and usually discouraged but it is not unheard of. Supercapacitors, which are capacitors that have performance characteristics closer to that of a battery, can be used to provide power to volatile memory for a short period of time in lieu of using an actual battery.\n\nI've seen motherboards in which the LEDs remain lit for 15-20 seconds after AC power has been disconnected. Although this does not indiciate that the power rails supplying the various logic components remain powered, it does show that there exists a residual charge in some sections that does take time to dissipate.\n\nIn any event, a well designed electronic device should see all components powered up and powered down together, save those that must remain powered for integrity reasons, such as volatile parameter memory. These devices are usually powered by a battery, not by a capacitor. However, not all electronic devices are well designed.\n\nThe more likely explanation is that this advice is little more than a harmless old-wives tale. Even where there appears to be little to no truth to it, there's little harm it doing it. In most cases it does absolutely nothing, a hard reset for 10-15 seconds is as good as a hard reset for 100 milliseconds which is as good as an assertion of the device's reset network without any power interruption at all. In the off chance that it actually does something, then the problem is resolved.\n\nOlder electro-mechanical devices such as printers, projectors, motors, etc... may be damaged if they are power cycled too quickly. However, modern designs usually self test quite reliably and won't tear themselves apart.",
"As some has said, basically all devices containing electronics have capacitors. A capacitor can be seen as a tiny battery that can be charged and discharged very fast. It can hold charge for a few seconds when disconnected. In fact, some devices can stay powered up for over a minute if it is in standby (ex: turned off laptop, it take little power, but have 'massive' capacitors). So to be sure that the power run out, you need to disconnect long enought for them to get discharged enought so the electronics completly stop and all reset proprelly.\n\nAlso, a capacitor is near a short circuit when discharged. A circuit on the input side limit the current that can get in until the capacitor is charged. This is often done via a resistor that change of value as it heat up: when cold it have an highish resistance, letting little current pass. As it heat up (and that happend very fast) the resistance drop to near a wire. If you disconnect and reconnect too fast, the capacitor will have time to discharge, but the resistor will not have time to cool down. The result: unexpected high current flowing for a tiny split second. Some parts don't like that hit. What can happend is that the part weaken and ends up breaking.\n\nSome other devices may also malfunction if cycled too fast. In the past, some hard drive would spin too fast if you cycle it before it have time to fully stop. It appear that the start up sequence was basically: give the motor full power for 2 seconds, then regulate the speed...",
"It's easy to observe the effect of the capacitors if you have a desktop computer. Power it down using the normal shutdown sequence. Then unplug the power from the electrical mains. Then press and hold the power switch for 10 seconds. You will hear the fans spin up briefly, and if there is an LED you can observe, it will illuminate for a few seconds.",
"Comp sci student here.\n\nYou've got a lot of great explanations as to what flea power is here, but I want to mention two things.\n\n* Pressing the power button of an unplugged device can help discharge flea power in some cases.\n\n* I didn't believe it till I saw it with my own eyes, on a circuit I built myself.",
"In cars if you disconnect both battery cables and touch them together, it's a capacitive discharge. Works in the same way other electronics do. ",
"It's not capacitors or an old wives tale. It does serve a purpose, but not a direct technical function.\n\nYou see, most people are not computer friendly. If you tell them to restart something, do they know the difference between restarting a program, logging off/on, rebooting, and powering down/back on? Experience tells me they generally do not.\n\nHaving them shut down for 10-15 seconds ensures that it is was actually powered off and then back on again.",
"I used to take apart disposable cameras and hook 2 wires to the capacitor for the flash, talk about stored energy, it uses a AA 1.5v battery and it charges the capacitor to 333 volts! Touch the wires to metal and POP! Or even better, touch it to your buddy and shock city! And then you better run cuz it tends to piss people off haha..",
"For computers with rotating hard drives it was important to let the hard drives some time to stop or slow their spinning, otherwise some wear on the hard drive could occur.\n\nWith modern spinny drives, Don't think this as much of an issue. With solid state, it's not an issue at all.\n\njust one reason."
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2mvpk8 | if the national guard is responsible for defending us from domestic threats, why do we send them out for foreign tours? | this question popped up when I was watching a National Guard video showing soldiers helping out in the home front. They never once said anything about being sent out, but it came out in passing from a friend of mine that he was sent overseas while serving for the guard | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mvpk8/eli5_if_the_national_guard_is_responsible_for/ | {
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"Because there are provisions in the law that allow National Guard units to temporarily be federalized and placed under active Army command. And States get money from from the feds if their governors offer up the States units to active service."
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3b88do | why does remote support have to be so frustrating even though we pay thousands of dollars a month for the software? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b88do/eli5_why_does_remote_support_have_to_be_so/ | {
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"You think it's frustrating for you... Imagine what it's like for the poor bastards that have to *take* your calls. They get yelled at on a regular basis for things that they have virtually no control over and by people who may or may not just be stupid.\n\nThe issue here is that you never encounter Remote Support unless something is broken... and that thing being broken is a problem for you. Since it's a problem you are stressed... because you are stressed you get angry... which makes the whole experience painful.\n\nMeanwhile, Remote Support is really doing a very difficult job. They have to diagnose, analyze, and fix problems remotely.... without being to touch the actual problem, or see the cause/effects of various problems. All they have to work with is one pissed off customer and whatever that person tells/gives them.\n\nIn Short - It's a hard job, that by it's very nature is going to be a painful process.",
"Funny that I should come across this today. I was just reading a post that sympathizes with just these sentiments, but on the other side. The remote support side. \n\nTo answer your question, of why pay thousands of dollars... Because without the remote support software, as good (or bad) as it may be you're cutting hundreds of dollars a day in saved time from your IT guys. Think about it. times that they would have to be running around your office or building fixing people's stuff, it would be a nightmare. Even just 5 minutes of travel time for each job and the IT professional is resolving, what like, 10-15 issues a day. That's at least an hour a day. At least!!! Then factor in that guy's pay, it goes on and on. \n\nYou get that right? Plus, most IT's love their remote support software. That article I referenced earlier talks about just that. IT's are genuinely grateful for their remote support software. They probably have their gripes, but it's better than nothing.\n\nThis is the post that will explain how much IT's literally cherish their remote support software.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: formatting",
"I work at a call center for Accounting Software like quickbooks. And I can attest, the better the technical support in a company, the more prosperity their customers will see. Its important to provide quality tech support, thats why you pay the bucks for the help!\n\nAlso like Toast said it cuts IT guys time down.\n\n"
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4jnjjy | how is it possible to self-plagiarize yourself? | I know how to commit the act, but don't understand how it is a thing- it is your own work that you are reusing, not someone else's work. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4jnjjy/eli5_how_is_it_possible_to_selfplagiarize_yourself/ | {
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"The concept is poorly named by people with a limited vocabulary. Your instinct that the sin of plagiarism lies primarily in taking other people's work is right--that is the origin of the term. (From the Latin word for \"kidnapping,\" by analogy.) \n\nHowever, particularly in academia, reusing your previous work without properly identifying it as such is also wrong. This is because proper citations and attribution to all prior work is expected. Failure to do so may be a mistake, or a form of deliberate dishonesty, but is in either case frowned upon. Some people use the word \"plagiarism\" for such acts because the concept is well-understood and has clear negative connotations. \n\nIf you understand what they mean, forgive them for their strange choice of words, though you can resolve to be more accurate yourself.",
"\"Plagiarism\" is normally equated as theft but its more about falsely presenting a work as original.\n\nSelf-plagiarism or duplicate publishing isn't necessarily theft like \"normal\" plagiarism is, but it is considered dishonest because you're presenting old material as new or failing to adequately document your sources.\n\nIt also may be interpreted as plagiarizing or defrauding the publisher of the old piece, even if you wrote it.",
"In a lot of areas the number of publications is an important part of your reputation as a researcher. If I write a year on my book ABCDEF, I get one publication. Splitting it in ABC-DEF doubles that. I can take this further, and if the content allows it, I can publish ABC, BCD, CDE and DEF all as a viable publication. However, I can't trick my readers into thinking that CDE is all new research. Most of it was already done in BCD. Therefore I have to cite myself. It's not that I'm stealing my own work, it's that I'm tricking my readers into thinking I did more research than I actually did. "
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21iov7 | big business taxes | This was brought on by that post on the front page about the small businesses paying more taxes then Apple... How does something like this happen? Could this lack of tax revenue from large corporations be the cause of our national debt? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21iov7/eli5_big_business_taxes/ | {
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"Just keep in mind that companies do not pay taxes. Consumers pay the tax.\n\nWhen you increase taxes on a business, they will react in 3 ways. Reduce costs (usually labor rates/amounts), increase prices, or find ways to reduce the tax burden.\n\nNow, to the comparing Apples to Oranges?\nThe US Tax code is so complicated that most \"small\" business do not have the means or the money to differ a lot of those tax burdens. A large business is able to carry more debt, which usually means a larger tax write off."
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3kmhno | why can i access the same file simultaneously with hundreds of thousands of people via the internet, but windows won't let me open the file if it is open somewhere else on my local network or even open as a preview on my own computer? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kmhno/eli5_why_can_i_access_the_same_file/ | {
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"When you access a file on a server (a webpage, for example), the server is sending you a copy of a file.\n\nWhen you open a file on your computer, your operating system is putting a lock on that file, this means that no other program can edit that file. The lock is the difference. The reason the lock has no relationship when dealing with a website is that you're never allowed to edit the file on the server, since you were given your own copy of it to view.",
"You definitely should be able to open a file as many times as you want in read-only mode. It depends on network setup. \n\nGoing to a website is a form of network access to a file. The network protocol (called HTTP in this case) is designed to let many people access a file in a read-only way. \n\nYour network at home is probably not configured that way. Whatever is doing the sharing either doesn't want more than one person accessing a file. I don't know enough about Windows networking to explain this, but it *should* be something that's configurable. If a file is already open (and locked), the network protocol should enforce Read-Only mode, not disallow all access. \n\nNow, if you're trying to *write* or *delete* a locked file, yeah, you should get an error. "
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4rbrah | why do they let the juno probe crash on jupiter after the mission? | Wouldn't it be a lot easier to get it back to earth because it would only need to wait for earth to align with jupiter and use earth and the suns gravity (after breaking free from jupiters gravity)? I don't know seems like very valuable equipment just being dumped when the mission is done. I don't have a clue about all this but I am curious. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rbrah/eli5why_do_they_let_the_juno_probe_crash_on/ | {
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"I can imagine that when they let it descend into Jupiter, they leave the equipment running / transmitting.\n\nThis means they get data from inside, which would otherwise be impossible to obtain. \n\nI wonder if Juno even has enough fuel left to get safely back to earth. That's a lot of extra weight.",
"There is no possible alignment of the planets that would enable Juno to escape Jupiter's gravity. And if it did return somehow to Earth, it would burn up in the atmosphere. It isn't designed for atmospheric reentry, as those features would make it heavier. ",
"Listening to an an interview today with one of the scientists on the project, she stated one of the Mission is only designed for 36 orbits. They knew that Juno will fail due to the massive amount of radiation it will experience. They want to crash it into Jupiter not so much for additional data but to make sure that it doesn't inadvertently crash into one of the moons and in particular Europa. This is due to the possibility that life may exist in some form on Europa under the ice and in the salt seas. NASA is in the beginning stages of designing a mission to Europa now. ",
"There are reasons to believe that at least one of Jupiters moons might have life on it, specifically Europa. In order to not contaminate it with Earths microbes Juno has to leave Jupiters orbit as over time we cannot guarantee that it won't eventually crash into the moon under complicated gravitational influence of a huge planet, dozens of moons and thousands upon thousands of asteroids. \n\nJuno doesn't have enough feul to leave Jupiters orbit, so instead they make it crash. It sacrifices itself to ensure that Europa stays like it is, so that when we send probes there we don't find Earth life.",
" > after breaking free of Jupiter's gravity\n\nThis is not going to happen. It would take enormous energy to accomplish that.\n\nBringing it back to Earth for what? This sort of spacecraft isn't really reusable or recyclable. The general process is to burn them up in a controlled way so that they don't accidentally hit something. Earth orbit got a little \"junked up\" before this process was adopted. In Jupiter's case, that would be the moons, which are valuable as pristine places for future scientific studies."
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eh0qcl | why is trying to pull a sock onto a wet foot so difficult, generating so much more friction than putting it on a dry foot? | Given that in most other cases, such as tires on a wet road (which poses a risk of hydroplaning), the presence of water on the surface appears to decrease, not increase, the amount of friction present. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eh0qcl/eli5_why_is_trying_to_pull_a_sock_onto_a_wet_foot/ | {
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"I believe it has to do with the water pulling the fibers closer together causing the sock to become tighter around the skin. Another example would be hair. It holds together more as it gets wet.\n\nAlso it's not what you asked but hair gets darker when it's wet for the same reason. Less light is allowed to pass through the hair when it's tighter together giving it the appearance of being darker in colour.",
"so in the example of a wet sock, the fibers in the sock are absorbing the water, making them swell up. this swelling up increased the amount of sock surface area that your foot is in contact with, meaning more friction. \n\nto a lesser extent, in the spaces that the swollen fibers do not fill, there are water molecules that will fill the space which adds to the friction. \n\nin your example of hydroplaning, the key difference there is that the water is not absorbed by the asphalt but rather creates a separate layer that will literally lift your car up off the road. tires have much more friction on asphalt than on water.",
"Isn’t this just the adhesion property of water? Water is a polar molecule and likes sticking to other things, such as skin and socks. Your socks are basically getting glued to your feet.",
"Actually, water increases static friction at molecular level. It does an adhesive work. Mercury on the other hand is a cohesive liquid. (Google angle of contact)\n\nTyres on other hand operate on rolling friction. In rolling motion, the friction force produces rolling effect vizaviz the relative motion. Since, the friction force increases on water, the rolling becomes faster.\n\n\nEdit- elaboration: Liquids have the property to be cohesive or adhesives, depending on the angle of contact with the surface. Just think of it being a tendency to pull or push the contact area. A pull is adhesive and push cohesive ( adhesive to itself). Now water falls in the adhesive liquid, so it sticks different molecular at close range, hence it increases STATIC FRICTION.\n\nNow, tyres roll on the ground. This is a concept of physics called rolling friction. The greatest invention of mankind - Wheels was a indicative that friction actually helps in causation of motion. The friction force is obviously opposite to the relative motion of the body. Assume tyres are rolling left, the friction is let's say on the right ( a general scenario of most cars ), when the tyres get into water, the friction increases suddenly, this produces a powerful impulsive rotatory motion (Remember the rotatory motion of tyres is due to friction force) causing it to unbalance and forcing u to use breaks to prevent the extra rolling. Skidding on the other hand occurs after this, now that breaks have been applied, the rotation is locked, high friction is now purely static and tyres skit on water after this. Hopes this helps!",
"Water is a polar molecule - one side electrically negative and the other positive. Because of its polarity, water likes to stick to other polar molecules, including itself. Your skin is somewhat polar, too, which is why sweat and water stick to it. A wet sock is a mesh filled with water, which then sticks to you.\n\nFurthermore, wet clothing isn't very permeable to air. It might be able to form a weak seal against your skin, if you squeeze any air underneath it out. That'll require extra force to break.\n\nFinally, wet clothing is considerably heavier than dry clothing. That may provide a higher normal force and thereby frictive force on the top of your foot.\n\nInstead of sliding your entire sock on, I suggest you smush your sock so it looks like a circle, place your toes in, and then roll the rest on like a wet, foot condom. Or forego wearing wet socks at all. They may lead to blisters.\n\n...\n\nedit: Some comments.\n\n1. Morning has come and your replies showed me that I answered a different question. My b. I took a quick shot at the actual question in a reply.\n\n2. As others have pointed out, non-polar liquids would behave similarly. The latter two effects are the most pertinent. \n\n3. I am still unsure about the grammar of \"wet, foot condom\" versus \"wet foot condom\". Please discuss.",
"I just had thus explained to me at an elementary age swimming party...\n\nThe water just makes you too sticky... we even had to battle to get the socks on just so the shoes would go on! That wasnt happening!\n\nFunny this would pop into my feed, by with the current responses... I dont understand it myself... sure can't explain it to kiddos...",
"In the dry foot scenario, the friction between the foot and sock is less due to tiny air pockets between the sock fabric itself and the foot. The sock absorbs water well. When the foot is wet, the sock absorbs this water that eliminates the air pockets and also creates a vacuum due to the sock actively trying to suck the water from the foot. These are the major reasons that contribute to this problem.",
"In the sock case the additional friction comes from surface tension of the water. This causes the sock to stick to your skin. People saying polarity of the water matter are implicitly implying that oil soaked clothing wouldn't stick to your skin which is untrue.\nBut why does surface tension matter? When the sock is in contact with your skin water droplets bridge the gaps between the fabric and you. These bridges make capillary forces that attract you to the sock. These are the same forces that make wet sand stick to things. These forces also vanish when the contact is fully flodded (which is why you can't build an underwater sand castle and clothes don't stick to you underwater). \n\nIn the case of the car, the scale has changed now the capillary forces are too small to be important compared to the other forces. In this case hydrodynamic forces (forces that move water about) dominate and these are enough to keep the surfaces separated. This means that there is no (or very little) actual surface contact and the friction is dominated by the viscosity of the fluid. Water has a low viscosity so the friction is also low.",
"Asphalt and rubber both resist the water so it stays mostly in between them making them slippery but your skin and the sock like water so both try to grab it making them stick together.",
"I'm going to reduce the scope of my answer to \"why is wet skin less slippery?\", since there's more factors than that to putting on a sock.\n\nReferencing [this article I found](_URL_1_), the main explanation proposed is that wet skin is softer than dry skin, which means the skin \"smushes up\" against the surface better and grips harder - compare soft rubber to hard plastic. This is actually what the article says dry and wet skin is comparable to: respectively, soft plastic and soft rubber.\n\nAnother thing at play is surface shape - if you look *really* closely at skin, you'll see a bunch of small \"grooves\" in it. This allows water to be directed away from the skin where it touches whatever it's rubbing against - just like the grooves in tires; analogously, a smooth tire has much more issues with hydroplaning than \"normal\" tires.\n\nOn that subject, there's also a speed-scale difference here. Referencing [wikipedia](_URL_0_) here, you really need a minimum speed before hydroplaning can occur, and (I hope) you don't put on your sock as fast as you drive on a highway.",
"Comment graveyard...\n\nOur nervous systems have a natural response to wetness... porous materials like tree bark, pumice or socks become easier to grip or gain traction on....\nThe response is greater the longer the skin is wet, causing wrinkles to appear increasing your grip further... this is why your fingers and toes wrinkle but your buttcheeks and calves don’t."
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526hg6 | what would happen if literally everyone voted in the u.s. for a written in candidates? | Leading into the upcoming election, I’m curious if voting third party is a viable option. The real question would be if everyone, or at least a percentage of the voters voted for, let’s say John Cena. Would the House of Representatives still be obligated to choose, or would a written in Candidates have potential to win the election? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/526hg6/eli5_what_would_happen_if_literally_everyone/ | {
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"If one write in candidate wins the majority of electoral votes then no the house doesn't have to vote. \n\nBut keep in mind that some states don't allow or count write in votes. Thankfully that's 43 out of the 50 accounting for a total of 493 votes up for grab for the write ins. \n\nThere's a catch. The candidate has to be registered with the state for any vote to be counted, I think there are four or five states that allow unregistered candidates. Registration usually requires a petition with a certain number of signatures. Once registered the candidate will appear on the ballot. \n\nThat seems contradictory, but to me it's either as a backup in case a registered candidate doesn't make it on the ballot by accident. Or its a left over voting regulation that was never changed. ",
"It depends.\n\nWrite-in candidates still have to be registered *as* write-in candidates for there votes to be counted. As a result, in this election, voting for Sanders (for example) would be about as meaningful as voting for your dog.\n\nIf literally everyone did it, though...there would be a Constitutional Crisis. The House of Representatives (and the Senate) can only pick the President (and Vice President) from the top three **electoral** vote-getters. If literally everyone voted for a non-registered write-in, no one would have any electoral votes, so the process would be stopped. Paul Ryan would likely become the interim President while the SCOTUS sorted everything out.",
"Impossible, at least on the presidential level. There is at least one state (South Carolina) that prohibits write-ins for president. "
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ak6ybe | why are some nationalities considered a race, and not others? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ak6ybe/eli5_why_are_some_nationalities_considered_a_race/ | {
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"Mainly due to the fact that we want to categorize with the intent of adding cultural meaning or simply to..simplify. \nWhat I’m trying to say is: The term race wouldn’t appear if there was no agenda. \nA world with easily distinguishable categories is easier to comprehend and it’s easier to make way for someone’s agenda if there’s just a small set of categories. Facing a problem, it’s easier to refer to a race instead of many different countries, peoples etc. \n\n\nThus term race itself is problematic and has been criticized for decades now. "
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247m2w | with all the talk of the end of net neutrality why don't we just make a "new internet" in its place? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/247m2w/eli5_with_all_the_talk_of_the_end_of_net/ | {
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"cause it's cost prohibitive. current infrastrure worldwide took trillions of dollars and 50 years of work. "
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2xrf0m | why do we make fun of france so much? | Having dinner with the lady and we talked about France, the many jokes about 'French Victories', white flags, freedom fries, and other jokes.
Why, when they supported our (United States) independence, sent a statue as a gift, fought for their own liberty and then had Napoleon Bonaparte become such a badass conquerer in his day and fought the Germans during occupation do we make fun of them?
Edit: Some of these responses... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xrf0m/eli5_why_do_we_make_fun_of_france_so_much/ | {
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"I think it's because Jacques Chirac didn't want to go on a war in Irak with you. \n\nAnd because our wine is good and cheap; our cheese is stinky and good; and our girls are shaved et good and swallow everything (even wine and cheese) \n\nBisous",
"You know, we joke about France but I can't help but think that everywhere else we're the butt of a joke. ",
"America, France, and Britain are like brothers. We sometimes fight, we always badmouth each other, but when the shit hits the fan we have each others' backs.\n\nWe make fun of France because we love them. We have a relationship with them that we only have with a few other places and peoples. And they make fun of us right back.",
"We make fun of them because we can't really control them. Britain will do whatever we say so they're our besties. France is like that cool kid who generally hangs out with you but sometimes makes you look like a complete dick by calling you out just when you think you've got the gang worshipping you.",
"It is simply an American trope that became mainstream after France refused to assist American interests in their war in Iraq in 2003.\n\nFrance had no interest in following America into a war against Iraq, Americans saw this as an insult to their nation after the tragedy that occurred on September 11, 2001.\n\nThe hostility towards the French funnily enough seems to have been seeded by a one-liner from The Simpsons, where Groundskeeper Willie refers to the French as 'Cheese eating surrender monkeys'. The line was used in 1995, and was referring to the French surrender to the invading Germans in World War 2. Many Americans (and Brits, Australians etc) have been of the mindset that France too easily capitulated to the Nazis, and it was the efforts of the remaining Allied Powers to bail them out. Some of this is true - the D-Day landings and subsequent ground war in WW2 (and the air and sea war) was a huge effort by the Allied Powers, but the idea that the French were too quick to surrender is completely ignorant of the context of the German attack and French capabilities at the time. Furthermore the French underground resistance was a large asset to the war effort.\n\nSo anyway, this one line from Groundskeeper Willie was retained in the American lexicon - it is funny, and reaffirms the prejudices surrounding WW2. When the Iraq War started in 2003, the French were vocal opponents to the invasion and did not provide any support. The French Foreign Minister said to the United Nations that \"We think that military intervention would be the worst possible solution\", and France threatened to Veto any resolution that allowed a military intervention in Iraq.\n\nThe US and UK were very vocal in opposition to this position, as their talk of building peace did not agree with the narrative that they were building as a precursor to a military invasion.\n\n This led to the renewing of the trope, the 'surrender monkeys' quote was used extensively by the media in opinion pieces, many in government and the press latched onto the trope. The most famous example was the use of 'freedom fries', which is what French fries were renamed by the then Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, Bob Ney at the Congressional cafeterias.\n\nAs with any trope that gets general acceptance in the community, it tends to stick around for a long time. It's all a load of rubbish and Americans should feel bad about perpetuating it.\n\nTL,DR: France was opposed to invading Iraq after 9/11, the US did not like this so built upon an existing joke made in the Simpsons offhandedly referring to WW2 to build domestic opposition to their position in favour of war.",
"Not going to develop about the reasons behind the stupid jokes or their major inaccurateness, but I read many times the reason they're so prevalent is that there was never a major wage of immigration from France to the US and as such there is no large French community, so Francophobia doesn't actually offend anyone in the US, while Germanophobia, Italophobia etc would offend large communities of people with German or Italian ancestors.",
"france has a better ratio of victories to losses than any other country. "
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3om8ip | how do surgeons make incisions without cutting nerves? | I've always thought that cutting through a nerve was a bad thing to do, so how do surgeons avoid that? Are they somehow able to map out their location? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3om8ip/eli5_how_do_surgeons_make_incisions_without/ | {
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"They study for years to make sure they know where the major nerves are. \n\nSome minor nerves do get cut - and to some extent they can regenerate, though slowly. The one cut when I had surgery under my jaw took 20 years or so to reconnect!",
"Large ones run deep inside tissue most of the time and often run with arteries and veins. So, the surgeon will locate them and separate them from whatever needs to be cut to make sure the nerve fibers aren't cut. Smaller nerves aren't as big a deal and may be cut by accident to no great detriment.\nSource: med student",
"Surgeons study anatomy to know where the major nerves are. \n\nSurgeons are trained not to cut things which they can't see. For example, if a surgeon uses scissors, they don't use the inner surface of the blades, because the inner edges are sharp, and because you can't see the bottom surface of what you are cutting. Surgeons use scissors by opening them, and letting the blunt sides of the blade, separate tissues gently, by pushing them apart.\n\nSo when a surgeon is dissecting the tissues to get to the site of interest, they will know when to expect nerves, and will be looking out for them as they go (they look quite distinctive and stringy). \n\nSome minor nerves are too small to see reliably, but those are less important than the big nerves, which are usually quite obvious.\n\n\n"
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2altkb | why is "name-brand" milk so much more expensive than store brand? who buys it, and why? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2altkb/eli5_why_is_namebrand_milk_so_much_more_expensive/ | {
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"I buy Horizon or Organic Valley. Am I 100% positive it is any better the the store brand? No. But it is maybe $1 more for the carton, which lasts me two weeks, so I figure $2 extra per month isn't too much to pay for even a 50% chance the organic milk is a better, healthier option. My grocery store of choice is Publix; the Publix brand isn't much cheaper than name brand, and their organic label, Greenwise, costs about the same as the leading organic brands. I buy a lot of store brand items, but milk generally isn't one of them.",
"I used to work for a major supermarket chain's quality control lab. About half of my time was devoted to testing raw and pasteurized milk products. \n\nName brand dairies can simply charge more because of their name recognition. Smaller dairies can charge more on the basis of better quality, whatever that is defined as and perceived or real. \n\nSupermarkets will put up name brand milks and their own store brand. Now, with consolidation - - some of your favorite known brands of milk may be owned by just one company. They may even be put up by the same dairy plants using the same farm sources.\n\nStore brand milk is usually put up by one of the major dairies, unless they own their dairy processing plant. Most supermarkets don't anymore. The market I used to work for got rid of their dairy 15 years ago. \n\nAll you need to do, is check the plant number. That's usually a 2 or 3 digit number with a dash and then a plant number. The first number indicates the state where it was processed. So, all you have to do, is check the plant number and buy the cheapest plant milk; be it store or name brand to get the best value. There's no difference in quality, usually the run is stopped when labels and packaging needs to be changed for the different brands. The testing, source farms and the quality are the same. \n\nMy supermarket used to put up THE name brand milk in our area that was actually was our store milk. \n\nOf course this doesn't necessarily apply to boutique dairies or organic products. \n\n\n\n"
]
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[],
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3xeo8z | how can the un security council enforce it's syria plan? | The UN security council just unanimously passed a plan regarding the future of Syria. A key point being that "free and fair" elections in Syria must take place within 18 months.
What happens if Syria refuses to cooperate?
_URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xeo8z/eli5_how_can_the_un_security_council_enforce_its/ | {
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"text": [
"The UN can't enforce anything, especially with Russia on the Security Council. This is another \"feel good\" resolution with absolutely no way to back it up."
]
} | [] | [
"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-35138011"
] | [
[]
] | |
2h4i1d | - im new to it recruiting. can someone explain data warehousing to me? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2h4i1d/eli5_im_new_to_it_recruiting_can_someone_explain/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"My experience with a data warehouse. We have a sytem that pulls tons of unintelligible data from our SQL servers. This data is then sent out to programs in readable formats. IE comma delimited and/or pipe separated. Depending on the parameters set. These files of delimted data can be imported into other systems as usuable, trackable, predictable data. Reporting and auditing systems rely on this type of data warehousing. This is my experience, but as with everything in IT, I'm sure there are others.",
"Data warehousing is the process of creating a central repository of data from different data sources which can then be used for reporting and analysis purposes. e.g., Data from a sales database and marketing database can be stored in a data warehouse and the combined data can then be used for analysis. So a single system is used for reporting the data instead of creating separate reports and then combining them."
]
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[],
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] | ||
k5bnh | how we know what things happened in ancient egypt. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k5bnh/eli5_how_we_know_what_things_happened_in_ancient/ | {
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"text": [
"A mixture of textual and archaeological evidence? What specifically do you want to know?",
"Well when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 he found an object called the [Rosetta Stone](_URL_0_) which could be used to translate Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics into modern languages, it is an incredible find, and without it we wouldn't not know nearly as much about Ancient Egypt as we do know.",
"A mixture of textual and archaeological evidence? What specifically do you want to know?",
"Well when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 he found an object called the [Rosetta Stone](_URL_0_) which could be used to translate Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics into modern languages, it is an incredible find, and without it we wouldn't not know nearly as much about Ancient Egypt as we do know."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone"
],
[],
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone"
]
] | ||
1rl2jy | why is it 'bad' to give kids soda/sweets? | Besides all of the obvious stuff that comes up with bing search (bad for teeth, makes them refuse worse tasting food/drink, caffeine is 'bad', etc), why is this still an issue? Are soda/sweets really any worse than some foods considered 'good'? How much worse is coke than orange juice in terms of sugar and acidity ? Seems like most the problems associated with soda/sweets are mostly superficial and can be resolved with responsible oral hygiene.
Thanks in advance | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rl2jy/eli5_why_is_it_bad_to_give_kids_sodasweets/ | {
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"text": [
"Kids need proper nutrition and sweets have very little. If your kid is active and eats a lots of junk food they could be missing out on important nutritional needs to properly develop. Also you may be raising their risk for obesity.",
"I think it is more of a life style issue. Will drinking one soda a day lead to obesity or your teeth falling out? Of course not, but people rarely stop at one can of Coke. It is important to emphasize moderation and not make soda and sweets a part of every meal or snack time. Personally, I led a very unhealthy life in high school and gained quite a bit of weight. After I decided to get in shape and drop the extra pounds I realized that I had done permanent damage to my body. So as a promise to myself to never get fat again I gave up soda and it will be 2 years tomorrow since the last time I had one. This sounds extreme and most kids are fine with soda/sweets but make sure it doesn't become a habit instead of a treat.",
"Childhood diabetes is a serious problem. Getting your sugars from fructose is much better than getting your sugars from sucrose. ",
"While orange juice has a lot of sugar, it also has a lot of vitamins where Coke has almost none.\n\nBut there's a more important point: kids given healthy food as children are more likely to eat healthier food as adults. If you're raised on processed, salt-laden food and soda, as an adult you are much less likely to eat a variety of fresh, healthy foods."
]
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[],
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3w6k6w | why don't more ships get stuck from the anchor getting caught on the ocean floor? | Maybe now they have sensors but back in pirate days and even closer to now when ships were not so advanced, how would the anchor not just fall down some large ocean hole or get suck under a large rock. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3w6k6w/eli5_why_dont_more_ships_get_stuck_from_the/ | {
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"The anchor is shaped in such a way that the only way that would happen would be if it rotated after hitting the ground. If the anchor wasn't solidly on the ocean floor the ship would continue to move so the crew would haul it back up and redrop it elsewhere. If it did get caught they'd just cut it loose and take their losses which is why most ships have two anchors.",
"If it does, they just cut it loose. It's just attached by a chain. Then they get a new one when they get to port.",
"A lot of the drag created by an anchor that holds the ship in place is just the extremely heavy chain. It's not just the anchor tines digging into the sea bed. They are designed to resist being pulled along horizontally but come out easily when pulled straight up. You don't even need the anchor it's self. Dropping 100,000 lbs of chain overboard will work pretty well.\n\nPlus, there's not a lot on the ocean floor that can withstand the full power of the winch used to lift the anchor. After all it's designed to lift a **massive** amount of weight.\n\n *The above mostly applies to large ships with heavy anchor chains. Small vessels that can't have that much weight need to rely more on directly hooking onto the sea floor and would be pretty pron to getting stuck, depending on the type of terrain they are used in. But they displace less and so don't need as much holding power to stay still.\n\nAnd after all, you can just cut it loose."
]
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[],
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2e6f5s | why does my cat "pat" her water before drinking? | She does it every single time she takes a drink from her dish. I JUST put down fresh water, and she did it. Wtf, cat? 5-year-old Siamese, if it makes any difference. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2e6f5s/eli5_why_does_my_cat_pat_her_water_before_drinking/ | {
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"text": [
"She wants to make the water feel good before she kills it.",
"in a cat's brain, [water that moves] (_URL_0_) is better.",
"A Siamese we had when I was a kid had sensitive teeth, he would \"pat\" his water to make sure it wasn't too warm or cold to drink. Have you had a vet look at her?\n\nEdit: typo",
"So that water knows who the motherfucking BOSS is.",
"My cat does it too, i think they are checking the water level",
"I've only seen my cats drink from their water bowl a handful of times. Whenever I put water down they aren't interested, only interested in the kitty biscuits."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"http://www.vetstreet.com/our-pet-experts/why-does-my-cat-paw-at-her-water-dish"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] | |
36ar5g | deforestation can we reverse the damage, if so how? | Can we reverse the damage if so how? Or are we doomed?
Example: _URL_0_
Please explain like I'm five, if the answer is "No", then so be it.
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36ar5g/eli5deforestation_can_we_reverse_the_damage_if_so/ | {
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"score": [
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"text": [
"Partially. Soils can be stabilized, new trees planted, but the resulting secondary forest will be far less biodiverse for a long time."
]
} | [] | [
"http://www.weather.com/science/news/devastating-deforestation-in-borneo"
] | [
[]
] | |
32caxz | why poachers are hunting the white rhino (and other species) to extinction, shouldn't they want to ensure survival to provide more 'stock' and ergo, profit? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32caxz/eli5why_poachers_are_hunting_the_white_rhino_and/ | {
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"Poachers aren't really concerned about populations and the like. They don't look at almanacs and wildlife surveys. All they know is that that animal's part (or whatever) is worth a lot of money and they will get it. They don't have respect for wildlife of the species to care about not letting it go extinct",
"They are just be short sighted, but the problem is they have no reason to be long sighted. It takes years for an animal like the rhino l to develop I to adulthood, it'd be economically redundant to wait years to let their numbers grow",
"It's the tragedy of the commons. The rational decision for every individual poacher is to hunt as many animals as they can, even though every poacher following this strategy means that they all lose out. Think of it this way: in no scenario is an individual poacher better off by hunting fewer animals. Either the other poachers also hunt fewer animals, in which case the first poacher could've hunted as many as they wanted with no consequence, or the other poachers are hunting as many as they want, in which case the first poacher should hunt as many as they can before the others get them all."
]
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[],
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31l5dr | why do referees wear black and white stripes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31l5dr/eli5_why_do_referees_wear_black_and_white_stripes/ | {
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"text": [
"The black-and-white striped shirt worn by sports referees, sometimes referred to as “zebras,” owes its existence to Lloyd Olds (1892-1982), of Ypsilanti, Mich. (pop. 19,435), who conceived the idea in 1920 after officiating a Michigan State-Arizona football game.\n\nDuring the game, the officials’ all-white uniforms were mistaken for Arizona’s all-white uniforms. So, Olds worked with his friend George Moe, who operated a sporting goods store, to develop a black-and-white striped shirt to avoid confusion on the field. Olds debuted the shirt at a high school basketball tournament in Detroit in 1921, and the uniform caught on with other referees.\n\n\nSource _URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://www.google.com/#q=why+do+referees+wear+black+and+white+striped+uniforms"
]
] | ||
430fvm | - what happens when you claim bankruptcy in canada | Friend of mine is claiming bankruptcy and seems to think it's not a big deal. I was always taught this was a last resort and kinda screws you over. Someone please explain what happens? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/430fvm/eli5_what_happens_when_you_claim_bankruptcy_in/ | {
"a_id": [
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"score": [
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"text": [
"In Canada, credit is pretty much the basis of your ability to live. File bankruptcy and your credit goes to shit for lack of better term and you will struggle with lots of things, including, but not limited to:\n\nBuying a house? You need good credit.\nAbout to get married? Your spouse shares your credit if you co-sign for something. No credit, no loan.\nBuying a car? You need good credit. (or you'll get slapped with an insane interest rates which is a trap to file for bankruptcy yet a second time) see /r/personalfinance .\nWant a credit card? Don't even bother.\nRenting? Some landlords require credit checks.\n\nAs bad as it sounds, the world revolves around money. As you said, it is really a last resort and should be treated as such.\n\nIf one is struggling to live without having to file bankruptcy, the struggle is going to exponentially grow after filing bankruptcy. Seek credit counselling (which I find dumb because Google is a powerful, free tool).\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
ayibec | why do some soldiers wear digital camo, is it actually useful for camouflage or is it just for aesthetic reasons? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ayibec/eli5_why_do_some_soldiers_wear_digital_camo_is_it/ | {
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"text": [
"It is rather hard to notice in foliage as long as the tones match. \nIt breaks apart the recognizable shape and helps it melt into the background.",
"Pixelated camo is generally better than non-pixelated. It relates to the processing that the human brain does - it is optimised to pick out shapes, primarily to identify things trying to kill us.\n\nThis is dependent upon the colour scheme being used though. Issuing green camo for desert combat is basically useless.",
"Scale variance and insomulance.\n\nIn 2001 the Canadian Armed Forces developed Canadian Disruptive Pattern (CANPAT) which uses an innovative digital pattern. This pattern was intended to replace the standard \"woodland\" pattern in use in the late 20th century and claimed to have the advantage of \"scale variance.\" If you consider a soldier hiding in vegetation, he will come to look more and more like a soldier in recognizable camouflage the closer you get to him/her because the \"blotches\" will seem unnaturally large compared to the color diversity surrounding him/her. Digital camouflage provides natural looking patterns at a greater variety of distances than the Woodland pattern that proceeded it.\n\nMARPAT was adopted by the US Marine Corps modeled on the Canadian design in 2002. The rest of the US Armed Forces adopted the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP) in 2005. In each case the tactical advantage of scale variance was stated as the principle reason for the change.\n\nHowever in 2015 the US Armed Forces began transitioning its units to a new Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP) this will fully replace UCP by the end of 2019. The OCP is based on the multicam pattern which was originally developed in 2002 but lost out to UCP. In 2010 it came to be deployed as a field uniform in the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and has caught on with lots of other militaries involved in uneven warfare.\n\nThe purported advantage of multicam and the transition to UCP is that it addresses the problem of insomulance. This is a fancy word that means that at a distance all the colors blur together and become gray. That is because the digitization works like pointillism. The UCP provides computer randomized color variation that still addresses scale variance without creating insomulance.\n\nIf there's one thing we can guarantee, its that military uniforms will change. Militaries are always looking for a tactical advantage. Even the perception of a tactical advantage can do wonders for morale and bravery. As the US completes its transition out of digital uniforms you can expect to see surplus digital uniforms used by other countries for a time, but ultimately the digital pattern will look like the Iraq War period just as Olive Drab looks like WWII.",
"Real foliage has tons of little color changes all over the place. \"Regular\" NATO camo has big blobs that really stick out, even if the color is similar."
]
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[],
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3klcnz | why so many big american companies have an indian ceo | How come so many big companies have indian CEOs? Some examples might be Google, Adobe, Deutsche Bank, MasterCard, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Nokia... | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3klcnz/eli5_why_so_many_big_american_companies_have_an/ | {
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"text": [
"Almost 1 in 7 people that live on the planet right now are indian. Lots of people are indian. ",
"India has a greater population than the US does (by quite a fair margin) and many Indians came to the US for their education so they know how the world over here works. \n\nSo for every one genius and potential brilliant CEO that the US produces, India produces four. The US pays a LOT better than India, so they come to the US.",
"I wouldn't word it as \"so many\" given that the majority of Fortune 100 companies are run by a [white CEO](_URL_1_).\n\nThis doesn't get better in the Fortune 500 [Other countries import more CEO's than India.](_URL_0_).\n\nThis is just confirmation bias because the news is reporting on these rare individuals in popular companies. In fact, if you were to classify Indians as Asian, then Asian CEO's are underrepresented in this country. The same goes from blacks, Hispanics, and even women. The CEO landscape is still overwhelmingly dominated by Caucasian males."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[
"https://hbr.org/2014/03/are-ceos-really-indias-leading-export",
"http://brandongaille.com/fortune-100-ceo-statistics-and-demographics/"
]
] | |
73bbqp | if it only takes a few moments for our eyes to undilate, why does it still hurt our eyes while transitioning from dark to bright? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/73bbqp/eli5_if_it_only_takes_a_few_moments_for_our_eyes/ | {
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"I believe it's the rush of stimulation. When your pupils are wide, they allow a lot of light in to stimulate the retina better. It takes a second for them to contract in response to brighter light, but in that second the light feels much brighter. Your eye muscles rapidly tense up, causing slight discomfort. It's like the reaction from glancing at the sun - it's just too much light at one time. \n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
oif74 | how the hell native americans migrated to america during the ice age? | Sorry, but I just woke up in shitty of Boston. It was wearing like 3 layers and I was still cold as hell. Explain to me how the Native Americans could migrate across the barren artic tundras where temps are in the negatives and into North America, especially when we know more about cold weather technology today than they did. Thanks. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oif74/eli5_how_the_hell_native_americans_migrated_to/ | {
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"text": [
"They did it at the end of the last Ice Age. See how Inuits survive.",
"\"The vikings felt cold. The vikings didn't like feeling cold. But the vikings were tough, so the vikings decided to stop feeling cold.\"\n\nHaha, in all seriousness though, it is possible. They had tents and coats and fires and it wasn't like they did it in an afternoon or necessarily even had the goal of migrating that way from the start. It's more likely that over generations and generations they just slowly \"ended up\" over there as they naturally moved around. This means that if you were around in those populations, you'd have been born and died knowing only the cold. I'm sure they didn't like it all that much but that's all they knew. That was their entire life.\n\nJust imagine if in 300 years, there are humans floating around in space stations and every so often they have to come down to Earth for whatever reason and there is a post by Blabbities the Tenth who's complaining and wondering how all those humans so long ago could stand having to deal with *gravity* all day long! \"Ugh, what a **pain** gravity is! I just like to **float** around in my space station!\" Well you never gave it more than a second thought and even if you have, there's nothing you can practically do about it. And yet, somehow, miraculously, you've survived! I'm sure the same went for all those Native Americans."
]
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[],
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6uecns | when you bend something for long enough, why does it retain the shape/bend that you created? | Also, why does this only happen to certain materials as opposed to others? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6uecns/eli5_when_you_bend_something_for_long_enough_why/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Everything has something known as a \"degree of elasticity\" which is a measure of how much it flexes or bends. Now once that amount is surpassed it starts to permanently warp until it reaches its fracture point. Now the weird thing is that EVERYTHING will do that, the question is how much you can move it before it reaches the fracture point."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
2y46eh | why aren't all galaxies basically equidistant from the origin of the big bang? | It just seems intuitive that if an explosion that large occurred, everything would be scattered far from the center, panning out in every direction with a huge blank space in the middle. However, when I look at diagrams of what scientists say the universe looks like, there seems to be a pretty even cluster of galaxies everywhere... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y46eh/eli5_why_arent_all_galaxies_basically_equidistant/ | {
"a_id": [
"cp62f5z"
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"text": [
"There's no center. Or alternatively, the center is everywhere.\n\nRemember that the Big Bang is not just your ordinary explosion. The explosions we are accustomed to, happen in a pre-existing space and expand within it.\n\nHowever, there was no space for the Big Bang to expand into. The Big Bang is the continual creation of space (and time) at an \"explosive\" rate."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
5d9rqq | what caused the trading powerhouses of africa and the middle east to become third world countries? | I'm talking more about politically and technologically, rather than others. I understand that Africa is isolated, but up until recently, the middle east and Africa were at least considered obsolete and barren. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5d9rqq/eli5what_caused_the_trading_powerhouses_of_africa/ | {
"a_id": [
"da2xfl6"
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"text": [
"Some climate change. Lots of over-grazing of sheep and goats decimated the local ecology. The things people needed \"from far away\" changed character from \"spices\" (light, small, easy to divide, easy to ship over-land) to \"bulk goods\" like ore.\n\nAfrica is problematically flat and so it lacks many of the land features that lead to high-fertility farm land and easy-to-mine metals.\n\nBasically the ability to ship things by sea, and particularly the technologies that allowed open-ocean (as opposed to shore-following) navigation spelled the end of the \"spice routes\" that fueled the trading wealth. And since there was nothing sourced locally the bottom fell out of the overland trade routes. That made the secondary industries (mercenary soldiering and standing territorial mandates) fall apart.\n\nBasically the trading model and modes of those concerns became obsolete and had no fall-back position.\n\nSea Shipping killed Caravan Trade just like Video killed the Radio Star."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
2c848h | why aa, aaa, and d batteries called this? and why not give a 9-volt battery a letter? | Were there other letters as well? Like an A batter? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c848h/eli5_why_aa_aaa_and_d_batteries_called_this_and/ | {
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"text": [
"The letters (and numbers!) they were referred to fell into disuse now that the other types of 9v are not really seen these days except in specialist applications. So most people just call them 9v these days.\n\nedit clarification, and they are PP3 - [here are all the 9v](_URL_0_)",
"Actually, yes. There are, or at least were, A and B batteries. However they didn't get much use as most of the products have been designed for AA, AAA, C, or D batteries.\n\nEdit: Here's a short article on B size batteries: _URL_0_\n\nThe story for other types is probably similar.",
"Nice little battery collection _URL_0_",
"and to add what others are saying:\n\nAA, AAA, C, D batteries are all 1.5V too. just different sized.",
"I heard a comedian making a joke about this before.\n\nImagine going to the store and buying B batteries.\n\n\"I would like to buy b-batteries.\" It sounds like you have a stutter.\n\nand \"I would like d batteries.\" \"what kind?\" \"yes, d batteries\"",
"Batteries AAA - D are all variations of the same single cell 1.5 volt battery. They are interchangeable in circuits, the only difference being battery life.\n\n9-volt and 6-volt batteries have different voltages, and could damage circuits expecting a 1.5 volt power source, so they have a different naming convention.",
"We started with batteries sized A, B, C, D, etc. with A being the smallest and the size being larger as you go farther. Then we started developing things that needed smaller batteries than A size, and they had to think of a way to designate smaller batteries- using more As was probably a good idea at the time.\n\nThe same situation occurred with star brightness measurements- the first guy called the brightest stars \"stars of the first magnitude\" the next \"Stars of the second magnitude\", and so on, but brighter objects were discovered(like the sun and moon) however, his set was numerical, and negative numbers are a logical option, so the brightest objects have negative magnitude and the dimmest objects have the highest magnitude.\n\nImagine if you were putting #0 or #1/2 batteries in your XBox controller, and flashlights used #3 and #4 batteries instead of the familiar designations of AA, C, and D."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battery_sizes#PP_series"
],
[
"http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=12325"
],
[
"http://www.ericwrobbel.com/collections/batteries.htm"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] | |
4rs5og | how stores like winners and ross can offer the same clothing brands and items, in style, for significantly less | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rs5og/eli5_how_stores_like_winners_and_ross_can_offer/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Department stores buy a bunch stuff at a time (like dozens if not hundreds of pieces), sell most of it & then get new stuff in for the next season. They like to make sure that they've got multiple copies of everything in multiple sizes. When they're almost out they put it on the clearance rack and, eventually, send it out of the store.\n\nStores like Ross buy the few odd pieces left from the department stores at a discount & then sell it at lower margins (less service, stores not so fancy, no guarantee of finding what you want, etc)."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
5vjjok | how does my cat know to wake me up exactly 25 minutes before my alarm goes off, regardless of what it is set for? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vjjok/eli5_how_does_my_cat_know_to_wake_me_up_exactly/ | {
"a_id": [
"de2k8md"
],
"score": [
11
],
"text": [
"It could be that after [x] amount of time asleep, your body is preparing to wake up (going into lighter sleep stages) and your cat hears the change in breathing. Whether my husband works days or nights our cat starts nuzzling him, whether or not an alarm is set."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
8x4ff4 | why birds are the only animal coming in many vibrant colors | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8x4ff4/eli5_why_birds_are_the_only_animal_coming_in_many/ | {
"a_id": [
"e20q67m"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"This is simply false. Fish and insects are animals that come in an amazing range of colors. Some lizards and octopus species too."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
ewswis | how are humans dependent on water but are unable to drink it unless its been filtered and cleaned? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ewswis/eli5_how_are_humans_dependent_on_water_but_are/ | {
"a_id": [
"fg46zgh"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"Human life isn't completely incompatible with drinking unfiltered water. Your chances of catching an unpleasant or even lethal disease are higher, but many of your ancestors (not to mention many people living in less developed areas today) were still able to live on unfiltered water. It's just best not to if you have the choice. \n\nThere are also ways to mitigate the risk, like drinking from a well or running water source (natural filtering) or boiling the water. Humans have known how to do all of those things for a very long time."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
6m4426 | why can nasa communicate with satellites millions of miles away but phones cannot pick up service when even nation-wide? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6m4426/eli5_why_can_nasa_communicate_with_satellites/ | {
"a_id": [
"djyqiz0"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"NASA uses Big Ass Antennas™ while your phones use tiny wires to act as antennas within the phone. \n\nThe bigger the antenna, the better it can catch signal."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
8xdqun | i have a slow internet connection, how does sites like imgur know to send me pictures and videos slower? what happens if it sends data too fast? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8xdqun/eli5_i_have_a_slow_internet_connection_how_does/ | {
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"text": [
"Servers (usally) have a fast connection. The only thing limiting how fast you can get stuff is by your connection.\n\nThink of it like a funnel, everything can flow fast from the imgur serves but your connection is the slow tip that limits everything.",
"Most data transfer (that isn't Streaming) uses the TCP protocol. One of the main things TCP does is that when a packet gets sent, it waits for an Acknowledgement (ack) before it sends the next packet.\n\nSo if you hooked up a garden hose to an outdoor swimming pool, the pool can't push any more water out of that hose than the hose can handle. It just waits and goes at the speed of the slowest link.",
"When you connect to anything, there is a transaction happening between both the host and the client. With imgur, there isn’t much discussion of “how much can you handle” and it’s moreso your slow internet that causes long load times, rather than a transaction deciding it should be slowed. Netflix might be a better example. As you watch videos, the host has to know which frames to send and when, so when your connection is slow, the worst that happens is a slow load time or frame rate drop, rather than a jumbled video where the frames are all mixed up. This transaction is more involved with client talking to host and saying how many frames per second to send, then host can accordingly send those frames. "
]
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[],
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bw7j0c | why are busses significantly safer than cars when they have far fewer safety features (eg airbags, seatbelt etc)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bw7j0c/eli5why_are_busses_significantly_safer_than_cars/ | {
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"1. They are very large and heavy so a collision with a small car doesn't crush them, or even completely stop them.\n2. They are professionally driven.",
"The danger comes from slamming into something and stopping rapidly. That transfers forces to your body greater that it can handle and injuries occur. \n\nThis is why cars have crumple zones, to extend that slowdown period to as long as possible. \n\nBuses have the advantage that they're large and heavy, so even if they are in an impact, it takes a lot to slow them down, so they'll likely not transfer much of that impact energy into the passengers. That and they're generally driven on set routes, fairly slowly by drivers whose literal job it is to drive safely.",
"The danger from accidents mostly comes in the form of rapid deceleration.\n\nMany of the safety features in cars are to help you decelerate as softly as possible. The front of the car may come to an extremely sudden stop, but the part you are in just keeps going slightly slower for a bit as the front crumples and the seat-belt and air bag further helps you from decelerating to harshly.\n\nEverything in the car is designed to soak up as much kinetic energy as possible in the event of a crash so that as little as possible ends up acting on your body and especially the important parts of it.\n\nWith a bus the problem is slightly different. A bus tends to be much heavier. If a buss hits your average obstacle it doesn't come to sudden stop it tend to go through most obstacles while only being slightly slowed down.\n\nIn order for the bus to end up in the sort of accident that would make seatbelts or airbags really useful it would need to hit something extremely durable at full speed, like a bridge support on a highway.\n\nIt is not a common problem.\n\nIf you google for bus accidents that have had multiple injuries and fatalities it rarely ends up being the sort of accident where a bus drove into some barrier at high speed. It usually ends up being either a bus catching fire on the side of the road or rolling down a cliff when driving in some mountainous country.\n\nBuses used for public transportation that mostly drive in cities tend to be fairly safe from the sort of crash that would make seatbelts and airbags a good idea."
]
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[],
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94obba | why does immediately grabbing and applying pressure to a mild injury (ex: stubbed toe) make the pain subside slightly? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94obba/eli5_why_does_immediately_grabbing_and_applying/ | {
"a_id": [
"e3mi4mv"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"Every area of a body has nerves. When those nerve endings react to painful stimuli, you feel pain. When you apply pressure to these nerve endings, you prevent the stimulation of these nerve endings to a certain extent and that's why the pain subsides a little. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
9asasf | how to do calculus | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9asasf/eli5_how_to_do_calculus/ | {
"a_id": [
"e4xorwp",
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"score": [
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3
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"text": [
"Calculus is a massive field. Maybe you ought to find some material online introducing calculus, and post specific questions here, then people wouldn't have to try to summarise massive amounts of information for you",
"You might want to ask something more specific. Calculus is complex and it is not something you will learn with a simple explanation. There are several books and online courses you can follow."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] | |
5a2p99 | why small genetic changes can mean a new species and large can still be the same species | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5a2p99/eli5_why_small_genetic_changes_can_mean_a_new/ | {
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"text": [
"Species is a fuzzy term. Some people will tell you you have a new species \"When two animals can no longer reproduce.\" Don't listen to them. That ignores things like ring species, different species that can reproduce, same species that can't reproduce, and entire categories of life that are asexual. It can be a handy benchmark, but it is *not* definitive.\n\nWhat \"makes a species\" isn't really clear cut. A lot of it simply stems from us looking at animals that have diverged far in the past, and have accumulated enough obvious differences that we consider them distinct. There's no 'line in the sand' that says when one thing becomes another. ",
"Because not every sequence of DNA is worth the same. Here's a simple way to picture it: \n\nI'd like an apple\nI'd love an apple\nI'd like a screwdriver\n\nThe first change altered the sentence but did not radically modified the meaning, while the second created a completely different sentence. \n\nMost of our genome, for example, does not code for anything useful at all: you could get rid of it, change it completely, reverse it and nothing would happen since it's not actually used. But try to change a single base in a vital protein and you end up with a non vital fetus. To give you an idea, roughly 1% of our genome actually translates into something (technically, it's called exome), the rest is just relics, rubbish and filling material."
]
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[],
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2l15zp | college football | Everything from conferences to independent schools to playoffs to bowl games to rankings. I've tried asking people and reading about it, but it still doesn't make sense. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l15zp/eli5_college_football/ | {
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"I'm not even sure how it works this year since the BCS is gone, but I'll give it a shot. \n\nConferences are groups of schools that play each other. Historically, there were certain bowl games that would match the winner of one conference against another conference such as the Rose Bowl which historically matched the winner of the Pac-10 against the winner of the Big 10. Before the BCS, the national champion was determined by the top 25 polls. One poll is the AP poll, which is composed of sports writers. The other major poll is the coaches poll. The problem with this system is that we often had split championships when one poll disagreed with the other.\n\nThen came the BCS or Bowl Championship Series. This is only for Class IA school. Class IAA schools actually have a playoff and are generally considered inferior to IA schools due to less available scholarships and lower attendance (being IAA and IA very much depends on attendance at games). Additionally, you had certain conferences that were BCS conferences. It was possible to get into the BCS championship as a non-BCS school, but it was very difficult. The BCS was basically a pointed ranking system that was partially based on the two polls I have already mentioned, as well as a complex computer algorithm. At the end of the season, the top two teams used to face eachother for the championship. The controversy was that occasionally you would have more than two undefeated teams at the end of the season, and this was a problem because who is to say who the best two teams are when three of them haven't even been beaten? A good example of this was the year that USC, Oklahoma St. and Auburn were all undefeated at the end of the season (can't remember the year, I think those were the three). \n\nAs a result, there has been a push to go to playoffs for quite a while. Unfortunately, there is a lot of money in the historic bowl games (which revolved as the BCS championship game during the BCS era), so there was a lot of resistance. I believe that this is the year they are going to a 4 team playoff. IMHO, this is just the first step towards a 16 team playoff like they have in IAA. \n\nAnyway, that's what I know. If you have more questions, just ask!",
"Only the top half of Div 1 (FBS- The Football Bowl Subdivision) uses Bowls. Everyone else has a playoff tournament very much like you have with the March Madness Basketball tournament.\n\nThe FBS has gotten together and agreed to do their champion that way mostly out of tradition, the NCAA doesnt actually recognize it because they do not run it. So FSU despite winning the national title game is not recognized by the NCAA as the Division 1 football champion, as the trophy is awarded by the Coaches Association.\n\nMost bowls will sign contracts with the different conferences to send teams to the game. The Sun Bowl (one of the oldest) in El Paso Texas for instance has an agreement to take the 5th best team from the PAC-12 and the 4th best from the ACC to play.\n\nHere is the confusing part now, because the FBS will be going to a 4 team playoff this year, but it is part of the bowl structure. There are a group of the 6 largest bowl games (Rose, Sugar, Orange, Peach, Cotton, Fiesta) who will rotate 2 at a time hosting Semi Final games. There is a selection committee just like in Basketball, with some interesting members like Condoleezza Rice and Archie Manning. The winners of the 2 Semi Final games then play the next week in the National Championship.\n\nBefore this was something called the BCS where #1 and #2 in the final rankings would play and that was it. Before that you just had the Bowls, and after the AP Poll (sports writers) and the Coaches Poll would release their final rankings and sometimes would not name the same team #1. Before that even they would name the champion BEFORE the Bowls (the Heisman is still awarded before them) since Bowls were originally just a vacation reward for a good year with an exhibition game against a team from another part of the country.\n\nConferences existed initially to allow regional schools to have an easier time making schedules each year, the sport began, and still tends to be very regional. If you wanted to or could afford traveling all over then being in a conference wasnt a big deal. You used to have 40 or so independents each year until the late 80's when big time teams Penn State and Florida State joined the Big 10 and ACC and a domino effect began. Today only Notre Dame, BYU, Army, and Navy are independent, though next year Navy is joining a conference. That means each of those schools each year to have 12 games, though Notre Dame does have a new agreement to play 5 ACC teams a year.\n\nI know that is a ton, but let me know if there is anything specific you would like clarification! \n\nAlso /r/cfb is a great and active community1"
]
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[],
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] | |
2to8k6 | why north and south korea want reunification yet can't achieve it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2to8k6/eli5_why_north_and_south_korea_want_reunification/ | {
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"Each side wants reunification on their own terms. North Korea wants all of Korea to worship the Kim family, which isn't going to happen. South Korea wants all of Korea to be a modern country, which won't happen as long as the Kim family remains in power.",
"Who told you South Korea actually wants reunification? \nJust think about the burden of integrating a North Korea into a modern South Korea would be. "
]
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[],
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33eely | why is it that sometimes i keep biting the inside of my cheek out of nowhere for a whole day? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33eely/eli5_why_is_it_that_sometimes_i_keep_biting_the/ | {
"a_id": [
"cqk40eu"
],
"score": [
8
],
"text": [
"The first bite happens randomly, after that it swells up and causes it to happen more often."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
487tu9 | how do my farmer "friends" always have to milk cows in the morning? do dairy cows always produce milk? | Do other types of cows just produce milk when they have calves? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/487tu9/eli5_how_do_my_farmer_friends_always_have_to_milk/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"All cows only produce milk when they have calves.\n\nDairy cows are constantly being impregnated so they continually produce milk.\n\nObviously their babies are taken away almost immediately, so the babies don't drink the milk that is then taken for human consumption.",
"Cows produce milk indefinitely, as long as they're milked, but the rate of milk production declines rapidly about 10 months after giving birth. Most dairy cows are bred often enough to calve every 12-14 months. "
]
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[],
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51ijce | why does rubber lose it's elasticity over time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51ijce/eli5_why_does_rubber_lose_its_elasticity_over_time/ | {
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"Because rubber works differently than many elastic things, and is fucking cool as shit. [actual summary of answer]\n\nWhen you think of elasticity, you probably think of a spring---a single piece of material that can be compressed or deformed and then \"springs\" back into place. \n\nBut that's not exactly how rubber works. Rubber is made up of lots of long molecules, surrounded by lots of short molecules. The long molecules want to stretch out (i.e. get longer and more relaxed) but the small molecules are constantly smashing into them, forcing them to stay bent, or to rebend when they have a chance to stretch out.\n\nWhen you \"stretch\" the rubber, this puts pressure on the system (increasing the temperature) and increasing the speed of the collisions until it goes back to equilibrium. Over time, as the molecules break down and sort out, this effect becomes less and less effective, until the elasticity is gone. \n\nBut, don't take my word for it, here's [Richard Feynman on this exact topic](_URL_0_)"
]
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[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baXv_5z7HVY"
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4q45l2 | why do some photographers take years to take a perfect timing photo, when they can just record and freeze the video to get a frame? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4q45l2/eli5_why_do_some_photographers_take_years_to_take/ | {
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"text": [
"The quality of a single frame in a video camera, even if it's a high-def camera would not be anywhere close to that of a photograph.",
"That photograph is spectacular. \n\nThe only way you could a frozen video frame to look anywhere *remotely* as good would be to record in a *phenomenal* frame-rate (we're talking *thousands* of frames per second), at an *incredibly* high resolution (we're talking 16+MP). I don't think there even exists a video camera that can do that. To make it even more fun, you'd have to record *raw uncompressed video*. \n\nEven if you found a camera that *could* do that, it would require an insane amount of storage space. For context, one raw 16MP photo is about 25 megabytes. And we're talking *at least* 2,000 per *second*. That's 50 gigabytes. Per second. \n\n...and it *still* might not be as unbelievably sharp as that photo! ",
"the cameraman will take several photos playing with the settings to get the perfect picture. they will take photos from different angles to get the proper lighting for the picture that they see in their mind.\n\nIm not a photographer but on some photos you can see all the settings in the lower left hand corner, ISO, lense, exposure ETC.",
"It would also eliminate the pleasure and sense of accomplishment that comes with capturing that perfect shot. ",
"I could be wrong but I believe the reason is that to capture an image like that from a video you need an incredibly high frame rate. The drawback would be that you would need a higher amount of light as the exposure time per frame would be drastically reduced. Using a camera like the photographer's allows for more instantaneous shots with less light and resources. Also, it is simply more feasible to use a camera since it would be lighter and more portable compared to a high speed video camera. ",
"At least part of the answer is the challenge :).\n\nIt is also possible that there are no high-def high speed video cameras capable of a shot like this, at least not without a movie studio backing you. This makes for a challenging ELI5 but I'll try to do it without sounding patronizing (and apologies if I do).\n\nFirst, some background information. Photography and videography are sort of a \"two out of three\" game. You have several variables the camera can manipulate:\n\n* Depth of Field (how much of an image is in focus)\n* Shutter speed (fastest 'speed' a camera can 'freeze')\n* ISO (essentially, how sensitive is the grain--contributes to sharpness)\n* Lens length (this is a bonus feature, the longer the lens the 'closer' the picture, but the less light is available for use).\n\n\n\nA bird bouncing around in a tree will start to 'blur' in an image if the shutter is slower than about 1/1,000 or 1/800 of a second. Your average \"flying around\" bird requires about 1/1,6000 to 1/2,000 of a second to 'freeze' the image. A fast bird, like a swallow, hummingbird, or plunging bird (like this one) requires at least 1/4,000 of a second to 'freeze' the image. Freezing a hummingbird's wings in flight can require much more than that!\n\nThis photo also seems to show a fair amount of sharpness--you can make out even the individual strands of many of the feathers. This is a different feature than focus, it has more to do with how fine the details are on the smallest features visible. In order to gain this sort of sharpness, the sensor (if this was digital) has to be set at a lower ISO number. The lower the number, the more light is required and the more detail is gained.\n\nIn order to gain that extra light, the photographer likely opened the lens *aperture* (a sort of pinhole type feature inside the lens) to its widest setting. This comes with the consequence of limiting the \"in focus\" part of the image to a very narrow area--perhaps only a few inches wide. In this case, just wide enough to 'fit' the bird in. This is why the bubbles just in front and behind the bird are fuzzy (out of focus) while the bird and the bubble immediately next to the bill are clear (in focus).\n\nThe last aspect to this image requires an understanding of kingfishers--they are rather shy birds and don't care for anyone to be within about 50 meters of them. They startle easily. The lens used on this image was almost certainly one of those huge arm-length ones you see from time to time. The longer the lens, the more the light coming through it is restricted--which in turn impacts the factors mentioned above.\n\nAll these factors together make it a *very* difficult shot. Unlike the high speed video you see of bullets and arrows and things in a studio with pre-planned lighting and at a close distance, this was shot in the wild (perhaps in low light judging by the sunset like colors in the reflections) at a very long distance. I'm not sure there is a high speed video camera/lens combination that could produce this sort of image; at least not yet. And if so it is certainly not something your average professional wildlife photographer could afford!\n\nA photo like this requires a shutter time of at least 1/4,000 of a second. More likely double or triple that (1/8,000 or 1/12,000 of a second). This not only 'freezes' the bird (note the flapping pictures) but also the water droplets.\n\nConsidering the length of lens, aperture, and ISO (grain) required for an image like this, that is almost certainly not something a video could capture without a studio to control the distance and lighting factors. \n\nFor comparison/context, here are two shots I took earlier this year in full daylight, from about 30 feet (vs at least 200 for the kingfisher). This was a 200mm lens, at full extension it still fits in the palm of my hand; whereas at its smallest the lens used for the kingfisher was probably about as long as elbow-to-forearm, in somewhat lower light, and at a greater distance.\n\n[One](_URL_0_). The duck was in slow flight, but even so the 1/1250 shutter time (not 1/4,000+) at 400 ISO (good detail) and the wingtips are blurring :S. The artisticness of the image is not my goal here, just to demonstrate *just how fast* the camera has to be. This would be the equivalent of a 1,000fps camera or so (there is time between frames in video, so shutter speed and frame rate are not 1:1).\n\n[Two](_URL_1_). The egret here was 'frozen' at 1/4,000 of a second, but notice that the water droplets show some blurring motion. This was at close range in broad daylight, with a short lens. ISO 400 (same 'grain' as the duck). Shutter speed 1/4,000 of a second, or about 3,000fps for video *in ideal studio conditions*. A kingfisher is faster than an egret, though that is an aside the average person probably won't be factoring--don't feel bad if it is a trivia fact for this situation!\n\nIf I had to guess those images were shot at 1/6,000 sec (about 4000fps equivalent) at 75m distance with a 400 or 600mm lens (mid-size, not the big bazooka looking lenses). Even so, there is some minor blurring at the wingtips in some of those images. *These birds are really fast*.\n\nTo get the same sort of \"sharpness\" with a fast shutter speed at a further distance and lower light...that photographer has some mad skills and at least pro-sumer equipment! (And a lot of practice)."
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"http://imgur.com/qALC3Rk",
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2i8q30 | do animals get insomnia? if not, why is it only a human phenomenon? | My dog can wake up and go back to sleep like it's nothing. But for me, if I get woke up, I'm up and that's it. Why do humans have so much trouble going to sleep? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2i8q30/eli5_do_animals_get_insomnia_if_not_why_is_it/ | {
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"text": [
"People use artificial light sources which mess up our day-night cycle (staring at computers all day is a huge one). Also stress.",
"Insomnia, to a large degree is only an issue when one is required to work to a daily schedule. If you can work when you feel rested and sleep when you're tired, it doesn't make much difference what your sleep cycle is like. Its coordinating with other people's schedules that causes these problems. The more complex society becomes, the more coordination is required.\n\nIt sounds like I'm being flippant, but I'm not: animals don't suffer from insomnia because they don't have clocks."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] | |
97ktww | how do people leak games and movies before they release? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/97ktww/eli5_how_do_people_leak_games_and_movies_before/ | {
"a_id": [
"e48x4sx"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Making a big blockbuster movie requires the involvement of hundreds, possibly thousands of people. Many of these people have access to early cuts of the film, or have access to the film before release.\n\nBefore a film is released it needs to be shipped to movie theaters so that they can screen it, which means that physical copies of the final movie exist days/weeks before the movie is set to release. Anyone who can get access to that copy could theoretically make a copy of it and leak it.\n\nThere are measures in place to prevent this, but if there is a desire for money or even just fake internet points, people are willing to try and circumvent them."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
bgwliu | how does the electrical grid sync up all the various 60 hz inputs across the continent so that it pulsates uniformly and nothing is out of phase? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bgwliu/eli5how_does_the_electrical_grid_sync_up_all_the/ | {
"a_id": [
"elo4910",
"elozl9f"
],
"score": [
7,
2
],
"text": [
"Once a generator is very close to being in sync (correct frequency and phase), it can be connected to the grid. There are special meters and automatic systems which control the connection. The generator will then stay in sync as long as the free running frequency is within parameters. The grid will actually speed up or slow down a generator which is running a little slow or fast. The generator's output power is monitored and it will disconnect from the grid if it isn't contributing the right amount of power. \n\n > [While the generator is synchronized, the frequency of the system will change depending on load and the average characteristics of all the generating units connected to the grid. Large changes in system frequency can cause the generator to fall out of synchronism with the system. Protective devices on the generator will operate to disconnect it automatically.](_URL_0_)",
"Once you connect a generator to the grid, there's a natural syncing mechanism. \n\nLike, there's some external force pushing the generator, and there's a bunch of mechanical inertia there. If the generator happens to be a tiny bit ahead in rotation than where it \"should be\" relative to the grid sine wave then it'll have more \"drag\", it'll need more force to be pushed at that speed, and if that force isn't applied then it'll slow down slightly; and if the generator happens to be a tiny bit behind the grid sine wave, then it'll have less \"drag\" and will be able to accelerate - and the larger the difference in phase, the larger the difference in \"drag\".\n\nSo within certain boundaries there's a self-balancing effect - as the mechanical power supplied to the generator varies, it'll change the phase difference between the generator rotation and the grid rotation, both staying at the same ~60Hz (it's usually not *exactly* 60.00 Hz, and it varies), changing the electrical power that it's pushing to the grid.\n\nIf the phase difference becomes too large, that's bad, so there's hardware that would automatically disconnect it."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronization_(alternating_current\\)#Synchronous_operation"
],
[]
] | ||
4fmtu0 | if the lymphatic system relies on contraction of muscles how does it work in paralysed people? | I read that the lymphatic system doesn't have a pump like the heart and instead uses the pressure surrounding tissue applies to the vessels when you contract your muscles, if this is true then how does it work for people who cant move their muscles? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fmtu0/eli5_if_the_lymphatic_system_relies_on/ | {
"a_id": [
"d2a69s6"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text": [
"The condition is called secondary lymphoedema. Lympho means lymphatic system, edema means fluid build up, and secondary means it's caused by the paralysis. Essentially, it means it doesn't work. Paralyzed people need external support like compression socks, healthcare workers who squeeze and move their muscles for them, and sometimes external draining. If the lymph stays too long, sometimes it can become solid and needs surgery to remove."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
2zhcwa | why do black socks leave lint in between my toes but white socks don't? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zhcwa/eli5_why_do_black_socks_leave_lint_in_between_my/ | {
"a_id": [
"cpix2yq"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"Because you're white and the black lint shows up better "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
4ha88m | why aren't guitar frets evenly spaced? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ha88m/eli5_why_arent_guitar_frets_evenly_spaced/ | {
"a_id": [
"d2omb92",
"d2omg45",
"d2ospop"
],
"score": [
33,
4,
2
],
"text": [
"Because for a string instrument, notes have a multiplicative, not an additive relationship. For example lets take a string that's tuned to an E. In order to play an E one octave higher you have to place your finger in the middle of the string, effectively cutting its length in half. To go up to the next E, you put your finger at the middle point between the last octave and the end of the string, making it effectively one quarter of the length of the full string. So, if you were to put frets to mark three octaves, it would look something like this\n\n--------|----|--|--\n\nAs you can see, they get progressively closer, just like the frets of a guitar. The difference there is that the guitar frets don't just mark octaves but the other notes in between.",
"It has to do with the relationship between string length and frequency. The simplest example is the octave: if you start at low E and go up an octave (12 frets), you get another E. The frequency of the high E is double that of the low E. You'll notice that the 12th fret is halfway along the fretboard. Now go up another 12 frets (if you have them) and you find the same thing happens: you half the length of the vibrating part of the string again, but now it's 1/4 the scale length. You could do this again and again (1/8, 1/16, 1/32) and jump an octave each time. The length of string in each octave jump gets smaller and smaller. \n\nThe same principle applies for single frets, each of which is a semitone jump up.",
"The notes in western equal temperament scales can be thought of as fractions. If 1 is the whole string then 1/2 of 1 is the same note but at twice the frequency. This is the 12th fret. \n\nIE You hit the E string and it's E. Fret the 12th fret on E string and it's also E but an octave higher because the 12th fret cleanly divided the E string in half, making it vibrate exactly twice as fast. \n\nAs you work your way down the guitar neck towards the bottom of the strings, the distances involved get smaller and smaller, there for the intervals get smaller and smaller as well. \n\nIn other words take a 2 foot long string and divide it into 12 notes and those divisions will be farther apart than trying to do the same to a 1 foot string. \n\nIf the fret board kept going all the way to the bottom of the guitar, eventually the frets would be so close together that your fingers would be too large to fret properly. \n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] | ||
3ggnb9 | if sound needs a medium to travel (most commonly air), why haven't we developed vacuum-filled windows/walls/doors to achieve 100% a soundproof room? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ggnb9/eli5_if_sound_needs_a_medium_to_travel_most/ | {
"a_id": [
"ctxwzvw",
"ctxx09z",
"ctxxk1a",
"ctxyofy"
],
"score": [
11,
3,
7,
2
],
"text": [
"Sound would still be able to travel through the solid structure that vacuum pocket was constructed in. Sound travels through solids, too. Unless you were able to totally isolate your house in a vacuum from the wider Earth, that sound is going to have a way in.",
"Besides being tremendously expensive, walls would still have to physically connect to floor and ceiling, which would transit sound. ",
"Sound doesn't just travel through air, it can travel through solid objects. So the parts of the walls/door/floor/windows that aren't vacuum filled would carry a sound wave. \n\nSecondly, 100% sound proof isn't necessary. You just need a room *practically* sound proof. What you're talking about would be a room where the sound waves do not exit, or outside waves do not enter. All you need is a room where the sound waves are absorbed enough that they cannot be perceived. That can be achieved, but it's pretty expensive. ",
"We do have soundproof rooms-many recording studios are nearly if not totally soundproof. However, from a practical standpoint-silence will drive you crazy.\n\nThere's been quite a few experiments performed (search \"Orfield Lab's Anechoic Chamber\" if you want to read more), people literally can't stand it for even an hour. We need some sort of stimulation to our senses, and when denied that input, we basically hallucinate.\n\nI recognize that you're referring to isolating sound from outside, not inside, but the effect is basically the same. Without noise, anyone who can hear is incredibly uncomfortable."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
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