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2elua7 | How did they take photos in WW2 invasions? | Like how they got a picture of Allied powers invading a beach and Benito Mussolini-Adolf Hitler being together? Do they have like soldiers with cameras there? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2elua7/how_did_they_take_photos_in_ww2_invasions/ | {
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"I will answer this from the perspective of two photos which I think are famous within the Invasion of Normandy.\n\nThe first being: \"Into the Jaws of Death\", photographed by Robert F. Sargent. He was the chief photographer mate in the US Coast Guard. I did a lot of digging for this answer. A chief photographer mate serves as the Navys professional photographer. Here is the general info on the position from about careers: US Military.\n\n\"They operate different kinds of still and video equipment on a variety of assignments. PHs cover news events, ceremonies, accident investigations and provide photography for release to Navy and civilian publications or for use in Navy historical documents. Their work may include portrait photography, photographic copying, aerial photography for map making and reconnaissance, scanning and editing of digital video images along with the production of training films, video news reports and all other types of audiovisual work. Along with the training provided to support all aspects of photographic laboratory work, some PHs receive additional training in the troubleshooting and repair and maintenance of photographic equipment and camera repair. This is a five-year enlistment program.\"\n\nSource: _URL_2_\n\nWith regard to Robert F. Sargent his job was to take photos of the invasion for those specified purposes. He took professional photos as a means of documentation. This particular shot (Into the Jaws of Death) is of Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division landing on Omaha Beach .\n\nAnother example would be someone who is civilian and not associated with the military. Robert Capa of LIFE Magazine also captured images of Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. On D-Day he took eleven photos from what I am reading and they selected ten of them for publication in LIFE Magazine on June 19, 1944. He says the following about his experience,\n\n\"The war correspondent has his stake — his life — in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute ... I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave.\"\n\nHe risked his life on many occasions to get the shots and is quoted as saying, \"If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.\" Capa is an individual who got the photos that are known for being iconic today. He is just one individual who worked to capture a moment so that we may see what the action on the front line looked like. It is as close as a civilian can get to experiencing war.\n\nI recommend this website for more on Robert Capa: _URL_0_.\n\nPicture of Capa's work: _URL_1_\n\nHopefully this has helped you out and answered your question. I enjoyed answering it and doing some of my own research for it."
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16yej8 | Is it (theoretically) possible to wire a person so that they can see more colors than normal? [Relevant to Neuroscience, Biology, and possibly Medicine] | Humans who are not colorblind are able to register as color electromagnetic wavelengths of size around 390-700 nm. Would it be possible to modify the eye (and/or brain) to register a wider variety of wavelengths?
If that is possible, how would you do it? What would you change in the eye? What would you change in the brain?
Lastly, if someone could register as color a wider span of electromagnetic waves, what would the colors look like? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16yej8/is_it_theoretically_possible_to_wire_a_person_so/ | {
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"To do such thing you would have to maybe modify the cells the capture light (rods) and specially those that capture color information (cones) on the retina (back part of the eye), so that a wider spectrum of wavelenghts could be captured and converted to nerve impulses that would then be transmitted to the occipital cortex of the brain. \n\nNow in relation to the question about how a person would perceive this additional information, that would be quite difficult to picture. \n\nProbably we would no see much of a difference in the colors we already normally see, but it would be possible to see better at night/low light if we capture infrared frequencies, and also have a different perception of some things at the ultraviolet spectrum. \n\nFlowers seem to be a good example of this last part, as bees see them a little different that we do, because bees can see more on the ultraviolet spectrum (see _URL_0_) for examples.",
"Maybe.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nMice, normally dichromats, have been engineered to be trichromats like humans.\n\nSince two cone cell pigment genes are on the X chromosome, it is hypothetically possible that humans with two X chromosomes could have genes for four different cone cells, which would make those individuals tetrachromats. The actual effects of this are poorly studied.\n\nUnfortunately, the cornea is pretty opaque to infrared, and the lens is pretty opaque to UV, so there's not a whole lot of room for extra colors, so it's likely to only improve color sensitivity in the currently-visible range, not introduce new colors.",
"Check out this RadioLab episode:\n[The Perfect Yellow](_URL_1_)\n\nThey talk about [Jay Neitz](_URL_0_) (professor of ophthalmology & color vision researcher @ U of Washington, Seattle) injecting the human gene(s?) for red cones into the eyes of squirrel monkeys, and the possibility of doing something similar for colorblind people, and even expanding typical human color perception. Worth a listen.\n\nAccording to Jay Neitz, “If the neural circuits for color vision are sufficiently plastic, it may be possible to use gene therapy to replace missing photopigments in the eyes of color blind humans.\" Neitz further states that since apparently \"the neural circuits can handle even higher dimensions of color vision that could come from artificially adding a fourth cone type, it is possible that gene therapy could also be used to extend normal human color vision\", making human trichromats into tetrachromats."
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Neitz#Possibility_of_turning_human_trichromats_into_tetrac... | |
tphoy | Why do we have the need to feel special? | Is there an evolutionary explanation for this? We are billions of very similar individuals, yet every one of us think we are special and unique. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tphoy/why_do_we_have_the_need_to_feel_special/ | {
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"I don't have an answer for you, but this general feeling is actually limited to mostly Western cultures; individualist socieites. The populations of collectivist cultures found in East Asia for example generally don't share this attitude. Theirs is more along the lines of \"I am because we are.\" However their collective consciousness may view their society as a whole as something special and unique. \n\nIt's a sociological / antrhopological question. But if you want to look at it from an evolutionary perspective, you could view individualist societies and collectivist societies as two \"mutations\" where both seem to be thriving at the moment. \n\n[Collectivist societies](_URL_1_)\n\n[Individualism](_URL_0_)",
"One explanation that I have is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. All humans have a need to be respected and held in high esteem by themselves (through high self-esteem) or through others (by achieving fame, glory, etc).\n\nSome of it is influenced by the cultural influences during your upbringing. The Confucian nature of East Asian cultures that emphasizes deference, working together as equals, certainly does lead to less desire to feel special, but i think from Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, all humans have a need to feel special or at least valued.",
"I think Neil Degrasse Tyson says it best in this video\n\n_URL_0_\n"
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4azypo | Why do mixed race people tend to be somewhere between white and black instead of either white or black? | I would imagine there would have to be different alleles to control skin colour for this to be possible? Or perhaps different alleles for the mechanisms that produce melanin? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4azypo/why_do_mixed_race_people_tend_to_be_somewhere/ | {
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"There's more than one gene that controls skin color. Black people have more genes for melanin production than white people, so they have darker skin. Mixed race people have some of the genes from the black relatives and some from the white relatives, so their melanin production is somewhere in between.",
"First, skin tone is a pretty poor proxy for ancestry. For example, the [Lemba people](_URL_0_) of South Africa are very dark skinned yet they have maintained an oral tradition similar to Judaism. While their appearance would suggest mostly African ancestry, genetic analysis shows that > 50% of their Y-chromosomes are semitic in origin. For some specific markers of Jewish ancestry, the Lemba rank higher than general population of people who culturally identify as Jewish.\n\nSo instead of focusing on people with mixed race, which is more of a cultural definition, let's just ask why children with one dark skinned parent and one light skinned parent can have a range of intermediate skin tones. \n\nThere are a handful of genes with mutations that correlate with skin tone. For instance, [this paper](_URL_2_) estimates that replacing the west African alleles of the KITLG gene with European alleles should account for ~20% of the skin tone difference between the populations on average. \n\nBut no one gene can account for a majority of the difference in skin tone. So part of the answer is that skin color, like height, is determined by many separate genes. But alleles are also only part of the story. A harder to measure feature of genes are the number of short tandem repeats (STRs) in the regulatory region near the gene. This [study of skin color](_URL_1_) in an isolated Mongolian population identifies a novel regulatory region associated with skin color by comparing STR markers.\n\nSTRs allows the body to tune how strongly one gene is activated (by changing the number of repeats). Since there can be hundreds of STRs near a gene, this gives a nearly continuos amount of variation instead of the binary difference associated with different alleles.\n\nCombining the high number of genes associated with skin color with the various lengths of the STRs in the regulatory regions makes it possible to get a wide range of skin colors. And because genes can interact in non-linear ways, there can be a lot a variation between [siblings born to the same parents](_URL_3_).\n\n**tldr:** Skin color doesn't follow the simple pattern of the Mendellian genetics they teach in class. Like height, it is determined by several genes and the regulatory regions near these genes so it can exhibit a nearly continuos range of tones.\n\nedit: fixed link"
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"http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(07\\)01418-3",
"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2974869/The-twins-tell-ap... | |
9pledg | Body Hair Removal - Why does modern western society prefer women hairless? | Men have been shaving their beards for a few centuries, sure. But what about chests, legs, underarms, genitalia? How did body hair removal come into fashion, and is it the first time the world has seen this trend? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9pledg/body_hair_removal_why_does_modern_western_society/ | {
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"Not to discourage further discussion, but the [faq](_URL_1_) features a few comments on hair, including a [great](_URL_0_) answer by /u/sunagainstgold ."
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/dailylife#wiki_hair"
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2b7okl | what exactly did the early nasa computers, the types used in the apollo missions, do? how did 32k of processing power actually 'send a rocket to the moon'? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b7okl/eli5_what_exactly_did_the_early_nasa_computers/ | {
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"It doesn't take much processing power to launch a rocket to the moon. The difficulty was the reliability of parts, not how fast it can compute.\n\nThe early computers are essentially just large calculators with built in course calculation programs in them.",
"Guidance:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_",
"They were designed specifically for the task. Your computer has a big bad 3 jiggahertz processor because it needs to so any different kinds of tasks. Today we use ASIC's (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) for things like the \"computer\" in your car or microwave. Instead of software doing much doin much of work, the circuitry of the ASIC does it much faster, but that's all it can do."
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1ts6c1 | what makes mozart arguably mankind's greatest musical mind, and how to someone like jimi hendrix stack up against him? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ts6c1/eli5_what_makes_mozart_arguably_mankinds_greatest/ | {
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"Apart from writting excellent music, what made Mozart unique was his natural aptittude for Music. \n\nHe was a better pianist before 10 than most professionals will ever be, and he could just listen to really long symphonies only once and transcribe them from memory later in his teen years. You can google more information about his life easily if you are interested. \n\nJimi Hendrix was an incredibly skilled musician in general and guittarist in particular. You can't take away anything from his legacy, and there isn't a valid ground on which you could compare the two, or any musicians. Music, and tastes in music are subjective."
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4asic7 | AskScience AMA Series: I’m Dheeraj Roy, a neuroscientist studying what happens to lost memories in early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Are these memories erased or do they exist but cannot be found? AMA! | Hi Reddit!
My research is about what happens to our memories when we cannot remember. When we experience memory loss, does it mean that these memories have been erased? Could it be that some memories exist in our brains but we are unable to find and recall them? These questions led me to study memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In addition to the impact AD has on our community, watching my own grandmother gradually forget drives me to the laboratory everyday with the hope that someday we will be able to help AD patients remember.
To study memory brain structures affected by AD, I use animal models that closely mimic the human condition. From patients, we know that initial stages of AD (known as “early AD”) are diagnosed when consecutive memory tests result in extremely poor performance. In particular, early AD patients seem to lose memories of events/episodes such as birthday parties, summer vacations with the family, high school reunions, etc. It has been assumed that early AD patients lose critical memory information and therefore cannot remember. My recent work (link to nature study: _URL_1_) using animal models challenges this widely held assumption. Not only did we find that early AD mice still stored the supposedly lost memories, but we found a way to bring these memories back. Given this work, I believe that memory loss in early stages of AD is because patients are unable find and retrieve the information, rather than a permanent loss of memory information.
Even though this particular work was done using animal models, I have hope that in the future we can learn more about retrieving lost memories in early AD patients. For a perspective on my recent work by expert memory researchers, go here (link to nature news and views: _URL_2_).
If you are interested in some of my previous research that led to the study of memory loss in early AD, go here (link to science study: _URL_3_).
I would love to continue discussing the future of memory research on Twitter, follow me @dheerajroy7 (link to twitter account: _URL_0_).
If you don’t have access to any of my research articles, email me (d_roy@mit.edu) and I will try to help ☺!
I am very excited to talk about memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease with the Reddit community because I learn so much through your insightful questions and comments. I will be back at 1 PM EST to answer all questions. In advance, I want to thank the entire community for allowing me to share my work!
8 PM EST, EDIT: It's been an amazing day sharing my work with you all and learning about different interpretations of our research. I would like to thank Reddit and everyone for taking time out of their busy days to contribute to this AMA. I have learned so much from our conversations!
| askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4asic7/askscience_ama_series_im_dheeraj_roy_a/ | {
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"Are you afraid to get it someday? ",
"Do you think we will find a cure for Alzheimer's disease in the future?\n\nDoes your answer change if the reason for the disease is to do with loss of memory/inability to retrieve the information?\n",
"Do you feel that simulating human memory behaviour in computers can shed some light on how Alzheimer affects it? Or do you think that the current models/theories are insufficient to be explored in a simulated environment? If the answer is no (it can't be) then what do you think is the biggest hurdle? ",
"Will DHA help combat memory loss?",
"Dr. Roy,\n\nThank you for all the work you do studying this terrible disease. My question might be a little broad, but I was wondering if you could speak about how memories are formed, and how it fits in with the idea that AD patients might not \"lose\" memories, but simply \"misplace\" them. Where could they have gone? What's the difference between normal memory loss and what you believe is happening in an AD patient?\n\nThanks for doing an AMA and best of luck with your work. ",
"Does your research point to any preventative measures we can start taking?",
"Hi! I'm interested in myelination during development. Have you seen any differences in the amount of myelin pathways specifically (as opposed to overall volume of gray/white matter), preceeding disease onset? I'd be interested in whether severity, onset timing, or speed of progression had any correlation to individual variations earlier in a person's lifetime? Any thoughts?",
"Hey Dheeraj! Thanks for doing the AMA. This is a really interesting area of work. Now, there are several movies out there that talk about AD and how it affects those around them and out of those, Still Alice is my favorite. So I want to know - Do you feel that the film represented the disease correctly? \n\nIf so and if you have seen it : My interpretation of the ending was that the patient could still remember really strong emotions (love) if not the memories themselves and so can that be used to somehow bring the memories back (strong emotional triggers etc.) ?\n\nFinally, where do you think the future of memory research is headed? \n\nThanks for your time again!\n\n",
"Are these memories erased or do they exist but cannot be found?",
"I remember watching a science TV show in the late 90s where is a scientist had discovered a drug that would prevent Alzheimer's. He said it might take up to 10 years to the get FDA approval. Well it's been almost 20 years and it's nowhere in sight. Any ideas about this? I remember he was a Canadian doctor.",
" > I want to thank the entire community for allowing me to share my work!\n\nVery gracious of you, but rather I'd like to thank you for working towards a cure for Alzheimer's while I am sitting on my couch eating trail mix.\n\nIn your text here, you give the example of the memory of a past birthday party. In your research, the memory for the mice is a Pavlovian electric shock coincided with a colored light. The idea being that a conditioned mouse would freeze when the colored light was turned on, since it associated that light with the electric shock. Right?\n\nIf I managed to get that all correct, my question is: what is the difference between a memory of being shocked, versus a memory of a past birthday party? Are they both memories, but just different sizes? Are memories different based upon the conditions they are formed under? (i.e., danger, happiness, sadness).\n\nThank you for your contributions and dedication to this field. You have my utmost admiration and respect.",
"What are your thoughts on the potential of RBM3 to treat AD (and other neurodegenerative diseases)?",
"Are there any observable physiological differences between \"everyday\" forgetting and AD-related memory loss?",
"Are preventative measures (such as doing puzzles, reading often) truly helpful in families with a history of the disease, or does genetics play too huge of a role?",
"Thanks for your time today! Can you tell me a bit about how memories are encoded in an Alzheimer's brain as opposed to a healthy brain, and how the difference affects new memory retrieval?",
"What do you think of Alzheimer’s being colloquially known as Type 3 Diabetes amongst researchers due to the apparent pathway stemming from insulin resistance? \n \nAs a tangent from AD but seemingly relevant to your field, what are the latest ideas/breakthroughs on memory vs drunkenness? More specifically, in the last few years there have been hypotheses put forward that instead of the conventional wisdom idea that when we're intoxicated we simply forget what we did during that period, what actually happens is our brain \"stops recording\"? So basically \"blank spots\" in our memory aren't because we can't access it, but because as far as our brain is concerned it never actually happened.",
"Thank you for doing this AMA. I had a great grandparent and a close family friend who got AD in their old age. \n\nWhat has been the most encouraging thing you have found from your research with animal models in terms of the link to humans? ",
"Hey man, \n\nThanks for doing this. I was wondering if you could elaborate on the connection between Alzheimer's disease and reduced insulin take up by neurons?\nFrom my understanding there is a big movement in the field referring to the disease as type III diabetes? Is this a potential route for therapeutics/ is this insulin intolerance seen across all patients? In what way does this contribute to plaque and NFT collection? \n\nThanks\nAspiring neuroscientist. ",
"Dear Dheeraj, \n\n\nsome time ago I watched the documentary \"Alive inside\" on Netflix, about how music that was meaningful for someone with AD before the illness developed can bring back memories, and for a moment bring them back to themselves. \n\n\nHave you tried / would you be interested in studying this phenomenon, which seems to point towards the same conclusions you came to with your current studies (i.e. that the memories are still there but simply not easily retrievable)? \n\nSince the brain region which activates when we listen to music is the cerebellum, which is strongly connected to emotional centers - and if I'm right, strong emotions consolidate memories, could it be that listening to music helps finding the way back to the initial memory? \n",
"Shouldn't we be taking the preventative measure of a whole food plant based diet and decreasing animal consumption to improve vascular health as a substantial body of evidence strongly associates atherosclerotic vascular disease with Alzheimer’s? Autopsy studies have shown that individuals with AD have significantly more atherosclerotic narrowing of the arteries within their brain.\n\n[1](_URL_4_), [2](_URL_8_), [3](_URL_11_), [4](_URL_1_), [5](_URL_3_), [6](_URL_5_), [7](_URL_6_), [8](_URL_7_), [9](_URL_2_), [10](_URL_9_), [11](_URL_10_)\n\nAnd what about animal testing being [essentially a fraud](_URL_0_)",
"Hi! I'm studying behavioral neuroscience in Boston right now, so I'm extremely excited to see this AMA. \nMy freshman year, I had a major seizure, and lost most of my memories. Some have came back, but senior year of HS is still completely gone. They diagnosed me with epilepsy but weren't able to explain why it started or why I lost many of my memories. I've found some articles related to this, but none have found much (or anything on treatment). My question is: do you think your research will be applicable to memory loss from other sources? (Also, would you like to grab coffee sometime? I'd love to chat since AD and memory loss are the reason I'm interested in the brain!) ",
"Thanks for doing this AMA\n\nHow big of a factor does stress, through life, have on the chances of getting Alzheimer’s disease. ",
"Fascinating work - I was wondering about the precise structure of one of your statements and what it implied ...\n\n > I have hope that in the future we can learn more about retrieving lost memories in early AD patients\n\nIs there something in your research that makes you think that early onset memory loss is different from that loss in at a later point?",
"What are the first symptoms a person would experience during the early stages of AD?",
"Are there any clear methods of diagnosing alzheimer's early on? My father-in-law passed from it a couple of years ago, and we never received a clear diagnosis that it was indeed alzheimer's until after the autopsy. Until then, we only believed it to be \"general dementia.\" Granted my wife and I only learned details second-hand from her mother, as we weren't meeting with the doctors ourselves.",
"Does this mean that brain plasticity is possibly the solution? If so, how do you maintain the new alternate connections and prevent hem from breaking down again? ",
"Can you ELI 5 what are memories,what exactly happen when i remember something.What is the nature or difference of what im remembering and what i am perceiving right now.What are their most basic form or part ,are they like the 1 and 0 in computers, and how are they are formed and stored.Sorry for the many questions, I'm really interested in these subject since my memory often fails me and im really afraid of getting something like Alzheimer when i grow old, so really thank you for giving your time in researching more about these conditions.",
"Hey Dheeraj, \n\nI don't really have a question, just wanted to thank you for your research. My grandmother passed away from it last year, it was terrible. She used to smoke two packs a day and eventually didn't remember she smoked and effectively quit because in her mind she didn't want to start a bad habit. It was strange because her longterm memories weren't as affected as her short term ones aside from the smoking and specific details. \n\n",
"Is there a difference between naturally forgetting a memory and losing a memory due to alzheimers?",
"I read the abstract of your paper but it was too technical for me (no background in neuroscience.)\n\nCould you explain in more simple terms:\n\n1. How you can determine when a memory is there but irretrievable, as opposed to the information being lost.\n\n2. What you did to restore the memories of the mice\n",
"Do you find any patterns in the life styles or backgrounds of people who are diagnosed? i.e heavy drinkers, drug users, previous medical problems with the head/brain or anything? ",
"Hi Dheeraj,\n\nFellow neuroscientist here. Very interesting work!\n\nTo what extent do you believe that your animal model actually mimics human AD? How similar are the morphological and behavioral phenotypes between AD mice and AD humans? Is there any evidence that the mechanisms underlying memory loss in AD mice are similar to those in humans?",
"Hello Dr Roy,\nThank you for the AMA. I am a Clinical Psychologist often called upon to help out with the diagnosis of early signs of AD. I wondered if your research could extend to other aspects of cognitive decline not just related to episodic memory? \n\nThe reason I ask is that, in my experience, people often present clinically with cognitive difficulties that are related to 'short term' memory difficulties (word finding difficulty, orientation difficulties etc). The initial episodic memory difficulties associated with AD are often considered more to be part of 'normal' old age (again, in my experience) and are not so distressing for relatives. I believe the literature would suggest that AD results in storage difficulties of short term memory faculties, rather than retrieval difficulties, so it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on this.",
"My mother has just been diagnosed with AD 2 months ago at the fairly young age of 63. \nI've been told that the process of the disease is rather quick compared to older patients. What causes this? Also what can I actively do to help my mother? Should us children be worried because AD runs in both the families of my mother and my father? ",
"Hi Dheeraj, neuroimaging engineer here: \n\nI've heard of instances where humans with severe dementia respond spectacularly to music, and Glen Campbell famously documented his decline into Alzheimer's - he could remember every note and every word to every song, but not which song he was supposed to play next. Are you doing any research into that? Can you speculate on the physiological mechanism involved here?",
"What's the best way of creating more neural connections? I'm learning a new language will that work?",
"Two questions, please:\n\nDo you think studying Sundowning Syndrome might lead to clues about accessing memories in general?\n\nand\n\nWhy do some persons with Alzheimers say they want to go home, when they are home? My mother seemed to have some sort of 'memory hash' about what her home was--- she thought it should be the living space of her current home, with the basement family room/laundry room of the house we had 35 years previously. ",
"There was an article recently about gut bacteria being a major player in brain function. Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, and general dementia were referenced as possible diseases for an imbalance of gut bacteria. Is this 'recent' emphasis on gut bacteria legitimate? Seems gut bacteria has been part of the discussion for sometime, but seems just recently there's been some new findings on it. Thank you.",
"Firstly, what animal models do you use?\n\nThe animal models I've seen in Alzheimer's disease research usually involve knocking in genes that have very little to do with the disease. Do you feel like your models are inherently flawed given that? If so how do you get around these limitations? What would you like to see done to create more representative models of the condition?\n\n",
"Not a neurologist, but interested in measurement. Can you explain how you make your measurements? How can you tell that a memory is there and how can you tell if the mouse has access to it? Can you tell if these are the same types of memories affected by early AD in humans?",
"How does Alzheimer's relate to non-Alzheimer's dementia and memory loss? I have a close family member dealing with the latter, particularly the memory loss and \"drifting\". MRIs and other tests show a normal brain, but the symptoms seem quite similar to early Alzheimer's. The general attitude he's encountering from doctors is \"nothing we can do\". Could early intervention treatments designed for Alzheimer's still be useful for other forms of dementia?",
"Any link between vitamin d and Alzheimer's?",
"Do you have any insights regarding the nature of memory itself? Are memories simply stored brain states, or is it not that easily reducible? Sorry if it's a little abstract, I'm studying neuro-philosophy at the moment.",
"What are your thoughts on the limitations of AD mouse models? The AD model hippocampi, for example, look fairly pristine save for the plaques. What level of degeneration is observed in the models you used?",
"Dr. Roy, \n\nAbout 3 years ago I wrote a research paper summarizing recent Alzheimer's study's. Much of this research seemed to be focused on sleeps role in cleaning the brain of beta-amyloid plaque formations that overtime destroy the brain. How does you current research using retrograde amnesia and optogenetic activation relate to this previous research?\n\nThanks!",
"I recently took cyclobenzaprine for a back spasm. It was the first time I'd ever taken it.\n\nThat afternoon, when I was near sleeping, and later that night, I was connected to memories I hadn't had in 30+ years. Direct, clear, explicit, very specific memories about aspects of the house I grew up in. It seemed to me that access to these memories was the result of the drug.\n\nI'd heard/read that memories are permanent but the access to them changes. Even if this is accurate or not, two questions:\n\n1. Can drugs help find memories? If so, what can I further look into, even if it's not well supported information?\n\n2. What do you suggest for keeping a brain healthy as it enters middle age and beyond? Something that might surprise me or is emerging information? (I've read typical diet, stimulation, exercise, etc.). My grandmother has Alz.\n\nThank you so much for this AMA and for your work.",
"Hi, I'm a biochem student interested in pursuing a post-graduate neuroscience degree, with a specific interest in research related to memory formation and loss. As someone currently in the field, what is your best advice for someone trying to enter it? What did you do as an undergrad student to best prepare you for where you are now? Many thanks!",
"First off, thank you for all of your research. I'm an doctor of occupational therapy specialized in neurological rehab and the contributions from folks like yourself move beside neurological care forward. \n\nWithout having read any of your work (but looking forward to doing so!), you may have already answered this in your papers but can your speak to the pivotal role that the entorhinal cortex plays both in memory formation and access to memories. Given the common atrophic processes that occur in the temporal lobes in AD, do you think because these episodic memories (birthday parties etc) have such a spatial component to them (recalling the space/context in which the party took place), that's why they're so difficult to access? \n\nLastly, is there work being done to bypass or strengthen the entorhinal cortex to ameliorate these deficits? \n\nAgain, thanks for the dedication to the wonderful world of neuroscience. ",
"Did your research show any indication of changed activity patterns that could indicate where the \"recovered\" memory reactivates after the procedure? \n\nCould this be a step in learning how memories are stored?",
"I have a question about Alzheimer's in general. Why does it seem that only certain *types* of memories are lost?\n\nUnless I'm mistaken, it seems that things like speech, color recognition, food recognition and the ability to read are unaffected. ",
"Did OP forget he was doing an AMA?",
"Did OP forget he was doing an AMA?",
"What exactly IS a memory? ",
"I'm too late to the party to ask a question, but even if you never read this comment, I want to say thank you. \n\nSeeing the disease in someone I love has surprised me. When I thought of Alzheimer's before I pictured someone forgetting memories and people, getting lost, being easily confused. That is part of the picture, certainly, but there is an entire other side to it that I had no awareness of. There are strange things, so unexpected and odd that it comes, each time, with an awful clarity of what it is to be broken as a person.\n\nTrying to pay for lunch with a pack of cigarettes, or attempting to get ketchup out of a squeeze-bottle by stuffing a straw into the hole, or circling the car over and over again because there doesn't seem to be a passenger's side, with bewilderment but also a sense that \"this must be how everyone does it.\" Why does she suddenly hate children? Why can't she pick out her own clothes? Why can't she choose what she wants to eat anymore? How are wants and preferences no longer at her disposal? How do you forget how to turn on a fan? It's incredibly disturbing. \n\nIt has been terrible to see someone who was once so vibrant, funny, and outgoing disappear into someone else completely in only her 60's. Luckily, we thought, it doesn't run in the family. \n\nThen, a couple weeks ago my father became adamant that we never owned a car we had for years and years, with no memory of buying it from his friend or the argument it caused with my mother. I'm worried that someday it's going to be him accusing me of stealing the things he is holding in his own hands. \n\nI wish you all the luck in the world with your research, and can only hope that it leads to some kind of breakthrough someday soon. I am so grateful. \n\n",
"Hi! Can I ask a few offtopic brain related questions? Well I'll try =) What do you think about possibilities of existence of something known as \"exocortex\"? Is there some kind of agreement among scientists about theory on how the abstract ideas and forms are being recognized by brain - simple tasks which even the most innovative AIs can't perform? And the tough one - what do you think about the idea that our civilization is mature enough to start some experiments on humans that sound awful to the most people - including brain experiments? I saw a lot of people with major and terrible illnesses talking about how unbearable their symptoms are and they would sacrifice anything to help others so they would not suffer that much, as an example that famous paralyzed guy who agreed for a brain transplantation attempt by a EU neurosurgeon...Thank you.",
"Do you find retrieving these early lost memories help slow down the progression of AD significantly or is it just delaying the inevitable continued process?\n \nmy grandfather battled with AD in his last year of life and watching that happen to the point my Grandmother couldn't care for him anymore was one of the most heart breaking things I have ever seen. Seeing him battle this while in a nursing home was even worse. I know all diseases are horrible but i truly hate this disease. ",
"Uninformed question: If an Alzheimer's patient were to look at an MRI in real time and was in some sense able to \"watch themselves remember\" as in while the memory was being created or recalled, would that help them locate exactly what parts of the brain to focus on for better encoding and retrieval?",
"Do you know of any correlation between use of diphenhydramine and Alzheimer's risk?",
"Is there need for additional funding for Alzheimer's research, or in your opinion are the most promising ideas being adequately funded? If I am going to make a large donation to improve global health outcomes, would an extra $1000 or $1,000,000 to Alzheimer's research get the most bang for my buck or should I fund other research instead? What organizations do you think make the most effective and efficient decisions about what research to fund?",
" > It has been assumed that early AD patients lose critical memory information and therefore cannot remember. My recent work (link to nature study: _URL_0_) using animal models challenges this widely held assumption.\n\nIs it really widely held? If so, I really don't understand how/why because I've always understood advanced Alzheimer's patients can exhibit unexpected moments of clarity that demonstrate the memories are still there.",
"Have you seen the black spots that they find in football players brains? What are those and do they have to do with Alzheimers?",
"What do you think of Pisa and Alonso et. al's work indicating fungal infection in Alzheimer's etiology?",
"This may already have been asked/answered, but do we know why dementia causes changes in personality? I witnessed my grandfather become very violent and paranoid in the last years of his life, though he had vascular dementia rather than Alzheimer's.",
"I've always wanted to ask a scientist this question... Did you have any family influence that lead you to this position? Such as a family member having Alzheimer's or your parents being in the same position. Or even your parents making you study so much that you were able to obtain the opportunity for this position.",
"What does it mean if you can remember great detail about things that happened when you were 2-6 years old but things much more recent are fuzzy or even....totally erased?",
"Is it true that many medications can increase AD risk? I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if there were a few, but my mom's constantly sending me articles about literally hundreds of different medications which are believed to increase risk. If true, are all these medications increasing the risk via a similar mechanism of action?",
"Can meningitis cause memory loss? I'm a 26m and I'm constantly being told that I'm asking the same questions over and over or repeating myself, And I don't recall any of it. All of which started after the meningitis/bilateral Bell's palsy episode",
"If you were popular on the club scene would you go by the stage name Dj Roy?",
"How did you become a neuroscientist?"
]
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"https://twitter.com/dheerajroy7",
"http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature17172",
"http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature17312.html",
"http://classic.sciencemag.org/content/348/6238/1007.abstract"
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"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23813612",
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.ni... | |
3xtb0q | what does alcohol consumption feels like? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xtb0q/eli5what_does_alcohol_consumption_feels_like/ | {
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"Kinda makes you feel dizzy. Depending on your personality type it can bring out the worst in you. When I'm drunk I get in peoples faces and start fights lol.",
"It burns against your throat and down into your belly. Then it kinda fizzles into a warm happy feeling that spreads through your body. The effects on your brain can be completely unnoticed initially, but continued drinking exacerbates them. For me I smile more, talk more, and become more relaxed. If I get drunk I think everything is funny, I involve myself in every conversation, and I slump or lean on things. I've learned to identify this stage and stop drinking. Because if I continue the silly/happy feeling turns into anger and sadness, I shout a lot, and my arms and legs seem to operate on a delay. ",
"Just warm and happy like you don't have a care in the world. \n\nYou might feel a bit dizzy and stupid, but your ability to notice you feel dizzy and stupid has diminished so you only notice that if you really try to."
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25uxi3 | how can worms still move and be alive when cut in pieces? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25uxi3/eli5_how_can_worms_still_move_and_be_alive_when/ | {
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"They aren't alive for long. They have compartments, as you can see by the patterns on their bodies that look like rings, these compartments are separate from each other, but their organs are spread throughout the body, while the two halfs will writhe in pain, it is probable that both will die eventually, the same way as if you had been cut in half, your brain would remain lucid up until you died of blood loss, it just takes a bit longer for worms. They also don't use blood, they use hemolymph, which is the insect equivalent of blood.",
"This is a copy/paste that I found.\n\n > Depends what you mean by worm. The word 'worm' actually applies to a number of phyla of invertebrate animals, including the Annelids (earthworms, polychaetes, leeches), Platyhelminthes (flatworms, tapeworms), Nematodes(roundworms) and Nemerteans (ribbon worms).\n\n > The common earthworm, the one you probably find in your garden, is an Annelid worm...and no it won't survive you chopping it, let alone turning into two worms (even though it is made up of repeating segments). Many of the free-living (non-parasitic) flatworms (P: Platyhelminthes, C:Turbellaria) are capable of regenerating wounded tissue and, reproducing asexually by binary fission, so being cut in half can result in two clones. Actually, experiments on Turbellarians involving various incomplete cuts into the worm have resulted in individuals developing two heads, or two tails etc. Some of the parasitic worms are capable of budding off reproductive segments...contributing to their great success as parasites inside the bodies of a variety of host animals. As for the Nemerteans, well I can't quite remember, and my books are too far away from me to check right now, so I might check that up later.\n\nSource:_URL_0_\n",
"I have two axolotl and every day I cut a worm in half to feed them. An earthworm mind. Don't know if it's the same with all worms. Suspect not. \n\nWhat I've found is the front end of the worm will not act any differently than before. The back end will spazz out like no ones business. I have been told by an old boss at an aquarium shop that if you cut below the vent on the worm (the knuckly bit) the front end will live on. \n\nI think the back end reacts more vigourously to attrack the attacker. If a bird cuts a worm in half the back end will be more likely to be eaten allowing the other end to burrow and survive. \n\nI've never cut the worm in to lots of bite size pieces for the amphibians, just one cut. I don't let the front survive becuase I'd rather not continually torture a creature by cutting its ass of and putting it back to allow it to regrow to do the same again. I'd rather just it all got ate. "
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2rtiwm | why do people think older=smarter? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rtiwm/eli5why_do_people_think_oldersmarter/ | {
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"I don't know many people who think \"older=smarter\". I know a lot of people who believe that \"older=more experienced\" which is a very different thing indeed.\n\n > Intelligence is the information you carry inside you\n\nNope. Intelligence is the ability to *USE* the information you carry inside you effectively and appropriately based on the situation. I know lots of very unintelligent people who have huge databases of facts in their heads.",
"Because people continue to learn as they get older. ",
"Smart is a generic word. A 12 year old may know a math problem that would stump a 60 year old, does that mean the 12 year old is smarter? Smarter at math maybe but clueless on how to live in the world.\n People will say smart is the stuff you remember....\n\n Others will say Smart is common sense\n\n Personally I say smart is from wisdom and that is what you get from age."
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60gt7e | if the weight loss after gastric bypass is due to severe calorie restriction, why is severe calorie restriction on it's own rarely advised? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60gt7e/eli5if_the_weight_loss_after_gastric_bypass_is/ | {
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"Well, for starters\n\n1. It's hard. If it's you only plan for weight loss, you're going to have a high chance of failing\n\n2. If done incorrectly for too long, you'll miss out on essential micronutrients and end up with some health issues\n\n3. Losing weight needs to be a lifestyle change, not just a temporary diet. Extreme caloric restriction is not a sustainable long-term plan. Better spend the effort on something that'll keep you going for a long time\n\nThat said, versions of it like intermitent fasting have been shown to work well, and are gaining in popularity.",
"PhD working about obesity here. The severe calorie restriction (strong diet, strong exercises, ...) are ALWAYS advised, especially in case of morbidly obese patients (the most relevant patients to get gastric bypass or other bariatric surgeries).\n\nHowever, unfortunately it is very uncommon for a severe calorie restriction to be efficient more than 6 months after the beginning of the diet (because we are all human). So in most case, the patients regain weight, and therefore the bariatric surgery is needed.\n\nIt is easy to understand why the gastric bypass (or other bariatric surgeries) are more efficient in the long term."
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30oauz | Why does red and green light combine to make an apparent color of wavelength between them, like yellow, but red and blue combine for an apparent color not between their wavelengths? | [As seen here,](_URL_1_) and compared with [the visible light spectrum,](_URL_0_) it seems that all main colors (red, green, blue) combine with each other to produce an apparent wavelength in between their parent colors except for red and blue. Why is that? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/30oauz/why_does_red_and_green_light_combine_to_make_an/ | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nThis minutephysics video might help! Its really an interest way our brain tries to make our spectrum a closed one..",
"Don't forget there's a third possibility: some wavelength pairs (additive complementaries) mix to make white light. The colour you get from mixing wavelengths A and B depends on where wavelength B is compared to the complementary of A. For example, the complementary of red is cyan, so lights of colours like green that are closer to red in the spectrum than cyan mix with red light to produce intermediate spectral hues, while lights of colours such as blue that are further do not.\n\nBut why do some wavelengths mix to make white light? If you think about it, if mixtures of wavelengths always gave the same colour as the wavelength between them, then a mixture of all wavelengths of visible light would be the colour of the middle wavelength (green to us!). Instead, our visual system is wired up so that cone responses are compared with each other in the retina (*cone opponency*). A light that evokes a balanced response from all three cone types is seen as colourless (\"white\"); colour is an experience created by the brain as an expression of imbalanced responses favouring one or two of the cones. These imbalances form a 360 degree range around the neutral centre, and many wavelengths have an opposite or complementary wavelength on this circuit, such that a mixture of the two can balance the response of the three cone types, and so produce white light.\n\nAn equally interesting question is why do red and blue light combine to create a *colour* that is in between them (purple=red-blue) while red and green light combine to make a new colour (yellow) that can be neither reddish nor greenish. The answer to that one depends on the way our visual system expresses these imbalances to us as colour perceptions consisting of red *vs* green and yellow *vs* blue opponent signals (*colour opponency*, as explained by aggasalk)."
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2u0w0q | Is visible light, or any other form of light for that matter, affected by wind? | Say I point a laser at a wall. If I turn a fan to face *perpendicular* toward the beam, would it push the light across on even an atomic scale?
EDIT: Changed parallel to perpendicular | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2u0w0q/is_visible_light_or_any_other_form_of_light_for/ | {
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"It wouldn't be noticeable, but the direction of the travel of the light is dependent on whether the medium is moving. \n\nThis property was used to test and reject the existence of luminiferous aether, which was proposed to be the medium light travels in because \"it can't travel in a vacuum\". \n\nIn a vacuum, the speed of light is the same for all observers. In your scenario though, if the light is travelling in the opposite direction as the wind, it would appear to propagate slower and vice versa. ",
"Wind is accompanied by variations in air pressure and that variability induces variations in the refractive index of the air. Those variations will result in slight wobbles in the direction of light. It is for this reason that stars twinkle.",
"Ughh.. I don't like the answers. Variations in air pressure do change index of refraction. I'm not so sure that variations in large scale air movement make a directional specific index of refraction. You're basically asking if a 1000 mile an hour wind will add or subtract 1000 miles an hour from the speed of wind. As light from satellite is essentially going through our atmosphere with a speed delta of about 1000 mph and this type of behavior isn't something I've heard of I'd say no. Wind does not affect light speed in that way. There is likely an affect but its not additive in that way."
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2la9f5 | Caligula had a painful headache followed by a coma. Could he have suffered brain damage causing his claims of divinity and other erratic behaviour? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2la9f5/caligula_had_a_painful_headache_followed_by_a/ | {
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"This is getting out of the realm of history and into speculative neuropathology, but a [frontal lobe tumor](_URL_0_) could have caused erratic mood swings, impaired judgment, and bursts of aggression and hypersexuality, not to mention agonizing headaches. [Brain damage](_URL_1_) to the frontal lobe (link goes to PDF) could have had a similar effect. "
]
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe_disorder",
"https://www.wlu.ca/forms/3305/Frontal_Lobe_Dysfunction.pdf"
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3ws70l | Given how loud, and often insatiable a human infant can be, how do you think we were still able to evolve and thrive as a species? What were some early parenting tactics that kept us from becoming food? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ws70l/given_how_loud_and_often_insatiable_a_human/ | {
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"This is really a question about pre-history, possibly even pre-Homo sapiens sapiens, and I would recommend you try /r/AskAnthropology or else /r/AskScience, as they are better suited for questions about evolution like this."
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1mla8s | why does beer taste different when i get it at a restaurant, from when i buy it from a store? | Why is it that when I drink beer at a restaurant (tap or bottled) it tastes amazing, but when I buy it at the market it tastes like dump? This happens with the same brand btw example, Heineken from the market and Heineken from a restaurant. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mla8s/eli5why_does_beer_taste_different_when_i_get_it/ | {
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"Do you drink your beer directly from the bottle? If so, that could be a major reason. Smell is an enormous amount of taste, which anyone who has eaten food with a blocked nose can attest to. If you're drinking beer directly from the bottle, you're forming a seal around the bottle with your lips, which means you cannot smell the beer at all before it enters your mouth. An enormous amount of the experience is lost. Instead, try pouring your beer into a pint glass and then drinking it. A good pint glass will have a wide rim that allows the aroma of the beer to be enjoyed while you drink.",
"When it comes to beer on tap a lot is placebo as stated by another poster and yes, the beer itself (to generalize) is often fresher as kegs get used, don't sit on supermarket shelves for months. \n\nBUT... The line plays a huge part too. By this i mean the piping between the beer keg and the pump. In an ideal world these lines should be cleaned roughly fortnightly and kept as clean as clean can be. They should also be of a certain length, not too long but this is dictated by where your beer cellar is.\n\nHowever despite what some people might say this is not an exact science. Some beers and other drinks suffer if the line is too clean. Lagers certainly benefit from super clean lines but some ales seem to like a bit of yeast built up. \n\nThere are a lot of variables here and with taste being such a subjective thing, plus beer a catch all phrase then it's hard to pin it down anymore than this but it's certainly a factor.\n\nTo stick a pin in my own post however i find that a lot of restaurants suffer from slow turnover and poor standards for beer and as such personally i find bottle beer 'better'. The last thing i want is a pint of beer that's been sat in the line (as discussed above) for two days. Horrible. Of course for someone who worked in the booze trade for a long time drinking to me is often a bit of a bus mans holiday and i pick faults like a moaning little bitch.\n\n"
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2fhkbe | why do i see the same thread, posted a few days later all the time? | Like currently one of the top ask reddit threads is what song will you always associate with what movie. I swear I saw this question like a week ago! I mean the exact one, not another variation like what will sometimes happen with a "Men of reddit" question turning into a "Women of reddit". I also even see it with some ELI5 questions. Am I going crazy or are these questions repeated? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fhkbe/eli5_why_do_i_see_the_same_thread_posted_a_few/ | {
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"Countdown until the next person who asks \"ELI5: Why do I like the smell of my own farts?\"\n\nBecause that one seems to be a daily occurrence.",
"Reddit has 114.5 million unique visitors every month. How they get that number, i'm not sure. Do I count 3 times, once for my phone, once for my work computer, and once for home? I don't know, but source: _URL_0_\n\nEven if half that number is real people, that's a ton of people. Not all of them see every post. Many of them think of the same things and post them a few days after someone else did. \n\nSome of them are karma whoring bitches who repost."
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5e0fc0 | why does a hollow cilinder descend faster than a solid one on an inclined plane? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5e0fc0/eli5why_does_a_hollow_cilinder_descend_faster/ | {
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"It depends on the moment of inertia's of the two objects. \n\nThis is a pretty classic example in beginning physics classes to \"break\" your intuition, so to say. You have a solid wheel and a hollow ring, both with the same mass and same radius. Which rolls down an incline faster?\n\nThe solid disk does! How? It has a lower moment of inertia. Conceptually, think of it this way. The farther a \"piece\" of mass is away from the axis of rotation, the more difficult it is to rotate. Unlike the ring, who's mass is all as far away as it could be, the wheel is more evenly distributed.\n\nMathematically modeled, you can take an integral to find the moment of inertia's for both. In any case, a ring is simply mr^2 while a disk is mr^2 /2 . \n\nBoth objects have the same gravitational potential energy. As they roll without slipping they have both linear and rotational kinetic energy.\n\nSolving for velocity, the disk has linear velocity equal to sqrt(4gh/3) while the ring has velocity sqrt(gh). As you can see, the disk will always have a higher velocity.\n\nNow why does the ring go faster in your case? Because it has significantly less mass overall. Remember, mass plays a part as well.\n\nAs to why it doesn't accelerate at gsin(theta), because to roll means friction, and friction means there are multiple forces which you need to consider."
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57npl1 | How do we create artificial elements heavier than uranium but cannot create hydrogen fusion? | Asking off the basis that you would need to fuse or add more protons, neutrons and electrons to an atom to create heavier elements so why can we not do that with hydrogen? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/57npl1/how_do_we_create_artificial_elements_heavier_than/ | {
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"We can create extremely heavy nuclei using fusion reactions in particle accelerators. So it goes without saying that we can *very easily* do fusion reactions with light nuclei like hydrogen as well.\n\nThe problem is that accelerators are not reactors. To build a fusion *reactor* which will produce power (hopefully more than the break-even point), we need to be able to contain a plasma hot and dense enough for sustained thermonuclear reactions to occur. There are [specific criteria](_URL_0_) which need to be met in order to ignite thermonuclear fusion in your reactor. This is a problem for *plasma physicists* rather than nuclear physicists. Nuclear physicists can easily perform fusion reactions in accelerators, but we don't do it to generate energy, we do it to study reactions or produce other nuclei.",
"With energy, it's never enough to just have an energy source. It has to be practical. \n\nCurrently, fusing hydrogen takes more energy than you get back. Solar panels were like this for a long time; they produced less energy in a lifetime than they took to manufacture, therefore they were basically only used by the space program where launch weight was the important concern. Similarly, corn ethanol wouldn't be used without government subsidies supporting it.\n\nAnd after a technology passes that point, it has to become cheap enough to make sense. It's not hard to think of a design that uses waves or tides for energy, but no one's come up with anything that's economic on a large scale.\n\nAnd finally, you can find lots of people arguing over the comparative costs of wind energy and nuclear energy versus fossil fuels, largely based on the subsidies each one gets.\n\nSo, to summarize, it's not enough to be able to make hydrogen fuse into helium: it needs to be efficient, then it needs to be economical, then the government has to get on board with it.",
"what makes you think we can't do it for hydrogen? that's wrong. we've been doing it for decades. \n\nwhat we haven't done right now (that's not to say we can't do it), is build a machine that fuses hydrogen, returns energy, produces new fuel, self-sustains the reaction, big enough to get a net gain. (\"big enough \"is important. a small machine cannot do that, we haven't built big enough ones yet. it's not that we have tried building a fusion reactor and it didn't work. we just haven't built a big one yet, ITER is in construction though.) that's now mostly an engineering/plasma physics problem (not a basic physics problem). "
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ctgoav | Was Lucius Verus a good emperor? | There is a lot of talk about the 5 good emperors their accomplishments and good character but they were not the only ones that ruled during that time. Why is Lucius Verus omitted from being discussed jointly with the 5? Was he a bad ruler( in any context), or was it that he didnt accomplish anything of note? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ctgoav/was_lucius_verus_a_good_emperor/ | {
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"The distinguishing characteristics of Lucius Verus were his hedonism, his affability and his dimness. At no point in his life did he ever display anything more than a passing interest in the affairs of state or even in warfare. He was marginalized by the Emperor Antonius and when Marcus accepted him as Co-Emperor it is generally accepted that this was more a practical necessity as Marcus had notoriously poor luck in children (he had 10 with only one son surviving to adulthood). During his eight years in \"power\" before his untimely death, he occupied himself primarily with chariot races, feasting and ribaldry. When he was placed in charge of armies in the field against the Parthians, the contemporary chroniclers could only praise him for taking the time to show his face at the front and for delegating decision making to competent generals, hardly the stuff legends are built upon. He is only considered a second rate emperor rather than a bad emperor because of his charm and good nature, separating him from the murderous excesses of Caligula, Nero, Commodus, Caracalla and Heliogabalus. \n\nFrank McLynn describes him thusly: \"Lucius Verus was one of those popular, charismatic yet ultimately empty-headed and second-rate personalities either in power or close to power that we encounter throughout history; many of the contemporary descriptions make him seem an uncanny pre-echo of Henrey II's son, Henry the Young King, a charming hedonist, spendthrift and profligate...as a youth he was known for his affairs with young men...he liked to trawl the taverns and low dives of Rome in disguise...he had a peculiar habit of smashing the cups in taverns with coins...a fanatical supporter of the Greens...the cost of one of his feasts was estimated at six billion sesterces\". \n\nInformation taken primarily from Frank McLynn's biography of Marcus Aurelius, \"Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor\"."
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4ca6rd | Who was responsible for blowing up the USS Maine in Cuba in 1898? | Has this ever been fully resolved?
The Spanish said it was an accident (coal bunker next to magazine caused the explosion)
Sampson Board's Inquiry in 1898 said it was a mine
Vreeland Board in 1911 said it was an external explosion, but different from what the Sampson Board described
Rickover Investigation in 1974 concluded the explosion was caused internally
A 1998 National Geographic investigation was unconclusive
A 2002 History channel investigation seemed to agree with the Spanish conclusion
How thorough were any of these investigations? Was it just an accident that the US capitalized on to go to war? Or was it really a Spanish attack? Did aliens blow it up? Or do we just not know? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ca6rd/who_was_responsible_for_blowing_up_the_uss_maine/ | {
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"At the moment most historians agree that it was an accident. There is at the very least no evidence that the destruction of the Maine was premeditated. One of the most important historians currently living who studies Cuba, specializing in the 1890s, was satisfied to simply cite the Rickover Investigation's conclusions (that it was an accident) and move on. _URL_0_\n\nSome contemporary Americans certainly believed the Spanish had done it, as Perez points out in that same article. But we have yet to come up with any proof that Spaniards planted a mine (much less a good reason reason, since the last thing Spain wanted was US intervention in the war).\n\nSome still push that it was a false flag operation by the US to enter the war. This was certainly the narrative of the post-1959 Cuban government. As of right now, however, this interpretation hasn't been able to present any proof. Interview with one such official can be found here: _URL_1_\n\nAs years go by and the rapprochement with the US becomes more real, Cuban politicians push this narrative less and less, or if they honestly believe it they keep it private.\n\nPushing the narrative that it was a premeditated by someone is more of a political position (a way to criticize the US, Spain, or whoever) than it is a tenable position among historians.",
"/u/The_Alaskan had an excellent comment about this a year ago. [Link here](_URL_1_).\n\n > **The current academic consensus is that there is no consensus.**\n\n > Let's review.\n\n > [There have been four major investigations into the sinking of the Maine:](_URL_3_) \n > • The first took place in 1898, immediately after the sinking. The McKinley administration created a naval board of inquiry that concluded unanimously that the ship was sunk \"only by the explosion of a mine situated under the bottom of the ship at about frame 18, and somewhat on the port side of the ship.\"\n\n > • The second investigation took place in 1911. President Taft ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to study the wreckage. Never to do anything by halves, the Corps built a cofferdam around the ship's wreckage, pumped out all the water and examined the exposed hull. Hundreds of photographs were taken, and the Corps removed much of the wreckage. A revised board of inquiry reaffirmed that a mine sank the ship, but it concluded the mine had detonated at a different place.\n\n > • The third investigation came in 1974, when Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear Navy, asked historians to re-examine the case. The historians dredged Spanish archives and consulted with foreign militaries about their own experience with internal explosions. They consulted professional engineers to analyze the 1911 photographs and took into context the \"natural tendency to look for reasons for the loss that did not reflect upon the Navy.\" This study resulted in [How the Battleship Maine was Destroyed](_URL_2_). That book concluded the explosion was, \"without a doubt,\" internal.\n\n > • The fourth investigation came in 1999 and was conducted by the National Geographic Society. NGS commissioned a study by Advanced Marine Enterprises, which conducted the first detailed computer modeling of the disaster. AME stated that a coal fire within a bunker could have raised the temperature within one of the Maine's magazines to hazardous levels within a few hours. As to a mine strike, AME found that even a simple mine consisting of 100 pounds of black powder and a contact fuse could have sunk the ship. \"If so, the mine must have been perfectly placed, which under the circumstances would have been as much a matter of luck as skill.” While it did not discount either option for the Maine's destruction, AME ultimately concluded (based on the 1911 photographs) that there was more evidence in favor of the Maine's destruction by a mine.\n\n > [Let's review the competing evidence for each side, and you can make up your mind.](_URL_0_)\n\n > For a mine detonation:\n\n > • The Maine carried a type of bituminous coal that rarely spontaneously combusted.\n\n > • Bunker A16 was not situated by a boiler or any other external heat source, and spontaneous combustion does not occur unless there is a heat source to speed up the process. \n\n > • When Bunker A16 was inspected the morning of the disaster, the temperature was only 59 degrees Fahrenheit. \n\n > • The Maine's temperature sensor system did not indicate any dangerous rise in temperature on the morning of the last inspection. \n\n > • Discipline on the Maine was excellent, and regular inspections of coal bunkers for hazards, as well as the implementation of precautions for preventing bunker fires, were diligently carried out. \n\n > • A number of witnesses stated that they heard two distinct explosions several seconds apart. If anything else besides a mine had triggered the magazine explosion, then witnesses would have only heard one blast, because the only explosion would have been that of the magazines. \n\n > • The only reason that two explosions would have been heard is if something besides the magazine had exploded, such as a mine.\n\n > • Divers who examined the bottom plates of the Maine reported that they were bent inward. This was subsequently confirmed with 1911 photographs.\n\n > • Divers spotted a large hole on the floor of Havana harbor, something that would not have occurred with a magazine explosion. Those are directed upward, toward the path of least resistance. \n\n > For an internal explosion:\n\n > • Spontaneous combustion of coal was a fairly frequent problem on ships built after the American Civil War. Coal was exposed to air, oxidized and began burning. The heat was transferred to the ship's magazines, causing an explosion. \n\n > • The Maine's bituminous coal was more subject to spontaneous combustion than anthracite coal. Furthermore, higher moisture content increases the danger of spontaneous combustion. The Maine had spent most of the previous three months in Key West or nearby, where tropical moisture predominates.\n\n > • Bunker A16 had not been inspected since 8 a.m. The explosion occurred around 9:40 p.m. There was ample time (12 hours) for a coal bunker fire to smolder into a disaster. \n\n > • From 1894 to 1908, more than 20 coal bunker fires were reported on U.S. Navy ships. \n\n > • No one reported seeing a geyser of water thrown up during the explosion, a common sight when mines explode underwater.\n\n > • No one reported seeing any dead fish in the harbor and these would have been seen if there had been an external blast. \n\n > • Inward bending of the plates could have been caused by water displacement occurring at the same time the front of the ship was breaking away from the rear.\n\n > -------------------------------------------------------------\n\n > ADVERTISEMENT: Read and subscribe to /r/100yearsago\n"
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17n7vc | Beijing's smog has been in the news recently and there's been a greater focus on Chinese pollution. Did Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan face similar environmental degradation as they developed or are China's problems worse? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17n7vc/beijings_smog_has_been_in_the_news_recently_and/ | {
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"Absolutely true. In fact, some of the worst known environmental disasters occurred in Japan in the 20th century. Chief among those was riparian and seawater dumping of heavy metals like mercury by Japanese chemical manufacturing companies like Shin Nihon Chisso, in collusion with the Japanese government itself.\n\nThe [Minamata story](_URL_0_) is absolutely horrifying. In 1951, Chisso began releasing organic mercury as part of their wastewater at the Minamata factory in Kyushu. The mercury poisoned the entire ecosystem, getting into the fish and then into the fishermen and their families. Soon symptoms of extreme mercury poising began appearing in fishing villages surrounding the factory, the mysterious \"Minamata disease\". The company began investigating, and soon realized they were causing the disease by their dumping. However, rather than stop it, or let people know, they played dumb and ordered the company doctors to stay quite while the poisoning continued. \n\nEven though Chisso wouldn't allow outside researchers access to their wastewater (which would have cleared up the issue immediately), by 1956, researchers at a local university had correctly identified what the mysterious Minamata disease actually was. However, as soon as they began making their findings public, Chisso and the Japanese government stepped in to discredit their research, and paid hack scientists to propose countertheories to confuse the issue. Chisso had an obvious financial interest at stake, and MITI was concerned that inevitable environmental regulations would impede the \"Japanese miracle\" that was then transforming their country. \n\nThus they pimped all sorts of false theories: fertilizer runoff, leaking military ordinance, bacterial blooms, and - most atrociously - filthy hygiene in rural fishing communities. The Kyushu researchers who had identified the factory as the cause were called country bumpkins, and big-name researchers from Tokyo came out to say it couldn't possibly be the factory. The press, a willing participant in the \"economic miracle\" narrative, ate this up. Listen to this interview between a reporter and one of the Kumamoto University researchers who had correctly identified Chisso's mercury as the problem (perhaps compare to the contemporary debate about climate change:)\n\n > Q: Selenium, manganese, thallium...the average layman just doesn't trust you any more. Why have you changed your minds three or four times?\n\n > A: The main thing for us is discovering the cause of the disease; we're not trying to oppose the factory. It can't be helped if the result is harmful to the factory. As for our coming up with three different theories, when you do research that's what happens; there's no need for me to defend this...\n\n > Q: Won't you just change your minds a fourth time and come out with another theory...\n\n > A: That won't happen...\n\n > Q: Maybe not, but why does Kumamoto University confuse laymen by putting out all these haphazard theories?\n\n > A: They're not haphazard. That's just the way the research happened to turn out...\n\n > Q: When you can't give a satisfactory explanation to a layman like me, I can't help thinking yours is really a country university. Scholars from the center [meaning Tokyo] are much better...\n\nSo, the poisoning continued. Because nearly half the people in Minamata either worked at Chisso factory or a connected business, those who spoke out were seen as enemies of the community. By far the absolute worst aspect of this tragedy: those fishermen and their families who contracted the disease were ostracized and ignored, for fear that local fish would be unsellable. In fact, we simply don't know how many people were poisoned because they hid their symptoms out of fear. \n\nIn 1959, eight years after poisoning of the bay began, Chisso corporation installed a Cyclator to purify their wastewater and claimed that - even though there was no definitive proof they were the cause of Minamata disease - their Cyclator ensured that the alleged problem was corrected. \n\nHowever, it was all a lie - the company consciously knew that the Cyclator would do nothing to scrub the mercury out of the water, and installed it simply to deflect the growing rumors. Thanks to this lie, the poisoning continued for another *ten years*. \n\nHorrifying evidence of the effect of mercury on developing fetuses came out of these decades. Doctors in Kumamoto noticed an immense spike in birth defects in those communities affected by Minamata disease. [Photographic documentation](_URL_1_) of those born with congenital mercury poising by W. Eugene Smith and his wife led to widespread international outrage but no action in Minamata itself. \n\nIt wasn't until 1969, after nearly two decades of continuous poisoning, that the truth about the company's multiple coverups became fully known. Chisso had dumped so much organic mercury into the water that Minamata Bay's seafloor qualified as a mercury mine. \n\nsource: Timothy S. George, *Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan* (2001)\n\nedit for spelling\n",
"I would consider China to be in an Industrial Revolution right now. If you look what happened to the peppered moth \"specifically, a genetically determined dark, or melanic, form of the moth replaced the lighter form as industrial pollution killed lichens on the bark of trees and also coated the bark with a layer of soot. The effect has come to be known as industrial melanism, and its existence is not in dispute (see Forrest and Gross 2004, 107-111 for a review).\" The Skeptical Inquirer29. 2 (Mar/Apr 2005): 23-28. Matt Young; Ian Musgrave.\n\nSorry about the citation, I do not know a better way of doing it in this form.\n\nBut, disputable or not as evidence, the industrial revolution in the Western concept caused much pollution, if not more because that was before we started monitoring it. China is in the midst of their own industrial revolution and it will take some time before it is fixed.",
"Almost all countries faced worsening environmental conditions as they developed. Japan and South Korea were and are increasingly pumping out more and more CO2. No country does pollution quite like China, however.\n\n[This](_URL_0_) Wikipedia page show the top producers of pollution in the world in recent years. \n\nBecause world-wide measuring of CO2 levels is a relatively new idea, I'm struggling to find pollution data that fits into the subs 20 year rule."
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91jf3s | why is it creepy to others if you never smile? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/91jf3s/eli5why_is_it_creepy_to_others_if_you_never_smile/ | {
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"A smile to humans is a \"I'm not a threat\" symbol that has persisted throughout evolution for a long time. Even some animals \"smile\" in a manner of speaking. Its just another form of body language. Someone good at reading body language (truly good. Ur not, I'm not) can read someone like a book.\n\nOf course there is the creepy smile that says something very different, with context. There is the smile that indicates deception, anger, jealousy etc (requires training to recognize accurately)\n\nBut just a normal smile basically says \"I'm not looking to kill you right now\" which back in cave man days was a very serious possibility. They didn't analyze it like we do these days. It was mostly instinctual. \n\nThese days, a stranger is not likely to just kill you and take your shit. But its still in our DNA and the information is used to make other determinations about the person.\n\nIn current times, someone who never smiles is not going to make someone immediately think \"they want to kill me\" but it can make them think you are always angry or have issues etc. The modern brain does, at some level, recognize that as a potential risk.\n\nEdit: To be clear, if someone is giving you shit for not smiling, fuck them. Maybe the non-smiling person is depressed, has had a really shitty life, etc. If they can't see that as a possibility and drop it, fuck them. I will say, as nice as it is to be around someone who NATURALLY smiles easily, making someone smile who doesn't normally is very rewarding.",
"I don't think it is anymore, after having had a Russian girlfriend and spending some time there. There is a cultural difference there where a smile is seen as mocking, as in you think the other person is a joke. At least that is how it was put to me, and you noticed that everyone there had a blank face. It was interesting to me to have to reprogram my brain while I was there to not stand out too much as I am always smiling.\n\nNow I don't assume anything when a person has no smile or a resting bitch face, because they could just be from a different culture!"
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5gbgg6 | why is chinese not pronounced the way it's spelled in english? | There are renderings of other languages to English that do the same but Chinese is most common. Why is Qing pronounced Ching? Why is Peking pronounced Beijing?
Side question: Why is British Worcester pronounced "Wooster"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gbgg6/eli5_why_is_chinese_not_pronounced_the_way_its/ | {
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"Mainly because the pronunciations are somewhere between the multiple spellings. If you hear a native Chinese speaker say Beijing, you'll hear a subtle mixed 'p' / 'b' sound at the beginning, and a subtle mixed 'k' / 'j' sound at the second syllable.\n\nChinese isn't the only language to suffer this. For example, there are at least 112 ways to spell [Muammar Gaddafi's name](_URL_0_).",
"Languages based on Latin use the same alphabet and the same basic array of sounds. Others do not, and use entirely different sounds. Chinese dialects use a variety of sounds which simply do not exist in European dialects and cannot be spelled with the Roman alphabet. We assign letters to those sounds, but they aren't the same sounds those letters make in our languages.\n\nAs to 'cestor', it appears commonly throughout placenames in England and is always pronounced 'Ester'. Leicester is Lester, Gloucester is Gloster, and so on. There's no real reason for it other than Britons being lazy with pronunciation in the middle ages, the same reason we stopped pronouncing half the letters in knight.\n\nFree Bonus: You're actually living in the middle of a linguistic shift in how a word is pronounced, the cot/caught divide. Half of people you know and most people under 40 pronounce those two words identically. The other half and most people over 40 pronounce them distinctly. Languages shift subtly but inexorably, and Cester has undergone a dozen or so transformations to arrive at what we see today.",
"The Chinese language simply has sounds that aren't present in English. They came up with a system assigning Chinese sounds to specific letters of the Latin alphabet, and in some cases they just had to pick a best fit that wasn't quite right because there wasn't a perfect match available in English. \n\n I had a four-week crash course in Mandarin. No expert, but I had a *little* bit of formal instruction.\n\nWorcester's pronunciation just comes from a thousand years of people getting progressively sloppy with their pronunciation. Remember that British cities are centuries older than US cities. We haven't had nearly as much time for the language and pronunciations to evolve in the US. British English was also influenced and altered by mass migrations from Germany and France over the past 1500 years.",
"There have been quite a few systems for representing Chinese in the alphabet which we use in English. The most recent system is called [Pinyin,](_URL_3_) and can read some more about the history of other systems [here.](_URL_2_)\n\nOne of the reasons that some of the letters in Pinyin don't line up exactly with their English equivalents is that some of the sounds in the Chinese language don't exist in English, so we have to choose something which is close but not perfect. For example there is something which sounds a bit like the *ts* at the end of the word \"cats\" which doesn't have a separate letter in English, but is represented by a C in Pinyin.\n\nAnother reason is that English isn't the only language which uses the Roman alphabet. While it might not make much sense for you as an English speaker for the letter X to make a *sh* sound, it makes perfect sense to Spanish or Portuguese speakers.\n\nBecause of this it's probably better to think of Pinyin as having its own pronunciation rules that are easier to make out in English, rather than as a direct conversion from Chinese to English.\n\n_____________________\n\nAs for Worcester, the town has been around for a very long time. So long in fact that we don't know exactly when it was first inhabited, or much about the [Weorgoran](_URL_0_) - the people who first lived there and gave their name to the settlement of Weorgoran Ceaster. \n\nOver the years the town and the rest of the country were inhabited by different groups of people, and language and pronunciation of things gradually changed. In Worcester's case, the sound in the middle of the word ended up being left out when people said the word. This happens quite a lot, and not only to place names, in a process called [Syncope.][Syncope]\n[Syncope]: _URL_1_\n\nSo in short, it's pronounced that way because people have been saying it like that for a while, and everyone has got used to it being pronounced that way.",
"It is not really spelled in English, it is transliterated into the Latin alphabet, which is usually used to write modern English and a large number of other languages.\n\nThis may sound pedantic, but understanding the distinction is part of the answer to your problem.\n\nYou may speak English or French or Mandarin as the spoken language.\n\nEnglish is written using Latin characters. Other European Languages like French or Spanish or Italian are written with the same characters (and sometimes some added characters like öáñß etc).\n\nThe characters may be the same in English or Italian, but that doesn't mean that a native English speaker can read a foreign language that is written in the language even though it uses familiar letters.\n\nSo far so good. And I have probably not told you anything you didn't know before.\n\nNow here comes the interesting part if you give some random European a text written in the Latin alphabet and ask them to read it out loud they will (absent any other context) pronounce the words quite differently. For example the name of the capital of France is written as \"Paris\" in a number of different languages but it is slightly differently in French than in English for example.\n\nSo what you consider to be \"spelled in English\" is actually written using a character-set that English speakers have no monopoly on and that doesn't really have a common agreed upon pronunciation among the different groups that use it to write down their language.\n\nAsk a German how the letter \"A\" is pronounced and the will make a different sound then an Englishman.\n\nNow there are other languages that use different writing systems. For example the name of the president or Russia is written as Владимир Путин in the Russian alphabet using Cyrillic characters. This is usually transliterated as Vladimir Putin. Or at least for english speaker it is. In Germany where they pronounces Vs and Ws differently they use a slightly different transliteration system and the В becomes a W and the given name comes out as Wladmir and the French write his last name as Poutine for the same reason.\n\nThe English and the Germans and the French use different systems to transliterate Russian names.\n\nThis is mostly because there has been lots of contact among the cultures for a really long time and everyone developed their own system that fits their own pronunciation of the letters best.\n\nWith other languages contact was later and less often and so for example for Japanese everyone basically uses the same transliteration system (actually there are several and there a different variants of the Hepburn that is the standards) So the name comes out more or less the same in Latin characters no matter which country you are in.\n\nWith some names you get so many different transliteration systems being used. For example the former Lybain ruler Mummar Gaddaffi spelled his name in Arabic معمر محمد القذافي but because no standardized system exist how to transliterate Arabic into Latin characters (or maybe to many standards exist) that can comes out as anything (List taken from the straight dope):\n\n > (1) Muammar Qaddafi, (2) Mo'ammar Gadhafi, (3) Muammar Kaddafi, (4) Muammar Qadhafi, (5) Moammar El Kadhafi, (6) Muammar Gadafi, (7) Mu'ammar al-Qadafi, (8) Moamer El Kazzafi, (9) Moamar al-Gaddafi, (10) Mu'ammar Al Qathafi, (11) Muammar Al Qathafi, (12) Mo'ammar el-Gadhafi, (13) Moamar El Kadhafi, (14) Muammar al-Qadhafi, (15) Mu'ammar al-Qadhdhafi, (16) Mu'ammar Qadafi, (17) Moamar Gaddafi, (18) Mu'ammar Qadhdhafi, (19) Muammar Khaddafi, (20) Muammar al-Khaddafi, (21) Mu'amar al-Kadafi, (22) Muammar Ghaddafy, (23) Muammar Ghadafi, (24) Muammar Ghaddafi, (25) Muamar Kaddafi, (26) Muammar Quathafi, (27) Muammar Gheddafi, (28) Muamar Al-Kaddafi, (29) Moammar Khadafy, (30) Moammar Qudhafi, (31) Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi, (32) Mulazim Awwal Mu'ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi.\n\nThere is no correct way or maybe they all are sort of correct.\n\nWith transliterating Chinese there is a standard, because the PRC made on. It is called Pinyin it was developed by Chinese and replaced earlier standard like Wade-Giles which were created by foreigners. The switch from one system to another is how the Chinese Capital 北京 turned from Peking into Beijing.\n\nThe way the sounds are transliterated is not specifically meant to imitate how an English speaker would write down what they hear but is a mixture from several different languages. The way the letter \"Q\" is pronounced perhaps comes the closest to the way an Albanian would do it. It is used to write down a sound that an English speaker would write down as \"ch\" rather than \"q\".\n\nSo that should answer you initial question about why Qing is pronounced more like Ching and the whole Peking and Beijing thing.\n\nBut it actually gets a bit more complicated than that, because Chinese is not really a single language. You have Languages like Mandarin (which is spoken in Beijing) and Cantonese (which is spoken in Hong Kong), the two are as different from one another as French and English are if not more so. However they can be written with the same Chinese characters.\n\nWhere a Frenchmen and an Englishmen writing down the the same idea in their own languages using the same script will arrive at different results, A Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker may come out with the same writing, because Chinese writing does not primarily encode sound but ideas.\n\nThe name of the Chinese capital 北京 says nothing about how it is supposed to be spelled it is just the two characters for \"North\" and \"Capital\" for \"Northern Capital\" and the city of 南京 means \"Southern Capital\" is today called Nanjing and used to be called Nanking under the old transliteration system that rendered Beijing as Peking. You can see that the charcter for capital is the same in both.\n\nAnother well known city with that character in it is 東京 it uses the characters for East and Capital again. What would you guess that is pronounced and transliterated in English? Something with jing/king at the end?\n\nYou would think so, but actually that is not a Chinese city at all but the way Japanese write the name of their Capital Tokyo. They borrowed the Chinese characters for their writing system but the language is completely different. The word for capital that comes out as \"jing\" when spoken by Chinese in Beijing comes out as kyo when spoken by Japanese as part of the names of cities like Tokyo or Kyoto.\n\nThe way spoken words their meaning and the way they are written down relate to one another can be extremely complicated.\n\nWhen one only ever has one language and mostly spells words the way they are pronounced except odd ones like Worcester, you usually don't realize how many levels there may be between words meaning and the characters we use to write them down as, but it can get really, really complicated.\n\nIt doesn't help that languages constantly evolve and borrow from one another, making a real mess of things that should in theory be really easy."
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weorgoran",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncope_(phonology)",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese",
"https://en.... | |
oi275 | Are animals susceptible to mental incapacitation? | After 4 years as a student at a magnet school for Science and Technology, I have yet to have a serious explanation of two things:
1. Are other animals susceptible to genetic disorders that make them mentally incapacitated like downs syndrome in humans?
2. Are other animals susceptible to mental retardation and other mental disorders that require heavy medication in humans?
If so, what happens to these animals? Are they quickly abandoned/left for dead? If not, why the seemingly rapid evolution of mental disabilities? Is it just because we have the medication/care to facilitate them that they survive?
| askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/oi275/are_animals_susceptible_to_mental_incapacitation/ | {
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"Any animal that has a central nervous system can suffer damage to that CNS or can have a developmental defect. What happens to them depends on the type of animal. Rats are gregarious animals and will care for a sick, injured or disabled animal. That is not the case in many animals.\n\nAs for medication, dogs are treated for epilepsy, anxiety disorders including PTSD, etc. using medications developed for humans. Again, whether they receive that treatment depends on who is caring for them. As these medications have been developed and then tested on animals to determine the effects and dosages, the treatment of various disorders has become more widespread. The attitude towards treating pets has changed as well. Pets are increasingly seen as part of the family by a larger portion of the population, which is a shift in orientation."
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3yk3dv | How come the earth at perihelion (in Jan) is colder than when it is at aphelion (in July)? | If the Earth is closest to the sun in January why is it so much colder than in July when it is furthest away? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3yk3dv/how_come_the_earth_at_perihelion_in_jan_is_colder/ | {
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"Earth isn't colder in January, the northern hemisphere is. Right at this moment there is summer in Australia, South Africa and South America and well, even in Antarctica, technically speaking. \n\nSeasons aren't caused by different distances to the sun (at least not on earth), but by the tilted axis of rotation. This tilt causes different angles of the suns radiation over a given location. Higher elevation of the sun in the sky means that the radiation is spread over an smaller area, or in other words, the location experience stronger heating. [This picture](_URL_0_) should give a clearer image. \n\nAs the earth orbits the sun, the axis keeps its allignment; consequently, at one time in the year the northern hemisphere points to the sun, while half a year later it's the southern hemisphere. As a result the northern hemisphere has summer, while it's winter in the southern hemisphere and vice versa half a year later. And at the solstices they have spring/autumn respectively. \n\nIf the earth had no axial tilt, it would be all time spring. The sun wouldn't change elevation in the sky over the year, but always take the same path. The equator would always have the highest radiation, rather than having this location moving from tropic to tropic over the year. The poles would have eternal dusk. \n\nThe distance to the sun does play a role in the seasons on other planets: Mercury with its tilt of almost exactly 0° only has seasons because of its highly elliptical orbit around the sun, while Mars has more pronounced seasons in the southern hemisphere and diminsehd seasons in the northern hemisphere, as the axial allignment and the perihelion/aphelion fall together in this particular way. \n\nFor earth it is similar, but the difference in radiation is only some percent, so it's not really noticable for human perception. "
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7puh9d | - how do flu strains vs flu shots battle it out? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7puh9d/eli5_how_do_flu_strains_vs_flu_shots_battle_it_out/ | {
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"Most flu strains are related. I would assume that having the antibodies for one might provide some protection until your body is able to produce new antibodies for the new strain.",
"The flu shot, like other vaccines, work by triggering your immune system, causing it to produce antibodies that target the pathogen. This process ordinarily takes time, which is why it takes a while for your body to fight off a infection or virus since this is essentially a tailored response. However once it's done so some of those antibodies essentially stick around for quite some time, and provide a \"memory\" after a fashion; if something trigger the main immune response, your immune system can respond much much quicker, dealing with the pathogen before it can get very far (ie immunity). \n\nThe flu shot doesn't give perfect protection. Instead they try to aim for strains they expect will be more common. Sometimes this is spot on, some times less so. However, even in cases like this there where the prediction is off, yes it can lessen symptoms. A lot of times the antibodies are kind of right and provide an easier starting point for your immune system, allowing it to more effectively fight off the pathogen. It's less effective, not ineffective. \n\n "
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3n0mcp | why so many couriers ride fixie bikes | These are people who literally ride a bike for a living so there must be something to it. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3n0mcp/eli5_why_so_many_couriers_ride_fixie_bikes/ | {
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"Because it's simpler system and there's less moving parts to break. A fixed gear doesn't have a derailleur nor the cable system for switch gears. The chain doesn't have enough slack to pop off the gear. ",
"I have ridden almost my whole life. I took a break in between. The multi speed bikes ditch me more often than my fixie. It's just mechanically simpler. \n\nI get less problems with breaks, gear changes. The multi speed bikes chain comes loose then the pedal spins and destroys my shins. \n\nThe down side is that any time you hit a hill, you are toast on a fixie. But most major cities are on somewhat flat areas. San Fran being on obvious exception. \n\nJust my thoughts",
"Because it's a fun way to tear around the city. And it looks and feels badass. That's about it. Everything else - simpler, low maintenance, etc - is just what to tell people who don't get it. ",
"Former bike messenger (Washington DC, early 90s) here. The only guys I knew who ran fixies were total posers. You could always find them at the park, smoking a J, drinking a 40, or talking up a girl. You almost never saw them actually delivering a package.\n\nThe reality of being a bike messenger is that you are going to be riding a bike 8-10 hours a day, 5 days a week. You want a bike that offers you max speed, for the least amount of energy. Having gears means that you will get more runs in per day/make more money.\n\nAll the top messengers I knew ran road bikes. I never had (or heard of anyone) having a gear related failure. You were much more likely to get a flat, or just straight up hit by a car. "
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1vjjg8 | why do we sleep elevated above the ground? | At least in the western world, most if not all beds are elevated above the ground. I know in some Asian places they sleep right on the floor so why don't we all do that? Seems like more effort to have the mattress on something. I figure a long time ago it was to avoid vermin and bugs but I'd say most people nowadays wouldn't have that problem. Is it just tradition? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vjjg8/eli5_why_do_we_sleep_elevated_above_the_ground/ | {
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"I would it started as a way to avoid bugs or other animals on you when you sleep, then someone saw you could put things under you bed. It also could have been a decorative statement within society. ",
"Your mattress needs ventilation. You sweat during the night and depending on how you sleep you breath onto your mattress. This way your mattress collects moisture that has to evaporate during the day if you don't want it to start to mold. An unobstructed airflow from below helps with this.",
"You say it's more effort to have a mattress, but consider how easy it is for your bed to be right at around hip level. It is easy to climb into and easy to climb out of. Plus the edge is easy to sit on.",
"I think it makes for better sex positions, but I'm quite a perv so .....",
"Well guys, 10 different answers and no sources... again..."
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2kso9a | why is general anaesthesia so common for wisdom teeth removal, if it isn't necessary? | I got my wisdom teeth removed this summer (age 37). Because I don't have insurance I went to a dental college to let some students do it on the cheap.
I was surprised to find out that they didn't do any kind of sedation at all and planned to do it with a local anaesthetic. Maybe the cultural "trope" of being knocked out to have them pulled is so common that I thought it was mandatory.
Is it purely marketing, something that dentists can charge more money for because so many people are nervous about dentistry? What about other tooth extractions -- are wisdom teeth statistically more complicated to remove? Also, general anaesthetic can be dangerous in some patients and I assumed it was something only to be used when necessary, so are dentists walking an ethical grey area by doing routine wisdom teeth extractions with sedation? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kso9a/eli5_why_is_general_anaesthesia_so_common_for/ | {
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"I'm having a tooth out soon and I want to be sedated purely out of fear. I can barely make it through an exam. An extraction would terrify me so I need to be knocked out.\n\nWisdom teeth can be more tricky to pull out. Mine came up so the root was sticking out the side of my gum and they were huge teeth. I would not have wanted to be awake for that.\n\n",
"Uh gurl, I do *not* want to be awake getting my wisdom teeth removed. I would not be able to handle that. Give me the full anesthesia please.",
"It varies from patient to patient. But the general rule is to try and avoid exposure to general anesthesia for ~~unnecessary~~ procedures *that do not really need GA*. It is advised to remove wisdom teeth one at a time under local anesthesia (several weeks to months apart) instead of removing them all at once which requires the patient to go under general anesthesia. Unless there are some factors that suggest removing them all at once. Like 4 badly impacted wisdom teeth (quite unlikely).\n\nEDIT: phrasing.\n\nEDIT 2: When I mentioned/hinted that 4 wisdom teeth removal might require general anesthesia, I did not say that it cannot be done under a local one. It really depends on the patient, how badly the teeth are impacted (depth, angle; they have grades of impaction @dental diagnostic criteria) and dental centers preference (or school of thought). ",
"I had mine removed on a valium drip, you're not out but you certainly don't remember a goddamned thing.",
"General anaesthesia always carries a risk and depending where you are at it is either considered an acceptable risk or not.\n\nWhere I live, and I believe in europe in general only local anaesthesia is used. Because the fact of the matter is that while getting wisdom teeth removed is unpleasant, it is also bearable. I would consider the pain for a week afterwards a much nastier experience.\n\nThe jawline is not that hard to numb down completely. With my operations the applying of the anaesthesia was the worst part because the needle was big and the surgeon used five bottles of agent on different places. After that, I could just try to focus on my breathing and try to stay in my happy place.\n\nWhere I live general anaesthesia is only ever used in the greatest of need. Wisdom tooth removal is such a tiny thing that it would be completely unacceptable to knock people out for it. But they do premed you with sedatives if you ask for them in advance (good for people with anxiety)",
"I just kinda wanted to ya know, get fucked up.",
"It's not really general anesthesia, it's a large dose of valium. You're sedated to the point of oblivion, but still breathing on your own. It's not necessary, but people want it and oral surgeons are more than wiling to provide and charge for it. "
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4f2uxv | how can space have no edge and yet still contain a finite amount of matter? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f2uxv/eli5_how_can_space_have_no_edge_and_yet_still/ | {
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"There are geometric shapes that have this property. Look at the surface of a sphere, for example. If you are a human walking on the Earth, you will never find the \"edge\" of the Earth, because there isn't one! However, there is only a finite amount of stuff on the Earth's surface.\n\nWe still don't know the exact geometry of the whole Universe, but it's at least mathematically possible to be on an edgeless but finite world. Who knows!"
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d2fkjl | Why is it easy to either completely close or open our eyelids, but takes effort to keep them half-open? | If the control of our eyelids was performed simply by a set of muscles, why would there be any difference in effort required to maintain the position? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/d2fkjl/why_is_it_easy_to_either_completely_close_or_open/ | {
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"If I can add further to the question by asking my own:\n\nAre the muscles in eyelids *contracting or relaxing* in the “open eyes” position, or is it more complicated than that?\n\nWorking from the common trope in movies that people die with their eyelids open and a person closes them physically post-mortem (as a sign of respect, for example) I would assume that closed eyes are the contracting position and open eyes are relaxed.\n\nBut on the flip side, a person who suddenly faints and falls unconscious *with open eyes* seems incorrect too, which implies closed eyes are relaxed.\n\nThat said, I don’t think I’ve witnessed someone fall unconscious or die, so I don’t have real-life experience of either.",
" > \twhy would there be any difference in effort required to maintain the position?\n\nTry doing a push-up normally, and then do a push-up really slowly. Try pausing at a few different points in the push-up and holding that position for a moment extra, and you might find that all the way up is as easy as all the way down, and the bits in between are more difficult. Not sure if these answer your question but it’s something to think about?",
"I tried to research this but had a hard time finding good evidence, but I'll try an explanation.\n\nThe [Orbicularis oculi](_URL_0_) is the muscle responsible for closing your eyes. The [levator palpebrae superioris](_URL_1_) is the muscle responsible por opening your eyes.\n\nWhen eyes are open, orbicularis is relaxed and levator is under tonic contraction, meaning that the muscle can keep this state of activity for long periods of time (sphincter muscles can also do this). When the eyes are closed like when you're resting, the levator is relaxed, and the orbicularis doesn't need to have much activity, because gravity does part of the work. The orbicularis is a lot more active when you need forceful closure. You can feel the difference if you just let your eyelids drop or closing the eyes as hard as you can.\n\nIn a midstate, the levator needs to be halfway activated (which is harder than keeping the tonic contraction) and the orbicularis also need to be somewhat activated. One simple thing you can notice is if you close your eyelids like for sleeping, there's no movement in the lower eyelid, but if you try to close them halfways your lower eyelid will raise a bit. This means that the orbicularis is more active midclosing than in a rested closed position."
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exndmg | why is there a difference between the voice you hear when talking and the voice on recording. and which is the one other people hear? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/exndmg/eli5_why_is_there_a_difference_between_the_voice/ | {
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"When you are listening to your own voice as you talk the sound is bouncing around your skull and makes it sound deeper. So your \"real voice\" is the one you hear recorded."
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27uvoy | (LANGUAGE HISTORY) How closely is the Kazakh (and other central Asian languages) related to the languages of northern native First Nation tribes considering they were their predecessor. | So me and my girlfriend, who is Kazakh, have been talking about how similar Nations like the Inuits are to central asians. She has seen videos of the spoken inuit and agrees it sound somewhat similar to kazakh minus the harshness on the throat.
Is any of this founded or is this a classic case of correlation not causation? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27uvoy/language_history_how_closely_is_the_kazakh_and/ | {
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"You can also try /r/linguistics and /r/AskAnthropology ",
"Kazakh is a Turkic language, related to other Turkic languages like Turkish, Chuvash, Khalaj, Uyghur, and Sakha. From multiple lines of evidence, including the earliest Turkic inscriptions, as well as records of Turkic peoples in Chinese histories, we know that the Turkic peoples originated more or less in modern Mongolia. There are some fringe theories that claim Turkic languages are related to Mongolic and Tungusic languages in a so-called Altaic language family (or even higher level groupings), but none of these are accepted by mainstream historical linguists.\n\nInuit is an Eskimo-Aleut language, whose other members include Aleut, spoken in the Aleutian Islands, as well as the Inuit dialect chain (in which neighbors can understand one another, but the varieties at the extremes are incomprehensible), which ranges from Tunumiit on the east coast of Greenland to Iñupiat on the north and northwestern coast of Alaska; and also several Yupik languages, spoken in west and southwest Alaska, as well as on the Chukotka Peninsula, in the Russian Far Eat. These languages do not have any higher level relationships that have had any kind of acceptance.\n\nSo to answer in brief, Kazakh and Inuit have no demonstrable relationship to one another.\n\nWhat may be going on is that there are several sounds that are somewhat uncommon in the world's languages, [uvular consonants](_URL_0_), common to both Kazakh and Inuit, perhaps not common to many other languages you have heard."
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sn8oy | Could someone list out why there are so many people in Pakistan and India with the family name, "Khan". | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sn8oy/could_someone_list_out_why_there_are_so_many/ | {
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"I might be wrong, but it could be down to a fairly small number of surnames. Considering both of those countries have a high population, that would likely make the number of Khans seem a lot higher too. The same is common in Vietnam, where the name Nguyen is very common (up to 40% [maybe 60%; not certain of the population have it), so if you increase the population the repetition of names seems even more common. This is just a theory though and could be very off the mark.",
"Well, it goes without saying that Khan was a name for Mongol leaders, its meaning falling somewhere in between 'chief', 'king', 'emperor' and 'governor' and Pakistan and India identified strongly with Mongol leaders after the reigns of Tamurlane and Babur. The wiki page _URL_0_ is actually pretty good for this. The Mughals in India often wanted to stress descent, real or imagined, from Tamurlane and thus Genghis Khan, and one of the results of this was a proliferation of people giving themselves a royal lineage through a 'royal' surname.\n\nNote the proliferation in other regions of similar surnames. Malak/Malik in Arabic, Shah in the Persian speaking world, and even the surname 'King' in English. A personal favorite of mine was [Malik Shah](_URL_1_); The king so nice they named him (king) twice."
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1e03or | how did our astronauts get off the moon and get home without the same elaborate setup we had in florida when they first launched? | I understand that the gravity is lower, buy I still can't see how they got home. Also, I'm no conspiracy theorist, just a little curious. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1e03or/eli5_how_did_our_astronauts_get_off_the_moon_and/ | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nThe gravity of Earth is about 6 times stronger, which doesn't look it would make a huge difference.\n\nBut if you measure the energy difference, it takes about 19 times as much energy to escape the Earth.\n\nSo it takes a heck of a lot of fuel to take off from Earth. And all that fuel's gone by the time you take off from the moon, except for what you need to return to Earth with.",
"It's a combination of the lower gravity and that what they needed to take off from the moon with was much smaller and as creep_nu pointed out, no atmosphere to deal with.\n\nThey left what they called [command/service module](_URL_2_) in orbit around the moon and what actually landed on the moon was the [lunar module](_URL_0_). \n\nAs you can see in the illustration it was built in two parts the descent stage (for landing) and the ascent stage (for taking off). And they left the descent stage behind when they went back up to the command/service module. The ascent stage. \n\nAccording to [this pdf from NASA](_URL_1_) the amount of fuel needed to get the ascent stage into orbit around the moon was a little over 5000 lbs and a enginge burn time of a little more than 7 minutes (pages 20 and 21 in the pdf).",
"A big part of the reason the rocket is so big on Earth is one of the biggest problems in rocket science.\n\nIt takes a lot of fuel to lift a rocket into the sky, but fuel is heavy. The more fuel we have, the more fuel we need to lift it. So, to lift the fuel we need to get a space ship from Low Earth Orbit to the Moon, to the surface of the moon and back is many many times more fuel.\n\nBut, when you're on the return journey, you're not lugging around as much fuel (we already used most of it getting out of Earth's atmosphere), so we don't need to spend as much fuel getting everything else back to Earth. That, coupled with the Moon's lower gravity, and reduced air resistance, the return journey is much easier!"
]
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78eirt | Why did the 390-750nm range evolve to be the "visible" spectrum of light for the vast majority of species? What's special about it? | I know there are some exceptions like snakes being able to sense infrared, and some deers being able to see ultra-violet. But those are very specific adaptions. All the rest adapted to (now) visible light, even though that's missing for half the time (night). And even those that are night-active just evolved fancy mirror eyes to catch more visible light, or ditched vision completely and went for things like echolocation.
What is it about that quite narrow range that made it the most viable choice? Wouldn't there be a lot more information in other ranges that could give an advantage, particularly at night? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/78eirt/why_did_the_390750nm_range_evolve_to_be_the/ | {
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"The visible spectrum is also where most sunlight is. Some snakes can sense far IR through special organs on their heads but not through their eyes. Other animals can see a little further into the UV, but there isn't as much sunlight there. ",
"I'm going to give a physicist's answer to this question. There are three overlapping factors: the spectrum of sunlight, the energy content of long-wavelength photons, and the absorption of photons by water in the eye.\n\n1) The sun is brightest in the [wavelength range of visible light](_URL_0_): the available light energy drops off fairly steeply above 750 nm, and *VERY* steeply below 400 nm. It wouldn't be useful to see in wavelengths where the sun doesn't shine much!\n\n2) To trigger the nervous system, photons must cause some sort of [chemical change](_URL_1_) in the organism. Typical chemical reactions involve changes in molecular energy (\"activation energy\") of one to a few electron-volts (eV). Light wavelengths longer than 1000 nm have [photon energies](_URL_3_) of less than 1 eV, so the photons don't have enough \"oomph\" to easily trigger chemical changes. If you use a chemical change with a super-low activation energy, there's another problem: atoms and molecules are constantly bouncing around, and at room temperature, a few will randomly strike your photosensitive chemical with enough kinetic energy to trigger it by chance. So you start having \"thermal noise\" that can swamp the detection of actual photons. Infrared astronomers deal with this problem by refrigerating their cameras, but life hasn't figured that trick out yet.\n\n3) Water is transparent to visible light, but [absorbs other wavelengths](_URL_2_) very strongly. Ultraviolet light below 200 nm will be absorbed before traveling 1 cm through water, as will infrared light above 1500 nm. Your eyeballs are full of water (path length about 2-3 cm): if you want to see deeper into the UV or infrared, you need to make your eyeballs out of something else. There aren't a lot of options."
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_energy"
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64cxdq | how can the judicial service prove that a defendant was read their miranda rights? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64cxdq/eli5_how_can_the_judicial_service_prove_that_a/ | {
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"This is why police officers now have body cams...\n\nThere is typically more than one officer on the scene when an arrest is made as well. The arresting officer has witnesses to the arrest. There is also the dash cam with audio, and possible video of the arrest.",
"Miranda rights being read when you're arrested is more Hollywood than reality.\n\nThe only reason the police need to Mirandize you is if they're planning to use your testimony against you. If you get stopped with a kilo of cocaine on your front seat, they don't really need your testimony - they're going to arrest you and toss your cocaine into evidence.\n\nIf they *are* planning to use your testimony, normally that testimony will be obtained in an interview room with video cameras and microphones down at the police station. That's when they need to read you your rights."
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4zctjd | Why was the U.S. carrier fleet scrapped so quickly after WW2 and why didn't they simply sell them off or give them away or just use them? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4zctjd/why_was_the_us_carrier_fleet_scrapped_so_quickly/ | {
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"So I sort of take issue with the basic premise of your question. That the carrier force was quickly scrapped and not supplemental to allies after the war, or made use of.\n\nOf the Essex class and the 24 completed, just 2!, would never see active service following WW2. The Franklin and Bunker Hill had both been badly damaged, and while the damage could at least be repaired the USN actually kept these reconditioned ships in their pocket to use as basically blank slates for refits to try out, instead of needing to take an active ship out of service. However as larger carriers, heavier aircraft, and other Essex's soaked up more money and needs, the 2 were sold off for scrap in the mid 60's.\n\nWhile the rest of the class got several decades of usage. The SCB-27 and SCB-125 programs were complex overhauls for the class which kept them useful for years. They added new catapults, rearranged the location of elevators, and added the now universal angled flight deck. That allowed carriers like Intrepid, Oriskany, and Bonhomme Richard to even deploy to Yankee Station off Vietnam along with their newer larger cousins like the Forrestals. \n\nHowever the size of the ships, and power available for the catapults limited their viability intot he 60's. They were limited to operating lighter smaller jets, and turbo prop aircraft, or helicopters. While they could be useful for striking land targets in close proximity like Vietnam, for open ocean, or as part of a task force this increasingly limited what they could do. Many found themselves converted to helicopter carriers like Boxer, amphibious assault ships like Valley Forge, or as useful for ASW patrol aircraft carriers. Others found more unique usage, the Tarawa later became an aircraft transport. And also as a unique use the Antietam spent over a decade in Florida as a training carrier for Pensacola, followed by Lexington until the early 90's. \n\nAs to why we didn't sell off or transfer some carriers. Well we did actually. The French got 2 smaller carriers, and the Spanish 1. But consider that any other nation that had need had another buyer. The RN was selling off much faster and aggressively, and had a few easy customers. The Canadians and Aussies both took possession of ex-RN carriers, while the Argentinians, Brazilians, and even Dutch all bought some too. \n\nWhile the British had their own stable of carriers and no need to buy any, and the French were not in a position to operate any large fleet carriers. \n\nThe USN was also unwilling to easily part with good usable hulls for carriers in the late 40's. As no new carriers were being built, and the Midway class had been cut in half the Carrier Admirals were anxious to not be the victim of the USAF seeking to establish primacy as the US military's air power wing. And if they could sell of a few of their carriers, why not all of them and let the Air Force do the job? The tension over the future of carriers and the Cancellation of the USS United States led to it spilling over into a series of sharp public comments and hearing known as the Revolt of the Admirals. "
]
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673ads | what makes a mute person unable to speak? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/673ads/eli5_what_makes_a_mute_person_unable_to_speak/ | {
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"There isn't any one cause. Mute just means someone can't speak, no matter what the reason.\n\nKind of like a person who is blind may have been born with no eyes, or they may have lost their eyesight due to an accident, or they may have contracted a disease.\n\nSomeone who is mute may have a cognitive impairment that prevents them from being able to form words, or a physical impairment that makes it impossible to make sounds with their mouth, or any number of causes.\n",
"Most common causes are damage to the vocal cords that make it physically impossible to make the sounds required to speak, and brain damage to part of the speech center. There is also some psychological reasons, for example extreme cases of social anxiety."
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4ivnbw | why is the pound worth so much more than the us dollar? how does a currency degrade/change value? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ivnbw/eli5_why_is_the_pound_worth_so_much_more_than_the/ | {
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"How much the base unit of a currency system is worth is an entirely meaningless & arbitrary distinction *at a single point in time*. It's only by looking at how those exchange rates *change over time* that you get any information out of it.\n\nHaving a Pound worth 1.5 Dollars doesn't tell you anything interesting. If that rate goes to 1.25 or 1.75 next week, OTOH, you can tell that there's something going on.\n\nSimilarly, having the Japanese Yen worth 100 USD doesn't mean they've got a stronger currency, they're just using bigger numbers.",
"Okay, so way back when, every currency was based on gold and/or silver. Then some countries decided the wanted to smooth out the booms and busts of the economy, and decided the easiest way of doing that is by controlling how much money is in the economy. Long story short, it worked and inflation is lower on average and less volatile. Today, currencies are based on the trust that a dollar is a dollar. Which works, because everybody agrees on that.\n\nToday, the change in the value of currency is based on differences in interest rates in countries. If interest rates are higher in one country than another, investors will invest in that country and the currency in that country will rise relative to the second country. That's how currencies change in value today. However, when currencies were based on gold and silver, that wasn't possible. That's how the general level of exchange rates were set. Today, they don't matter, their movement does, because they make goods cheaper or more expensive in different countries",
"It's like deciding whether to cut a pizza in 8, 10, or 12 slices. So the U.S. is a large pizza cut into 12 slices and Britain is a medium pizza cut into 8 slices. Each individual slice might be larger on the British pizza, but all the slices together are more on the American pizza.\n\nThe percent in change in value over time is more important that the absolute numbers at a specific time. Each country can decide how much currency to issue, and that will impact its value. But is the size of the pizza growing or shrinking, vs. is it getting cut into more or fewer slices, is what's important.\n\nThe growing or shrinking is determined by supply and demand for the various currencies, which is heavily influenced on trade. If the U.S. had more demand for imports from Britain, then the Pound will strengthen relative to the dollar. If the opposite is true, then the Dollar will strengthen."
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k1d7t | Are there any irrational numbers which don't have equally-occuring digits? | So, in all the irrational numbers I've come across, each digit occurs with equal frequency.
Are there any numbers in which this doesn't happen?
EDIT: Are there any commonly used irrational mathematical constants which are not "normal"? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/k1d7t/are_there_any_irrational_numbers_which_dont_have/ | {
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"Lots. For example, I believe that this number, extended indefinitely, is irrational:\n\n0.101001000100001000001...",
"This property is **(edit: almost)** called [normality](_URL_0_). Almost all real numbers are normal. Obviously rational numbers are ~~(generally)~~ not, but it's rather easy to construct irrational numbers that are not -- just choose \"randomly\" only allowing a subset of the digits. (Replace random with any deterministic non-repeating sequence, if that worries you.)",
"Lots. For example, I believe that this number, extended indefinitely, is irrational:\n\n0.101001000100001000001...",
"This property is **(edit: almost)** called [normality](_URL_0_). Almost all real numbers are normal. Obviously rational numbers are ~~(generally)~~ not, but it's rather easy to construct irrational numbers that are not -- just choose \"randomly\" only allowing a subset of the digits. (Replace random with any deterministic non-repeating sequence, if that worries you.)"
]
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ykt4l | What research has there been into the ability of animals besides humans to hallucinate? | Obviously humans can hallucinate, what about are closest relatives the primates? Can Mammals, Birds, other vertebrates, or even cephalopods? If so do they share any common traits? If not is it because of the difficulties to study the phenomenon or do they lack certain necessary traits. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ykt4l/what_research_has_there_been_into_the_ability_of/ | {
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"My chance to shine!\n\nFrom a neuropharmacologic stance, hallucinations can be induced with indoleamine pyscomimetics (LSD is a good example). These drugs can be given to mice and a response gained. From there we then use the drug under research to try and end the responses or reduce them.\n\nThe important factor here is that the mice respond. In some way the mice are responding to the agent we give them. There are conflicting views on the mechansim of action for the indoleamine psychotomimetics. There is supportive and contradictory evidence for the involvement of 5HT receptors in the actions of hallucinations.\n\nHowever; some potent 5-HT1A agonists are not very potent hallucinogens, and furthermore tolerance to indoleamines elicits cross tolerance with mescaline; mescaline does not bind with high affinity to 5-HT1A receptors.\n\nThere is another 5HT receptor, the 5HT2. Hallucinogenic indoleamines and phenylethylamines have high affinity for 5-HT2 receptors and psychopharmacological responses are blocked by 5-HT2 receptor antagonists.\n\nThis suggests that the 5HT2 receptor is heavily involved in hallucinations, but that the 5HT1A may or may not be. It is known that mice have these receptors.\n\nFrom this it is fair to conclude that in humans hallucinations are at least in part caused by 5HT receptors, and that mice also have these receptors. It is not possible to prove they have hallucinations, but a response is routinely gained from mice that have the 5HT receptors agonised. That gives credibility to the idea that mice can hallucinate.\n\n\n"
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1atr2b | What are the two red spots that are missing from the Planck CMWB map? What could cause the difference? | _URL_0_
You can see that the two red spots near the centre are not present on the Planck image. What is the reason for this? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1atr2b/what_are_the_two_red_spots_that_are_missing_from/ | {
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"That region is right in the midplane of the Galaxy, where there is a lot of foreground emission which must be properly subtracted. It is possible that the subtraction was less good in WMAP than for Planck.\n\nAlso, the higher angular resolution of Planck means that some blobs in WMAP get resolved and broken up."
]
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"http://www.pictureshack.us/images/21323_wmap-planck.gif"
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4h5u03 | why wasn't north america as advanced as eurasia was? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4h5u03/eli5_why_wasnt_north_america_as_advanced_as/ | {
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"One theory is a lack of domesticatable animals. CGP Grey has an excellent pair of videos about it if you'd like to learn more. I'll link them in just a second\n\nEDIT: _URL_0_\n_URL_1_"
]
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2jmb6f | video game graphics are just going to keep getting better and better. are we eventually going to have live action video games that have real actors in them | P.S. I know some real actors have been in motion capture for games such as Silent Hills and L.A. Noire | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jmb6f/eli5video_game_graphics_are_just_going_to_keep/ | {
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"Far too expensive in my opinion, it's far cheaper to just create a 3d model then pay an actor exorbitant amounts of money to flail around in front of a camera",
"That's not really feasible for most game genres. You would have to have the actor take every step, every shot, and every roll possible in the entire game. Human time is far more expensive than computer time. You might be able to do it in something like a sports game where the field is uniform, but not in something like a first person shooter where you're moving around varied terrain. Eventually, we'll be able to put a real human face on the characters in game, but all the movement will still be done as a digital animation based off of motion capture and not an actual recording of the actor's movements.",
"[They already exist](_URL_0_).\n\nMost of them take the form of some kind of choose-your-own-adventure game, like \"Star Trek: Borg\" or \"Darkstar\". You watch some video clips, then either a video happens that you have to click on, or a mini-game is transitioned to where you solve a puzzle to continue.\n\nThere are others like Phantasmagoria that are more point-and-click adventure like. The actor recorded a million little clips: walk here, walk there, pick up this, put down that. From that, they become your avatar who wonders around the world.\n\nFinally there's ones like the Wing Commander series, where the actual game is interspersed with cinematic story clips. Some of those clips are interactive conversations, while others change (drastically or subtlety) based on your actions in missions and previous conversations.",
"You'd be better off just getting a good scan of the person. Ellen Page was scanned in and mocapped (and apparently there was some controversy over some nudity in a debug mode) with Beyond: Two Souls. Also related is the Vieviev project (Google it, it's NSFW but pretty interesting) where they're scanning women's bodies in and then manipulating it in the game. It's amazing to look at on the Oculus Rift. You could do mocap for some scenes but it'd be easier during most of the game to have an artist make the animations. "
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258oft | How do animals such as salmon make it back to breeding grounds? | Recently in geography I've been doing a case study on salmon and they begin in spawning grounds, swim wherever they want and somehow make it back to the same spawning grounds to reproduce... How does this happen? Is it just salmon? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/258oft/how_do_animals_such_as_salmon_make_it_back_to/ | {
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"Lots of animals have incredible homing abilities that rely on all kinds of senses. Pigeons have been shown to use infra sounds for example. \n\nSalmon however use a combination of things such as the moon and tides but primarily rely on scent cues from their natal streams."
]
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26x0lf | Why does Maxwell's demon need to erase information? | As I understand, Maxwell's demon increases the entropy of the universe whenever it erases information. My question is why does it necessarily have to erase information in the first place? If we were dealing with a very small system, say a few hundred gas molecules, could the demon not record the positions and momenta of every single particle over a long enough time period to effect a separation without needing to erase anything? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/26x0lf/why_does_maxwells_demon_need_to_erase_information/ | {
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"Because we assume that Maxwell's demon can only store a finite amount of information. This then requires the demon to delete information when it updates the positions and velocities of the particles it is keeping track of. This is the fundamental connection between the erasure of information corresponding to generation of Heat (entropy)."
]
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ctsmt5 | If it weren’t for climate change, would most of the glaciers we see today still be retreating? | When looking at information on the history of glaciers in the U.S. today, it appears that most of these glaciers started retreating at least as early as 1910s (that I have read at least). Given that climate change was not as big of a favor back then (or was it?), it made me wonder if glaciers today would still be retreating if there were no climate change?
Disclaimer: I’m certainly not a “climate change denier”. The science is clear there. But would like to understand this better. | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ctsmt5/if_it_werent_for_climate_change_would_most_of_the/ | {
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"It's a complicated question, but the answer is probably \"yes/maybe, but we would generally expect that glacial retreat would have stopped or would be slowing, as opposed to accelerating, which is what we observe in most locations currently\".\n\nThe global retreat of glaciers around the world is likely a combination of both anthropogenic climate change and a response to the end of the [Little Ice Age (LIA)](_URL_1_). The LIA was a cool period with somewhat poorly defined beginning and ending (i.e. there is argument about when exactly to say it started and ended, but it's clear that it happened), but that roughly spanned from the 16th to 19th centuries and was characterized by glacial advances in most places. While there have been a variety of mechanisms proposed for the LIA, it does appear to fit into a history of short lived cooler periods characterized by glacial advances (and eventual glacial retreats) over the last several thousand years, e.g. [Matthews & Briffa, 2005](_URL_4_), so it's reasonable to expect that there would be glacial retreat following the end of the LIA. The extent to which you can decouple the glacial retreat following the LIA from the glacial retreat caused by accelerated global warming from anthropogenic inputs of greenhouse gases is a bit muddled. For example, there's been the argument that glacial retreat started earlier than it otherwise should have (in response to the end of the LIA) in the Alps by anthropogenic forcing, e.g. [Painter et al 2013](_URL_0_). More synpotic views have suggested that generally there is some inflection point (maybe around 1970) of where the primary driver of glacial retreat shifted from a response to the LIA to a response to global warming, e.g. [Dyurgerov & Meier, 2000](_URL_3_), but glaciers are complicated and pretty much any location may have more nuanced behavior, e.g. as a random example, the history of glaciers in Glacier National Park record a brief glacial advance in the late 1970s and early 1980s superimposed on a longer history of glacial retreat, e.g. [Hall & Fagre, 2003](_URL_2_)."
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"https://www.pnas.org/content/97/4/1406",
"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0435-3676.2005.00242.x"
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3c5uxh | why do dogs get so scared or fireworks, no matter how quiet/far away it is? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c5uxh/eli5_why_do_dogs_get_so_scared_or_fireworks_no/ | {
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"Same reason why we were so scared of lightnings and made up fierce deities to explain their existence. We are scared of imposing things that we don't understand. Dogs are no different. ",
"What if all if a sudden, you started hearing unexpected, screaming sounds? You have no idea what they are, you just start to heard terribke terribke noises, and you have no idea what they are or where they are coming from. Wouldn't that scare you? For all the dog knows, those could be anything!",
"My dog has been lying in bed with my husband for the past five hours while he deals with ptsd flashbacks caused by fireworks. It is very dependent on the dog any the owner. If the owner is nervous and afraid the dog might be as well. ",
"dogs have a heightened senses they can hear more than us , the sound that might be quiet for us would be loud for them .",
"What we can hear at 20', a dog can hear @ 80'. That explosion we`re hearing may very well be 4X to a dog. Many vets will give out dog-tranquilizers this time of year. May wanna save them alotta stress next yr & get a perscrip.",
"Not all dogs are afraid. We used to have to tie my grandpa's dog's leash to something or she would go up to the fireworks. She would put her nose an inch from a strand of firecrackers going off. She wasn't the brightest dog. She had a scar between her eyes because she ran into a parked car while chasing a ball."
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26i8zx | what is ukip and why is their victory so controversial? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26i8zx/eli5_what_is_ukip_and_why_is_their_victory_so/ | {
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"Basically they want withdrawal from the European Union, membership of which they say costs the UK £120bn per year.\n\nAlong with that they would remove EU fishing quotas, withdraw from the Common Agricultural Policy and enforce much tighter controls on immigration. \n\nBasically UKIP is seen as an isolationist and racist party, a magnet to all sorts of crazy and scary people, as well as leaning well to the right, being friends with all sorts of nasty parties in Europe.\n\nEdit: Here is a Guardian article, [10 good reasons not to vote UKIP](_URL_0_).",
"* UKIP want to withdraw from the EU.\n\n* The 3 mainstream political parties (Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem) do not.\n\nDespite mainstream politics being, broadly speaking, in favour of remaining with the EU - the election results indicate that huge swathes of the country want out of the union.\n\nThis is controversial for a few reasons:\n\n* UKIP now has more MEPs than any other UK party. Remember - these are people who have no interest in the EU yet now have the most representation. They're replacing MEPs from mainstream parties who actually want to be MEP and who want (or *should* want) to develop the EU and the UKs' position within it. \n\n* It's also controversial because UKIP are widely regarded as a single-agenda party with few policies on anything else but withdrawing from the EU. This is important because we have a forthcoming general election and their popularity at the moment is expected to grow to the extent that they have a real possibility of winning seats in parliament for the first time. It's this bit, really, that is unprecedented and controversial. \n\n* Polls suggest that the majority of people either want to reform our position within the EU - or to be out entirely. Given that our ability to reform the EU and its policies relies heavily on our MEP representation in the EU the UKIP surge means reform is all the more difficult - pushing us further in the direction of *out*. ",
"\"People say they're going to vote for UKIP as a protest vote. That's like shitting on your hotel bed to protest bad service, and then having to sleep in it\"\n\nStewart Lee sums it up nicely.",
"The reason is simple to understand. The UKs three political parties are seen as not working in the best interests of the British people and are instead in the pocket of the international community of bankers. So in these cases libertarian parties tend to thrive.\n\nSo because they are a new political party who threaten patronage jobs of the established political order they are called everything from Xenophobic to Racist. Remember a lot of people in socialist countries like the UK. Have very high paying jobs they get because their friends get elected into office. I am not only talking about at the top of government but also at the local level as well. This is how the UKIP is called the racist party when the UK actually has a racist party called the BNP that is extremely popular with the white English lower classes.",
"UKIP are a party in the UK who advocate leaving the EU. The other parties all disagree, and yet UKIP have won the most recent national (albeit for the European parliament) election. The victory is controversial because UKIP hold the opposite opinion to all the other major parties and yet have won the most votes.",
"tl;dr Most of the UKIP voters have no idea why or what they were voting but something said immigration so they went with that\n\nHowever the UKIP wants to reverse all progress we're trying to make with green energy (For what stupid reason I don't know!) and pretty much destroy all the progress we're is making towards a better future.\n\nThey won't last long I'm sure."
]
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2vcumt | If you fired enough electrons into a black hole, could you significantly change the charge? | Ignoring the problem of where you'd get that many electrons, could you add enough of them (or positive ions/protons, I guess) to change the charge in a way that would alter its behaviour? (I've head that having charge or spin can subtly change how a black hole and its event horizon behave, though this might be incorrect.) | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2vcumt/if_you_fired_enough_electrons_into_a_black_hole/ | {
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"You can describe any general black hole with three quantities: the mass M, the charge Q, and the spin J (see [wiki](_URL_0_) for more). You are correct, you can get some strange effects, such as an inner and outer horizon, which is true if either Q = 0 or J = 0 as well (but not both)."
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21br7t | which further (plausible) developments in russia / ukraine could lead to or avoid a second cold war? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21br7t/eli5_which_further_plausible_developments_in/ | {
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"I think it's incredibly unlikely that there will be a second cold war, because there's nothing at stake here that either side is likely to launch nukes over. You have to understand that during the cold war, you had two ideologies competing over the basic structure of global economics and society. \n\nThat fight is not being renewed. Capitalism won a resounding victory. Russia is not trying to impose a new \"way of life\" on the world. Putin just saw a low-risk opportunity to grab some land, and create some nationalist pride within Russia that would distract from internal domestic problems and provide him with an approval boost. \n\nAlthough they don't want to admit it, Russia is not a superpower anymore. The country is rife with corruption, the economy is weak, and it's only managed to continue to project an image of power due to it's oil/gas production, which Europe continues to move away from.\n\nWhile they do have a decently large and modern military, it's drastically outnumbered by the forces that NATO has available, and Russia is not really capable of projecting military power outside of their adjacent neighbors. If they didn't have a huge pile of nuclear weapons left over from the USSR days, they wouldn't really be scary at all to the western world. "
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1keb6l | how are the finances of religious groups in the usa structured? | I've heard that churches, synagogues, etc. are "tax exempt" or "nonprofit." Does this mean they are all 501(c)(3)s? If they are basically nonprofits, how is it that some people (ex. televangelists) are able to make so much money? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1keb6l/eli5_how_are_the_finances_of_religious_groups_in/ | {
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"Don't answer! It's a trap!",
"They are non-profits. As to how the people make so much money? Salaries. \n\nNon-profit doesn't mean you can't have revenue, just no \"profit\" at the end of the year. \n\nSay you bring in 10 million dollars and building upkeep and operations costs 5 million. You have a profit of 5 million right? Wrong. You still need to pay the people who run the church, and there's 10 employees so let's give them Each a salary of 200,000. \n\nSo now you have 3 million profit, except the church could really use a new community center, oh that's another 3 million, and what do you know, we have 0 profit this year. \n\nNow you have a non-profit organization with the people working getting large sums of money. "
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1okuqo | How was concert etiquette in the major Baroque, Classical & Romantic periods of music different to the classical/art music concert etiquette of today? | Today I had a lecture on Beethoven's piano concertos, specifically No. 4 where the piano begins quietly on its own. My lecturer mentioned that the audience may not have even noticed it beginning because people did not treat performances with the same reverence as they would today. This led me to thinking, how has concert etiquette changed throughout the major periods of musical history? (Not referring to modern popular/rock music concerts) | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1okuqo/how_was_concert_etiquette_in_the_major_baroque/ | {
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"OHH YAY! Crowd behavior is my absolute favorite topic of opera history! \n\nIn the good old days music crowds were RUDE as HECK. There was no concept of showing respect for the art or the performers as we do now. Talking through performances was totally normal, and so was eating food, drinking wine, reading books (the opera house was lit as normal with candles, no darkening), getting up whenever, booing and hissing, and calling for encores of favorite bits in the middle of the performance, all acceptable. And that's just the floor seats! (Which were the cheap seats then, mostly middle class.) If you were a rich person in a box you could nap, play cards, have sex (draw the shutters first), go visiting in the other boxes, and even cook food on little braziers. (opera tailgating!) \n\nImagine a baseball game crowd from today -- take away the guy with the margarita backpack thing because it wasn't invented yet, but other than him you've essentially got a baroque/classical music crowd. They might shush up and watch when someone hits a pop fly (or sings a choice aria) but otherwise, do whatever you want. \n\nWhy did it change? Two things -- on the French side, the influx of more middle class and bourgeoisie who were not used to opera around the time of Napoleon quieted French opera down gradually (though it took a while!) On the German side, Wagner's reforms in opera had a big effect, he's the one who started turning off the lights and making \"immersion\" techniques in opera watching. By the end of the Romantic period things were pretty quiet. The Italians were the absolute last to adopt the new norm in crowd behavior, I have tales of Italian opera shout-outs as late as the 1970s. There's actually a school of thought that the way we watch old operas and enjoy old live music now is wrong and historically inaccurate! \n\nIf you want to read about music crowd behavior you cannot do better than *The Gilded Stage: a social history of opera.* Dense but awesome! "
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372wa1 | How does the brain process sensory information? | I'm having trouble imagining how we perceive senses. For example when we hear a sound, the air turbulence travels into the ear and gets converted into signals which go to the auditory cortex. But in the end whats makes us hear it the way we hear it. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/372wa1/how_does_the_brain_process_sensory_information/ | {
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"This is the hard problem of consciousness and the answer is we don't know. We don't know why electrical activity in certain parts of the brain can give rise to the feeling of seeing red in one case and hearing a voice in another."
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t4529 | Salt: Sodium or Sodium chloride? | I'm not a chemist or scientist, but I thought salt was = sodium chloride. Yet most of the general public calls salt, "sodium". Is this just a general and accepted misuse of the word, or am I confused here? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/t4529/salt_sodium_or_sodium_chloride/ | {
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"It's just a general and accepted misuse of the word, table salt really is sodium chloride.",
"Table salt is sodium chloride, but to a scientist, salt usually refers to a group of compounds of which sodium chloride is one. In nutrition (as I understand it) sodium content is what's important not necessarily salt content, so that is probably why people use them interchangeably.",
"In chemistry, ionic compounds that result from reacting an acid and a base are called salts. The \"salt\" we eat, table salt, is sodium chloride. Of course, there are also other sodium compounds that isn't sodium chloride, such as baking soda. So the \"label\" in the nutritional data includes all sodium compounds.",
"Salt is sodium chloride. The reason people refer to it as sodium is that when monitoring one's sodium intake (such as when your blood pressure is too high), salt is a major factor.",
"Sounds like you're more informed about salt than most people! For everyday use \"sodium\" does refer to table salt. But as you pointed out, the chemical name for table salt is in fact sodium chloride.",
"if salt was only sodium, we wouldn't even be able to touch it. sodium is a highly unstable element and when it comes in contact with water, it causes an exothermic reaction and could even react explosively."
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5hhyxx | why something purchased via mail order took 6-8 weeks to deliver instead of the few days it would take today? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hhyxx/eli5_why_something_purchased_via_mail_order_took/ | {
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"Because logistics have vastly improved. Options for quick delivery are so cheap and common now that businesses which don't deliver in under a week are at a serious disadvantage. \n\nIn 1990 no one expected to place an order and receive a delivery the next day without using a personal courier. ",
"A huge factor is that it took everyone 6-8 weeks, so consumers expected it to take 6-8 weeks, so there was no huge incentive to improve. \n\nLet's walk through the process - today, you place the order with a computer, which charges your card almost instantly, prints a ticket in a warehouse (or sends an e-mail to the store, at least), where a stock picker is given a computer-optimized route to take to collect multiple orders in the most efficient way possible. This is all in the first few minutes, potentially. \n\nWithin the hour, FedEx picks it up and using ridiculously complex algorithms, figures out how to get everything to the right place overnight. \n\nHow did this work in the past? You'd call in, and they would take a credit card, at best. If you mailed a money order, it would take another week. \n\nThe credit card form gets taken by a clerk, who charges it manually (which may create a backlog on busy days). Once confirmed, the clerk would fax (at best) it down to the warehouse, where another clerk would check some things manually... oh wait, it's 5 pm on a Friday. See you on Monday!\n\nThen a clerk would wander the warehouse, getting annoyed that someone would change it all around... no, wait, they've actually run out and no one reordered. Time to make this recursive and have the clerk place an order with another warehouse. \n\nThings take 6-8 weeks for delivery, so very little gets ordered this way, so the mail only gets sent out once a day, at 3 pm, so your order doesn't go out until the next day at 3, to a sorting centre where things get manually sorted and routed to what might be the best place... or maybe not. \n\n\n"
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1awywu | Can anyone explain early 19th century European Exchange rates? | I am currently re-reading Alexandre Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo" and am having difficulty understanding currency values. Often, numerous currencies are mentioned in regard to one another in seemingly arbitrary relationships. Mostly things like Crowns, Francs, Louis & Piastries(?) are referenced but I have gleaned very little of their relationships. The book, as you may know, takes place around the Napoleanic era and I am chiefly interested in the first 3 decades of the 19th century. Does anyone know the values of these currencies, and anything else that could be noteworthy?
Ninja: Wording | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1awywu/can_anyone_explain_early_19th_century_european/ | {
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"It is a bit complicated - most countries had capped their currency either to gold or to silver - however, as gold and silver varied in value and the exchange rate coins against coins remained fixed, some coins simply vanished from circulation when the metal value in them became greater than the exchange rate to other coins.\n\nLots of coins was discontinued, but continued a life in book-keeping. Many denominations never existed as a coin, only in 2-, 5- 10-, or 20-multiples of its value, and other coins, like US ones (dime, quarter etc) were commonly known by their nicknames.\n\nFor example, in Britain 1816 onwards;\n\n1 guinea was worth 21 shillings.\n\n1 pound was worth 20 shillings.\n\n1 shilling was worth 12 pennies.\n\n1 penny was worth 2 halfpennies.\n\n1 halfpenny was worth 2 farthings.\n\nThe shilling was a silver coin that contained 5,23 grams of silver. The guinea was a gold coin that contained 7,7 grams of gold. When 21 shilling coins (109,8 grams of silver) was worth less than 1 guinea coin (7,7 grams of gold) people would exchange shillings for guineas and melt the guineas to sell the gold and make a profit - the guinea then disappears from distribution. The guinea was discontinued for this specific reason - the last ones made was minted 1813 to pay Wellington's army in Spain, as the locals only accepted gold. The state had to pay 27 shillings in paper money for the gold needed for 1 guinea (a net loss of 6 shilling, not counting minting costs) per coin.\n\nFrance had during the time of \"The Count of Monte Cristo\" (1816 onwards) this system;\n\n1 gold franc was worth 100 centimes.\n\nA crown was a 5-shilling coin (thus containing 26,15 grams of silver).\n\nA franc was a 1-franc gold coin containing 0,29 grams of gold.\n\nA Louis d'Or was a pre-revolutionary or post-Napoleon gold coin. The post-Napoleon coin was worth 20 gold francs (thus 5,8 grams of gold), the pre-revolutionary one was worth 24 livres and contained 7,01 grams of gold. There were Napoleonic era 20 francs gold coins with Napoleon's profile on circulating still, and they were called \"Napoleons\".\n\nPiastra was the unofficial nickname of a Two Sicilies 120 grana silver coin (containing 22,93 grams of silver).\n\n1 ducat was worth 100 grana.\n\n1 grana was worth 2 tornesels.\n\nIt quickly gets complicated with gold and silver coins. People would often \"shave\" the edges of the coins and melt the silver or gold for its value and still using the coin at its full value. The state or corrupt minters reducing silver or gold value in the coins for their own profit was also common."
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4bocdz | Roman historians - how was bread baked in the roman society, and what role did it play? (following a diet) | Lovely historians,
I am doing an experiment where I am following the old ancient roman food culture in terms of diet for 120 days. I am trying to be as accurate as possible and documenting everything I do in a blog. I've been in contact with many universities and now recently traveled to Italy myself in order to research the topic. I want it to be as close to 100% authentic in regards of recipes and ingredients as possible.
The only thing which I'm having some challenges with is the bread, and what role it played in the old roman society. Also with what crops it was baked and how these were treated.
Perhaps the historians at Reddit can offer me some more insight? If you have any valuable info, please let me know. It would be greatly appreciated! Thanks so much! | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4bocdz/roman_historians_how_was_bread_baked_in_the_roman/ | {
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"Spelt was the best friend of the common man. However, different classes consumed different [kinds of bread](_URL_0_) and there were several varieties, besides. Are you looking to try all of them or emulate the average Roman? The British Museum and a Michelin chef recently tried out [a recipe](_URL_1_) from a large bakery in Herculaneum. It's a kind of sourdough.\n\nHard and soft grains yield different breads; with the introduction of new, higher-quality grains from Africa & Sicily, bread types expanded. Grains were first toasted, then ground to separate the chaff. Removing chaff from wheat, like bran from rice, leaves a better-tasting product. In this case, the bread was softer, spongier, and less acidic.\n\nTypically, slaves, soldiers, and the poor would consume barley, rye, and oat bread. It was typically quite hard; sailors and soldiers ate a kind of bread which was essentially hard tack. These are more resistant to mold but rather unpalatable, and bad for sopping up stews and the like. Barley is extremely hardy and at the time had a much higher yield than any other grain. I think I remember a professor telling me that in the 2nd half of the first millennium in Britain, it was an 8:1 bushel ratio for what you reaped:what you sowed. Wheat was nearly 1:1. So figure that's not much different from Roman times.\n\nThroughout history, the higher you get in class, the finer and whiter your flour will be. Wheat flour was highly coveted because wheat yields were so low. Good wheat breads would often have luxuries like oil, candied fruit, wine, and milk mixed in. Bread has been a very good indicator of status throughout time. Different types of wheat will give higher or lower quality breads. Semolina and durum are better for pasta and gruel, but semolina was used to make a less attractive, biscuit-y kind of bread.\n\nUnleavened bread was the norm until relatively late in human history, as we know from the writings of Plinio, the Elder. Romans would have eaten flatbread or a kind of gruel known as *polta* mixed with cooked meat, when available."
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3lyqe8 | what do people mean when they say that wages have been stagnant? | The only thing I can find is that essentially even though the numbers look bigger, they have the same purchasing power. So while you used to be able to buy a house and raise a family on minimum wage, now you can not. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lyqe8/eli5_what_do_people_mean_when_they_say_that_wages/ | {
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"The median wage in the US has not grown in real (inflation adjusted) terms. Basically, yeah, exactly what you wrote.\n\nThe purchasing power of people in the middle and lower ends of the income spectrum has scarcely expanded in the last 25 years despite increases in productivity over the same period.",
"\"Stagnant\" means \"remain still or the same\".\n\nWhen applied to wages, it means they've stayed nearly the same over time. This applies to nominal wages, what are actually paid in dollars. Inflation has no bearing-you can have stagnant wages in any inflation or deflation scenario.\n\n[Here's a nice chart for household income in the US](_URL_0_), giving both the Nominal (actual dollar amount) and Real (adjusted for inflation) figures from 2000-2014.\n\nNotice how the red (Nominal) line had a nice increase from 2000-2008 while the blue line stays relatively flat? That's ideal-increasing wages matched inflation and buying power stays roughly the same.\n\nNotice how the red line from 2008-2014 is relatively flat? That's stagnation-it's no longer growing and is hanging around the same value. See how the blue line has gone down? Since wages didn't keep up with inflation, effectively, people have less buying power than they did before. "
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qok9q | why doesnt the eu just drop greece from the euro? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qok9q/eli5why_doesnt_the_eu_just_drop_greece_from_the/ | {
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"If that were to happen, people would lose confidence in the EU. It would appear to 'not work' and lose credibility. \n\nFurther, a lot of people have invested in Greece. Other people have given loans to Greece. Other countries have given loans to Greece. Greece leaving would lead to a lot of people losing a lot of money which has a cascading effect on other people.\n\nFurther, people inside Greece will panic and attempt to withdraw all their money for fear of it losing its value. That in turn will make the banks collapse and that can also have a very large impact on the economy.\n\nAll in all, the world financial market is complicated and delicate and it's not as simple as dropping a country. It was probably more beneficial to help bail Greece out. "
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723nra | why do your legs fall asleep when you sit on the toilet for a long time but not when you sit in a regular chair? | Edit: Thank you for all the advice on why it takes me so long to shit. My problem, however, is getting distracted by my phone and just sitting there after the business is done thus causing tingling legs. Guess that's more of a personal problem though. I could have googled but thought of y'all instead- take that how you want. (:
Edit 2- I'm strangely proud that a question about the shitter has been my most viral post. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/723nra/eli5_why_do_your_legs_fall_asleep_when_you_sit_on/ | {
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"Toilet seat has a rim. Smaller surface area means it presses on your legs with higher force. So has higher tendency to slow down blood going into your legs. Regular chairs on the other hand are flat, have higher surface area, so less pressure, and less force pressing on your legs. So less tendency to slow blood flow.\nEdit: the comment below me corrected me. The higher force presses on the nerves, not blood flow. thank you.",
"Also I think due to the angle you're getting more direct pressure onto your sciatic nerves ",
"Because my arms are rested on my legs while I visit Reddit cutting blood flow to the lower legs making me paralyzed and my legs useless.",
"Wouldn't the concave shape of the toilet seat cut more circulation off than say the convex shape of a proper chair?\n\nAs far as I can tell, most toilet seats including the one I sit on this very second, has a concave shape",
"Do you reddit on the toilet (of course you do, don't bother answering). Your elbows are probably digging into the tops of your thighs and the hard seat rim into the bottom, and the combination is enough to reduce blood flow, causing your numbness. ",
"I think leaning forward creates more pressure as well as the relatively thin surface your legs are supported by. I have crappy posture to begin with and I think it gets worse in there. \nI also spend too long sitting like that. \nI spent the first 30 seconds going, the last minute cleaning up and the other 20 minutes playing games on my phone in the one place in the house where nobody can come bother me. Except for the cat. That motherfucker follows me everywhere and bites my toes while I poop.",
"same amount of weight, smaller surface area. you know how a bed of nails works? if all of your body was on one nail, that one nail would hold all of your weight and poke into you with all of your weight. (this has a name: normal force is the force that pushes you back when you push on something.) on a bed of nails, you're suspended on many, many nails, and even though theyre ALL sharp, each nail only holds a tiny fraction of your weight, so it pokes into you less.\n\n(also the reason snowshoes work. more surface area > each inch of snow is holding less of ur weight and is less likely to crumble.)\n\nso, all of ur body weight is on the seat of the toilet, so a larger fraction of ur weight is on each inch of rim, because there's less seat, so it's \"poking\" you more. where a normal chair has more even weight distribution. more force on each inch of ur body > more likely itll fall asleep.\n\n(ive also had my butt fall asleep after sitting on a chair for a looong time. it just takes longer.)",
"The toilet seat puts pressure on the nerves leading to your legs by allowing your butt to sink into the giant hole in the middle. This puts the bottom of your femur (thigh) under a lot of pressure, when that area would normally not be because our butts are designed to carry fat to protect our sacrum (tailbone) and the nerves that go through it/ around it. What happens is essentially the same thing as if you were to lean on one arm for too long- it's not so much a blood flow issue, although that can contribute in a minor way, but rather the compression of nerves. \n\nWe discussed this in a class in my nursing program (I'm studying to be a registered nurse) because they make a pillow referred to as a \"donut.\" It's supposed to help older adults feel more comfortable in a hospital bed, (especially because they don't have butt fat anymore) but instead it has the same effect as sitting on the toilet for hours on end. Companies try to market it to prevent pressure ulcers on patient's rear ends, but it's actually bad for them. \n\nNow you know! \n\nEdit: wow guys! Thanks for all the upvotes, and your wonderful comments :) \n\nOther users have pointed out the actual muscles and nerves involved: the toilet seat puts pressure on the piriformis muscle, which then compresses the sciatic nerve. That nerve compression is what causes the unpleasant feeling. ",
"Doc here, I know it's late but here's an actual explanation:\n\nThe feeling that you get is due to what we call neuropraxia, which is the mildest form of nerve injury. When you sit on a regular chair, your weight is distributed primarily on your ischial tuberosity(i.e. \"sit bones\") and other soft tissue meant for weight-bearing. When you sit on a toilet seat, the weight shifts to where it's putting your weight onto your sciatic nerves(the major nerve in your leg).\n\nThis compression of the nerve causes this mild, reversible nerve injury and is responsible for the \"falling asleep\" feeling you experience.",
"Have you ever had someone sit on your lap and thought, \"wow, they have a boney butt!\" What you're feeling are the ischial tuberosities, the lowest part of a bone of the pelvis. When sitting on a flat surface (in this case a chair) these boney projections prop up the body away from the nerves that run from the spinal cord down into the legs (the sciatic nerves).\n\nBecause the ischial tuberosities of the pelvis are fairly centrally located, when sitting on a toilet seat they don't prop up the body - and as a result you compress the sciatic nerves. Nerves really don't like to be pinched, pulled, or compressed. I think everyone has \"hit their funny bone\" enough to understand this quite nicely.\n\nNote: the reason the answer to this question has nothing to do with blood flow is that the main blood supply to the lower limbs are from the femoral arteries, which are located on the front of the legs, not the back.",
"Because your legs are way more inclined in the toilet (for you to dump easier), and you are literally sitting on a hole so the blood in the area that is in the border has a difficult time trying to reach your legs due to pressure.",
"Since there is a wide opening in the middle of the toilet, there is less surface area forcibly touching your legs. Less surface area equates to more PSI: (pounds per square inch). A chair often will not meet the threshold required to interfere with blood circulation enough to induce this affect.\n\nTLDR: toilet seats are designed in a way that provides a higher concentration of pressure to the area of the body you're sitting on.",
"Most folks lean forward, forearms on their upper legs on the toilet. This applies pressure to the femoral nerve which is a large nerve that serves the thigh, and muscles that move the knee. This pressure inhibits nerve signals from passing to these body parts, causing them to \"fall asleep.\" It's really a temporary deadening of the femoral nerve. ",
"Actually, my legs fall asleep even when I sit on chairs and sofas too. As long as whatever you're sitting on reduces your body's circulation it can make your legs fall asleep.",
"Not all toilets do it, I have found that more circular or toilets that sit with my knees at an exact 90 degrees allow my legs not to fall asleep. Where as more oblong toilets or ones that sit too low or too high don't allow the weight to sit evenly across thighs and feet. This cause more pressure on the under side of your thighs and nerves as well as blood supply there to be interupted.",
"It happens really badly when you rest your elbows on your knees which puts pressure on your butt against the toilet seat, cutting off circulation ",
"Because you've sat on the toilet too long. It's not good to do that; there's a reason why there's the saying \"shit or get off the pot\". I believe it could even cause hemorrhoids, or at the very least, make them worse.",
"Toilet has less surface area. Your body weight is directed to the toilet seat usually around your legs and these points act like little tourniquetes. Your thighs have huge arteries that are easy to restrict flow to. Also a fun fact, many older people die on the toilet when pooping because they exert so much pressure it clamps down on their aortic artery, and when they release it causes a reaction with their vagus nerve that lowers blood pressure to a point that they can't recover in their old age, and die a poopy death. ",
"The same reason being stabbed with a pencil will penetrate skin but being hammer punched with the same force doesn't. \n\nThe weight of the body is evenly spread out over a chair, but when on the toilet the weight of the body is concentrated on a smaller portion of the leg, which also has major blood vessels running where that pressure is applied.",
"You don't notice it but you reposition and adjust on a regular chain frequently. On a toilet you don't really have that luxurie as your ass is inside of a hole. You can move your legs a bit but that's it. You have to move your butt from the hole to unpinch those nerves. Lots of people get distracted by their phone and don't even realize their legs are gone until they try to move them.\nYour legs will fall asleep in a regular chair if you keep them still long enough",
"It’s because when you sit on a chair, your gluteal muscles (butt muscles) and the ischium (butt part) of the pelvis take most of the weight. When you sit on a toilet, your gluteal muscles and ischium are suspended by the basin of the toilet and most of the weight is beared by the semitendinosus and bicep femoris muscles (big parts of your hamstring).\n\nCoincidentally these hamstring muscles are right behind the sciatic nerve, which is the largest nerve in the body, and is solely responsible for almost all of the feeling and motor function of the leg. \n\nSo when you sit on the toilet, after a while, those muscles put pressure on that nerve and cause your legs to go numb.\n\nEDIT: spelling ",
"I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that there is a hole for you ass in the toilet seat, for obvious reasons. This put more stress on the back of your thighs which blocks off blood flow. That's my logic anyway.\n\n",
"When you're sitting in the toilet you're probably leaning forward with your elbows on your knees? That's pinching off the circulation to your legs at your hip crease. ",
"When you torture someone in a military interrogation, the chair does not have a seat. This type of chair is used for military POW training also.",
"Piggybacking to say: also why does my ass hurt/fall asleep after 1 hour of a flight across the US but feels fine after 6 hours on a computer chair ",
"The rim at the edge of the toilet seat puts pressure on a nerve that runs along the back of your leg called the sciatic nerve.",
"I called it Tetris legs, as I used play Tetris on the toilet for ages to escape the 3 women I grew up with, the only place I could get some peace 🤣",
"I came across this as I'm taking a shit. My question of why do I have to stand in pain while holding myself up by the sink has been answered. ",
"Your body circulates blood differently when actively trying to poop which causes this over time. If you only sit on the toilet your legs will not fall asleep",
"Perhaps due to the femoral arteries being pressed on. One day you may try to get up and fall, slamming your temple against the corner of your sink and before you turn around to flush. So when they find you the shitter will be full and you lying in a puddle of blood next to a full comode with your pants around your ankles. Why such a vivid hypothetical, you may ask. Because it happened to my uncle so stop laughing",
"Perhaps due to the femoral arteries being pressed on. One day you may try to get up and fall, slamming your temple against the corner of your sink and before you turn around to flush. So when they find you the shitter will be full and you lying in a puddle of blood next to a full comode with your pants around your ankles. Why such a vivid hypothetical, you may ask. Because it happened to my uncle so stop laughing"
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6slwyb | How long/many organ transplants did it take for us to truly understand how our body rejects new organs and how to fight this process? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/6slwyb/how_longmany_organ_transplants_did_it_take_for_us/ | {
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"I don't know the full answer to your question. But Renee Fox and Judith Swazey, in their book [The Courage to Fail](_URL_0_) have a chapter on this. In 1973 surgeons began to think that they had the ability to do heart transplants successfully. One of the things I don't like about the chapter, though, is they don't explain why they thought this. Dogs were still dying in post-op recovery, so I don't know why they thought it would be any different for humans.\n\nAnyway, two hospitals, one in Chicago and a Canadian hospital (I think in Manitoba) began doing heart transplants. Only no one was living very long. Some died in two weeks, others lasted six or eight months. These were all patients with very low life-expediencies without surgery, mind you.\n\nAfter nine surgeries, all with very low success, those in the Canadian hospital fought about whether to do a tenth. The main surgeon wanted to move forward. The director of the hospital didn't. I should have said that the surgeon at the Chicago hospital was the mentor of the surgeon at the Canadian hospital and he was faring no better. Finally, the director of the Canadian hospital said to his surgeon \"Do you think you're a better surgeon than your mentor? Because he's failing left and right [paraphasing]\" He admitted that he was not. They decided not to do the tenth surgery. That patient wound up living six more years on his own, far beyond what would have been expected with surgery.\n\nHeart transplants in the Chicago hospital stopped shortly thereafter. What followed was a long voluntary moratorium on heart transplants until anti-rejection drugs were invented. It's an interesting story in professional medical ethics."
]
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"https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Fail-Social-Transplants-Dialysis/dp/0765807416"
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6ot1rw | what does drowning feel like and how long does it take for the body to completely shut down to the point of no return? | Edit: I'm not suicidal, please don't worry! Just genuinely curious. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ot1rw/eli5_what_does_drowning_feel_like_and_how_long/ | {
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"The point of no return depends on a lot of circumstances. Most of the body can survive for quite some time and still recover. The limiting factor is the brain. Without oxygen the brain starts to get damaged. If the brain is too damaged then it does not help much that the body is fully working. This can take seconds to minutes or it can take hours. Kids can survive longer without brain damage, temperature is also a huge factor with cold water slowing down the process. So an elderly person who drowns in warm water might not make it even if rescued and given CPR within two minutes. However a young child who falls in an icy river and is found after three hours might make it given proper treatment."
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30tjx6 | What does the outside world look like to an observer falling into a black hole? | I understand that the time it takes for me to cross the event horizon is finite, but still very long (to a far away observer). So if I'm falling in feet first and look up, what do I see? I've been looking for an answer online and seem to find slightly different results. This is my understanding so far:
* All the light that would enter the BH during the time I fell toward the even horizon would pass by me, so I would "witness" the rest of the universe's time pass by very quickly.
* But it would all be in the form of extremely high energy radiation due to blue shifting so... it would likely kill me (if I didn't get spaghettified)?
* And as I crossed the EH, the light from the outside world would narrow down to a point, as the rest of the light would bend toward the singularity.
Is this correct? I also read a couple of sources online that referred to the contracting time of the outside world (to me) as an illusion. But this didn't sound right, as I thought the point of relativity is that time is *actually* different. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/30tjx6/what_does_the_outside_world_look_like_to_an/ | {
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"The event horizon would appear to recede below you: the event horizon is defined by the region of spacetime where light cannot reach you, but the light from farther above you can reach you perfectly fine. Observers far above you would appear to speed up, yes, since clocks that are higher in a gravitational well move faster. I'm pretty sure the light would be blueshifted, since it clearly gets reshifted on the climb out (from near the event horizon, that is). And yes, light that would have hit you from the side in flat space will bend behind you (to the singularity, assuming you're looking outward). This does *not* mean you wouldn't see anything from that direction. Light that would have otherwise passed above you would instead fall into your eye, so you would actually see a wider region of the sky than normal concentrated into your field of view, like a fisheye lens. I can't really comment on the detailed optical effects. The light coming from those directions may be dimmer, I'm not sure.\n\nAnd no, the contracting of time outside is not an illusion. If you go into a gravitational well and come back out, you literally have not aged as much, and we can measure this easily with GPS satellites (which need to take this effect into account to work properly). It is a common misconception that relativity of simultaneity, time dilation, and other effects of relativity are just optical illusions caused by the finite time light takes to travel places. They are *real* effects, and you don't technically need to mention light at all to describe them. Light does not have to *exist* for these features of relativity to work. There are *also* new optical effects on top of those, but the basic time dilation stuff has objective consequences. The thing you are calling \"time\" and the thing a stationary observer are calling \"time\" are *different*--it's like two people calling different directions \"forward\"--and so the statement that you measure things differently is totally sensible, because you're *not measuring the same thing*. "
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1w8obm | How much gold was actually found in California during the Gold rush? | You always read of people becoming wealthy from selling supplies to prospectors, but did any prospectors get really wealthy from gold finds? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1w8obm/how_much_gold_was_actually_found_in_california/ | {
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"Some prospectors (better referred to as placer miners for the first period of the '49ers) became modestly rich, meaning they obtained enough money (in the low 5 figures) to purchase \"that farm back home.\" Most of the 300,000 or so '49ers who came to California between 1849 and the early 1850s did well enough, but mainly because the Pacific Coast was so abundant in resources and opportunities (and especially non-mining opportunities). But the vast majority did not become millionaires.\n\nBetween 1848 and 1860 (a period which includes some hard rock, underground mining as well as the destructive hydraulic mining) roughly $300,000,000 was produced, this at a time when gold sold for roughly $16 per ounce, meaning that the period produced over 1 million pounds of gold. Because much of the period was dominated by small groups of miners, much of this wealth was distributed - in an uneven but a necessarily broad way - among the hundreds of thousands who arrived. See [this source](_URL_1_) for example. And see [this collection of gold rush letters](_URL_0_) which I helped edit for background as to what life, success, and failure was like.\n\nCompare this to the Great Comstock Lode in Nevada - first strike in 1859 with productivity for twenty years (followed by uneven periods of prosperity from mining). During that period roughly $350,000,000 in gold ($16 per ounce) and silver ($1.60 per ounce) was produced. But this was in a small, four mile line of mines as opposed to the California Gold Country that included a great expanse of the western slope of the Sierra. The Comstock produced roughly 500,000 pounds of gold and 5 million pounds of silver. In today's terms, both rushes would have produced sums in the tens of billions (with gold hovering around $1,250 per ounce and silver at about $20 per ounce).\n\nOn the Comstock, a few capitalists made most of the money, but laborers did very well, being the highest paid industrial works in the world with a $4 daily minimum for underground work (compare this to 75 cents for canal diggers or $1.25 per day for workers at the Colt Factory at Hartford (see the National Historic Landmark nomination for the Colt district). The California Gold Rush wasn't great for many, but it helped set up some. But as I said, the best thing about the gold rush for most was landing on the West Coast. \n\nFor the Comstock, see [my book on the subject.](_URL_2_)"
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"http://users.humboldt.edu/ogayle/hist383/GoldRush.html",
"http://www.nvbooks.nevada.edu/Browse/Titles/The%20Roa... | |
2qcjjg | Could a person stand on mars wearing only a good face respirator? | I read that some parts of mars, during certain seasons, are warm enough to be comfortable for human life. So is it possible that during these seasons you could go outside on mars wearing only some kind of face respirator and feel its atmosphere first hand? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2qcjjg/could_a_person_stand_on_mars_wearing_only_a_good/ | {
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"The atmospheric pressure on Mars is about 0.6% of sea level pressure on Earth. Temperature on a hot day is 20^o C, so the moisture *will* boil off your skin making it a very [unpleasant and dangerous experience](_URL_0_), though briefly survivable. \n\nSince Mars lacks a magnetosphere you will be subject to cosmic radiation. This will not kill you on the spot but will greatly increase the risk of developing different forms of cancer later on. ",
"You'd also have ear trouble, ranging from discomfort to rupture of the eardrum. \nThe difference between Mars surface and earth is about 100kpa, and eardrums rupture at 35-100. Your respirator, covering only the mouth and nose would produce a pressure differential in the ear between what is necessary for breathing, and the outside. \n\n\n\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n",
"The pressure on Mars (0.6 kilopascals) is well below the [Armstrong Limit](_URL_0_) (6.25 kilopascals), which is the pressure at which water boils at or above human body temperature. This includes moisture on the skin and in the lungs. Exposure for more than a few minutes would be fatal. "
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cuah4d | In the movie Gravity when Sandra Bullock is spinning out of control, would simply closing her eyes stop the spinning sensation? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/cuah4d/in_the_movie_gravity_when_sandra_bullock_is/ | {
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"I think I see what you're getting at. Velocity is relative, and you always feel like you're at rest. You only perceive speed relative to other objects by directly observing them - i.e. you see the fenceposts fly past while you feel like you're staying still in the car.\n\nBut this isn't the case if you're spinning. Your body is constantly in acceleration. The net acceleration of your whole body is zero, but the velocities of different parts of your body are constantly changing as you spin around. Your body has inertia and somewhat resists this change, which feels like a centrifugal force stretching your body apart. This is a *real* effect - your body really does get stretched a bit when you spin it around fast.\n\nWhen it comes to motion in a straight line, there's no difference between you moving and everything else staying still, and you staying still while everything else moves in the opposite direction. But this isn't the case for spin - everybody will agree that you are indeed the one who is spinning. There is a real, locally observable difference between you spinning, and everything else spinning around you: the centrifugal force will be different. There's also the Coriolis force will can add extra disorientation when you're spinning rapidly.\n\nOn a *really really big* space station, it can be rotating slowly enough that you get a strong centrifugal force with only a weak Coriolis force, and then it's *difficult* (but not impossible) to tell the difference between rotation and gravity. But if you're just a person spinning around, it will be very noticeable.",
"Yes, kind of. But only after she stops flailing and waits a few seconds.\n\nRigid objects with no external forces acting on them ~~can~~*EDIT: with one notable exception\\* will inherently* only spin about a single axis at a constant speed, so all that appendage-flailing changing her moment of inertia and center of mass has to stop. When she holds still at the end of the scene, her rotation smooths out. They actually did really well simulating the physics in that specific case. [According to NASA](_URL_3_) (and my entire aviation career) the vestibular system will actually reach equilibrium with your rotation *if it is constant speed*, causing the sensation of spinning to disappear after a short time. If she closed her eyes, she would not physiologically experience a spinning sensation except maybe the sunlight shining through her eyelids.\n\nThis is a famous concept in aviation which leads to lots of spatial disorientation and occasionally flying a perfectly good airplane [into the dirt](_URL_2_). Essentially your inner ear fluid catches up to your body's spin and stops giving you the \"hey you're spinning now\" signal, which causes pilots to think they're flying straight and level when they aren't. It's also what causes your eyes to repeatedly track one direction and saccade back when you play dizzy bat ([optokinetic nystagmus](_URL_1_)).\n\n\\***Edit part 1...** I was apparently unclear about the one axis thing above for two reasons:\n\nObjects with three distinct principle moments of inertia experience a [flipping effect](_URL_0_) when spun about the intermediate axis, which hypothetically could apply here but does not apply to the general case of rotating objects.\n\nOtherwise rotating rigid objects not subject to external forces experience a resultant rotation which can be described by a single axis. If you disturb this rotation by nudging the object briefly you merely change the orientation of that axis. Things don't rotate simultaneously in two different directions without external forces or mass redistribution. If she keeps her arms and legs still, she will resolve to a single rotational motion and her ears will eventually get accustomed to it. We are assuming she stops flailing and spins smoothly because A) it's the ONLY way she can get rid of the spinning sensation and B) she actually does this in the film.\n\n**Edit part 2...** For those asserting that you will still feel a \"spinning sensation\" due to centrifugal force, not quite, the axis of tensile force in your body (which is centripetal force) is stationary with respect to your body, and would feel like being pulled apart, not spun around.\n\n**Edit part 2 episode 2...** If you're going to fight about centrifugal force existing or not, take it somewhere else, we don't have to distinguish frames of reference to discuss literal feelings. You're both *not wrong*, one is just more convenient given the situation literally being about her rotating frame of reference and how it feels. In this case, centrifugal force existing is convenient.\n\n**Edit 3...** ^(HL3 confirmed?) To save a lot of extra reading ^(\\[he says at the end of a several hundred word essay\\]) \\-- there's a lot of conflation between the astronaut and a spinning top. This is not a valid comparison, as the top experiences a force from the surface on which it's spinning which is what causes it to precess. Sandra Bullock experiences no such effect."
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8f4wot | why does nerve damage cause muscle atrophy? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8f4wot/eli5why_does_nerve_damage_cause_muscle_atrophy/ | {
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"You nerves are the \"wires\" your brain uses to send signals to your muscles to move. If your nerves are damaged and the signals can't get through, your muscles don't move and then atrophy.",
"Great question! \n\nThe simple answer is that the body is a very complex machine that doesn't like to waste energy. If a muscle isn't doing any work, the body will divert its limited energy away from that muscle. Without energy to sustain the cells of the muscle, the muscle will shrink in size.\nIn the case of nerve damage, the muscles themselves are likely completely healthy, but they aren't receiving any directions on how to act so they lay dormant, not doing any work.\nThis energy/work-based concept is the same reason why muscles tend to atrophy when in a cast; because the muscles are physically restrained they aren't able to do any work. \n\n\nGetting a little more complex...\n\nYour nervous system has a number of \"tracks\" that control different functions. Descending tracks from your cerebral cortex (the ridges on the outside of your brain) are the primary control of your motor functions. The action of this \"corticospinal\" track is fine tuned by other parts of the CNS, producing smooth and coordinated movements.\n\nThe corticospinal track involves two nerves. The first travels from the cerebral cortex, down the spinal tract, until it reaches the level of the respective muscle--for your upper limbs this is at the cervical level (your neck), for your lower limbs the lumbar level (your lower back).\nThe first nerve--the upper motor neuron (UMN)--ends at this point, but communicates with a second neuron--the lower motor neuron (LMN)--which carries any message (either to relax or contract) directly to your muscle.\n\nDepending where the damage is (to either the UMN in the spinal cord, or the LMN running down your limbs), you can see different patterns of damage. \n\nLMN damage results in very rapid atrophy. The muscles themselves can detect that the nerve they communicate through is broken so they don't waste any time shutting down shop.\nUMN damage takes a longer time to result in atrophy. Since the muscle won't be able to function properly without the UMN, it will eventually shrink due to disuse, but because the LMN is still intact, for the most part, it won't shut down shop in hopes that orders eventually start coming down the pipe again."
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3x63g2 | What causes elements to form into all the different rocks and gems we find on Earth? | Is it simply different materials found in the ground, or is there more to it than this? I saw the giant jade stone on the front page and now I'm super curious about what makes them all form differently. | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3x63g2/what_causes_elements_to_form_into_all_the/ | {
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"You're asking a question which defines an entire field of study called \"petrology.\"\n\nSuffice it to say that a whole host of physical parameters control what kinds of minerals form from a given melt, including temperature, pressure, cooling rate, and yes, slight differences in the composition of the parent melt. ",
"There are lots of different ways rocks and gems can form. Depending on the conditions (especially the cooling time) magma or lava can form igneous rocks with different sized crystals of relatively pure elements. The pure crystals are called minerals. When lava cools quickly, like in basalt, the crystals that form are too small to see the individual minerals in it. When magma cools slowly, you get rocks where you can see the grain of the individual minerals, like granite. Sometimes a gas bubble might make it possible for particularly large crystals to grow, like inside of a geode. The magma or lava that forms an igneous rock will also be enriched in different elements, causing different minerals to form.\n\nJade is a metamorphic rock, meaning it started as an igneous or sedimentary rock and then slowly evolved due to heat and pressure. Many minerals have glassy transitions, so it is possible for them to melt but remain too viscous to mix. Metamorphic rocks tend to have wavy boundaries instead of sharp linear ones you see in igneous rocks or the straight parallel bands that are more typical of sedimentary rocks.. "
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1y5z4p | If I had a ten foot-wide core of the Earth as long as the diameter of the Earth would there be Earth-normal gravity at the ends of this long cylinder? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1y5z4p/if_i_had_a_ten_footwide_core_of_the_earth_as_long/ | {
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"No gravity iirc is relative to the mass present in a given space. Since the 10 foot wide core would not contain all the same mass as comprises the earth, gravity would be vastly reduced. Conversely if the cylinder were the same material as a neutron star it would have immense gravity as generally speaking a Neutron star might be around 10 km (6 mi) in diameter yet have a mass multiples greater then even our sun.",
"No.\n\nIf the entire Earth were compressed to the size of a baseball and you stood on a platform at the same distance as its former radius, the gravity would be the same as before.\n\nIf you squished all of the mass of the Earth into a cylinder 10 feet wide, as long as the diameter of the Earth, then the gravity would be the same.\n\nIf you drilled a hole 10 feet wide through the Earth and stood on a platform above the hole, you would have a tiny bit less gravity due to the lost material but it probably wouldn't be measurable.\n\nYou are not just affected by the mass of the ground directly below you. All of the mass to either side is accelerating you too, but the sideways vectors cancel each other out and the acceleration ends up being straight down.\n\nOn a completely unrelated note, if you are at the bottom of 10 foot wide pipe with a mile of water above you, the pressure would be exactly the same as if you were a mile deep under the ocean. Because the pressure is related to the column of water directly above you and has nothing to do with the shape of the container you are in."
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1vzpyo | Why is Julius Caesar a household name, but Sulla and Marius are not? | Why are Caesar, Antony and Pompey so popular, but Marius and Sulla are not? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vzpyo/why_is_julius_caesar_a_household_name_but_sulla/ | {
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"I would say Shakespeare. \n\n\"Et tu Brutus\" is something everyone knows but cant actually be attributed to Caesar, but it was immortalized in Shakespeare's plays. Much like how Romeo and Juliet are household names but the stories they originally came from are not.",
"Not to deny that Shakespeare had some importance in immortalizing Julius Caesar, but the Bible was also probably heavily influential.\n\n \"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's\" \n\nThe Bible makes several references to \"Caesar\" (meaning any Roman Emperor, not just Julius Caesar). The Bible does not mention Sulla and Marius.\n\nSince the Bible was probably the most influential book in Western civilization, its use of the word \"Caesar\" probably popularized that title (and therefore, Julius Caesar as the originator of that title) throughout Europe, and not just in England or English speaking countries."
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3d3t0t | what is that wind-like sound you hear inside your head when stretching at night/tired? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d3t0t/eli5_what_is_that_windlike_sound_you_hear_inside/ | {
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"IIRC it's caused by a small muscle in your inner ear known as the tensor tympani, which can be triggered when doing certain things such as yawning or clenching your jaw. Some people can do it on command, but the short version is that its a tiny muscle in your ear and the sound is it tensing up. "
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2typ4d | Apparently when shown footage of the Holocaust during the Nuremberg trials, Goering was shocked and speechless. Why would this be? | I've watched a couple of documentaries and they all show the same thing, Goering being very shocked when forced to watch film of Allied entrance into holocaust camps. Bodies, disease, etc. Was he faking it? It makes no sense because he was a pretty hardcore racist himself.
(I'm not an anti-Semite by the way and certainly not trying to defend the man, just curious why he showed surprise at being shown the camps) | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2typ4d/apparently_when_shown_footage_of_the_holocaust/ | {
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"Do you have a link to a video showing his reaction? ",
"No more guesses, posts that do not directly answer the original question or answers like : \"No historical info here, but even if he did know about the camps it's one thing to hear about them, and another thing to see them with your own eyes.\" When you post an answer on Askhistorians, it must be in-depth, meaning that it should be more than one or two sentences or based on a single Google search; as it says in our rules: \n\n > Being able to use Google to find an article that seems related to the question does not magically make you an expert. If you can contribute nothing more than your skills at using Google to find an article, please don't post. \n\nYour answer must also be non-speculative, meaning no answers relying on guesses or common sense. Including any phrase like \"I guess...\", \"It makes sense to me that...\" or \"It's only common sense.\" is a good way to have your post removed. \n\nIf you any of this is still unclear to you, please consult our rules, found in the sidebar.\n",
"Besides Himmler the top Nazis had very little to do with the actual running of the administrative side of the concentration camps or even the holocaust in general. As such it wouldn't be surprising if this was Goering's actual first look into what was actually happening in the concentration camps. \n\nFurthermore top Nazis could be quite squeamish, for example when Himmler went to observe a shooting of Jews in occupied Russia he had a near nervous breakdown from what he saw:\n\n > Himmler became very uncomfortable, very quickly. As the firing squad started, Himmler, was even more nervous. During every volley he looked to the ground. When two women could not die, Himmler yelled to the police sergeant not to torture them\n\n\nGoering actually had quite an interesting history with concentration camps, he opening the first one, Dachua in 1933, and he (along with Himmler) was responsible for ordering Reinhard Heydriech to organize the \"final solution\" to the Jewish question in Europe. \n\nAfter the failures of his Luftwaffe, Goering kinda took a backseat in politics, he was still active but the administrative aspects of things like the holocaust and the concentration camps would have been handed over completely to Himmler. This happened right around 1942 which is when the liquidation of ghettoes and mass gassings in camps began to happen. \n\nOf course, it's also possible that Goering was lying to make himself seem more innocent or ignorant of the concentration camps; but I would point out that at Nuremburg Goering bragged about setting up the concentration camps, so I do think there was a genuine shock factor at seeing the footage.\n\nI would also like to second requests for a link, because I've never noticed this in documentaries on Nuremberg and would be interested in seeing something discussing Goering's reaction. ",
"I take it from the question, that this was an event that was part of the trial itself - specifically that he was in the trial, and this was evidence being presented to justify conviction. Is there any historical evidence to point to this simply being a reaction of a person realizing that there was damning evidence that would lead to his conviction and, thus, execution?"
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3mhvqq | why the chief justice of supreme court was never considered for potus line of succession ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mhvqq/eli5_why_the_chief_justice_of_supreme_court_was/ | {
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"The chief justice has a very different role from a cabinet member or Congressman. Most importantly, Supreme Court justices do not act democratically: they do their best to determine what the law *is*, while trying to stay away from determinations of whether that law is good or bad, and trying not to be swayed by popular opinion.\n\nOther elements of the position also make it difficult. A justice is expected to serve for life (or until retirement), while cabinet members and legislators switch roles frequently, so they are more natural choices. Additionally, the chief justice becoming president would leave a vacancy in the court that the new president would nominate a successor for, which could be undue interference.",
"It is also worth noting that the Chief Justice is \"Chief\" because they were appointed to fill the previous chiefs seat. It is mostly just timing that makes you chief. The Chief is not necessarily the most senior member of the Supreme Court. "
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5mfs62 | If electrically charged particles were fired into a black hole, what would happen? Would there be a point at which the electro-static repulsion of the particles overcame the force of gravity? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5mfs62/if_electrically_charged_particles_were_fired_into/ | {
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"If you send charged particles into a black hole the black hole becomes charged, and yes, there is a point where the electrostatic repulsion wins over the gravitational attraction.\n\nThis happens when (in the right units) the total charge equals the mass of the BH, in which case it is called an extremal black hole. If the charge is less it's a stable subextremal BH, if it's more then it would be a superextremal BH, actually an unstable state.\n\nHowever, by sending charges into a normal subextremal black hole it is impossible to make it overcome the extremal barrier. If a particle carries a charge that would make the BH superextremal, then the electrostatic repulsion prevents the charge from falling into the black hole."
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7gggaq | Could I take a block of Lead, remove some protons and end up with the same amount of gold? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7gggaq/could_i_take_a_block_of_lead_remove_some_protons/ | {
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"Yes, but “just removing some protons” is not a trivial thing to do. It can be done, but it’s prohibitively expensive for producing mass quantities of some element for commercial sales.",
"Yes, but setting aside, for the moment, that removing individual protons from an atom is hardly a trivial process, and is vastly more expensive than the value of the gold produced, you'd **also** need to remove some neutrons as well:\n\nThe most abundant isotope of lead is Pb^208 , with 82 protons ('cuz it's lead) and 126 neutrons. Just removing 3 protons does indeed yield gold with it's 79 protons, but the isotope Au^205 which has a half-life of about 30 seconds. You've got to *also* remove 8 neutrons to get Au^197, which is the only stable isotope of gold."
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5akvll | why have we only discovered less than 5 percent of the ocean? what about the other 95 percent? | And what can exploring the ocean do for us? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5akvll/eli5_why_have_we_only_discovered_less_than_5/ | {
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"Most of it is covered with water. \n\nBut we actually have mapped the bottom of the ocean pretty well, as far as where the surface is and it's general formation. We just haven't sent probes down to get eyeballs on it; it's mostly been indirect measurements. \n\nSo we have great seafloor data, and actually the mapping of the seafloor helped us figure out plate tectonics. ",
"After a couple hundred feet light no longer enters the ocean so the majority of life lives less than 200 feet (60 meters) from the surface. Life does exist lower, however there is significantly less stuff to see. \n\nThe deepest human divers can only go to about 1000 feet (300 meters) below the surface because of the water pressure. 1 gallons of water weighs about 8 pounds (8.35 lb, 3.79 kg) so by going that deep you are putting all of that water on top of your body, which is another reason why most life does not live that deep. \n\nIt is possible to go lower with a submarine, it just costs quite a bit of money. \n\nThe bottom of the ocean is about 36,000 feet. So the majority of the ocean hasn't been explored because it's expensive and there isn't much life beyond what has been explored. "
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29be3f | How did Americans react when they learned that Hirohito would not only escape prosecution but also keep the throne following WWII? | Looking at all the propaganda posters during the war, it seems Hirohito was by far the most hated man in America, moreso than even Hitler. The deal with the Emperor doesn't seem to have been something that affected Macarthur's career, either. | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29be3f/how_did_americans_react_when_they_learned_that/ | {
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"I can give a little explanation of why and how the governments on both sides made sure there wasn't a massive adverse reaction, if not really what the reaction was.\n\nBoth the Japanese and the Americans expended a significant amount of effort in the post war period to portray the Japanese people and Hirohito in particular as pawns of the Japanese military that were dragged unwillingly into a war. For the Japanese the reasons for this are obvious - they didn't want to be hated and punished for their atrocities, they wanted to do everything they could to distance themselves from it in fact.\n\nFor the Americans there were significant advantages too. Ultimately in the post war period the US saw Japan as a potential significant stabilizing influence in Asia, and a powerful ally against the communists. In order to get the US populace to support this they had to try to undo a degree of their war time propaganda casting the Japanese as a whole as evil. As Hirohito and the imperial family was a major sticking point in negotiations, they had to cover them as well in this, as they couldn't really afford to oust the Emperor.\n\nHow much is this true however is dubious. Hirohito and the populace and a whole certainly didn't seem opposed to the war early on, and members of the imperial family committed significant war crimes during the war most noticeably Prince Asaka's role in the rape of Nanking. Ultimately however it was expedient for both sides, so it became the prevailing view it certainly helped that Hirohito took steps to surrender at the end of th war, and appeared contrite, and it is certainly true that most of Hirohito's power was symbolic, but I'm not sure it is true to cast them as unwilling.",
"Related, was anybody mad that we insisted on unconditional surrender then let them keep the emperor? If we had told them up front they'd keep their emperor, peace might have come sooner.",
"I have a follow up question - how is the Japanese defeat handled in current times? Is it totally glossed over? How is it handled in respect to the national pride that Japanese hold so valuable? How does it compare to how Germans and Italiand handled defeat?"
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1nz4yq | with a nuke, how is it possible that so much energy can come out of something that small? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nz4yq/eli5_with_a_nuke_how_is_it_possible_that_so_much/ | {
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"Nuclear weapons mostly work on the principle of fission. A heavy element (like Uranium 235, which contains 143 neutrons and 29 protons, and is unstable) is forced to lose some of it's subatomic particles and become different types of atoms.\n\nAtoms are made up of three types of subatomic particles, protons (positive charge), neutrons (no charge/negligable) and electrons (negative charge but generally minescule and general have to equal protons in number). These three types of atoms are held together by one of the four Fundimental Forces of the universe: the Strong Atomic force. Because fission is ripping apart atoms, the energy of the Strong force is partially where the energy from nuclear fission comes from. As well as other forms of matter, such as gamma waves, which are deadly to humans.\n\nIn a simplistic way: Imagine you've got a big bag of potato chips (or crisps if you're UK/irish). That is a whole atom. You tear the bag open, and potato chips fly across the room, some shattering into smaller chips. The energy is the force required to split open the bag and results in the movement of the atoms, or chips, across a space with a lot of momentum (which translates to heat, light, and radiation in nuclear weapons).\n\nThis may help: _URL_0_ \n\nNote that Nuclear Fusion (creating new elements by forcing light elements together) is also used for nuclear weapons (hydrogen bomb) but they were not the nukes dropped in the only combat Nuclear Bombing (Hiroshima and Nagasaki).",
"So I was in the Navy on a Trident nuclear missile submarine and worked in the Engine room (read: Reactor). When I first went through the Navy training this analogy is how the principle of fission was explained on the first day. Fission is how both a nuclear bomb and nuclear reactor work.\n\nThink of a floor covered with mousetraps (fissile/radioactive material) and on these mouse traps are ping pong balls (neutrons, protons). If you take a ping pong ball (a neutron) and through it onto a trap in the middle of a bunch of traps you get a chain reaction of ping pong balls (neutrons) flying everywhere. The rate and density that these ping pong balls fly everywhere is the energy and heat that is released.\n\nFor a nuclear bomb, the mousetraps are really dense and are all set off really quick. The radioactive material has really large atoms which means lots of binding energy that is released when broken (the bright flash and mushroom cloud)\n\nThe difference in a reactor like at a power plant is you have monkeys hanging off the ceiling (the control rods) and the mouse traps are not as dense or close together( the radioactive material isn't as concentrated). As fission occurs (mousetraps getting set off) some of the ping pong balls are caught by the monkeys controlling the chain reaction. Controls rods are made of a material that absorbs neutrons and remains stable i.e. fission doesn't occur.\n\n"
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165eih | why do broke actors have to do every movie they can to pay their debts? wouldn't one movie be sufficient? | I often hear about actors who will do every movie they are offered because they need the money. (Nicolas Cage for instance) Wouldn't the xx milion $ from one movie be sufficient?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/165eih/why_do_broke_actors_have_to_do_every_movie_they/ | {
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"That depends on how big their debts are, how much they really get paid, and what kind of lifestyle they are living in the meantime. For example, if Nic Cage owes some ridiculous amount of taxes, and gets paid a few million for a movie, he still has to pay taxes on that new income. Plus, if he's still spending millions every year on his home, car, parties, travel, etc. he may not have much left over to pay off debts. Finally, not all actors are paid the same amount - bigger stars who get people to go to a movie just because they're in it get paid a lot more than B-lists like Nic Cage.",
"You seem to be underestimating how much debt some people can run up. Cage got up to something like $13M. And even if he earns several million dollars for a film, he still has to pay taxes, his agent, his ongoing expenses, etc. at the same time he's trying to pay off the debt. And interest on the debt (or IRS penalties) can also make the payback take more money than one might think. "
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tkiih | why do i wake up "angry?" | Why am I not a morning person and why do I get angry when I'm woken up? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tkiih/why_do_i_wake_up_angry/ | {
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"I would like to know this as well. During the day, I'm a happy go lucky, completely friendly guy. In the morning, however, I am the most angry, psychotic person you'd ever find. I don't like to talk, the mere action of people walking across the floor disrupts my attention, and I hate it when people touch me when I eat. ",
"Are your dreams fun? Mine usually are. Having them interrupted to have to go to work and take care of other boring adult stuff feels sad. Often we express our sadness as anger because it's easier.",
"If you're a teenager you should try and find an Australian documentary called Whatever. It's about youth - there is an episode on sleep. It may also help if you're in your young 20's. \nIf you have troubles finding the doc, I'll upload it or something for you. ",
"I get upset when I'm woken up early because I have trouble falling asleep. It's like great, because you just HAD to know where the egg beater was, I'm now going to have to go through my day on 5 hours of sleep"
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qygs9 | How long does your body take to refresh all its atoms? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qygs9/how_long_does_your_body_take_to_refresh_all_its/ | {
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"Tattoos can last a lifetime. I see no reason why tattoo pigment should persist longer than other material in the body. One can therefore conclude that, whilst there is a constant cycle of material, a proportion of molecules that enter the body by whatever means do not leave until the person dies.\n\nAlso, there are ~30,000 more [molecules in 1l of water] (_URL_0_) than there are [litres of water in the world](_URL_1_). If all the water in the world were instantly well-mixed, then every time you drank water you would consume molecules that were previously part of your body. I don't know enough about water cycles to speculate on a time constant for water mixing, but the longer a particular volume of water has been in the water cycle, the more spread out it becomes. It might be sufficient to say that, after a certain period of time, the probability that you are drinking water with molecules of 'past you' is significant.",
"Extremely long time. No idea of the length of time but I'd bet much longer than a human life.\n\nI'll try to find the citation later for the details, but there have been studies on human brains looking at radioactive elements kicked up during atomic weapons tests. The bomb blew up radioactive elements, those elements were then taken in and incorporated into neurons born on the day they were inhaled or whatever, and then stayed for about 50 years.\n\nYour DNA there's some turnover, like when nucleotides get damaged, but MOST of it should not be in constant flux in your brain cells, which don't divide. Changing the DNA constantly would introduce a lot of mutations. So there's recycling, but it's extremely slow, to the point where most of the atoms are the same decades later. \n\nSo I'm guessing you'd have to live thousands of years for the atoms to have all turned over. And you'd long be dead of cancer or something else.\n\nEdit: [Here](_URL_0_) is a free review article that discusses the experiments and their significance, with citations to the primary literature. It was ^14 C, produced in abundance from nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 60s, they isolated brains from recently deceased people, purified neurons, isolated the neurons' DNA, then measured the amount of ^14 C. "
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1je905 | why do we need vaccines like tetanus more than once? | my understanding is that vaccines are weakened forms of an attacking virus. Vaccines allow the body to figure out how to defend against the vaccine, so once a vaccine is used doesn't the human body remember how to create these immune responses?
I think that weakened viruses are the reason that some people get sick form flu shots. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1je905/why_do_we_need_vaccines_like_tetanus_more_than/ | {
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"Living bodies are all about effectiveness. Our bodies will not hold on to the instructions of how to get rid of something if it has not happened in a long time. The reason is there are special cells responsible for recognizing a previously documented intruder, we keep a few of them around after an infection as a memory cell, to more quickly recognize this same intruder. After a while though, these cells will die too. And if the infection returns then, it's relatively speaking, back to square one.\nThe reason this happens with flu shots is due to evolution, I believe. New strains of the virus appear, and the vaccines are our best guess as to which kind might be most likely in upcoming times, hence the need for new ones."
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25oitt | what happens in the brain when it decides to attempt suicide | The brain and the body have so many different reflexes, instincts and systems whose goal is to keep itself alive. With the brain being the center of this what change causes it to switch from self-preservation to self-termination? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25oitt/eli5_what_happens_in_the_brain_when_it_decides_to/ | {
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"Suicide is not a reflex. Though our body is designed for self-preservation, ultimately it is at the mercy of our conscious command. If someone really wants to kill himself, there is no neurological reaction that could stop him.",
"The human mind is more complex than any single drive.\n\nYou're correct that self-preservation is a powerful instinct that we all have, but emotional or physical pain, the influence of drugs or alcohol, genetic variance, and psychological trauma or disorders can all be factors that can possibly compete against that instinct.\n\nThink of it like this, for the most part people commit suicide when there is *some* sort of stress or impairment of the subject going on. (Exceptions exist. People have committed suicide with no discernible motive or to make a political, philosophical, or religious statement.)\n\nWhen we are under stress or impaired, we tend to behave less rationally than we normally do. As an example, I will use depression. Depression can seem insurmountable, overwhelming, and it can impair our judgment.\n\nA person might not normally consider suicide, but if they suffer from depression they might reach a point where the hopeless feelings it brings on overwhelms their rational decision-making. At a certain point the drive to survive has less sway over the individual than the desire that the (emotional) suffering just stop.\n\nEmotional pain isn't \"just in your head.\" It's very real to those who suffer it. At a certain point a combination of emotional pain, lack of faith that relief is in the future, and emotional exhaustion from dealing with the pain can lead a person to feel that suicide makes sense.\n\nThey didn't \"lose\" the drive to survive so much as a combination of other factors resulted in a perfect storm capable of overwhelming that rational drive.\n\n"
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3e00lb | what is a "trigger" on reddit, and is it a term used outside of reddit? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3e00lb/eli5_what_is_a_trigger_on_reddit_and_is_it_a_term/ | {
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"When some people undergo severe psychological trauma, like rape victims or soldiers, they're left with something called PTSD. Sometimes, things that remind them of the traumatic event can give them a panic attack or other unpleasant things.\n\nIn some online communities, it's considered polite to warn people if you might be talking about sexual abuse/violence.\n\nOn Reddit, it's almost always used in a way that's meant to be condescending or insulting to those communities. The implication is that the communities are too sensitive to offending people and label everything as a \"trigger\".\n\nThey say it's a \"joke\". It really falls flat on that point - it's a no effort, content free bit of circlejerkery.",
"Please search before posting.\n\n_URL_0_"
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4hlyrh | why do rich people invest in football clubs? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hlyrh/eli5why_do_rich_people_invest_in_football_clubs/ | {
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"it's a way to spend the huge amount of cash they have into something that seems productive and interesting and can make them more popular or well known. it's also a status symbol thing."
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2zhrga | Where Can I Learn More About Maroon Communities? | Richard Dunn's *Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planeter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713* mentions maroon communities and how they interacted with Indies colonial activities throughout the book, and even has a reference to something referred to in the index as the "Maroon Wars". However, he does not really go into much detail about them. Thus, I was wondering if anyone knew of any other books I could look up to find out more about these communities. | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zhrga/where_can_i_learn_more_about_maroon_communities/ | {
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"Richard Price's Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas is the classic text and covers maroons all over the Caribbean and the Americas. It came out in the 70s but has seen subsequent editions. A good place to start looking at the different communities, the wars, etc. "
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8wpaet | why did it take till now to develop phone chargers that fit both ways? is there some special technology in making it fit both ways, or did just no one think of it till now? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8wpaet/eli5_why_did_it_take_till_now_to_develop_phone/ | {
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"Nobody wanted to break standards. The microUSB connector was standardized for phone chargers early on, when USB did not have a reversible connector. And is the inconvenience of using a one-way connector really that great. \n\n\nAlso, Apple's lightning connector has been on the market for a while, and is reversible.",
"It's really a case of no-one having bothered to make one until recently.\n\nThere are some technical hangups like having to duplicate certain wires on both sides of the connector but that's more a design nuisance than a real technical problem.\n\nUSB has been notorious for issues with plugging it in wrong-side up since it's earliest days but the difficulty of creating and getting everyone to agree to use a standardized connector is such that no one bothered to try to fix it.\n\nApple may not have come up with the idea of a reversible connector but they made the idea of one popular with \"Lightning\" the standard connector for the iPhone et all. Apple has the philosophy of using proprietary connectors whenever they can get away with it, so they had the upside of being able to develop lightning without needing to pass it by any standards bodies first. In other words less red tape.\n\nUSB-C was released partly as an answer to it, and partly to meet European law that mandates that all cellphones use the same charging connector. A law that Apple lobbied strongly against.",
"They had this ages ago. The connector was round, with a pin in the middle. This charging standard was great, but it only did charging. The whole USB thing came up to do data and charging at the same time.",
"I'm not sure the USB standards group [entirely knew what they were doing](_URL_0_). USB-3.0 came out around the time when phones were switching to Micro-USB B. This was also before phones started to get decent capacities for internal storage.\n\nA few years passed, and phones needed faster data transfer, so USB-3.1 was developed. But the USB-3.x high speed connectors were weird and ungainly in the interests of backward compatibility. So manufacturers designed a new connector. And they saw that they could make the connector reversible, so they did.",
"For a long time, they designed connectors purposely asymmetric so that people COULDN'T plug them in wrong. Look at DVI or VGA or old style parallel port. (The connections are parallelograms (EDIT: Trapezoids... I didn't pass 5 year old test of \"shapes in holes\". apparently) , not squares.)\n\nIt simply took people a while to figure out that \"hey, we can design smaller connections now and they're no need to have them be \"keyed\" like there was in the past.\"\n\nBasically, back in the day the state of technology dictated that we needed connectors that only plug in one way. And it takes a while for something so ingrained like that to go away. Also asymmetric connectors \"hold on\" better.",
"To add on: not that long ago, connecting peripherals and hardware to computers was a crapshoot of different connectors and wires, and everything needed to be keyed correctly in their connections to work properly. As such, connectors were asymmetrical and differently sized to prevent damage if they were put in the wrong spot, which still happened frequently.\n\n\n When USB came out, it set a standard for connections, and allowed flexibility where there hadn't been much before. But, manufacturers know that if you make something idiot-proof, someone somewhere will build a better idiot, and to minimize the possibility of damage they kept them keyed a certain way.\n\n\nOr nobody could be bothered. One of those two.",
"\"Phone chargers\"? Are you talking about USB connectors? And what about older chargers with round connectors that fit in more than just two ways? Or Apple's Lightning connector, that has been used for 6 years or something?",
"Think of a USB connector as a digital freeway. You have two north-bound lanes and two south-bound lanes. If you were to \"disconnect\" the freeway and reconnect it, as long as the north-bound lanes match up with the north-bound lanes, and south-bound lanes also match with south-bound lanes, then the freeway works as expected.\n\nIf, after disconnecting the freeway, you flip one part of the freeway before reconnecting, north-bound lanes match up with south-bound lanes and everything becomes a mess.\n\nTo solve this problem, and allow all freeways to connect in any configuration, you need a special interchange. This special interchange is an add-on expense which manufacturers decided to skip when USB first came out.",
"If you want to take a step back, phone chargers 15 or so years ago before the dawn of smart phones were proprietary, and may were actually reversible. Some were as simple as the old round plug into socket.\n\nAs phones became more prevalent and battery tech better where the need to exchange data where you would want to connect it to your pc, and \"hey, there is some voltage on here that we can use to send an effective charge the thing\" happened, they were somewhat contained by the standards of the time.\n\nHell even then it wasn't uncommon for you to have a dock that had AC power run separately, and then a USB or serial connection (early gen palm pilots and the like). Yes, you would plug your device into that dock, which was foolproof, but you weren't making and disconnecting the connections to your pc\\the wall a few times a day.\n\nUSB, while a standard way to connect stuff, still wasn't meant to be constantly plugged in and unplugged 20 times a day in its original design. \n\nSo in short, it didn't matter it took you 2 (ok, 3 tries) to get it to plug in right most of the time.\n\nSo when it DID become common for you to do that, you still had to maintain backwards compatibility with a ton of devices. Which meant that if you wanted to keep one end the same (the big end of the USB cable) that could plug into something you knew almost everyone had, the other end had to be able to handle the \"ok, i'm plugged in backwards, or i don't care which way i'm plugged in, part\".\n\nunfortunately that end was on the device you were most concerned with when it came to size and efficiency of the connection.\n\nWhich took some time for tech to get to a point where your phone is able to deal with that, the cables can deal with it, and it all can be done without compromising other capabilities of your device and at a good price point.\n\nReal ELI5: USB wasn't designed with that in mind, because you weren't constantly plugging and unplugging stuff originally. When it became common, it was too widely implemented to do it on on the easier side to do it, so you had to wait for tech to catch up on the other, harder, side to do it on.\n \n",
"In the old days companies didn’t care about compatibility. Each company had its own proprietary charger, some even changing shape from one mode to the other.\n\nThe regulation of phone chargers to a common type paved the way to stop this carnage. The USB connector/standard was a natural choice. It was initially developed to allow real-time voice-over-data communications with “phantom” power delivery over the same cable - an idea that has been around since a very long time in audio systems. It provides enough power to power and charge many devices, unlike older standards that did not support this feature (100 mA up to 500 mA charging current with 5V DC voltage, which is suitable for directly charging many batter types without the need to extra circuits).\n\nThe catch was that USB connectors were polarized; they cannot be flipped. The reason back then was that DC connectors cannot be flipped or they will damage the circuits - it would literally fry them. Nowadays however, there are power circuits that could be added to automatically correct a flipped power connection without damaging the circuits. In the old days it was not much of a requirement really because the advent of the USB was a big advancement and revolutionary its own right. But now, after we have had enough experience with its advantages and limitations, it’s quite evolutionary to require that connection to be unpolarized.",
"Follow up question(s) \n\nDoes a double sided charger cable / AC-USB charger block work any different when it's plugged in \"upside down\" ? "
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4jugm6 | Why is 0! greater than 0.5! ? | When I type 0.5! into my calculator, I get 0.8862.... But when I type 0! into my calculator, it gives me 1. How can a factorial of a smaller number be larger than a factorial of a larger number? I understand whole number factorials, but I don't understand decimal factorials at all. Also, how is it possible to have a factorial of a non-whole number? Is there some advanced way of defining factorials that we aren't taught in highschool? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4jugm6/why_is_0_greater_than_05/ | {
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" > Is there some advanced way of defining factorials that we aren't taught in highschool?\n\nYes, there is. The factorial function can be generalized to inputs other than non-negative integers. The standard way to do this is via the *gamma function*, which is a function defined over the complex numbers and is what your calculator is using to give you a result. \n\nThe gamma function satisfies\n\nGamma(n) = (n-1)!\n\nfor n=1,2,3,4,..., but it is defined in such a way that for all complex numbers *z*, Gamma(*z*+1) = *z* Gamma(*z*).\n\nYou can read about this function [here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_2_). A plot of the gamma function over the real numbers looks like [this](_URL_1_), and you'll see that Gamma(1.5), which is what your calculator is using for .5!, is less than 1.\n\nWhy does this happen? As you go from 10! to 9! to 8! and so forth, the value decreases. But notice that 1! is 1 and then 0! is also 1, or, equivalently, Gamma(2)=1 and Gamma(1)=1. How does this happen? The answer is that the gamma function has to have a minimum between x=1 and x=2; for any x between 1 and 2, Gamma(x) < 1; equivalently, the generalized factorial function is less than 1 when you compute the factorial of a number between 0 and 1.\n"
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r9ufs | Boiling and melting point when impurities are present | When a soluble impurity is added to a solvent the boiling point will increase if the impunity's boiling point is higher than the solvents. While the melting point will decrease if the melting point of the impurity is higher than the solvent. Then what about alloys? When I melt an alloy, if I add a metal with a lower melting point in as an impurity (smaller percentage of the entire alloy) will the melting of the alloy be higher than the individual metals. Then instead of adding a metal that has a lower melting point, I add one with a higher melting point will the melting point be decreased? What if the the two metals have equal proportion? How will the melting point be affected.
Then what about the boiling point of the melted metals. Since they are insoluble in each other, then will they just boil off separately? Thanks for the help. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r9ufs/boiling_and_melting_point_when_impurities_are/ | {
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"Actually, I think when a solute is added to a solvent, the boiling point of the solution will always increase, and the freezing point will always decrease, both in relation to the molality of the new solution (regardless of the freezing/boiling point of the solute.)",
"Concerning melting points of metal alloys:\n\nMelting points will be lower if you add a little bit of low-melting **B** to a higher-melting **A**, like the [tin-copper system](_URL_1_). In fact, in most binary systems, adding a little bit of alloying metal to any other parent metal decreases the melting temperature like the [iron-carbon system](_URL_0_), where adding a high melting carbon atom to the relatively low melting iron atom *still* decreases the melting point to form that low melting 'eutectic' composition. Just image search [binary phase diagrams](_URL_4_), and pay attention to the slopes of the very top lines on those diagrams, known as the [liquidus](_URL_2_) lines. Notice how all of the liquidus lines are lowering in temperature as you move across the composition from one side to the other? That means the melting point lowers as you add a little bit of one type of element to the other.\n\nThere are a few scenarios where adding a little bit of a second element will seems to increase the melting temperature of your compound, like the [Nb-Sn](_URL_6_) system or the tin-copper system up above. Look on the tin/Sn side of the phase diagrams and you'll see at first glance that there's an increase in melting temperature. But if you were to zoom in to an incredibly close distance on the Sn-rich side of the phase diagrams, you'd you see a tiny drop in the liquidus at around 230^o C for Nb-Sn and 227^o C for Sn-Cu, forming a low melting composition, known as a eutectic (you-tech-tick). Adding any small amount of alloying metal to a parent metal will decrease the melting temperature in alloy, *as long as the atoms are quite different from each other*. The tricky ones that don't follow this rule occur when the atoms are *very* similar to each other, like [silver and gold](_URL_3_). Silver and gold have similar atom sizes, valency, etc., and when you mix even a small amount of gold (high melting) into silver (lower melting), you'll still increase the melting temperature of the mostly-silver-alloy.\n\nedit for clarification: As BorgesTesla states below, systems can form stable intermetallic compounds that have very high melting temperatures, but this is generally when you mix larger amounts of each pure metal, not low \"impurity levels\" like I assumed you were talking about. An example of this that sums it all up is in the [aluminum-calcium](_URL_5_) phase diagram. On either far side of the diagram, the melting temperature of the alloy lowers whether you're 99% aluminum, or 99% calcium, but when you get into the middle of the phase diagram where Al2Cu sits, the melting temperature of that intermetallic is greater than either of the melting temperatures of the pure elements. Not all phase diagrams will have these intermetallic compounds, though."
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2jxp7i | "nothing ever goes away on the internet." truth or just a scare tactic? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jxp7i/eli5nothing_ever_goes_away_on_the_internet_truth/ | {
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"Closer to true than to not true. If you put anything online, ever, it's very likely around somewhere. If the thing you posted was ever interesting to anyone, it's probably been copied and saved by someone. Naked pictures doubly so.",
"It's as true as \"treat a gun as if it is always loaded\". Maybe you can get something removed from the internet, and maybe the gun jams when you pull the trigger. Point is it's better safe than sorry. "
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2yo0ib | why are americans obsessed with superheroes? | Serious question. While Hollywood is obviously saturating us with superhero films right now, it seems to me more than just a passing trend. For example, social media is full of grown adults doing superhero cosplay, posting superhero quotes, getting superhero tattoos etc. It's more of a cultural feature than a fad at this point.
As an outsider looking in, it's quite strange to see Americans basically hero-worshiping these fictional completely unrealistic characters, particularly when, as a country, you have so many *real* heroes and achievements to be inspired by. I often have the feeling that the fact these superheros are made up has been completely forgotten!
What is it about superheroes that appeals so much to Americans? Is it really just their impossible abilities? Why is this more relatable than an average but real person who overcomes impossible obstacles? Is this basically a country-wide trend or am I just seeing a particular sub-culture via the window of social media? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yo0ib/eli5_why_are_americans_obsessed_with_superheroes/ | {
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"A lot of them originally came about during darker periods of US economic and political climates. They gave people something to distract them from the reality. A lot of truly great stories have taken the form of comic hero arches and many artists have created amazing pieces of work. \n\nThere are now people who either remember the original stories, grew up in the time when many of them became animated series (90's Batman Animated Series widely considered some of the best Batman screen time in history) or have discovered hero stories in the new trend of movie appearances. \n\nThe stories are good, they have high entertainment value and huge production values. People enjoy the stories. Can't fault them for that. ",
"What you're seeing is what's called \"selection bias\"\n\nAmerica has 319 million people living here. You've seen, what, 20,000 people going absolutely gaga over superheros? Even if we call it 100,000, that's still about 0.0003% of the population. But it's a very *vocal* 0.0003%!\n\nThat said, I'd be extremely surprised if more than a small handful of them **genuinely** hero worship, rather than admire the tale being told (or even just are entertained by the story). I think a lot of what you're seeing is that comics, for a long time, were viewed as kind of nerdy and unpopular (despite their, well, popularity), but these days, it's easier than ever to find people who share your interests. As such, there's more acceptance of previously niche subgroups, and people don't feel the need to hide their interest as much -- at least online.\n\nAs for cosplay... it's a hobby. Nobody questions if you dress up as a superhero on Halloween, but do it at a con and suddenly everyone's flipping their shit? Again, aside from a few relatively isolated incidents, it's not like you're walking around and BAM, captain america walks by. Unless they're doing it for sweet youtube views, anyway... Unless they go to a con (or live near a convention center hosting a con), the average american is unlikely to see, in real life, someone dressed up as a superhero outside of halloween. And dressing up for cons isn't anything new. People dress up as anime characters, movie characters, TV characters, occasionally even book characters. It's not just limited to comics (though superheros tend to have simpler costumes -- if for no other reason than the artist doesn't want to constantly be drawing something horribly complex!)",
"Comic books.\n\nMost american adults nowadays (say 30+y) grew up with those as their thing instead of PC/PS/xBox/whatever, so now with all those Marvel/DC movies/TV shows, it's like a dream becoming true for a lot of people. It's a resurgence of their past, people are nostalgic and tbh superheroes are just cool.",
" > you have so many real heroes \n\nNone with super powers",
"Better question: Why are you NOT?\n\nSeriously, I would say it's our mythology. America is the fabricated nation of the modern world and we have no mythos to fall back on of our own. We cling to the superhero as a form of supernatural deity all our own. "
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dgcxmd | When and where does the "stereotypical" image of a caveman come from? Why do we seem to all agree that cavemen wear cheeta skins, wield clubs, and say "ooga booga?" | Obviously nobody was around writing stuff during prehistory, so this image of a caveman had to come from someone's imagination. When, where, and why did this come to be the image of a caveman? My first thought was the Flintstones, but it seems like they relied on some familiarity with the imagery. Is this idea from colonialism and stereotypes of "primitive" natives? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dgcxmd/when_and_where_does_the_stereotypical_image_of_a/ | {
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"French paleontologist, Marcellin Boule, was the first scientist to describe the Homo neanderthalensis as ape-like in the 1920s, probably leading to the ooga booga part of your question (also, an 1886 short story by Andrew Lang first described the practice of clubbing a woman over the head and dragging her home; cavemen behaviour was seen as primitive, ‘not like us‘). This version of the Homo became to be used interchangeably with the term caveman (although science tells us there were dozens of species of the genus Homo before Homo sapiens monopolized being a human; e.g. the Homo denisova was only discovered in 2010). This term is derived from the fact that the earliest traces of ancient Homini were found in caves, most famously paintings, long before archaeologists unearthed more substantial evidence of their culture. Considering your clothing question: At first, I thought Hollywood, as they have shaped many historically inaccurate looks collectively accepted to be the real thing (e.g. in the monumental antiquity movies popular in the 1940s and 50s). But then I found illustrations of pelt-wearing hunter-gatherers dating back to the 19th century (e.g. the cover of Pierre Boitard‘s 1861 novel, Paris Before Man), so I‘d assume the sentiment of wearing fur is rooted simply in the image of cavemen hunting animals, and that, of course, they would fashion clothing out of their skins (as we still do today). The cliché one-shoulder-strap fur toga seems unlikely though because if you lived somewhere warm enough to not cover your shoulders and legs, fur probably would have been to hot for clothing. Characteristics like that were popularized in comics beginning in the 1910s; in those iterations cavemen were often depicted as living alongside dinosaurs (which they actually have missed by an unfortunate 60 million years). \n\nConclusion: The image of the caveman was first shaped in the 19th century following the discovery of ancient human species (Homo neanderthalensis was found in Germany in 1856), depicting him as a primitive version of us. This sentiment was build on in the early 20th century through comics and movies.",
"Other commentators have hit the nail on the head pretty well. There's a lot of intermixing factors for where this conception came from \n\n\n1) The general belief in the \"primitive-ness\" or \"apeness\" of the Neanderthals, due to them being the first pre-modern human fossils ever found. The first Neanderthal skulls were found even before Darwin' published Origin of Species, so you have to remember that a lot these early interpretations were based upon the lack of the fossil record, how humans evolved (or if they evolved at all), and an over emphasis on \"primitive\" traits seen in the Neanderthal and H. heidelbergensis fossils. Many of these early fossils were found in caves, which drove the \"caveman\" conception. \n\n\n2) Eurocentrism played a big role in shaping these conceptions as well. I mentioned in an early comment about the racism in construction our evolutionary tree. Early paleoanthropologists often either believed in unilineal origins (one single line of descent) or polygenism (multiple origins, not to be confused with multiregionalism). The unilinealist perspective would place all modern humans in order of evolution, with White Europeans and the top, and Black Africans at the bottom, and then just below Africans would be Neanderthals and Homo erectus (\"Java man\" was discovered in 1898). The multiple origins perspective was similar, but all human species evolved independently in different areas. This was still used to argue for a racial hierarchy of evolution, stating that peoples like the Khoi san were evolutionary relics. The racist and colonialist attitudes towards hunter-gatherers in Africa shaped the conception of Neanderthals and other \"primitive cavemen\", since in their mind, they were almost the same thing. This also had a huge effect on interpreting the fossil and archaeological record in Africa and Asia. \n\n\n3) The persistent need to separate ourselves (modern H. sapiens) as unique in our cultural abilities, language, art, etc. This involves both of the above historically, but it still persists in arguments to this day about what defines us as a species (beyond morphology). Conceptualizing earlier species as \"less human\" serves this to define our uniqueness. \n\n\nI recommend (as I did below) checking out: \n\n\nDebating humankind's place in nature, 1860-2000 : the nature of paleoanthropology by Richard Delisle. (2007) \n\n\nFor a more recent perspective on how Eurocentrism and Colonialism have shaped out conceptions of the emergence of modern humans, Arthreya and Ackermann have a great chapter in a book about the subject. Here's the pre-print accessible version: \n\n\nAthreya, Sheela, and Rebecca R. Ackermann. 2018. “Colonialism and Narratives of Human Origins in Asia and Africa.” AfricArXiv. August 18. doi:10.31730/_URL_0_."
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rmtkr | WHY do waves propagate? | I'm ashamed to say that after studying physics as an undergrad, I never once thought to ask "why?"
I understand that as far as, let's say, sound waves go, basically the energy is vibrating through the atoms. The energy travels through air until it hits an atom, then the atom absorbs and then releases energy, and the process continues.
I suppose my confusion is really arising when I think about transverse waves. I understand what is happening. I just don't get the why behind it. If we break down a transverse wave and take a look at it particle-by-particle we see the particles moving up and down while the energy is travelling perpendicular. That's my question - why is the energy moving perpendicular?
I'm sorry if this is a really stupid and basic question, and I'm a bit ashamed for not knowing the answer already. I'm sure the answer is simple enough, I just never thought to question it. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rmtkr/why_do_waves_propagate/ | {
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"This is a fairly subtle question, actually. The idea of a wave is very challenging to define as it incorporates a huge variety of phenomena. One characteristics of a wave is a transfer of energy from one point to the next without transporting any mass or substance. How can this be achieved? Well, the medium that hosts the wave must have a couple properties:\n\n* The medium must be near a stable equilibrium.\n\n* The motion of the components of the medium must be coupled to one another. \n\nIt might be easiest to think of a line of particles sitting side by side as our medium. In order to be in stable equilibrium, whenever a particle is pulled a small distance out of its resting position, it would experience a force attempting to return it to its resting position. Then, if we consider that neighboring particles have something like a Morse potential acting between one another (basically a potential that creates a force that attracts the particles to one another if they get too far apart, and repels them if they get too close), when the first particle is pulled out of equilibrium in a direction perpendicular to the string it will pull the second particle out of equilibrium perpendicularly as well. The second particle then pulls the third particle out of equilibrium, and so on. Eventually, the restoring force returns the particles back to equilibrium starting with the first.\n\nIn terms of energy, all the particle start out in their ground state. When we displace the first particle from equilibrium, we are adding energy to that particle, we can call the amount of energy E. E is initially split between the potential energy of the restoring force and the potential energy of the Morse potential from the second particle. The morse potential then creates a force that pulls the second particle out of equilibrium (does work on that particle) thus increasing the second particle's energy, but due to conservation of energy, whatever energy the second particle gains must be lost by the first particle. At the same time the second particle is being pulled up, the first particle is being pulled down, decreasing its energy. The second particle pulls up the third, transferring some of its energy, and so on down the chain. Eventually, all of the energy, E will reach the final particle on the other end of the chain without causing any displacement of particles along the chain.\n\nHope that helps clarify things!\n\n",
" > the particles moving up and down while the energy is travelling perpendicular\n\nSo, its not the particles themselves that move up/down. The up/down represents pressure variation. Think of a compression wave travelling along a slinky, if you periodically squeeze one end of the slinky and let go, you'll have a wave moving from one end to the other. High pressure is like compressed portions of the slinky and low pressure is like stretched portions.\n\nEnergy is moving the way it is because there is something that is causing it to. In the case of sound waves in air, it is the vibration of the diaphragm of a speaker.\n\nWhen an electromagnetic wave propagates from point A to point B, the wiggly wave that you draw on paper does not represent the actual motion of some sort of particle, it is just the oscillation of the electric and magnetic fields. \n\nEM is fundamentally different from sound in that there does not have to be a medium of propagation or some vibrating object causing the oscillations. An EM wave (light) travels in the direction that it does because you switched a torch on and used a mirror to direct all the light in that direction."
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2dbgv1 | How much of the human body can grow back after injury? | We all know that if you get a cut or even a sizable wound, your body will slowly reconstruct itself. My question is, at what point is a wound too severe to be regrown? If I took a bunch of the flesh off of an arm, could it regrow? How bad does it have to be before it can no longer regrow? What determines whether or not it can regrow? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2dbgv1/how_much_of_the_human_body_can_grow_back_after/ | {
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"Oh, this is gonna be a long one. It really depends on a lot of factors, like, as you mentioned, severity of the wound, locality, depth, width, which tissues are affected in which ways, function of immune system, function of coagulation, integrity of blood supply and probably a few other things I forgot about. For one an important factor is how capable the affected tissue is of healing. [A good overview for the general understanding you should read before my post](_URL_0_) is provided by /u/Ehcadroj ; my post will focus on a couple of details on different aspects of anatomical and physiological processes of wound healing. Here a couple of examples:\n\nSkin (the epidermis specifically) has specialized stem cells in close proximity to hair follicles, these can migrate to the surface and undergo a cascade of differentation - from basal cells to keratocytes to corneocytes. The stem cells are, as said, in close proximity to your hair follicles, but other more differentiated cells I mentioned build the surface of your skin and protect it from dehydration, infection and so on - this is called the epidermis. In an open wound this surface layer is damaged and the underlying connective tissue (dermis) or even fat tissue (subcutis) is exposed. Whether or not the epidermis can regrow depends on how affected the stem cells around the hair follicles are from the damage and if they are able to redistribute basal cells among the surface (can also happen from follicles next to the wound). If the wound has a wide area this process is pretty much mitigated as cells generally can not travel that quickly, so to compensate for the damage a replacing connective tissue is formed that is structurally inferior to the epithelial cells of the epidermis - this is scar tissue. Alternatively the wound is filled with scar tissue also when the wound is deep enough to rach the subcutis. To bridge this there are a couple of tricks that get used clinically - like adjoining the wound ends with each other via suturation or excising a patch of skin from one part of the body and applying it as a skin graft.\n\nOf course before any of this healing can happen the wound needs to be closed - and before that happens the immune system needs to fight off any intruder that tries to enter the blood stream or colonialize on the dermis or subcutis. For this reason inflammation (reddening, warming, swelling, pain) occurs followed by hemostasis, the process of closing wounds via blood clotting factors and thrombocytes in the blood stream. For this reason it is essential for wound healing that the blood stream is as intact as possible, and how quickly a wound can heal depends on how vascularized a particular structure is. For example, the healing prognosis for severe burns depends on whether or not arteries and veins are damaged. Another example are feet from diabetic people: the constant (chronic) hypoglycemia caused small arteries and veins (especially in the feet) to degenerate, so any small wound on the feet can be damaging, as they do not really heal and get infected quite easily (in addition to most diabetic people also having damaged nerves, so they do not even notice their feet are damaged).\n\nAs for repair of the dermis (connective tissue), this process goes down a little easier, as connective tissue is easy to reconstruct as you might imagine. Once again it is important how vascularized the structure is not only for inflammation and clotting, but also nutrition of the repairing cells. And the degree of infection and the competency of the immune system to fight it off is a limiting factor as well. \n\nLets get a little deeper than the skin: skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle is a special tissue consisting of very long conjoined cells called myofibrils. for this reason muscle cells (which really are long cellular strands) have a lot of nuclei (cell cores). Microdamage to the muscle fibers can be easily compensated by the metabolical activity of the nuclei in close proximity to the damage. In larger damage where the nuclei are mitigated as well, a specialized group of cells attached to the muscle called satellite cells can donate nuclei to the damaged muscle or even differentiate into new muscle strands. Once again the functionality of this process is influenced by the severity of the wound (depth and width), and too extreme damage will once again lead to the production of permanent connective tissue, scar tissue. It goes without saying that this tissue is functionally worthless for effective muscle contraction, so removing a chunk of flesh from your arm would probably never fully heal without mitigating the overall function of your muscle.\n\nBones as a connective tissue are particularly good at healing, and are only limited by how damaged their progenitor cell reservoirs (periost and endost, the outermost and innermost bone skins) are and how close the endings of the bone fractures are and in which degree they stand to each other. Also if the respective wound is open (bone sticking out of the skin) or closed (with either intact or mitigated surrounding tissue, but without sticking out of the skin) and how fractured the bone is. For a little more detail, check out [my other post I did a couple of days ago](_URL_1_).\n\nNext on the list is the nervous system. How well any neural structure regenerates really really depends on where we are down the line. Nerve cells (as you may already know, which are really long cellular strands with only one nucleus) are surrounded by so called glia cells, which serve a couple of functions. Besides electrochemically isolating nerves for better conduction, fixing them and their synapses in a stable position and nurturing them, glia cells also serve an important function in repairing damaged nerves... that is, only in special places. The nerve cells in your periphery nervous system (arms, legs, breast, belly etc) have special glia cells called Schwann cells, while the ones in your central nervous system (brain, spinal cord) have oligodendrocytes and astrocytes. Schwann cells of the PNS are very capable of repairing damaged nerves, so even severed nerves can more or less fully regenerate. However, the glia cells of the CNS are, while still able to do so, bad at repairing and reconstructing nerves, so any damage to spinal cord and the brain are with high probability permanent (or heals very very slowly).\n\n\nLastly, a couple words on internal organs: Depending on the organ, the damage may or may not be easily permanent. Heart muscle for example has a very low capacity for proper repair, so scar tissue easily forms in case of for example heart attacks. The liver can actually slowly regenerate even without stem cells/progenitor cells. The key word is slow: If the liver receives too much damage, you would probably die before the liver had the chance to attempt for repair. I am not too sure about how well intestines can heal, but I imagine it is capable of doing so as well because of the existence of stem cells in the mucosa lining and the fact that structural surface damage done to the intestine like through celiacs disease is reversible. I am not too sure about perforation though. Most other internal organs, however, do not really have healing capacity, so will almost always react with connective tissue (scar tissue) to wounds.\n\nI probably forgot some aspects, but that should be a raw overview of the different perspectives on healing capacities of the human body. Feel free to ask further questions.",
"In a glib sense, **all of it can**, to some capacity with time. That being said there are several significant considerations as to the repair time of the various organ systems in the body. More to your question, so long as you don't completely remove the entirety of an tissue some repair will be able to take place.\n\n > at what point is a wound too severe to be regrown?\n\nAt the point where you develop scar tissue. Each tissue type is different and has a certain propensity of taking damage (e.g., like your skin). These tissues are adapted to readily regrow in the presence of an injury; however, tissues like your eyes and kidneys are a one-shot deal, they more or less do not repair themselves to regain function, this is mostly due to the complexity of their *in utero* development. Fun fact: the fetus will make and destroy 2 sets of kidneys before you're born with the one's you'll use for the rest of your life.\n\n > If I took a bunch of the flesh off of an arm, could it regrow?\n\nShort answer: No. Long answer: Yes, with significant amounts of scar tissue and disfigurement. Now, with reconstructive surgery, what you're essentially doing is stepping a wound through the healing process and removing the stop-gap response of scar tissue with clean wounds that are easier to heal without scarring. This takes several years for severe damage (like burns) to begin to fade, and the patients never really 100% recover, but it's a huge improvement from the first round of healing that occurs after an incident.\n\n > How bad does it have to be before it can no longer regrow? \n\nNot that bad. It all depends on where and how a wound happened. If it happened in a section of the body that ended up producing huge amounts of scar tissue then the area may never regrow properly; there will be continuous reconstruction by the body given proper exercise and diet and some functionality may return given the tissue, but people are not Wolverine.\n\n > What determines whether or not it can regrow?\n\nSeverity of injury, physical location, and what type of tissue was injured.\n\nRead /u/GarfKarpador 's post about the nitty-gritty anatomical happenings of the wound healing response for an in-depth understanding."
]
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[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2dbgv1/how_much_of_the_human_body_can_grow_back_after/cjo2puc",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2cythr/does_bone_fuse_back_together_after_surgery/cjkj4na"
],
[]
] | |
ftcg6 | If the other rocky planets had water, would they have continents similar to ours? | Also, do those planets also have tectonic plates like Earth? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ftcg6/if_the_other_rocky_planets_had_water_would_they/ | {
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"text": [
"[These guys say water isn't even a requisite for plate tectonics on exoplanets.](_URL_0_)\n\nOpinion: yes other planets have continents, though resemblance to Earths is not likely.",
"The only other body with liquid on its surface that we know of is Titan, and it appears to have isolated lakes rather than oceans and continents.\n\n_URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0710/0710.0699v1.pdf"
],
[
"http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2005-041"
]
] | |
dagy9h | Do you know any ancient or medieval recipes that you've cooked/might be worth cooking or maybe a list/book of recipes or general food and food preparation? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dagy9h/do_you_know_any_ancient_or_medieval_recipes_that/ | {
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"text": [
"The website you want is [Medieval Cookery](_URL_1_). They've got:\n\n* Links to [digitized versions of actual medieval cookbooks](_URL_3_)--some in translation, some in the original languages. These aren't going to be recipes in the modern sense; ones with measurements and such don't start appearing in any appreciable amount until the very late 18C or 19C, and there's a lot of \"and add spices\" or such. But they're really, really cool to look at, and a good place to start.\n\n* Links to [online modernized recipes to follow, adapted from medieval outline-versions](_URL_2_)\n\n* A list of [recommended books and cookbooks you can buy](_URL_0_)\n\nI also own the books *Pleyn Delit* and *The Medieval Kitchen*, which are modernized versions of medieval recipes.\n\nI hope this gives you some good, uh, food for thought and further reading!\n\nHappy feasting!"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://medievalcookery.com/books.html?primary",
"http://www.medievalcookery.com",
"http://medievalcookery.com/recipes/",
"http://medievalcookery.com/etexts.html"
]
] |
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