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Can animals have other sexualities outside of heterosexuality?
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Homosexuality has been observed in some species of penguins. In the context of these penguins, it's theorized that gay couples increase the number of parent caretaker penguins, but do not increase the number of child penguins that require care - gay parents can adopt orphaned children penguins.Oh very much so. Homosexual partnerships and behaviour have been frequently documented in over 1,500 different species of animal life. There’s even a zoo with a gay male penguin couple who recently hatched a donor egg and raised the chickThe New Mexico Whiptail is only found as a female. Females stimulate each other in order to induce eggs in a form of asexual reproduction called parthenogenesis.
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How does my rear view mirror work when I use the tilt lever to manage the effect of the bright lights of the cars behind me?
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This alters the angle of the mirror so it does not reflect back into your eyes. What remains is the image reflected off the glass - the same effect that you might get from a store window reflection
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Why is there neurological damage if our brain stops receiving oxygen?
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Neurons need a lot of energy to maintain their function. This energy comes partly from oxidation of glucose, a process that requires oxygen. So no oxygen = > no energy production = > certain processes stop and induce cell-death
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Lets say we find life on other planets. How would this effect us on planet Earth?
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Other answers in this thread are saying things like "not much," but I disagree with this opinion. Alot would be affected. First and foremost, religion would be in a huge cluster fuck. Some religions would re-interpret their religious documents to explain the aliens, while other religions would outright deny the fact and call it a conspiracy. Many religious followers would also become non believers, if for example, they realize, in their own interpretation, that their religion specifically states that aliens are impossible. New religions would also be created as well as cults, and new beilef systems. There would be mass amounts of debates and arguments about the nature of the aliens, and their stances on the religious aspect of it. Everyone would be in a disagreement. There would be a sudden increase of atheism in the world, unless of course the religions can adapt to say that the aliens are still supported through their text. Otherwise, space agencies, biologists, and many other scientists would take the front and lead in figuring more about these new lifeforms, and continue to add to the growing knowledge database of humanity. TLDR: It would be one of the greatest and most well documented events in human history, but at the same time, the most controversial and argumentative tooI think the simple answer is that right now we only have one example of life to study. Finding life on any other body will either provide a second opportunity to study life or proof that life on earth may have similar origins to that discovered. Either way it would be a historically and scientifically significant discovery.
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Why do certain cases like Caylee Anthony, Trayvon Martin, and Amanda Todd get national attention when these things happen all the time?
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The key is having a factor that elevates the prominence. Caylee Anthony - All the damming evidence that showed how she didn't appear to care about the fact her daughter was missing. This convinced the public she was guilty and captivated viewers to watch as she faced what they thought was impending justice. Trayvon Martin - Martin's case wasn't a big deal until commentary from friends and family was released to the public, and the appearance of a cover-up began to emerge. Amanda Todd - Amanda had posted a very popular video on youtube about bullying, a source of national interest in America right now. Her suicide elevates her story even further", 'They were all "incendiary" topics. Meaning they get people riled up. Caylee Anthony's mother was pretty much guilty in the eyes of most of America, and the people there to prove she did it in court dropped the ball, and she was found innocent. We will never know for certain whether she actually did it or not, due to a civil protection known as Double Jeopardy. Double jeopardy prevents the court from trying you twice for the same crime. Trayvon Martin was an opportunity of the media to have another "Rodney King" event. If it were two white people or two black people involved, this would not have become a national, or even a local news case. But because it was differing races involved, it was made into a racial event, pretty much to get people to tune in. Amanda Todd was a sad example of a young misguided woman tortured by her peers to the point where she thought she had no other options. Sadly this happens every day, only this happened to a young girl who had made a quite prominent video on youtube about bullying, something many can relate to. It also doesn't help that, along with missing child cases, the media overwhelmingly prefers to report on white children in trouble.
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Why hasn't 'natural selection' weeded out all the animals that think it's safe to cross the road?
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We've had road crossings for about 110 years now, and only a lot of them with a meaningful amount of traffic for maybe 50. Even today the majority of a given species lives mostly away from roads. 100 years isn't nearly enough for evolution never-mind 50, and even if it were there's plenty of the species not facing the roads.Evolution doesn't work in an exact 1:1 ratio. The parts of the brain that make an animal run across the road are certainly harmful for that exact situation. On the other hand, maybe the ingrained response to quickly run across open areas helps them escape predators more often than not. Your average animal is no intelligent enough to make meaningful distinctions between "open plain" and "paved roadway with cars" so it thinks of it much the same as any other area where they are highly exposed. That instinct is enough to keep them alive when they aren't crossing a road which is probably 99% of their lives, so the few that die getting hit by cars aren't enough to alter the beneficial behavior for the restWell, animals would have a hard time if they never crossed the road. I suspect your question is more along the lines of "Why hasn't natural selection weeded out all the animals that dart out in front of cars". The story I was always told is that the instincts that cause animals to get killed by cars are the same ones that keep them from being eaten by something like a wolf. Specifically, a charging predator has a hard time changing direction quickly, so by taking off right in front of them, but perpendicular to the predator is moving the animal is able to give itself a little bit of a head start.
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What is making the pop sound when a balloon pops?
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Right on the second attempt. The sudden release of pressure causes a pressure wave to spread out from the event, which we hear as a bang.
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Wouldn't the carbon footprint of shipping used goods to be recycled largely offset the benefits of recycling?
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It would probably depend on what the goal is. The benefit from recycling paper is you need to cut down fewer trees. The goal of recycling aluminum cans is to save on mining more aluminum. The other goal of both is also the main goal of recycling k-cups: keeping them out of landfills. Carbon footprints are a secondary consideration at bestIts hit and miss, somethings have such an a massive energy requirement to initially create but recycling is comparatively much cheaper the shipping is worth it. Other wise some in house recycling might become bigger e.g. _URL_0_ While the price might be high its definitely alot more carbon friendly to recycle it in office than waste energy shipping it to the recycling plant and then packaging it and finally sending it to a shop to be resold
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Why do the numbers on a microwave seem to bounce around whenever I'm chewing?
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This has to do with how the display works. Typically the lights in the display flash 50 or 60 times a second. Different parts of the display update at different times. So when your head is still it looks like a solid image, but when vibrations go through your head when you are chewing something crunchy or making a low pitched note with your voice, your eyes will vibrate as well and so different parts of the image will be seen by your eyes in slightly different positions. Depending on the frequency of the vibration, the letters/numbers will bounce around at different speeds.This can be compared to the [Rolling Shutter] effect, where if the camera is vibrating or moving fast, it can result in wobbly or distorted footage due to different parts of the image being recorded at different times.
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What is the Dow Jones and NASDAQ and how are they effected day to day?
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The NASDAQ is a stock exchange. That is publicly listed companies trade their stock on the NASDAQ. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a stock index, that is, a way of measuring how well a basket of certain stocks are performing. In the case of the DJIA this basket consists of 30 large publicly owned industrial companies' stock. The formula is not as complicated as another user said, it's simply a price weighted average value of all the stocks, computed everyday. This value is thencompared to previous values and the percentage points change would be known. This index is a indicator of how well the biggest 30 industrial companies' stock are performing. Obviously if the individual stock prices of the 30 companies on the DJIA go up, the DJIA will go up. What will drive these prices up? Supply and Demand of these individual stocks.
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The technical feats/methods used in "Handle" robot from Boston Dynamics
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There is a computer in the "torso". It has precise motion sensors that measure acceleration. Software in the computer has a model of physics that predicts the outcome of continuing the current state. Based on input controls, the user says they want to continue the current behavior, or do something new like "Jump". The software computes how to change the predicted state to match the commanded state, a process called [PID control]. The new speeds for motors are carried by wires to the motors that turn the wheels or move the actuators. Then the process starts all over again with new measurements. Google/BD doesn't say, but most robotics runs at about 100Hz. This fancy balancing stuff might run at 400Hz. More specific questions get more specific explanations.
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How does birth control remain effective during the 7-day placebo period?
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The pill has already done its job, you don't need to take those. The reason those placebo pills are there is so you don't mess up your pill schedule. If they just tell you "Only take 21 pills, then rest 7 days", they increase the chance that you forget when you are supposed to go back to taking the pill. Has it been 5 or 6 days? Damn. A few weeks later you feel sick in the mornings and I want to kill myself :) The placebo pills make it easy, "just take one every day" are much simpler instructions.
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What compelled the Japanese to to declare war on the US and attack Pearl Harbor?
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There are a few ways to look at the start of the war, but I'll give you the Economic answer: In the early and mid 30's the Japanese engaged in several aggressive actions in what is today eastern China. This annoyed the US to a fair degree, and as a result the US started instituting trade bans for specific raw materials. This was a significant issue for Japan because they had almost no access to Oil outside of international trade, so they were basically dependent on trade to survive. As a result they decided to try and conquer some resource rich areas to maintain their access to oil. Unfortunately for the Japanese the Philippines, which were US controlled, lied more or less directly between the Japanese home islands, and the areas that they wanted to take over. This meant that if they didn't also conquer the Philippines that they would run the risk of having their supply lines cut by US forces operating out of there in the case of a war. So the decided to conquer the Philippines too. In order to take over the Philippines it was necessary to come up with some way to take the US Navy out of the picture, which gave birth to the attack on Pearl Harbor. There is also a political argument to be made that goes something like this: The Military had a lot of control over the Japanese government. In addition the Japanese Army and Navy basically hated each other, and were in a contest to see who would wield influence. With the actions I mentioned in China being almost entirely an Army run operation, the Navy became worried that they were losing this contest, so they decided to draw the nation into what would basically be a Navy lead conflict. Again, the real prize was the resource rich areas in places like the Dutch the East Indies, the US got involved because more or less in the way.
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the story of the soviet union
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This is one of my favorite topics, because it allows me to expand on a couple points. The first is exactly how bad things were in Tsarist Russia. Russia was one of the last honest to god Feudal societies on Earth. They had actually progressed past this earlier, but then reverted. The Serfs were considered literal property of the land-owner whose estate they were born on. Those born on Imperial land were State-owned. This ended in the 1860's, and the resulting situation wasn't much better. Think Jim Crow laws on steroids, and applied to everyone who wasn't a noble or aristocrat. The second is how wildly successful communism was. Don't consider this an endorsement, it's just a statement. It took the society I just described and by 30 years on had created one of two super powers the world has ever known, with mastery of the atom and a space program. Think of it like the dinosaurs- They may have died off, but they shaped, and dominated, the world. Indeed, the Twentieth Century can be seen as the story of the Soviet Union. America's adventure in Vietnam was a direct response to Soviet activity fostering an uprising in the country. Osama bin Laden got his start in the Mujaheddin, an American-funded guerilla force put forward to hinder and ideally end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The Soviet Army are a large tangible contribution to Hitler's downfall in WW2. We went to the moon not for any specific reason, but to make sure we beat the Soviets there. Many of the international organizations began as a way to facilitate communication between the Soviets and the West. Communism failed, and the Soviet Union collapsed. I'm of the mind that Communism will always collapse under its own weight eventually. Others differ in their opinion of that. But it's hard to overstate just how much influence the Soviet Union had on the world we know today.
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Are more police shootings happening or are we just hearing about them more?
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I'd say it's combination of the two. Most cops are severely under trained, under immense pressure from quotas that their department issues and are undeniably racist. Couple all that with social media and boom.
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How does a CPU understand and execute machine code when it has never done something similar before?
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It doesn't _understand_ it per se, any more than a ball 'understands' it should roll down hill. It is just a set up to generate certain outputs given certain inputs. Here's a really good mechanical illustration of how a CPU adds numbers: _URL_1_ To take it to the next level, someone build a CPU in minecraft that you can actually observe working: _URL_0_ You can start to imagine how when you put a few of those together you might get something that can play battlefield 4.Suppose you have a calculator that can perform 4 simple operations: add, subtract, multiply and divide. You can use those 4 operations to calculate arithmetic expressions. For example: ) * 2) / 7 We could represent the above expression as: add 6 ; answer = answer + 6 sub 3 ; answer = answer - 3 add 4 ; answer = answer + 4 mul 2 ; answer = answer * 2 div 7 ; answer = answer / 7 A CPU works much the same way. It supports operations such as `add`, `sub`, `mul` and many others. Higher level programs written in a programming language are then converted by another program called a compiler or an interpreter to lists of CPU instructions, just as the arithmetic expression above was converted into a list of arithmetic instructions.> never done something similar before? I'm not sure what you are asking/implying. CPUs are designed to understand machine code. It isn't a learning machine.Your question is actually, "How does the CPU do what it has been specifically designed to do?". A CPU is designed to execute machine code. Machine code is \'programmed\' by the placement and connection of the transistors in the CPU.
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Why do people think it is so bad when machines or robots take over human jobs?
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Because it's hard for the person who has lost their job to think of the bigger picture and the overall effect on the economy when they had such a big thing happen to them. It doesn't matter if their jeans are $24.99 instead of $29.99 when they can't afford to buy jeans at all. It's also much easier for people in general to identify with the person who has lost their job than to think of the abstract concepts of wealth and efficiency. It's simply not how the human brain is wired. We're wired to connect with individuals, not ideas.
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Why are 2 batteries generally inserted the opposite way to each other?
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Battery configuration is meant to create a closed circuit. Them being reverse each other is simply for ease of manufacturing. It's easier to connect the negative to the positive right next to each other, and vice versa, than to take the negatives, and then span the length of the battery to create the circuit. It would almost be like splitting a power plug, to plug into two different outlets. Why not just put them near each other, in order to plug it in as one piece. Or like the negative terminal on a car is shorter than the positive, so the battery can't be turned around because the cables won't reach their goal terminal post
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Why are shots injected in the upper arm?
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Such shots are intramuscular, meaning they go inside a muscle. Muscles have lots of blood vessels, so the medicine is picked up fairly quickly and spread to the rest of the body. The upper arm has a nice big muscle which is easy to get at. Another big muscle is the butt, which is where most of the shots in my childhood went. Edit: wording.
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Why do your fingers become swollen after going from a cold area to a warm area?
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When you're cold, your blood vessels become thinner, particularly in your extremities . This is to stop you losing so much heat to the environment through them. If you get warm again, your blood vessels dilate to supply oxygen back to your tissues . Sometimes you'll get a tiny injury to one of your capillaries when this happens. This can cause an immune response - which can be made worse by the oxygen re-entering your cells and leading to reactive chemicals being formed. The subsequent immune response is what causes the swelling. This is known as a reperfusion injury.
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Why do unreleased cars get tested with the black wrap all over them?
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The manufacturer doesn't want their competitors or their customers to know exactly what they are developing until the product is actually released. It takes years to develop a product like a new car. If Chrysler were to know how the 2021 Corvette was designed they might borrow from that to make their own sports car. And if the public knows too much about what's coming out in the future they might not buy what you're trying to sell right now.
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Why isn't there a lens that shifts the spectrum from infrared to visible?
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A lens uses refraction to bend light, typically to focus it. That mechanism doesn't change the wavelength. Now there is such a thing as nonlinear optics. Your typical green laser pointer uses this to double the frequency from infrared to green. But it isn't very efficient and needs high power. You can't simply double something just like that. Someone else will have to fill in the details for me.Simply put, a lens only changes the direction of Light, not the wavelength
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How is a person not disturbed by their snoring?
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I imagine it becomes something they are used to and/or background noise. It's the same for people who leave the TV on while they sleep. The TV may be loud but they've gotten used to the noise so it doesn't bother/wake them.And even weirder. I am sometimes woken by my snoring but only in public settings like the classroom. Other than that it never bothers me.
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How is it possible for a CNN Tech Analyst to think changing s's to dollar sign will help you if your password is 'password'?
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Well, it is an improvement. By how much is hard to say. Pa$$word isn't in any dictionary and probably not in the top 10 words of every brute force attack. So at least it will take the attacker a few milliseconds more to break in. But my guess is that Pa$$word with this little variation is still in many lists and won't help you. But the advice isn't bad. Extending the alphabet makes it harder to use brute force methods. You want to use special characters and numbers. Or just really long passwords, i usually advice people to use a pass sentence, like "WTF!!! My donkey just ate a bird!". Sadly most services don't support spaces. Which makes you use more complicated passwords to be safe from attacks. And as someone who tries to explain complicated things a lot, i do understand why you would use a simple example like "password". It just makes it easier for everyone to follow. I think the guy does a pretty good job, he mentions encryption afterwards and even password lists. Pretty decent for such a short time, people can actually learn something from it. And if you ad some more things like "1pXa$$wXord" it would probably already be good enough for simple brute force attacks to fail. As long as you don't use common words, add in some bonus letters, special characters and numbers you're as safe as you can get with a password.They're out to make money, not inform people. They only inform people insofar as it promotes the money making. Real tech guys cost a lot more, need more time to say things the home-audience will quickly get bored by and is ultimately less profitable. At least by their reckoning, clearly.
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Why do batteries lose their recharging ability over time?
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Batteries are compact galvanic cells. They work by compartmentalizing a chemical reaction, in which one of the compounds is oxidized and the other is reduced . Galvanic cells separate these two reactions so that the electrons that the oxidized compound loses flow through a wire and end up reducing the other compound. The key to this whole thing though is keeping the compounds separated. Electricity always takes the path of least resistance, so if you don't keep the 2 compounds separated, current will not flow through the wire. Batteries lose their recharging ability over time because, over long periods of time, the 2 compounds that are being oxidized/reduced will slowly leak into each of the other's compartment, which will reduce the total charge that you can get off of a battery. Your battery will become completely dead when the 2 compartments have leaked into each other and have reached equilibrium.
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When a user is given a public key, how is it that data encrypted by it cannot undergo the opposite operation to decrypt.
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[Simple paint explanation] followed by the numbers explanation. This is the example I was able to actually grasp what was going on, rather than just explain without understanding.Think about a square root. Squaring most numbers is fairly easy and can be done on pencil and paper by most adults. Now ask those same adults to get the square root of large numbers. In the same way public and private key encryption makes use of math that is significantly easier in one direction than the other. In the case of RSA it is the factoring of the product of two large prime numbers. There is one correct answer to the problem but solving it would require many many lifetimes using today's technology. In fact it shouldn't become easy for many years to come unless a major breakthrough occurs in number theory or computing technology . In the later case however we could just move to bigger keys, although all past encrypted communications, stored by your favorite neighborhood NSA could be decrypted.
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How did the number of soldiers under Nazi Germany not deplete in just a couple of years after having invaded so many countries so rapidly?
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At first it was Germany who was the one inflicting massive casualties on their enemies. It wasn't until later in the war that Germany started to lose massive amounts of their soldiers. For instance, the loss of the 6th Army at Stalingrad and the loss of the Afrika Korps didn't occur until 1943. Edit - check out the following link. _URL_0_.
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Why does my mouse hand get cold when I'm on the computer for too long?
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I too get this. Well you're not alone at least. I hope someone can answer soon.If you rest your arm on the desk surface, as virtually everyone does, the pressure of the desk surface on your forearm may be restricting blood flow. Not only will that cause your hand to get cold, it may also reduce sensitivity in your fingers and make your hand feel "asleep". If your arm is extending over the edge of the desk, the pressure may be increased as the edge of the desk may be pushing into your arm. Try raising your chair to reduce the effectYou are tensing the muscles in your hand, wrist, and forearm and so on up to your shoulder/neck/back. Keeping muscles tense limits blood flow. Good circulation depends on regularly contracting and relaxing muscles. Let go and raise your arm above your head to let fluids in your lower arm circulate back into your core. Put the arm and hand through a range of motion periodically.1. You're not moving your hand much, so your muscles aren't stimulating blood flow 2. Your arm is likely positioned so that your hand is above your arm, so blood isn't flowing down to it like usual, it's flowing up
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How does c-4 detonation work?
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C-4 is an engineered explosive, specifically made to be insensitive to shock. You want soldiers to carry it around in case they need it, and if a stray bullet could cause someone's backpack to explode - there would be less volunteers to carry it around. The key is to create a highly concentrated shockwave. A detonator cord or blasting cap generates a very high pressure shock in a very small area. This concentration of the pressure triggers the C-4.
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What is the point of those wooden honey-dipper things?
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A former boss at a fancy restaurant I worked at once told me that the point is to be able to drizzle honey on things consistently and evenly, where as other tools like spoons would leave big drops here, little drops there. Makes the presentation better, I guess.There's nothing wrong with using a spoon, but the slotted ball on a stick honey dipper allows you to rotate it and break the trickle of honey that gets everywhere. It makes less of a mess.
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Can someone explain how the Command Module from Saturn 5 managed to "blast off" from the moon?
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You kind of got it right but the Command Module never went to the moon, that was the job of the [Lunar Module]. So the Command Module waited in orbit while the Lunar Module went down. And the Lunar Module had it's own fuel and rockets . If you look at [this] cutaway you can see that the Lunar Module really was in two parts and the bottom part was left on the moon when they went back up.
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What are apples made out of?
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> Apples contain dietary fibre in their skins and core. About 10% of an apple is made up of carbohydrate and 4% of an apple is made up from a variety of vitamins and minerals. The rest of the apple, more than 80%, is water. [source]
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why do doctors ask you not to eat 12 hours before surgery/blood test?
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The reason to not eat before surgery is to reduce the chances of you vomiting during the surgery and thus reduce the chances of you drowning in your own vomit, or just making it harder to do the surgery because they are preventing you drowning in your own vomit. For the blood tests they are specifically wanting to get your blood sugar levels while fasting. The moment you eat something your blood sugar starts to spike and it will give them false numbers on their tests.Your blood sugar will rise after you eat. How high it goes and how fast depends on what you ate and your body's response to it. Not eating means your glucose level will be at a base line. It will not be high due to eating. Your triglycerides and cholesterol levels will also be affected.
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How toys like Hot Wheels and Micro Machines are painted
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Taking a shot in the dark here, but many things are painted in a process called "Electrostatic Painting" where the object, in this case a Hot Wheel car that is metal is given a small charge, much like how a magnet is created, and then paint in a powder form is sprayed all around it and is attracted electromagnetically to the metal body, then is put in a oven and baked at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time, giving the object a uniform consistency and coating. This is how fire extinguishers are \'painted\' source: I watched a how its made episode and was awedDunno about hot wheels but here's how figmas are made: _URL_0_ I found the blog an interesting, if somewhat creepy due to all the censoring, read. More videos on the process can be found under the "why are they so expensive?" heading here: _URL_1_
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What prevents me from setting myself up as a small ISP for my own benefit?
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Well, you could either purchase some of Sky's bandwidth from them, which is the easiest way, or you could install a connection to the nearest hub yourself. For a few million dollars, minimum. I don't know what country you are in, but generally the major Telecom companies own the internet backbone that you are trying to connect to, so you would have to negotiate it with them. You would need to pay to construct the fiber connection to your house, as well as the switching equipment to route it to you. Again, you are talking millions of dollars of equipment. And you would have to work out a bandwidth deal with whichever company, allowing you a certain bandwidth per second per month. They probably won't even look at you if you are asking for less than a gigabit, but good luck trying, and paying the hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for that.Time and money. If you have plenty of both, knock yourself out.[These people did it]. Depending on where you live, there may be grant funding available to help finance it, too. If you're serious and in the US, pm me and I may be able to find more info for you; one of my jobs relates closely to this.
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Why is the Nvidia Quadro FX series so expensive if they perform so poorly?
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The Quadro series is not optimized or even built for gaming - its optimized for rendering, graphics design, etc. Quadro drivers aren't built for gaming, so there are none of the gaming-specific optimizations for it. > Workstation graphics cards are clocked slower for better stability & power consumption and are heavily optimised for OpenGL/CAD applications . Many of them have special plugins for Maya, 3ds Max, Proengineer, Autocad and all of the most popular 3D design tools that enable them to do very specific things which are only necessary for 3D Design, like running FSAA on resolutions of 3840x2400, which is something no mainstream GFX card can achieve or very, very advanced lighting effects, which are only beneficial to a 3D designer creating CGI for example. > To give a comparison, the Quadro 6000 which is around $4000 AUD, is hardware-wise an essentially slower-clocked GTX 580 with less CUDA cores but 4 times the VRAM, and it doesn't come anywhere close in matching a GTX580's performance in any cutting-edge game. [source] If you actually spent 3K on a quadro card thinking that it would be better for gaming, you wasted your money. If you had a quadro card already for doing rendering/design work, and are trying to use it for gaming, you aren't going to get good performance out of it.
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How can some people intuitively tell when a website/news article is bogus while others cannot?
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Two things: 1) **Confirmation bias.** Confirmation bias is the tendency to believe things that reinforce your existing beliefs. This makes it harder for people to recognize something as fake if it is in line with their beliefs. So if you already think Hillary Clinton is evil and malicious, a fake news article that says she's running a child trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor confirms your existing bias, so you are more likely to believe it. Everyone is guilty of this to some extent. The people who fall for fake news are _more_ guilty of it though, and perhaps more susceptible because they lack . . . 2) **Critical thinking skills.** Critical thinking is the cure for confirmation bias. Unfortunately, a lot of people never learned effective critical thinking skills in school or stopped using them . A person with well-developed critical thinking skills will stop and ask themselves questions about a news story _from all sides_, not just from the one that confirms their beliefs. Hand in hand with this is the ability to place sources in context -- you might not like Fox but like the New York Times, or maybe you like Fox and distrust the NYT -- but either way, you should be able to mentally place those and other media outlets on a political spectrum and use that as part of your critical analysis of the news. And if the source is some never-before-heard-of website, that's a red flag that you really need to bust out the [critical thinking nunchuks].
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How does the hawk-eye technology work ?
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Hawk-eye is just one of several systems that organizations are using to do things like assist refereeing. It's likely several cameras synchronized on a computer that runs a relatively simple computer vision algorithm to identify the ball from live feeds. If the cameras are synchronized properly you can take the position of the ball relative to each camera at discrete time markers and work out a 3-dimensional location of the ball at any given time. Once you have this information, it's also possible to e.g. use the last few milliseconds to anticipate trajectory.
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Why do they hire "analyzers" / "hosts" that never played the sport that they are "analyzing" / hosting?
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Astronauts know how to fly the ship, and know a little bit of the math to get them to the moon. The physicists know the math of orbital mechanics like you know the alphabet, but only know how to fly the ship a little bit. Athletes are amazing at their sport, but aren't probably the best at being a host on the radio or tv . The statics and history of their position are part of their awareness but aren't a focus. While the hosts and analysts specialize in the finer details of the sport. I would also like to mention that many host have played the sport, just maybe not professionally.Sometimes they understand the game and can speak eloquently enough while they narrate what is happening.Playing a sport and analyzing a sport are different skill sets, and while playing probably helps, there is no reason you couldn't become an expert analyst without playing the sport.
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How does an "En Passante" work in chess?
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Basically, pawns have one special move : they can move two spaces instead of one the first time they move off of their original position. This was a change made very early in the history of European chess. *However*, you aren't allowed to use this special move to avoid being captured by an enemy pawn that is already on the fifth rank . So the rule for *en passant* capture is, you move your pawn to the spot where the enemy pawn *would be* if it had only moved one space, and capture it.When you're moving a pawn for the first time, you can move it one square like normal, but you can also legally advance it two squares . When that rule was added, it was a bit unfair -- if your opponent had a pawn waiting to capture as soon as you moved yours, you could jump over the danger . So, on the very next move, your opponent can "capture" the empty square your pawn jumped over. If they don't do it right away, they lose the chance . Basically, it keeps you from using the move-two-squares rule to pass your opponent's pawn on the next file.
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Why is it acceptable for beef to be pink in the center, but not poultry or pork?
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If handled properly during processing, beef and fish carry minimal risk of containing pathogens. Damn near all of the US poultry population is infected with salmonella . Meanwhile pork can have all kinds of nasties, considering the way pigs live and eat. There are poultry populations in other countries that are pathogen free. In France for instance, there are chicken breeds you can eat rare/medium rareActually, they recently changed the regulations on pork doneness temps in the US. **USDA is lowering the recommended safe cooking temperature for whole cuts of pork from 160 °F to 145 °F and adding a three-minute rest time. The safe temperature for cuts of beef, veal, and lamb remains unchanged at 145 °F, but the department is adding a three-minute rest time as part of its cooking recommendations.** So a wee bit of rosy color in a pork tenderloin, is A OKAY.The most common bad organsims on beef don't live inside the meat, they live on the surface. With pork and chicken though they live all through the meat. Even the rarest steaks in a restaurant are seared on the outside to kill those surface germs but if the meat has been properly handled and stored the inside shouldn't have anything bad in it.
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Why do men get bald as they age? And what does it have to do with growing beard early?
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The hairs on the top of the head are structurally different from the ones on the side. When you start to get older, your hair follicles become more sensitive to DHT, a type of testosterone. The increased sensitivity to DHT affects the hair follicles with the certain protein makeup on the top of the head, effectively killing them. The ones of the side are spared of this horror. Hair transplants work by using hairs that don't have the faulty genetic make up and moving them to the top. Facial hair on the other hand responds positively to DHT due to the androgen receptors that cause hair to grow in response to DHT being present. Growing a nice beard could perhaps mean you have an excess of DHT or you are sensitive to it. Either way that will correlate with balding
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How do cats purr and why do they pad at soft surfaces before lying down?
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Lots of animals paw at the ground - often times it's to check for rocks or other things that would make the animal uncomfortable. With movable blankets, pillows and so on, the action translates well to fluffing the surface for comfort. As for purring last I checked there was no answer - they still aren't entirely certain on the mechanisms of it.You might also want to ask in /r/cats. :) Also, I'm not sure if this is correct, but I was always told the "pawing" was used to either soften up / make an area comfier, or to massage the mother's breast to produce milk.They keep rocks in their gullet to grind food. Nowait, that's chickens. Chickens do that.
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Why are cold symptoms heightened when you first wake up?
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The stuffy nose you get when you wake up without a cold is caused by the increased level of histamine your body produces to wake you up in the morning. With a cold, this is usually worse because there is already histamine from your cold. Think of it this way, antihistamines like Benadryl make you sleepy because they basically decrease histamine levels. Your body normally makes histamine in the morning to make you more alert.
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Why are human babies so incapable and defenseless?
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The birth canal can really only be so wide . The baby is born while the head can still pass through the birth canal. This leaves us birthing at a less developed stage than most mammals, which means our babies are more helpless. I'd a trade of that allows for a big head relative to the rest of our bodies; the head can continue to grow after birth for a few years. Even with this extra growth later, babies are born with skull bones still unfused, so the head can continue to grow to hold the brain at its final adult size.
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How and when did USA get involved in the middle east? Who started it all?
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The Middle East, has always been an area of interest for the West ever since we discovered that oil is a very profitable source of energy - over 120 years ago. In fact, the reason we call it the middle east is because it used to be literally towards the middle and the east of the map of the British Empire. So, short answer: the Brits started it. Then, others joined in, France, Austria-Hungary Empire, Russia, Germany When the US became a superpower, thanks to Europeans bombing each other during WWII, it joined the partyWhen a staggering amount of oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia, it became one of the most strategically important regions on the globe. The US got more involved when the British and French gave up their colonies.
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How do the HSBC key authenticators work?
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Key authenticators usually work in a similar way. There is a clock and a secret, unique algorithm in the key generator, with the algorithm known to the verifying party. The algorithm will take the input time, round it to the nearest 30 seconds or so, and run it through the algorithm. The algorithm generates from that "seed" a short series of digits, usually about six, which the verifying party can determine match what happens when they do the same thing. This is secure because even if an attacker knows the six generated digits and the time they can't figure out the algorithm from that data, so the next code is completely unknown. And in 30 seconds the intercepted code is useless so that isn't a danger.
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Please ELI5: Why do peoples' nipples get hard when they're cold?
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It's a mix of two things: 1) contraction of the muscle layers under the skin, similar the goose bumps, and 2) an extremity is cold, so you body increases blood flow it keep it warm. For obvious reasons, nipples have historically been on the "important to keep warm" list, for reasons that should be obvious, you know, nursing babies and all that.
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Root causes of "Kashmir conflict" and who is the owner of the region, Pakistan or India?
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So when the British were leaving India and had plans to divide it on religious lines, Kashmir had a Muslim majority and bordered Pakistan, so Pakistan felt it should be theirs. After all, Pakistan was intended to be the Muslim majority areas of India. The ruler of Kashmir decided to join India to have their guaranteed protection- which prompted a war. At the moment, about 50% belongs to India, 40% to Pakistan and the rest to China- a region called Aksai Chin.\r\rThe issue of ownership is why it's still a conflict. Do you side with Pakistan as Kashmir is majority Muslim and joining India was just the whim of a king? Or do you side with India because the leadership of Kashmir legally decided joined India and Pakistan has severe management problems, especially in its northern regions? Or do you side with Kashmiri Independence, which is becoming increasingly popular to avoid both demographical conflict with India and the shortcomings of the Pakistani Government?", 'No-one has any more right to it than any other. Like so many of the world's conflicts, the root causes lie in colonialisation, and the utter incompetence, insensitivity and downright idiocy oif the nincompoops put in charge. So many arbitrary border lines were drawn up and so many people shunted around, that the mess that is there now will not and can not ever be resolved to everyone, or even anyone's, satisfaction. Israel/Palestine, Northen Ireland - same story. Oh gosh, what do you know, the British seem to have been everywhere
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What's the thing with rappers and the "illuminati"?
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There is nothing with rappers and the Illuminati. It is just stupid idiots trying to make themselves sound more important or more menacing than they really are. Like when some of the call themselves mafia or mafioso. They just want to portray themselves as tough when in actuality they are just dirtbags.
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What is the theoretical explanation for why planets/moons are always nearly perfect spheres?
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Because a large enough mass of rock under gravity will deform like a plastic. In essence, the material flows, because the weight of it is so great. When it flows, it attempts to flow to the most conservative potential state, a sphere. That's the \'ideal\' shape where, if you think about it, there's no "Downhill" from any spot. To get chunky shapes, you need less mass so gravity can't compress them over the strength of the material. Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars, are examples of a bit more \'chunk\' factor. Oh and they did not exist from the big bang. They formed laterAll of the atoms in a region will be attracted to the center of gravity and will all accelerate toward that position. The end result is that you have a bunch of stuff all trying to get to the same spot. The sphere is the shape that results from this. With any other shape, there will be areas of it that can "get closer" to the center. As those areas move to get closer, the shape will deform into a sphere.
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How is it that our brain knows to make a "face" based upon your emotion?
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There are a few aspects your question could be alluding to. From an evolutionary perspective, to cultural to just pure mechanics of creating a facial expression. For the main part, we just do it subconsciously. The reason we can't help but look sad when we hear bad news. Or not laugh when something hilarious comes up etc.. Considering mechanics of muscles that create emotions on our face There are 40 odd muscles in the facial area and all emotions and their corresponding muscle activations are well documented in a Facial Action Coding System or FACS. It defines a range of Action Units, each corresponding to a action on the face, such as chin raise, brow lower, lip depressed etc. It also includes head movements and eye movements. Each emotion constitutes a combination of these actions, which FACS system has documented. So, when a brain wants to put an emotion on your face, it just fires some neurons to activate the respective muscles.
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Why does 60 degrees feel cold when I'm inside but pleasant when I'm outside?
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The sun provides a great deal of heat if you are outside. The light rays may not heat the air much because air is not dense but if it hits you, your body will feel warmer than being inside. Aside from the sun, when you are outside, you are usually not staying still. Moving around generates more body heat than staying still like you mostly do when inside . Unless it is very windy, that movement will let you heat up while you are outside.
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why do wheels appear to spin in reverse when filmed?
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Imagine there's a tire, and you've got a red dot on the side of the tire. You take a picture of the tire, then turn it forward, but not quite a full rotation. You take another picture, but the dot is is now slightly behind where it was in the first picture. Now repeat this multiple times. If you then showed someone those pictures in a row, it would look like the dot is moving backwards, even though the tire is going forwards. That's what's happening with wheels looking like they're spinning the opposite direction of the way the car is going in film.
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Why do certain foods and beverages taste better or worse at specific temperature ranges?
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In part, the sense of smell plays a big part in taste. Flavor in food is typically comprised of a multitude of flavor and fragrance compounds. Examples: Vanillin, eugenol, thymol, etc. A lot of these compounds are "volatile" compounds, which means that at certain temperatures they will evaporate. When this happens, those compounds are more obvious to human sensorial organs . So if something is at the "wrong" temperature, you might be picking up compounds that aren't tasty, or you might not be picking up enough of compounds that are tasty. There's a lot more to it than that, I don't know the full answer, but that certainly plays a part.
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How did we end up with taste buds that find things that are "bad" for us better tasting?
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I assume you're talking about sugar and fat? These are only 'bad' for us because they're so readily accessible. We can eat as much sugar and fat as we want and there's nothing to stop or limit us. If you consider how we evolved, though, neither sugar nor fat were plentiful. Sugar required you to find and pick ripe berries or raid a beehive. Fat required hunting large game. But, both sugar and fat are energy-dense, meaning you don't have to eat a lot of it to ward off starvation . So we evolved to really, really like them, because they were good at keeping us alive. But it turns out that in large quantities, both sugar and fat are bad for us. These situations didn't really come up 200,000 years ago on the plains of the Serengeti.
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Why autism links to males 1/52 times but to females 1/352 times.
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My guess? Because we are bad at recognizing autism in females. The symptoms are slightly different. Just like how there are more autistic kids today than there were 20 years ago. Its not that there is more autism, we are just better at diagnosing it. In 20 years, female diagnoses will catch up. We'll see more and more female autistics as the years progress
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What is that falling feeling that you suddenly wake up too when you are sleeping?
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It's called a hypnic jerk or "sleep start" it's the result of a mechanism of the brain that is engaged during sleep. The motor cortex of the brain basically goes offline for conscious movement, IE we are paralyzed while sleeping. This is to prevent a person from dreaming they were running, and actually running as they slept. It's a safety mechanism and usually it is not engaged until we are well asleep, and it usually disengages before we wake up. If the timing is off you get one of two problems. Hypnic Jerk is when it starts to relax muscle control while a person needs those muscles to hold their position, like resting your head on your hands, or leaning against wall. As you lose control of the muscles, your body panics and control is handed back over to you, causing you to jerk awake. Similar to unplugging somebodies xbox controller while they are racing in a car, and when you plug it back in they spin out because they were madly mashing buttons. The opposite of the hypnic jerk is the night terrors aka sleep paralysis where the body keeps the person paralyzed for too long and they start to wake up but not so much that the paralysis fades. A person in this state will find on waking up that they can't move their bodies, this results in immediate panic. They are also unable to control their breathing, so this internal panic, without the ability to breath faster, results in a feeling of not getting enough oxygen, or a weight on your chest.It's called hypnagogic jerk and it's just a twitch that happens sometimes when you're falling asleep
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How do wooden roller coasters not fall apart?
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If a plank is rotten, then you remove it and replace it with another plank. The structural integrity of the roller coaster is maintained because the wood that sustains it is continually being upgraded. The original roller coaster doesn't exist because each of it's component parts has been replaced piece by piece.Wooden roller coasters are inspected regularly, often daily and anything loose is tightened, and broken or rotten boards are replaced.
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why do we shake hands?
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It is a ritual show of nonaggression. If I offer you my right hand, you can be pretty sure there isn't a weapon in it.Started as the mutual hand on the other's forearm gesture you see in movies set in the middle ages. Hand on their lower sleeve allowed you to confirm they had "nothing up their sleeve" as in a dagger.Extending an open right hand was originally to show that you're not carrying a knife or sword in that hand, and therefore mean no ill will towards the person you're meeting.
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Is it possible for someone to never learn to walk?
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Yes, someone could be disabled at birth in a way that makes the person unable to walk . There have even been inheritable disorders that result in an inability to walk in families, although this is rare. _URL_0_', "Barring a disability, I don't think it's possible unless the person was actively discouraged from walking. It's not something that has to be taught. ETA: I shouldn't say *impossible*. Very little is literally impossible.As disability: yes. A mutation in the DNA can trigger it. See the [Ulas family].
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Why does everything sometimes look yellow outside after a thunderstorm?
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> > > Most thunderstorms occur in the late afternoon. By this time of day, the sun is beginning to set. The orange hue is caused by the same process that causes the vivid colors at sunsets. Shorter wavelengths of light are scattered quickly, leaving only the yellow-orange-red end of the spectrum. _URL_0_', "I just looked this up last night after a thunderstorm rolled through Baltimore. I believe it has to do with the scattering of light by water molecules in the atmosphere. Just as the atmosphere already scatters light to give the appearance of blue during the day, extra water makes the area around us look yellow or green. That's the most detailed explanation i can give.saw the title, and immediately knew you were talking about philly. that was definitily uniquely weirdWhen the sun is low enough in the sky to be reflecting heavily off the atmosphere as well as the bottom of the cloudsYES! Thank you! I live in the Philadelphia suburbs, it was crazy yellow the other day, and noone in my family found it remarkably odd. Bookmarking this to show them someone besides me found it to be notable.I'm in Central Illinois, and I love the yellow hue to everything. It seems to happen fairly often here in the spring and summer since we get severe thunderstorms fairly often.Hello fellow Philadelphian! Did you see the rainbow?
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Why is paint stripper called "aircraft remover"?
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It's supposed to indicate that it will remove very, very tough pain jobs, like the kind you'd find on an aircraft.
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If anti cheat programs look through your computer to look for cheating tools, could they potentially also look for other "illegal" stuff and give it to a third party or to the police?
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well, the simple answer is that if you install software onto your computer, it could do whatever the hell the programmers/developers want it to do, whether they make you aware of it or not. And if it could do that, it'd be described in the vaguest of language in the software's End User License Agreement . Your best bet would be to read that stuff if you are genuinely concerned, .
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What exactly is the InstallShield shielding me from?
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Generally open windows that run commands. You'd see things like DOS prompt windows open and close, open and close, with file copy output flying past.
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Why do we have to press ctrl + alt + del to log into a locked Windows account?
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The Ctrl + Alt + Del key combination is known as the [Secure Attention Sequence] on Windows. This is not overridable by software outside the operating system. Pressing the SAS means you are guaranteed to get a response from the operating system, not from some other software. This is important because malicious software might try to emulate the login screen to capture login details and passwords. The SAS prevent this. When designing Windows NT 3.1, the developers looked around to see what key combination wasn't used in any shipping application, so it didn't cause compatibility problems. The only one they could think of was Ctrl + Alt + Del, because it was the reboot sequence on DOS-based PCs and therefore not used by applications. Twenty years later we still have the same sequence for pretty much the same reasons :)", 'As windows always tells you CTL + ALT + Delete cant be used by any other program, when you press it only Windows can react. Its built into the OS to ensure a method of always accessing things like the task manager, power options, users etcBack in the dark ages of PC computing, CTRL-ALT-DEL was used to "pull the pin" and force a reboot of the OS . The combination was chosen because there was NO WAY anybody could possibly ever mistaken mash that key combination by accident, like you could possibly do hitting CTRL C instead of SHIFT C . Back then there were few industry standards, so every program used CTRL and ALT combinations at will. But the PC standard was always CTRL-ALT-DEL will force a reboot of the computer. Not sure if this will still work in a DOS environment, being how ingrained it is as a Windows keystroke combo.I don't know if this is still true, but originally in the Windows kernal, the combination ctrl-alt-delete is reserved for windows. This means that nothing you install on the computer could use this key combination, so it prevented malicious programs from giving you fake login prompts.
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Why do hurricanes never hit South America?
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_URL_0_ It is more than 2-3. But it is somewhat protected due to the structure of the various major wind streams and ocean currents which will drive storms north most of the time. This protection means it will have fewer major storms.South America gets about one tropical storm a year, the most recent was Tropical Storm Brent in June. It hit Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela, causing fatalities and millions in damages. Most storms hit the Carribean coast, it's the southern Atlantic coast where they are quite rare. Tropical storms typically form near the tropic lines, where prevailing winds collide. They rarely reach the quiet zone around the equator, which South America straddles. For a long time it was thought tropical storms could not form in the South Atlantic, as the vertical wind shear and colder waters do not favor Hurricane productions. Then in 2004, Hurricane Catarina struck southern Brazil, killing 10, damaging thousands of homes, and ruining croplands. It didn't even have an official name, because there was no system in place for south Atlantic storms. Since then, there have been a handful of tropical and subtropical storms. Many scientists are taking this as evidence of climate change.
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What happens to elders whose family refuses to take care of them?
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Stay tuned: Millions of Americans are about to find out. This is not a joke. And it doesn't happen only to those whose families turn away. See [here] and [here].
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How does cooking some foods make them more nutritious?
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A lot of the time food contains chemicals composed of things we can't use that we don't have the tools to break down. Cooking can sometimes help by breaking up these structures into their constituent parts that our bodies can deal with.
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What is that sinking feeling you get as you come to grips with the reality of the passing of someone you were close to?
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Fear.. the instinctual reaction to a threat/change to your current life and environment. That person is gone and you fear how your life will be different since this reality is new and unknownI depends on the person and your relationship. I think it could be cause be relief of the passing of someone in pain, that they found some peace. It could come from regret, from feeling as if your last interaction with that person was negative. It could come from the realization that the happiness they provide in your life will still be there in your memories. It could come from the acceptance that nothing you can do will change the situation.
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Why Can Pressure Freeze Water?
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The water was below freezing but the ice crystals had nothing to start to form around. When you opened the bottle, the pressure change caused bubbles of CO2 to come out of solution. Those bubbles provided nucleation points for ice crystals to form around. Edit: Clarification in response to reply.
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What purpose does imagination serve? Do other animals have imaginations?
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The imagination is likely the result of the ability to think abstractly and predict possible future events. Other animals have this capacity; for example dogs can predict the possibility of a treat, or anticipate their master's anger when they misbehave. Fantastical imagination is just the result of using such a system with information known to be incorrect.
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Why are freight train engines no longer streamlined?
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The amount of fuel efficiency lost from a slow-moving freight train having flat windows is minimal and probably barely offsets the savings of a cheaper construction process.
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if a teenager can be charged with child pornography for having nudes of himself, why haven't people be charged with flashing for sending unsolicited dick picks?
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The only reason kids have been charged for having their own nudes is over zealous courts. The dick pics, in the other hand, are probably harassment or indecent exposure, but they're either much harder to prosecute or deemed nosy worth the time it would take to actually build a case against some one.
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Why, after being out in the freezing cold for a long time, does it hurt to put your hands in warm water?
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When your hands are very cold, your veins constrict and push more blood toward your core to keep the more important organs functioning. When you expose them to something much warmer your veins dilate and blood rushes back in. This rapid change in temperature makes the veins expand again quickly, and it causes a burning sensation. I hope that answers your question thoroughly enough!
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How is censorship legal if Freedom of Speech exists?
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If you're talking about freedom of speech in the US, you might start by taking a look at [restrictions on the first amendment] in the U.S. What the bill of rights actually says is: > Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech This has been generalized to include the federal government as a whole, but the government has recognized many exceptions to this, described in that wikipedia article. Just a few examples of things not covered by the first amendment: * Information relevant to national security* Government Speech * Commercial Speech * Incitement to crime", 'The vast majority of censorship is by a private entity . The first amendment only applies to government, and it has restrictions.Freedom of speech doesn't give anyone an obligation to provide a stage for you. It also doesn't cover a visual.
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Why does my brain think really hot water is cold sometimes?
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The nerves in your skin that detect temperature only measure the **change** in temperature and not whether it is cold or hot. Context and other variables tell your brain if it is cold or not but sometimes the brain still gets confused and sends you the wrong signal.
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LI5: Can someone explain what's allegedly happened with Murdoch's phone hacking scandal, and why it's so important?
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Police were investigating a girl's murder. One small detail of the case was that her family insisted she was still alive because phone records showed her voice mail was still being remotely checked regularly and some messages were even deleted. It turns out a News of the World employee was the one checking the voice mail as a way to get story leads. Messages were deleted so the voice mail box wouldn't fill up, blocking new messages. Deleting those messages is destroying evidence and is terrible because even the tiniest clue can catch a murderer. This catches the public's attention, more investigation is done and it comes out that this has happened several times before. Most notably, another Murdoch employee allegedly tried to grease palms with September 11th first responders to get info from cell phones in the same vein. This REALLY catches the public's attention. So, the debate, if we can call it that, is whether or not it's ok for reporters to illegally access your phone messages, delete the ones that could possibly catch the person who murdered you, etc. And, that's only the thing they were *caught* doing.
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Why do light switches sometimes turn outlets on and off?
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They've been intentionally wired that way, to allow you to control plugged-in devices by using the light switch. This is useful for devices that you would want to turn on or off frequently. For instance, lamps, so that you can turn off the lights with a light switch.
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Is there a psychological reason why a lot of people treat employees like crap in retail?
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Yes, there is a reason. It's not so much retail in general as it is the specific type of retail. I don't have facts or statistics for this but I would be willing to bet the lower-priced a retail store is the more rude those customers might be. When people are shopping they might be frustrated they can't find an item, mad that the store is out of an item, upset their paycheck is smaller than normal, mad at their kids who they left in the car, etc., and those frustrations come out to the employee. No one is mean to employees because they don't like the individual helping them but rather something external has made them mad. These are clearly anecdotes but I think most people would have similar experiences: In high school I worked at a chain grocery store in a lower-income neighborhood. Most people were normal people but there were also quite a few people who yelled at their kids, were rude to me like I was personally involved in some conspiracy against them. About a year later I got a job at a high-end grocery store a few miles away because it was closer to my house. The clientele was drastically different than the lower-income store. Sure they would get upset but they never took it out on me personally. The ones who got mad seemed to know their problems were not because of me. The type of customer you market to will make a huge difference in how you are treated. I've been inside Jaguar dealerships and I've been in buy-here-pay-here places and the clientele's attitudes are worlds apart.
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How did Queen / Freddy Mercury becomes so beloved and popular in an era when open homophobia was socially acceptable?
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Homophobia became way more socially acceptable when AIDS came around. When queen was big glam was in, think David Bowie and Roxy music
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why does some website in some countries still can be accessed after it has been blocked? Does that coutry need something to hold the 'door' everytime or that site found another way in?
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Nice try North Korea, can't fool us But seriously blocking a country from calling a website is like trying to block an entire country from making a phone call to Howard Stern. Howard can have a set up where a hundred phone numbers from a hundred different cities are redirected to him. Or he can have a million people agree to forward calls to him. Websites are the same. They can exist on thousands of IP addresses at one time. You can hit a VPN to redirect to the site. Block one IP for the site or one VPN address and two new ones pop up. At most countries succeed by blocking the search tools that allow users to find the site. They block DNS resolution or Google searches . All they can really do is make it hard enough to reach the site that people are too lazy to do so.
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when sleep talking/walking what's going on in my brain?
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When you sleep, chemicals in your brain are distributed to temporarily paralyze your body. Perhaps your brain doesn't produce quite enough of those chemicals and the sleep talking happens in correlation to your dreams. Don't quote me, I'm kind of guessing from information I've heard in the past.
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Why is an urge to pee so common when you have nerves before a big event?
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Ever heard of the fight-or-flight response? When you are looking down the throat of a hungry tiger, your body instinctively goes into red alert. You need to run, so your muscles get a boost, as do your heart and lungs to supply oxygen. On the other hand, everything not immediately necessary gets cast aside. That includes your guts, kidneys and reproductive organs among others. Your kidneys are pretty much a bunch of tiny pumps attached to each other. Your bladder is a water balloon at the end of the pump. A bigger balloon is harder to pump into, but usually your kidneys can handle it. But now that we are in power-saving mode, suddenly your kidneys are hungry and tired. It would be like if you only had 110V for a 220V pump. So your body decides to empty the balloon so your pump can work with less energy. Cue the feeling - 'I need to pee'. On a side note, people wetting themselves has a bit different reason. When normal fight-or-flight is activated your body typically uses the sympathetic nervous system. But when you are surprised, your body actually relaxes - this is because your parasympathetic nervous system also received a jolt. The parasympathetic nervous system happens to cover your bladder sphincters, and with a big enough jolt, the floodgates will open. Oops.
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Why do torrent sites, like Kickass torrents, have to change their URL?
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Because, sometimes governments have the power to force, or at least pressure DNS providers to not give a domain to a certain entity. That's why these torrent sites are often registered in Sweden , Tuvalu Cuba and Tonga .
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Why do Westerners like being tan while Asians prefer being pale?
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Beauty has several societal factors. One of the biggest that can be seen across diverse cultures is what the powerful/rich do. For a long time in Western history, being pale was considered beautiful. Why? Because it meant you didn't work in the fields. If you didn't work in the fields, you had money Now that what work people most commonly do has changed, those who work behind a desk all day are going to be paler than those that have the luxury of taking days off and lazing about in the Sun, preferably on some beach in some exotic locale. For Eastern societies, it is a mix of the above idea that the wealthy didn't have to work the fields, but also Western influence over them. This is also why surgery to get "double eyelids" is so popular in many countries there, especially Korea.Same thing, completely opposite perspectives. It shows that you have wealth and status. In the west, being tanned signifies the ability to vacation in tropical locations. In the east, being pale signifies that you don't do manual labor outside in the sun.
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The difference between Prime Ministers and Presidents
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While this is not true in all cases, the general distinction is: **Presidents** are elected directly by the people for the specific position of President. **Prime Ministers** are elected as members of parliament by their constituents, then selected by the members in their own party as leaders of their party. The Prime Minister is the leader of whichever political party has the most seats in Parliament. . Some countries have separate leaders of the legislature and chief executives, others trust those responsibilities to the same person. What the difference is between a President and Prime Minister is really a function of the individual government.Depends on the country and how it's fashioned. In some countries Presidents are just figure heads who don't usually have significant power but are voted by the people to represent their country on the international stage. Ireland would be an example of this. In other countries, prime ministers fill the role as leader of the country and figure head on the international stage, but they aren't the highest. An example would be Canada. However the queen is technically the figure head . The military forces of Canada swear to the queen , but the power remains with the prime minister and more recently with PM Harper and the GG who refused to delay an election or something). This style tends to be a leftover of the British system, as noted by the government of India, which is seperate from that monarchy, however still retains a prime minister position. The position of figure head/president has replaced the queen's place. Finally you have systems similar to the US where the power of prime ministers and presidents is consolidated in one person, for whom the people vote for, and whom the military forces pledge their allegiance too. Now of course there are slight alterations on this system. An example that jumps at me is Iran. Where they have a president, however they have a religious figurehead who supersedes the president who is above the law.
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How are we able to tell the difference between fake nice and genuine nice?
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As far as non-verbal cues, humans are embedded with a list of involuntary "tells" . For a single example, a genuine smile will cause crinkling of the cheeks and around the eyes, where a faked smile won't usually do so. There are also tonal differences. Faked niceness seems to almost always feature drawn out vowel sounds. Think of that really fake girl from high school and her god-awful "Hiiiii, oh my gawwwwd how are yoooouuuu?!" Not entirely sure why this is. In addition, body language is huge. Leaning in toward someone or mimicking their body language are subtle, involuntary cues of genuine interest and amicability, where folded arms, glancing away, and crossed legs tend to indicate otherwise. Finally, when speaking, a flickering look to the left GENERALLY displays dishonesty, while to the right is implying honesty. Has something to do with how we retrieve data from our brains.
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Why exactly is Netflix opposing the Comcast/TWC merger?
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Because Comcast is known to throttle streaming services which is how Netflix makes most of their money nowadays. Add in the fact that almost every city in the US has Comcast or TWC and nothing else for cable services, that means that Most cities will now not be able to stream Netflix at the speed that they're used to.Netflix benefits from a competitive market. If there are fewer ISPs, it's harder for them to negotiate for and demand better services. If one ISP throttles your traffic and you have ten other options, you might switch. If one ISP throttles your traffic and you have no other options, you're out of luck. In this case, "your traffic" could mean Netflix movie streaming. Since net neutrality is under attack, there's nothing necessarily stopping cable companies from throttling your communication with Netflix servers while offering their own competing service. Slightly similar example: Apple sometimes clones successful apps, then bans the original from the App Store as a duplicate. When the person controlling your connection has a vested interest in getting you to pick their service, ugly things may happen.
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Why it feels so good to scratch rashes, poison ivy, bug bites, etc. if it is not a good thing to do.
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There is a natural small release of "good feeling" chemicals in the brain when you scratch anything. This came about through evolution. If you have a mite or dangerous parasite your itching will kill it or at least it is worth a shot is what your brain tells you.This is my understanding as a five year old not very complete but simplistic :)Im not an expert, but it is because the mild pain signals from your itching drown out the discomfort, so the discomfort can no longer be felt. You no longer feeling that "itchiness" feels nice, as it is relief from that discomfort. It's somewhat like those things that pass a small electric current through your body so that you feel less pain.
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Why can't old but good instruments (like Stradivariuses or Selmer Mk VIs) be recreated using modern tech?
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The Stradivarius thing is a myth. People who claim to be able to identify one by sound, can't. And when blinded, have been known to pick modern instruments over them for sound quality. I don't know much about the MK VI, but I would expect it's the same.
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How does one gallon of gasoline emit around 20lbs of CO2?
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Yes, there's that much oxygen being taken into the reaction. Every 1 atom of carbon takes in 2 atoms of oxygen, and oxygen weighs about 4/3 as much as carbon.If you started with 12 lbs. of carbon and burned it completely, you would wind up with 44 lbs., nearly 4 times as much. A gallon of gas is 6.2 lbs., and by weight, mostly carbon, so getting 3x CO2 out of it sounds reasonable. And if instead of CO2, they meant greenhouse gases, most of the rest of the gasoline will be convert to water, making it even more plausible.
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How is the Earth running out of water?
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The concern is that we're running out of water that is usable for drinking and irrigation in places where people live. You're right that only a small amount of water leaves Earth and it's largely a closed system. What we're doing is pulling clean groundwater out of aquifers, using it, and putting it in the atmosphere where it rains back down. Problem is, a lot of that rain goes into the ocean where it becomes contaminated with salt. The water shortage problem can be largely solved if you use large-scale desalination plants along the ocean to pull water in and separate it from salt. But that takes a very large amount of energy, and people don't like the looks of them on the beach. The UAE, for example, gets all of its drinking water through this process using fossil fuels.
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Why does the military care if you have an undescended testicle?
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Total guess here, but probably because at some stage soon you will need it bringing down surgically. They probably want you getting it sorted before enlisting in order to avoid paid downtime.
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What proof or facts of global warming is out there?
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It's important to note that the argument is not about whether or not global warming is real. The Earth has measurably grown warmer by at least half a degree Celsius since 1980. Wikipedia has a good basic discussion. The goalposts in the last decade or so have been moved to ask whether or not global warming is *anthropogenic*, or caused by humans. _URL_0_ A simple way to say it would be that **the percentage of climate scientists that believe that global warming is real and that global warming is caused by humans, is the same percentage of medical researchers that believe that second-hand smoke causes cancer.** Another simple way to say it would be that the American Association of *Petroleum* Geologists affirms anthropogenic climate change. This is significant because that association has nothing to gain from some kind of global warming hoax or conspiracy.Just to be totally PC, it is generally called "climate change" not "global warming" because the problem is not just temperatures getting hotter but also the weather patterns changing. I want to caution you that you might not be able to sway your mom's opinion. My dad thinks it is all a hoax mostly because he read an article 10 years ago in some scientific journal which questioned a small part of the science and he just decided it was all a hoax. Facts and data don't sway him because he has decided all the facts and data are made up for scientists to get more money. If you want good information, the [EPA] actually has some great info on climate change where you can always learn something new.
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Why are there a finite number of musical notes?
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There isn't a finite number. As long as you can divide by 2, you can always make another note.Western culture chose to standardize musical notation with 12 semi-tones.Do a search on microtones or microtonal fretboards. Wild stuff.
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How come the NSA bugging the UN HQ and hacking UN computers hasn't started a massive "shit storm"?
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Diplomats in the UN have conducted business under the assumption that the location they are at have been bugged for decades. While it certainly angers them when it comes out directly who is doing what it isn't that large of a surprise.Likely because every government on earth has assumed as much for decades, and because every government that can afford to do the same thing has and is.When the US provides over 20% of the funding it's easy to see why no shit storm has developed. You don't bite the hand that feeds, it's as simple as that.The real question is does anyone care. Electronic monitoring is just a facet of the information age.
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How did they double the life expectancy of people with Down's Syndrome over the past few decades?
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My uncle has DS and he's still going strong at 59, having led an amazingly full life. For his fiftieth birthday, he went to Liverpool football stadium and got to lift the European trophy! As far as I know, he hasn't had serious medical intervention, at least not in the past twenty years, and he's got by with dedicated care and support. I'm not sure how he's lived so long!
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If Japan knew that it could not win a protracted war with the US, why did they attack in WWII?
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They didn't think the war would be protracted. By crippling the Pacific Fleet, they bought time to fortify their positions. They figured that the cost to retake the lost territory would be too high for the Americans to stomach. As for why they attacked at all, Japan was between a rock and a hard place. The US had an embargo against Japan, and was starving it of vital resources that it needed to continue the war effort in China. Further, the US was a very powerful force built up in the Pacific, and the two countries *were* going to come into conflict sooner or later, and if they waited for the Americans to make the first move, it could have been a catastrophe. So the tl;dr is this: go in for a cheap shot early, bide time to bulk up defenses, and hope that the Americans just accept the loss of some minor overseas possessions instead of mobilizing for total war. It was a mistaken calculation, but not totally irrational.
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Why is it that when we're drunk and we close our eyes to sleep, it sometimes feels like the world is spinning around us or we're on some sort of fairground ride?
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Basically there's a level in your ear that's calibrated to your specific blood density, but alcohol thins it out which makes that thing go off more easily. It's also why inner ear infections and hearing issues can give people vertigo.Is there an easy way to get rid of the spins that isn’t common knowledge?
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