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the difference between shampoo and liquid soap. | The basic difference is that shampoo has a small amount of conditioner in it, so that hair will not be too difficult to comb . If you use plain soap to clean your hair, and your hair is long, you're gonna have a bad time when it's time to comb it. |
Why do so many animals go apeshit for peanut butter? | Peanut butter is an energy dense food, high in fat content. Lots of fat = lots of energy. Energy is one of the main reasons why animals ingest food, so evolution has made good energy sources like fat taste really good to our brains.It's the smell; fat, protein, sugar and salt all in one package that they can smell from... |
Why are TVs, radios, etc designed so that the volume can go high enough to blow out their own speakers? | Speakers are often blown not just by sending too much power to a unit, but by sending too much **low quality power** to the speakers. It can spike, it is dirty, etc., low quality amplifiers do not send clean power to speakers. I once listened to a pair of $10,000 speakers pushed by a $15,000 amp. The guy said he could ... |
Why is visual impairment (aka glasses) (by most people), linked to smartness? | Back before glasses were a common thing, they were expensive and not as easy to get. If you had bad eyesight and just worked on a farm or did manual labor , you probably didn't need to get glasses . However if you did more technical work, like reading/writing, or a doctor, or something of that nature, you got much more... |
Why does healthy food taste bad, and junk food taste good? | Humans have evolved to have cravings for the things that were in short supply for our ancestors - sugars, salts, fats, and proteins. We never needed to evolve a liking for fruits and vegetables because they were always available and we rarely had a choice but to eat lots of them. And junk food is bad for us because the... |
How do you go about building a PC? | Basic run-down for ELI5. What a computer NEEDS: * CPU: This is the brain of the computer. It does the processing.* RAM: This is like a note pad. You store temporary data here while working.* Hard Drive: This is the storage. It's like a backpack that contains all the data you need to save for later.* Motherboard: This k... |
why is it ok to watch a sunset, but its not ok to stare at the sun any other time? | When the sun is low on the horizon, it has to shine through more atmosphere to reach you since it's going across instead of straight down. This dims it by absorbing and scattering the light. |
Why is it that I can feel pain in places like ovaries or other reproductive organs when there aren't really any nerves in any of my other organs? | Visceral pain is that poorly localised dull crampy or colicky pain that is associated with visceral stretch, distension, spasm, or inflammation. Not sure that it actually has a "purpose" other than to let you know that you are sick and should rest. But there are nerves that bring sensation from the viscera, and some of... |
Can any political candidate make their own party for a general election in the US? How does the primary process work for third parties? | > could they legally set up their own party to run in the general election? You bet they could. You don't even have to set up your own party - you can run as an independent just like Ross Perot did. Being in a party is not a prerequisite for running for president. > Or could they just convince another established party... |
Why does sticking one leg out from the covers make you comfortable instead of one leg being cold and one still hot? | Same reason as elephants have big ears. The blood looses heat while flowing through your exposed leg/elephant's large thin ears, and then carries on round the body, thus cooling the body as a whole.Because the blood flows around your body. It takes around 1 minute for blood to do a full "circuit" of your body, so it's ... |
Why did I never get sleepy during the day until high school, and now as an adult I'm constantly in need of a nap daily? | As we get older our sleep patterns naturally change, and the amount of sleep we need decreases steadily until adulthood. Why we dream is another conversation entirely, but the agreed upon part is that it's to recover and help with memorization. When you're young you're constantly learning different things and incrediab... |
Why are tabloids like the National Inquirer allowed to sell enormous lies? | You're allowed to say whatever you want in publications, and the people you're lying about are just as allowed to sue you for it. There are plenty of cases of tabloids being successfully sued for defamation.In the modern age it costs almost nothing to post a refutation on the Internet. This means the new media, very ta... |
Why does a sunny 65 degree day feel different than a cloudy day of the same temperature? | When we say a day is '65 degrees' this is what the temperature of the air around you is in the shade. They measure this with a thermometer in a special white box called a [Stephenson Screen]. The box is white to reflect as much sunlight, and has slats in the sides to make sure its measurements aren't being thrown off b... |
why voters are attacked in the Middle East? | People attack those who might vote for leaders they don't like. If you attack voting places, it scares other people and they might not vote at all. This prevents a democratic system from taking hold, and makes it so insurgents can continue to try and take over the country.It is a protest by boycotting - they don't reco... |
How does releasing singles digitally a while after releasing them on the radio/other media increase revenue for the music industry? | Mostly because they try to increase revenue by building interest before allowing it to be released. Also, the main singles chart in the US is based on a combination of sales, radio airplay, and streaming. Most record labels want their songs to have the highest chart position on the Hot 100, so if they get radio airplay... |
Why are brand names sometimes blurred out on television? | Nobody making a TV show does anything for nothing, and if they're not getting paid to promote a brand, they won't. On the other side, they don't want an unintentional connection to a company they don't intend to support or endorse. |
Why don't human foetuses be small enough to be easily carried and delivered by the mother? | They do come out and grow bigger. But that's a trade off. The smaller they are when they come out, the more likely they are to die after they come out, and the longer they will have to be intensely cared for by their family, rather than being able to exist at least semi-independently. I am sure it could have come out d... |
Why does music sound much higher in pitch when sped up on a computer? | Pitch is the number of cycles per second. If you speed up the sound, there is more cycles in each second, and the pitch is higher. |
Why did all of the love and fascination for Jennifer Lawrence go away basically right after her nudes leaked? | She hasn't had any movies come out lately . She'll come back when the Mockingjay Pt. 2 publicity machine really gets going. 'Love and fascination' feeds on interviews and public appearances, and when a celebrity isn't doing that, people move on to the next big thing. It's the same thing with Taylor Swift -- she feels u... |
How did it come to be that most keygens are accompanied by a song? | This is actually a fascinating topic in the history of computing. I'll try to keep it short. In the beginning of microcomputers computers were introduced for the 1st time to households, where kids, and not just professionals had access to them. People taught themselves to code, and to manipulate computer systems in var... |
Why do I get cranky when I'm tired? | Your brain and body are not functioning at their best. In the case of your brain \r1. You are not processing information coming in as well as normal. So you may find insults or slights where none were intended.\r2. You are not as quick to temper your emotions. So it will take less of XYZ than normal to piss you off.\r3... |
Difference between Salt, Spices, and Herbs | Herbs are leaves , spices are specifically not leaves. Both herbs and spices are additives, which means whether they are herbs or spices can be situational. In culinary terms, onions and garlic can be a spice or they can be a vegetable, depending how they are prepared. Salt is a mineral, it is neither herb nor spice, a... |
When you eat something acidic your body releases more saliva to dilute it. How does your body recognize and complete this process? | The answer to your question begins with thinking about how salivation, in general, is stimulated. You have two types of salivary glands -- *minor* and *major* . Your minor salivary glands are constantly producing saliva to keep your mouth moist. The extrinsic salivary glands are activated in response to sensory input w... |
How come minuets and seconds start over at sixty, but milliseconds go to 100? | Minutes and seconds are loosely based on Babylonian timekeeping - they used a sexagesimal system . This worked fine for a long time, before it was necessary or even possible to measure anything to a finer degree of precision, but when science and engineering made such measurements important, it made sense to make divis... |
Why does (it feel like) one strong cup of coffee hits me harder than 2 normal cups? Ditto with beers. | The caffeine and alcohol in those drinks actually takes a while to work its way into your system. What you *might* be reacting to is the taste/aroma/sensation of consuming those beverages. Strong coffee has more bitterness and often a strong aroma. Strong beers may have enough volatile alcohol to give the aroma and aft... |
Why marathon training doesn't recommend runs greater than 20 miles. | Source - My dad used to run marathons Your body doesn't know the difference between running a marathon and getting hit by a bus. Its horrifically bad for the body. Remember the story of the original marathon that dude DIED at the end. So you don't want to push your body beyond its limits *until you actually are running... |
How do internet providers catch copyright infringing when one torrents? | In general, they don't. Instead, copyright holders will often attempt to download works to which they own the copyright, and then send cease-and-desist orders to the ISPs of anyone caught sending them copyrighted material . That warning then gets passed on to the user, because the ISP doesn't want to get sued for facil... |
How do fetus's in eggs, say chickens, get enough energy to replicate all its cells and grow from just a few cells to a breathing animal? | That is what the yolk is for. The yolk is packed full of everything a developing foetus needs to grow. It serves roughly the same purpose as the placenta in mammals. |
- why this weiwei vase is worth $1mil? | They'd be valuable even had Ai Weiwei done nothing to them, since they're Neolithic era vases to begin with . |
According to the CDC, the transmission rate for HIV and other STDs are statistically low. Why exactly is this? | The human immune system is pretty good. You don't get a cold every times somebody sneezes around you. You don't get e.coli every time somebody undercooks a burger. and you don't get HIV every time your dick touches somebody. |
Why are some military bases patrolled/guarded by private security companies? | Because training a soldier takes time and money. They are not going to waste trained soldiers guarding the staff car park and some open lawns. Which is usually the outer perimeter of a military base. Those contracted security guards will get a background check to make sure they are not criminals or have affiliations wi... |
How do anti-theft wheels on shopping carts work? | Kind of like invisible fences for dogs. There's a cable buried around the perimeter of the store. Each cart has a device that, when it goes outside of the cable perimeter, locks up one of the wheels and prevents it from spinning. I assume the logic behind this is that no one wants to steal a cart with a stuck wheel. |
How do clouds on average hold 1.1 million pounds of water in the air? | Clouds don't actually *hold* the water, they're *made up* of the water. Each individual molecule of water vapor floats on its own, and when that vapor condenses, it's still held aloft by wind and air currents. The clouds aren't actually 'holding' anything. |
What is the sun orbiting? | This is such an excellent question! Yes, the sun moves! It, alongside the entire solar system, orbits around the centre of the milky way galaxy. Our solar system's velocity averages around 828,000 km/h , which means that it would take our solar system around 230 million years to complete one full orbit around the galax... |
3D printing of organs and various other things | We can't print organs. It's just a concept, and one that lacks enough evidence to suggest it's actually viable. |
why are Monotremes considered mammals? | Mammals are not defined by live birth though. If they were then several species of snakes, several species of sharks, and a few amphibians would be mammals. Mammals normally have live birth, but what defines them as being mammals is the production of milk to feed their young.There are more aspects that make a creature ... |
Why do some exercises really have a noticeable effect on my muscles and others just makes my muscles tired? | In the first scenario , you're working your muscle near its maximum ability. This causes small tears in the muscle, and your body rebuilds those tears stronger than they were before as a way to adapt to it . In the second scenario , you're not working your muscle as hard as you can: you're just working it so *long* tha... |
How long are the worlds tallest skyscrapers designed to last for and how would we demolish them if the time comes? | I don't know how long they're designed to last, but demolition can be done pretty much as a reverse of construction. While implosion is faster and easier, sometimes it's not practical. The Harmon in Las Vegas's City Center ran into problems during construction and after a few years it was decided to tear it down. Since... |
Why does scratching chalk boards or sticky/rough porcelain feel so bad to human ears? | There were two explanations proposed. One was that the frequency of the sound from scraping the chalkboard is at 2000-4000 Hz, the range of frequency that human ears are most sensitive to. Interestingly the cries of a human baby also fall within this range. The other explanation is that it's all in the mind - the sound... |
People have written software that can learn to beat video games. In ELI5 terms, how would a program be able to do this? | It plays the game many, many times and starts by randomly pressing buttons. It can "see" the screen, has [probably] been told what Mario look like and [probably] been told what the values it needs to optimise are . So it plays it once and doesn't press any buttons. That gives a certain score and progress. Then it plays... |
How do Police speed cameras work? | Lidar guns essentially work on timing the return signal from the vehicle. The gun shoots out a laser which bounces off your vehicle and the gun measures the return time. A fraction of a second later it shoots another laser and the gun measures that return time. The gun can use the return time to derive the distance the... |
Why is it legal to drink 1 beer and THEN drive, but illegal to drink 1 beer WHILE driving? | I always figured it was because it's not very practical to pull someone over and ask,"Is that your first beer? Okay good, just checking. Have a nice day." Easiest way to enforce that law is to have a 0 tolerance policy on open containers/drinking & drivingThere is a lot of misinformation in here, and a real answer will... |
Electrons that Orbit atoms vs Electrons that move through wires as electricity. | So every atom has some electrons on it and in a metal, the electrons on one atom can move around to all the other nearby atoms. Now when the electric current gets to the metal, that's some new electrons arriving. They reach the atoms at the edge of the metal, and they try to get in with all the other electrons that are... |
Why do we find snow beautiful? I understand green land and blue sky is lovely because it symbolises warmth and fertility but surely snow = cold and death in our subconscious? | Snow is quiet. Solitude. Serenity. A fresh blanket of snow unmarked by prints of any kind can give one a sense of peace. Maybe it does subconsciously symbolize death, and maybe that's ok. |
why does darker skin pigment help protect skin from the sun when dark colors absorb more heat and lighter colors reflect more heat? | > dark colors absorb more heat That's exactly how it helps. It absorbs the UV rays that would otherwise penetrate through the remaining layers of skin, causing sunburn, damaging DNA and potentially causing cancer. |
Why is the U.S. healthcare system more "expensive" than countries with universal healthcare? | Compensation rates are negotiated between hospitals and the insurance provider in most countries, and this can be at a federal or provincial level. When you have a single buyer, they have a certain degree of more negotiating power because they are going to be your sole source of revenue. For example, where I live, Onta... |
Why do athletes dump themselves in tubs of ice water after working out? | Ice reduces inflammation and for certain kinds of injuries, inflammation slows the healing process. So submerging yourself in ice is a great way to reduce overall inflammation! |
How do TV shows make money by putting their shows on Netflix and How can Netflix pay all the networks and only charge 8$ per month? | $8 a month * 23.6 subscribers = 188.8 million a month of incomeTelevision and movie license deals are also based on what window you get. The first window is the right to broadcast a show first. That goes to the major network that first plays the show and they more than pay for the production costs with that license fee... |
Why do people complain about illegal immigrants taking jobs? Shouldn't they complain about the companies who give illegals jobs? | The is nothing to be explained other than the person that hire those illegal immigrants are of the same nationality of the person that complains about it. Very often those who hire illegals are complaining about it too since they feel that they cannot compete legally. Finally, "Taking jobs" that most citizens don't wan... |
Why is the first world war called like that, the first world war? | Scale. There have been a number of large conflicts but the First World War was the first truly industrial, total war, across the entire globe conflict. It was so much more massive, so much more destructive, and so much more well everything than any previous war combined.At the time it was called The Great War . What se... |
Why are higher speed bullets more lethal? | High powered rifles, like the rifles used by snipers, shoot rounds that are both bigger, and travel faster. High speed bullets inherently have more energy. Energy matters because that's what's being transferred when a bullet hits you. For instance, if i punch you slowly, a smaller amount of energy is being transferred ... |
Origin of Two-Party Political System in U.S. | It is a mathematical consequence of the US Constitution. There is a natural equilibrium point with two roughly equal parties. The problem is there is not much difference in the amount of power a party with 35-40% of the vote wields, and a party with 1%. So when a party shrinks below that level for too long, it becomes ... |
The gender pay gap in America | Its bull crap, few professions that do have a pay gap, the cap is in the region of 10%. Which is minimal at best . The fact is that on average women make less than men, and that's fact. Even when you nail it down to the same company or same field women make less. BUT women don't make less for the same work. The reason ... |
How is it safe to eat sushi? | It's safe as long as the fish comes from safe sources. That is to say, it's safe as long as you are eating in a decent place. Raw fish is *not* safe as a concept, at least not safer than cooked fish. Some fishermen in Japan, who eat raw fish in the boat, get diseases from them. |
Why do we adapt old literature like Shakespeare to children? | The themes aren't that complex, to be honest. Take *Romeo and Juliet*, for example. If by "schoolkids" you mean kids in their early to mid teens, which is when Shakespeare is usually introduced to them, the play is about two horny teenagers who hook up at a party and then make a series of stupid mistakes that ends in d... |
Why do so many people need a fan on to achieve sleep? | I'm one of those people. I like it being cooler when I'm sleeping, and the mild noise is better than silence, especially if you live alone or in a place with good sound proofing.Personally, I have tinnitis and need a fan to drown out the noise. Other folks find rhythmic background sounds lull them into sleep easier tha... |
How is there no more urine in a flushed toilet? | There would always be some urine left in the water I guess. You're never going to get it all out. The components of urine are heavier than water, so it doesn't need much coaxing to be flushed, but toilets are more concerned with solid waste. |
Why did most American revolvers from the mid-1800s have only six shots? | As you add more bullets, you need a larger cylinder to hold them. Six was probably the largest number of bullets that wouldn't make the cylinder impractically large and heavy. Keep in mind that revolvers need to be sleek enough to fit in holsters. There are revolvers with as few as three or as many as 24 shots; five or... |
What is a "jinx" exactly? | It is a superstitious notion that, in your case, expressing good fortune brings about an ironic reversal. It's not a real thing, however. |
Why are many Asian restaurants allowed to racially discriminate when hiring? | One can discriminate if a private business as long as the discrimination occurs for reasons pertaining to the function of your business. So if many of cooks don't speak English then hiring a waiter or waitress who speaks the appropriate language is legal. In other fields non- profits can mandate that their employees ar... |
Why is regional Australia (before you reach the outback) so fertile, yet so sparsely populated? | 1) What makes you think regional Australia is fertile? Even much of the Eastern Seaboard is not that fertile. Soil in Australia is well-known for having much less organic content than those in other continents. Only tiny parts of the country, like Hunter Valley and the area around Brisbane, have rich soil. Source: [1] ... |
If two parents refuse to name their newborn, how does it get named? | In Denmark, if you haven't named your child after a period of time it will be given a name from the Danish royal family line, randomly.\rBoys: Frederik, Henrik, Christian, Joachin, Nicholai, Vincent\rGirls: Magrethe, Josephine, Marie, Isabella |
How do tight rope walkers set up the tight wire over a long distance? | Not an expert or anything, but I do know that they often, where necessary, get a small rope across the opening by carrying it manually, then they tie that ropes end to a larger rope and pull the larger ropes end over the opening, then if necessary, tie that to a larger one, etc., as many times as is necessary to get th... |
How did they teach Helen Keller to talk? | [Here is video] of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller, with Anne explaining how she taught Helen, and the both of them demonstrating itMy understanding is that her sense of touch was extremely sensitive, so she learned to read both lips and sign language by feeling the touch with her hand. I would guess that she learned to... |
- what would happen to the USA economy if all of their debt would have been paid? | The problem is that this sort of question is impossible to answer because it depends so much on the exact way they pay off that debt. - If the USA prints a whole load of money and buys back all the outstanding debt , that will crash the economy. Pumping that much money into the system would lead to insane amounts of in... |
What's the difference between an allergy and an intolerance? | An allergy is an autoimmune response. Literally your immune system incorrectly acting as if something is an infection rather than food or a toxin or venom. An intolerance is the body being incapable of metabolising a substance because it lacks the chemicals to do so. Let's look at milk. Milk allergies are among the mos... |
The difference between real, reactive, and apparent power (electrical). | This is not real explanation, but look at this picture , it sums it pretty well! _URL_0_', "Real power is power that the source machines produce and resistance or other machines consume and transform into heat and motion. This power is flowing from the source to the load and then being removes from the system. \r\r\rRe... |
How second-hand smoke is worse than smoking yourself. | It's not worse for you that smoking surely; it's the same smoke with *less* chemicals in, some of them having been absorbed by the smoker. The problem people have with it is that they don't get a choice about breathing in second hand smoke, and people smoke around kids and things.There's an episode of Penn & Teller's "... |
Why is air invisible to infrared cameras? Why isn't the entire image the temperature of the air? Also, what is the relationship between infrared light and heat? | Infrared light is just like any other color of light, its just below the level that we can see. Heat is a measure of how much motion particles have. We know that hot things give off light- this is why metal glows when it gets hot, or why the sun is bright. Things that are not quite that hot also give off light, it just... |
why does simply checking your credit score, lower it? | Google “hard pull” versus “soft pull” When you want to know your credit score - make sure you’re only getting soft pull results. When you get closer to an event like a car purchase or house purchase - you’ll have to do a hard pull at some point - but do your research first so you don’t make things worse! |
How do lock makers mass produce locks that can only be opened with one key? | They don't. They have a certain number of lock configurations and produce a lot of them, so the lock on your front door probably has hundreds if not thousands of twins out there that can be opened with your key and vise versa. In fact if you go to the hardware store, you will see that most lock sets have stickers with ... |
Can protest forms like sit-ins, picket lines, and riots be performed in online spaces? | Websites aren't like physical spaces. Amazon, for example, has the ability to ramp up web capacity *thousands* of times to handle Black Friday/Cyber Monday/After Xmas sales. It's a huge reason that companies have pushed towards being "in the cloud" - if you need more capacity, you simply turn on a few more virtual serv... |
Why are straight men attracted to women's breasts ? | Yes. Breasts are a secondary sexual characteristic. They might not play a direct role in reproduction but most animal species use certain secondary sexual characteristics as a way to indicate that they are capable of mating and that a potential mate should totally pick them because they are better/fitter than another m... |
Why is that the higher you go in a building, the warmer it gets, but the higher in elevation you go outside, the cooler it gets? | Hot air rises, and the building contains it, simple as that. Something interesting can occur if a big tall building is entirely air conditioned though. Cold air is dense, and that big tower of cold air, heavier than the air outside, wants to come out and escape. The place where the pressure of this air is the highest i... |
why it's 'light blue', 'light green', 'light purple', but when it comes to light red, it's "pink". Why is it different? | Each color actually has a name, including "light blue" , light green or light purple it's just that we 've gotten into the habit of not using those color words. As for pink, I suspect we HAVE gotten into the habit of using that because so many little girls claim it as their very favorite color of all. I'm pretty sure t... |
- How does Twitter make money? | Companies pay for promoted trends and promoted tweets. Let's say Starbucks are releasing a new drink, and they want to promote it through Twitter. They will pay Twitter a certain amount of money to promote the trend, which means it will appear on the main page timeline. It's all advertising, except the user doesn't kno... |
Why has socialism worked in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark but not in China or the Soviet Union or other socialist states? | Social democracy != Socialism _URL_0_ "Sometimes mistaken by Americans as socialist, while simultaneously being criticized by Scandinavians as overly capitalistic, the Nordic model could best be described as a type of middle ground. It is neither fully capitalistic or socialistic, and attempts to merge the most desirab... |
how can people sense when someone is looking at them? | They can't. It's been shown However it's been demonstrated that people who are rubbernecking actually draw stares to them. So if you start rubbernecking, people will stare. You catch them staring and feel vindicated in your actually baseless feeling that you where being watched. |
How does a sail boat go back to shore where it came from if the wind is blowing against it? | Triangular sails are held at an angle to the wind. So if the wind is moving west, it might push the boat southwest. Good sails can make the boat go even faster than the wind at a right angle to the wind. So if the wind is blowing 20mph to the west, the boat might go 30mph due south. Think about stepping on an ice cube.... |
How does shorting stocks work? | Basically, when you are shorting stocks, you are borrowing the stocks from someone who plans on holding them for a while anyway, selling them and promising to return them after a specific period of time. You do this because you hope that the price of the stock will drop over that period so you can buy them back for les... |
North Korea-what's the situation with its nukes, how "good" is its army and who would win in NK vs USA? | There is no doubt the US could destroy North Korea in any sort of war. The question is, could they: * do it without suffering politically unacceptable losses?* do it without massive civilian losses in South Korea?* do it without drawing China into the conflict?The USA would decimate North Korea , we have the biggest mi... |
Why do many rappers from the early 90's have close relationships with The Nation of Islam? | Concisely, 5% Islam was spreading like wildfire at the time. in a lot of the impoverished neighborhoods that these rappers came from, especially in the northeast where most of said rappers hailed from.because they are descendants of the black panthers, who were closely related to the nation of islam. for example, tupac... |
why isn't internet and cellphone data usage a publicly owned free resource? | Data/bandwidth/internet usage isn't a consumable resource. What you're paying for is the connectivity. Data usage is only growing and the providers need an income stream to constantly upgrade their networks as well as maintain what they currently have. |
What happens to a fit, pregnant mother's abdominal muscles during and after pregnancy? | They get stretched out, and can separate, causing diastasis recti. Not everyone experiences this condition, and many times the muscles just go back to normal. Your ligaments and joints get loose as well, all caused by certain pregnancy hormones that enable a women's hips to shift during birth. All of this usually goes ... |
Why do many things appear darker when wet? | Because when something is wet, light bounces around inside it more before being reflected back to the eye. The more the light bounces, the more of it gets absorbed, the less reaches the eye, and the darker the object appears. The reason the light bounces more is that the moisture increases the average scattering angle ... |
Why do we get the urge to hurt ourselves when we're extremely stressed out? | Not everyone has these feelings. Some do, and some even act on them. There are a few reasons. - Actual or contemplated pain acts as a distraction against the stressful situation.- Actual pain releases endorphins, brain chemicals that help us feel better, like a built-in medicine. - Some people report that the ability t... |
How do password crackers work. Don't servers reject after X amount of attempts? | They do. Password cracking relies on getting the database of hashed passwords from the site, and finding matching passwords by guided brute forcePassword crackers is a broad term for any system intended to find a correct password. The strategy varies a lot, and is rarely as straightforward as hammering a single usernam... |
How does an increase in the number of individual samples increase the likelihood of observing an extremely rare event when the likelihood of that event isn't increased for an individual sample? | The question has to do with a very subtle point in probability. *Before you flip any of five coins*, the odds of you getting five heads are 1/2^5 = 1/32. But *after four coins are already flipped and found to have landed heads*, your odds are simply 1/2. The reason this works out is something called *conditional probab... |
Why do most escort services reject black men? And how is this legal? | As heard from an escort, they don't want to wear condoms, haggle about the price, complain of racism, rude in general. |
when did giving the middle finger start and why was it considered such a bad thing? | I had a tour of the colosseum in Rome yesterday and the guide told us that it was to originally used to indicate whether you were a giver or a taker. Edit for clarification-Male ProstitutionI had heard that, during the 100 years war, whenever the French would capture an English archer they would cut off his pointer and... |
When I take a picture of my computer screen with my phone, why does it make little ripples? Example pic in the comments below. | What's happening is that you have two patterns lining up, the grid of pixels in your camera's sensor and the grid of pixels on the computer screen. When they don't line up exactly evenly, you get a Moiré pattern, which is a pattern that "emerges" from the interaction of the two patterns we're dealing with. It's curved ... |
Why does it hurt so bad when I drink or eat something and it "goes down the wrong tube?" | This mainly has to do with a sudden reflexive spasm of the diaphragm and other pharyngeal muscles to try and prevent or clear food from obstructing the trachea and choking you. The sudden reflexive engagement of these muscles is unexpected and can be painful. TL;DR it triggers a reflex that basically gives you an auto-... |
[EL15] Why are television networks never hijacked/"hacked," like websites? | It doesn't happen often but it's not entirely unheard of. The [Max Headroom Incident] is maybe the most well-known; Wikipedia has a [list of major "tv hacking" events]. The use of digital encryption and the specialist equipment and knowledge required to attack a modern TV network make it very difficult to carry out the... |
Why do certain sounds (eg; Nails on a chalkboard, Polystyrene rubbing together etc.) cause me intense discomfort, especially in my teeth? | Nails on a chalkboard type of sounds have a similar wavelength to a human "death screech." Therefore it it rubs us the wrong way. |
Who really holds the power in America: the electorate, Congress, President, or Illuminati? | There's this whole system of checks and balances that ensures whoever can buy out two or all three of the branches can make the laws. Because corporations are people and money is free speech and you can't take away a persons right to free speech, that's in the constitution. |
Does a popcorn kernel have the same nutrients as a piece of popcorn? | I would assume the nutrition to be similar. I know that when vegetables are boiled, fried, or baked they lose nutritional value because the heat alters the chemical composition. The same nutrients are still present, but not in the same quantity. Since popcorn is a starch, I assume some changes occur under heat, but not... |
Why are we bad at coming up with random numbers? | Same reason that answering 'C' 4x in a row pisses people off. We tend to see patterns in short runs of random numbers, even if they are aperiodic. A more annoying response is that your brain is deterministic and therefore at best can only come up with pseudorandom numbers. |
Why was water on Mars so important but we already knew there are oceans on Enciladus? | Water on Enciladus is like finding cheap gasoline on some random gas station way out of your way. Still a good find, but kinda inconvenient to use. Water on Mars is like finding cheap gasoline in a neighborhood you were considering moving into. Something that looks like, in right conditions, you would use a crap out of... |
Why is it easier to see stars out of the corner of your eye instead of straight on? | There are two different types of light receptive cells in your eyes called rods and cones. The cones detect color and require bright light and the rods don't detect color, but work in dim light. The edges of your vision are detected almost entirely by rod cells, and as you move to the center of your vision more and mor... |
What determines whether words are considered "easy" or "hard", regardless of their length, spelling or pronounciation? | Simply how often they're used, I guess. The more obscure words tend to describe more specific things, so they get used less. |
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