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Why do energy drinks come in metal cans instead of plastic bottles?
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Ever seen a Rockstar or Monster in a clear container? they look really nasty. i always thought that's why they're in cans.I have only seen [NOS] sold in plastic bottlesto convince you to pay $3.99 for $0.05 worth of sugar water and caffeine.In my country they're sold in glass or plastic bottles almost as much as cans.
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If you buy a $999 computer online during Tax-Free Weekend, are you exempt from taxes?
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Under Georgia law, you won't pay sales tax on a computer costing under $1000 during the tax holiday. So, you should be able to go in with $1000 in cash, buy a $999 computer and walk out with a dollar.
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Why does the iPhone make you delete so many pictures in order to take a new one?
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50 sounds like an awful lot but anyway, it's like this: when you take a picture the raw data is recorded from the sensor, this raw file is a shitload bigger than your standard jpeg. The phone processes the raw data, compresses it, saves it and then discards the raw file. Therefore you need a lot more memory space than just one jpeg to process the new one. If you have saved other data on your phone since taking the last picture, the more photos you will need to delete.
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Why is a lot of human effort directed towards space exploration and colonizing different planets while no serious attempts are made at ocean colonization?
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It is harder to explore the bottom of the ocean than it is to explore space. It is far easier to protect from a vacuum than to protect from intense pressure.
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Why do people hunt rhinos for their horns? What do the horns have that you can't get elsewhere?
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As in, what do they physically have that makes them desirable? Nothing. The horns don't contain any special chemicals that make them valuable. They look cool though, so they can be used for decoration . In east asian countries, there's also a belief that rhino horn has healing properties, especially for erectile dysfunction, which unfortunately simply isn't true.In certain Asian countries it is considered male enhancementIn certain countries their is a belief that rhino horns have certain properties valued in herbal medicine. Heing properties, or fertility - things like that. It happens with a lot of other animals too . Rhinos are hunted because many wealthy people will pay a lot of money for these horns. In many places where rhinos live, poorer people can earn a lot of money from just killing one rhino and selling its horn. Really, the people funding the poachers are the root of the issue, but the poachers themselves are still a big factor even though they can be so poor that killing a rhino would be very important for their incomeThe horn are actually made of keratin and are like massive face nails that can grow back of cut off above the base. It is just mumbo-jumbo BS that is the reason people want them.From what I've read, a large part of the demand for rhino horn is traditional Eastern medicine and as a status symbol. _URL_0_
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How do people find the most off the chart random glitches where you have to do a certain thing to do it in a video game?
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Some of them are on purpose due to knowledge of the code. For example, Ghandi in Civilization. In short; in some game code, if you make a number go below zero, sometimes it will circle around to a very high number instead. _URL_0_ Some are done by trying over and over. Playtesters don't just play games to see if they're fun, but to see if they can break the game or cheat this way. A playtester might be told to try to make the game mess up in a certain level, so the tester might try weird things: running backwards, jumping constantly, running into corners where the computer might mess up and make them fall through the ground, trying to do things the game wouldn't normally allow you to do. This can take a lot of time, but by knowing how the game is made, the tester can try to break the game certain ways.Accidentally. Or, for the more serious individuals, they might examine the code itself and/or the memory of the computer. Some things are the result of methods and functions interacting in weird and unexpected ways.
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how is it that my cellphone gps can still show my live position on a map if I lose cell reception?
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GPS does not have anything to do with your cell reception its a seperate radio that communicates with GPS satellites. Your phone talks to at least 3 of them to pinpoint itself and tell you where you are. This is how you can have signal and no GPS and vice versa. Your phone can also use tower triangulation to figure out your location if need be.Your GPS knows it's location based on delays in communication with satellites, not cell towers. The map that your position is marked on uses your cellular data to load that GPS information in a way that is meaningful to you. The map itself can be cached which means it's accessible without needing a live connection. This isn't as useful as caching something like music which is static because when you're moving the map must continually be updated.
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When you read news articles about global warming such as "The hottest year on record in 80 years!", why was it so hot 80 years ago?
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This year being really hot isn't necessarily indicative of global warming, an article with that title is being sensationalist. If the running average temperature over the last 10 years was getting continuously warmer, that would be a better indication of a trend. Temperature is affected by a lot of different things so their are years that are extra hot and years that are extra cold. It becomes a problem when their are a lot more hot years than cold years in a 10, or 50, or 100 year period.
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How is cape town in South Africa running out of water?
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Desalinization is energy intensive, so it's quite expensive. You see it a lot in places that have little water but are on the ocean, and there's lost of money -- like the Arabian peninsula. The problem with Cape Town is that it's experiencing a drought, which is a *temporary* reduction in rainfall. Desalinization is a bad solution because it's very expensive, and then at some point the drought ends, and the people who built the desalinization plant have to compete with -- get this -- **free water from the sky**. It is a very bad business plan to sell something that falls out of the sky for free.Not only is desalination very expensive, it only solves half the problem. Most water distribution systems rely on gravity, it rains uphill. water flows downhill and is diverted to where it is needed. Desalinated water winds up at sea level, which is as downhill as you can. You still need to find a way to transport that water uphill to a million thirsty people.Desalinization is super expensive, both to build the plant and to run/maintain it . And because droughts are often shorter than the time to get approval, design, fund, build such a plant they aren't often built -- especially given the costs to run them and how that would impact the cost of water. Hard to get everybody on board for something that might take a decade and billions to build for a problem that could end the next rainy season.
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Why is there a risk of a deformed child when brother and sister perfom incest?
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Basically, for some genetic defects, you need both parents to be carriers of that defect. If only one set of your genes has the allele for this defect, you'll be a carrier but not show symptoms. So if there's a small chance of being a carrier, even if you're a carrier you're spouse probably isn't, so your kid should at worst be a carrier himself. In the case of incest, if it turns out I'm a carrier, then it's highly probable my sibling is a carrier as well. So any genetic defects I'm carrying are way more likely to actually show up in my child. You can look at it statistically: Say there's a 2% chance to have a giant head gene. So out of a random sample of the population, any couple has a .04% chance of both being carriers and making it possible that their kid will have a giant head. Now take a random incestuous couple. There's a 2% chance that one specific person will have it, and if one person has it there's a 25% chance their partner will have it. So with incestuous couples, there's now a .5% chance their child will have a giant head, which is a 1250% increase. tl;dr: Out of a random sample, there's a very low chance both members of a couple are both carriers for some defect. Out of random incestuous couples, the odds are much higher.
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Why do white things turn yellow if they stay in light?
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It's not that they're white, it's that they're made of a type of plastic that, after prolong exposure to light, will degrade, becoming yellowed and brittle. UV is bad for that type of plastic, so the more time it spends in direct sunlight, the more it yellows.Either ultraviolet rays from sunlight, or just oxygen in the atmosphere, or both, are bad for the white pigments included in many white objects, such as computer cases, paper, etc. In time, the white pigment degrades, and is less able to imbue the surface with a white color. The result is often a yellow-ish hue, although some kind of dirty gray is also possible.
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When dreaming, Why do we sometimes forget we are in one? How does our brain make it realistic?
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In some ways, you are living in an artificial simulation created by your brain at all times. Sometimes the simulation is based on information from your senses and sometimes it's not. Noticing that you are in a dream requires you to realize that the reality that you are experiencing does not make sense. Some people train themselves to check if they are dreaming by using tricks like remembering to always look at their watch twice and make sure the time is consistent. Science doesn't really know how dreaming works, however. We barely know how being awake works, for that matter.
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If doctors prescribe medication, why do comercials for medication exist that are targeted toward patients?
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That's all about encouraging patients to ask for the drug by name, rather than the generic version. Brand awareness 101.Just wanted to throw in that the U.S. and New Zealand are the only two western nations where these types of ads are legal.Because a patient asks for a specific medication increasing the rate the medication gets prescribed. So the pharmacy companies get more money. Two scenarios. A patient walks in and says I have depression The doctor says, oh. Here are some things we can do that don't involved medication. The patient leaves and uses therapy to treat his depression and he gets better. The patient is happy and the doctor did his job and makes some money. Or A patient walk in and says I have depression. I saw a Comercial for Prozac and I want to try that. The doctor recommends other therapy but the patient wants Prozac. The doctor prescribes Prozac. The patient gets drugs the pharm company gets money and the doctor gets money. Also. Pharmacy conpanies will give money to doctors to prescribe their pills. Hope that helps.Ads create demand. How many men would have opened up to their docs about sexual performance issues before all the ads for ED. An ED is psychologically so much nicer than having to actually say erectile dysfunction. I also agree with the other commenters thus farThey want patients to ask for it at the doctors I think. I am British so seeing them when I moved to America was really strange. Only adverts for over the counter stuff like for hay fever exist there because the market is regulated for prescription drugs.
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why everyone fled/hated Digg once v4 was implemented?
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Why I left, in a word, superusers. The way content was promoted was not even close to being democratic. This is a good read _URL_0_ > An ordinary user might post the most important story of the day on Tuesday and get three "Diggs." But if MrBabyMan noticed the story on Friday and posted a duplicate link, it would be on the front page with 10,000 diggs in three hours
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What happens in court if there is conflict between parents over homeschooling their child?
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Are the parents still married? In which case, do they want to get a divorce? Because this is how you get a divorce. A married person doesn't sue his spouse if he doesn't get his way. It's impossible to say how it would go down. It really depends on a lot of circumstances: there will probably be a psychological evaluation which will have an impact on the ruling, and various state laws will have an influence as well.
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What causes the earth's surface to spontaneously drop into sinkholes?
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It's caused by the surface collapsing into holes beneath the surface. It can be hard to determine the exact geology underlaying a site, and it's possible to simply not know about underground weak points that can eventually collapse into a sink hole. Florida and some other parts of the South are really known for them; there are places where old salt mines have caved in and caused massive sinkholes, and Florida's geology is so cruddy to build on that you get sinkholes all the time down there.
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If downloading packets is random, how come videos stream in a sequence?
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Downloading packets only has a random latency, and probably a smaller random loss rate. The actual packets and their order isn't often randomized. The packets contain serial numbers, so they can be put back in order. Video streams aren't real-time, the player buffers up enough packets before the video starts to keep the screen busy if there is an unlucky delay or retransmission. You see this when the connection is too bad as the stream stops with the "buffering" icon.Downloading packets isn't random. The very basis of most connections is the fact that the packets are sequenced and must be sent and received in the correct order. If a recipient computer receives and out-of-sequence packet it sends a request for the correct packet in the sequence.
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What did Google "invent" that made their search engine so much better than earlier search engines like Yahoo?
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[Page Rank] which was a good process to decide which pages were important. Prior to that it was easy for a computer to find a lot of pages that had some keyword, but hard for them to tell which were useful . In simple terms, page rank borrows information from humans to determine which pages are more useful than othersWhile PageRank was important its also important to recognize many of the other factors that have lead to google's success including a focus on making websites that are responsive to users and A/B testing. For instance look at all these search engines: _URL_3_ And then look at _URL_3_. Which do you think would be faster to load? Which would be most likely to show results in an easier to read fashion? So google's success is both from having good results, but also making it easier to get to those good results They applied a little known algorithm developed in 1976 by Gabriel Pinski and Francis Narin to rank scientific journals to web pages. They both were solving the same kind of problem, link analysis. In the case of scientific journals, it was based on the citations Their algorithm was far more effective than their competitors who had implemented simpler keyword lookups.
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How can water/liquids in pipes and hoses go straight up and defy gravity.
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You defy gravity every time you lift your arm. Your muscles can apply enough force to overcome gravity and make your arm lift. Defying gravity is really easy. As for how the water in your pipes can do it, it's because of water towers. They pump a large amount of water into the air and let it gravity feed back down into the pipes that eventually lead to your house. Your pipes are lower and much smaller than the water tower, so it pushes the water through them.
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How is the Brexit divorce bill being calculated?
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The figure the EU came up with is the cost of the Uk's membership up to 2020 plus any funding or financial agreements already pledged by the UK , around £100 billion. The EU then took any rebates owed to the UK into account to come to around £50 billion.
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Why does a humidifier (water vapor) keep my skin from getting dry while simply splashing water on my skin does not?
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Your skin gets dry because it loses water to the air. Unless you keep your skin constantly wet, it will lose water to the dry air. A humidifier makes the air more moist, which makes it harder for your skin to lose water to it.
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why if you try to sleep when not very tired, you stay awake way longer than if you waited until you were more tired
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Pressure/stress and lack of routine. Here there are a myriad of things working against you. The first could be lack of routine. If you get in a habit of doing specific things before you go to bed, that allow you to relax, it signals the body "time to sleep now". Secondly, pressure/stress. These go together. You have to get to sleep now. You have to be up early so you need to sleep now. Thats a harsh demand to put on a body trying to relax. Because you feel the pressure to go to sleep now, if you don't, you start to stress. Then thoughts like I only have X more hours of sleep I can get pop up. So you put more pressure on yourself to sleep. It becomes a cycle that can be hard to get out of. On a side note, don't surf reddit if you can't sleep. It stimulates you enough to keep you from truly relaxing. The best trick I have learned to get to sleep when I need that extra boost is to put on music without lyrics on a low volume. Then allow your mind to create a "silent movie" about what the music. This forces you to be in quite atmosphere. Takes your mind off of other pressures and helps you relax. Soon, you movie runs into your dream and you are waking up the next morning. Hope this helps.The answer is circadian rhythm. How are circadian rhythms related to sleep? > Circadian rhythms are important in determining human sleep patterns. The body's master clock, or SCN, controls the production of melatonin, a hormone that makes you sleepy. Since it is located just above the optic nerves, which relay information from the eyes to the brain, the SCN receives information about incoming light. When there is less light—like at night—the SCN tells the brain to make more melatonin so you get drowsy. _URL_0_ TLDR: your body operates on a 24 hour cycle. If you try and go to sleep earlier than normal you will probably have a difficult time falling asleep.
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why can't heat be converted to electricity in a closed system?
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Because in any closed system, entropy always increases. Assume a uniformly warm room. Turning some of the heat to electricity would now give you a warm area and a cold area, thus *decreasing* entropy . However, if your room includes a warm zone and a cold zone, you *certainly can* convert that difference into an electricity source, for example, powering a Stirling engine that runs a generator.You can. That's what a [thermoelectric generator] does. You'd technically have to only heat half the room to ensure a heat differential. Of course, you'll never be able to put back into the battery every bit that came out of it. Not even close. Terribly, terribly inefficient.
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What is the point of showing the 'tropic' lines on a globe or world map?
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These lines represent the northern- and southern-most points of the sun's "travel" in the skies. The sun would be overhead during one of the solstice's were you to stand on each line--the northern one in June, the southern one in December. In between these lines and the sun may appear overhead some months, north of the viewer some months, south of the viewer some months. Beyond those lines and the sun will be visible but never overhead. . Climate tendencies usually follow these rough "lines"
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What is going on with the US Secret Service
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It's likely mismanagement that is causing all of the commotion combined with the Internet putting everything in front of your face every single day. I'm sure there's always been some bad eggs in any organization. Previous management may have had a better grip on keeping issues in house. Having said that, any new secret service head that steps in should be in strict following of a less than zero tolerance policy meaning that even the implication of wrong doing of agents will result in their termination up to prosecution if necessary.Mainly the latter. The SS runs in cycles. In the early 60s, they were every bit as lax and mismanaged as they are now. The JFK assassination was kind of a wakeup call, and they got their shit together for awhile, now they 've been in decline since about the 90s or so. You have to understand that, contrary to the carefully-propagated myth of them being "the best of the best" and so forth, they are really just average government employees with guns. The requirements to become a SS agent are a driver's license and a high school diploma. If you want to be a supervisor, you have to have a bachelor's degree . Like every government agency, the guys at the top are only interested in their careers, and increasing their agency's budget and clout. The madness wreaked on the government after 9/11 and the formation of the DHS has had a further toxic influence on any agency dealing with intelligence/security/law enforcement. The whole system is really seriously messed up now.
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Why does our perception of time disappear when we go to sleep?
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Our brains stop taking in external information when we sleep. Sleep also messes with memory, so we simply don't remember much of what happened. How much we take in and remember depends on the stage of sleep. If you're sleeping well and hitting REM/deep sleep, you won't remember much. If the quality of your sleep is poor and you spend much of the night in only early stages of sleep, you'll remember more and likely be quite aware of the passage of time. The brain is still keep track of time in the sense that it is following its circadian rhythm.
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Game Show questions for TV watchers
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The most likely reason is that if they didn't have a question, it would be considered gambling, and they'd need a gambling license. By having a question, it's not gambling, it's a competition. I have no idea about the law in Germany, but that's true in many countries.
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Why is Hunter S. Thompson cool?
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Writing talent. Sociopolitical insight. Humor. Sports knowledge. The ability to make friends with almost anyone. The drug tolerance of an african elephant.He's a unique character. He has always been a counter-cultural figure, but also has a number of conservative values. He's an avid and enthusiastic user of hallucinogenic drugs. He's been friends with many famous people. He also basically invented [a new style of journalism]. Finally, he wrote what is for me [one of the top-five all time openings to a book].
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How does hydroplaning work? How can a dirtbike ride on a lake?
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Liquids acts like a solid the first millisecond you touch it. That's why you can slap the surface of a container of water.
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Why do humans like white noise like rain so much?
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The brain likes to use its senses. In dead silence the brain goes as far as making up noises for itself to process. White noise is less crazy person, more natural feeling. Edit to add: This also tricks your mind out of *super sense* mode. A uniform noise throughout the night is predictable, easy for the brain to write off as just noise and go about it's brainy business. Dead silence with the occasional bark fest at three am will set off all kinds of fight or flight triggers.
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When you visit a fancy restaurant, why are the pepper shakers so large? What does the length add?
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* they are pepper grinders, not shakers they grind up whole peppercorns to give you tasty fresh pepper* the bigger they are, the more peppercorns they can hold* the longer they are, the more easily they can reach across a table', "I'm guessing you're referring to those huge foot-long pepper grinders . Something like [this gentleman] is holding, right? I assume they are that big because restaurants get through pepper a lot faster than a single household would do, so it makes sense to have a big grinder that you're not always having to refill.
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Why aren't meteorite fragments more valuable and treasured than diamonds and other rare earth minerals?
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They're ugly, they're almost impossible to distinguish from regular rocks, and they're far too rare to collect enough to sell regularly.
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Why is crispbread stored in paper and not plastic?
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Plastic seals in moisture, so as water evaporates out of the bread, it gets trapped and eventually reabsorbed by the crust. This makes it not crisp, so it would just be bread, and not crispbread. Paper absorbs the moisture as it evaporates, so that the crust stays crisp.
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The lighter your skin, the more prone you are to getting sunburn... considering that light colors reflect more light, and dark colors absorb more light?
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Because sunburn isn't about heat: it's about UV light causing the same kind of damage that heat does to our skin. Melanin is a protein human bodies produce that protects against UV light; and is dark in color: basically, it absorbs UV and some visible light . So while dark-skinned people heat up faster in sunlight, they ~~don't~~ **take longer to** burn because UV light ~~isn't damaging~~ **causes less damage to** their skin. edit: Corrected the last sentence based on feedback from /u/darkhorse_defender and /u/mschwartz33. Thank you for the corrections. [This website] says that dark skin is roughly equivalent to SPF 13 sunscreen; meaning they can be in the sun ~13 times longer without burning.
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How do social networks like Facebook defend themselves against DDoS attacks?
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They are really really big. DDoS is all about overwhelming a server. When your servers are capable of handing a few billion pings a second, a couple extra hundred million doesn't make a noticeable impact. Few people have the resources to compete against Facebook's servers. Additionally, they have spent considerable money on various defensive programs and equipment. I'm less familiar with this gear so I'll leave that to someone else.
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Why are car designs today so mundane opposed to car designs of the past (1930s-1990s)?
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From 1930 to 1990 ish oil especially in America was very cheap so they made all kind of designs and now oil is more expensive so cars have to have aerodynamic designs to save oil.
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Why are drug stores selling products that have a disclaimer saying "No Approved Therapeutic Claim"?
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They are believed to have beneficial effects but haven't gone through the testing needed to prove it, or haven't conclusively showed any benefits during testing. It can also mean that the company selling the product just doesn't have permission to say it does have approved therapeutic properties. As for why stores are selling them, that's because they still make money off the product. Lots of people still believe there are benefits to supplements and such, despite labels like that, and many supplements do have a legitamate effect
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How did we determine the composition of the Earth's core?
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We haven't actually "detected" the presence of iron/nickel in the core, or even measured its actual temperature. Seismology allows for measuring the core's density, as well as the inner/outer core boundary because the outer core is liquid. Assuming that the core is made of iron/nickel is basically a very safe guess based on elemental abundance in the solar system and measured density. [Here] is a paper discussing that the actual calculated density of an iron/nickel core is higher than the seismologically estimated density of the core, therefore it must contain lighter elements as well. As for which elements, that's also speculatively based on elemental abundance .
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Why do we "jump" a bit when we are scared sometimes?
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It's called the startle response. It's not just humans. Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. It's a hardwired reflex that your brain stem initiates in order to protect extremely vital areas of your body . This usually comes from a sudden unexpected sound, something that's unnatural or simply sudden. Your brain is fast, but it can't figure everything out all the time. When it hears a loud noise that it can't identify as good, it takes a shortcut and assumes that whatever it is, is probably going to kill you. So it jerks you awake by sending a signal from your brain stem to your entire body. That's what ends up startling you and can make you jump. An offshoot of this is a slightly delayed response of adrenaline. Keep in mind that it takes at least 8 seconds for blood from your arm to return to your heart and reach your brain. So hormones like adrenaline and noradrenaline don't add to this response, but they can heighten your sensitivity and make you jumpy once it kicks in. The safest place from danger is any distance further away from it. So jumping or just moving in the opposite direction is one of those natural, instinctive things that were built into your body.
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How and why did mead lose it's popularity?
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Beer and wine from fruits can be produced in higher quantities than meads. Honey production is much more limited in volume than the crops used to make other beverages.
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Diffference between DPI and sensitivity?
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Dpi is how many discrete points per inch your sensor will resolve. Sensitivity is how far the mouse will move per discrete point. In some sense they do the same but if turn up your Dpi to extreme levels small mouse twitches and noise from unhomogenous surfaces will be amplified. Many mouse are also advertised with extreme DPI values in the several thousand range. Those numbers often don't mean a lot if the sensor isn't actually that accurate.
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How/where are heavy elements created?
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Stars can produce atoms up to iron, although they produce these elements very late in the life cycle. Any atoms heavier than that are produced in supernovas.Stars go through cycles. As one fuel runs out they start to burn out which causes them to start compressing due to gravity which then raises the pressure and temperature in the core and allows the star to fuse the next element. In massive enough stars this continues until the star makes iron. This process takes a fraction of a second and the star can't fuse the iron and so the core collapses under its own gravity. The rebound causes a supernova explosion. The pressure in the supernova is enough to fuse beyond iron.
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What is this thing on the bottom of all airplane windows? (Pics)
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It's a hole. There are two panes of plastic separating you from the outside, creating an air pocket. With the pressure change varying so much with altitude, if the air pocket were sealed in, it would more than likely explode. The reason the pocket exists in the first place is to create an insulating cushion to minimize heat loss in the plane.This question intrigued me and so I did a bit of digging, following a concise answer on Quora, led me to this quote on an _URL_0_ forum, it seems to explain things quite well - > The small hole is located on the lower part of the inner or secondary pane. The purpose of the hole is to transfer pressurisation loads to the outer or primary pane. If the outer primary pane fails, the pressurisation loads are then automatically transferred to the inner or secondary pane. I seem to remember that the 747 had a third pane that was part of the plastic reveal located on the cabin sidewall panels. This inner-most pane was known as the "scratch pane", and it was this one that prevented scratches and damaged to the two pressure panes.
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what's the fascination that people have watching videos of maggot removal, zit popping, ear dirt extraction, etc. ?
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Talking completely out of my ass here, maybe it has to do with some instinctive grooming drive that we inherited from our ancestors. If you go to the zoo or watch a documentary, you can see that apes/etc. instinctively groom each other; so some people probably get a sense of pleasure from seeing such things because there's an instinctive drive to remove/pop/clean such things.
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Hypothetically if everyone on earth was quarantined individually for 1 month could we irradicate most airborne illnesses?
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No. Humans aren't the only people who have diseases. Animals and plants get them too. Every so often, bacteria or viruses will "cross" from animal to human, infecting humans for the first time and starting the disease. This is what is believed to have happened with Ebola and HIV , and why things like bird flu are concerning to public health officials. Ebola and HIV aren't examples of airborne transmission, thankfully, but any type of flu virus is. In fact, you might do more harm than good with the quarantine by making the human population more susceptible to viruses in the outside world. *^Edit: ^Added ^examples*
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How does one country make threats to another country?
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Who says they don't just call the other country and threaten them? What do you think diplomats do behind closed doors?", '1. Through formal channels. President A orders his ambassador to country B to officially deliver the message "i'm gonna toss your salad" 2. Through indirect channels. Country A doesn't speak to country B, but country C does. Country A has their ambassador to C ask them to tell country B "i'm gonna toss your salad". This is how the US deals with North Korea. I think Sweden is pur country C. 3. Through the press. Country A knows country B watches Colbert, so their pres goes on the show and brags about how he's gonna toss Bs salad. 4. Through spies. Country A knows their spy in country B has been compromised, but they pretend he hasn't been, and send him info they want leaked. 5. With bombs. If you're bombing them, they know you want to bomb them.
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How can any style be considered "modern" (like modern architecture)? Wouldn't any style be considered modern during its time?
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There is "modern" meaning contemporary and then "[Modernism]" with a capital M referring to a specific artistic movement in the early to mid 1900s
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What causes me to wake up minutes before my alarm goes off, even when I've barely slept?
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There is something in our body called a biological clock. If your body is used to doing some things at a certain time, be it waking up or maybe using the restroom. You will generally do these things at those times even when its pointless to do so otherwise. Since you work your body does this to help you not oversleep when its time for you to work. I hope this helps you.Happens to me as well. But I suffer from anxiety disorders, so if you don't, I wonder what else it could be.
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Why do rockets level off horizontally rather than maintaining a vertical path?
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All the other commenters are correct, but no one has linked [this classic xkcd what if] that explains and illustrates the concept very well.Orbit is not a function of altitude, it's all about velocity. Obviously reaching orbital velocity at ground level is tough. Lots of air to push through, lots of trees in the way. So rockets burn more or less straight up until they clear the majority of the atmosphere, and then roll over into a more horizontal path to start building up speed and reach orbital velocity. If they went straight up they'd come straight back down as soon as the engine shut off.In order to enter orbit, they need to do two things 1. Reach a high enough altitude that friction from atmosphere is low enough to have a minimal effect on the craft 2. Gain enough horizontal velocity so that they fall AROUND the Earth, not back to the surface. For most low-Earth orbits, that is a 17,500 mph horizontal velocity to the ground. Getting the altitude, about 100 miles or so, is not the hard part. Getting that 17,500 mph is. So the rockets lean over fairly soon so they can use as much fuel as possible gaining speed while also climbing at a decent-enough rate> this is a popular flat Earth claim Wow really? Something simple enough to be understood by anyone who has played a few hours of Kerbal Space Program is enough to confuse these people? That makes me really sadSorry to join in on eli5. Can someone please explain the difference in how a weather balloon goes into "space", but we need 18.5k mph for a rocket? EDIT: Nvm. "The Space Station hasn't escaped Earth's gravity at all; it's experiencing about 90% the pull that we feel on the surface." reading the xkcd now :P
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How does a lawyer defend his client, if there is concrete evidence that they actually committed the crime?
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When there's concrete evidence that they did it, the lawyer will work for a lower punishment. They'll find whatever excuse they can to get a shorter jail time, avoid death penalty, whatever the case may be.
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Am I really saving gas by turning off my car's engine at red lights?
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I believe 10 seconds off will make up for the gas to start it up. However if you stop your car at every light you will wreak havoc on your starterForget the original question for a moment. When I learned to drive fifty years ago, my dad made the point that there are idiots on the road and you have to be ready at ANY MOMENT to get the hell out of wherever you are. If you have a stick shift, don't sit there in neutral with your foot off the clutch unless it IS for a long time. Always be ready to go. If you have an automatic, be ready to go. And if your car takes more than a second to start up then more time to put into gear remember that the idiot bearing down on you at "ONLY" 30 miles per hour covers 44 feet every second! Don't let your car be in traffic, which includes red lights, without the capability of getting the hell out of there.The amount of gas it takes to start depends a lot on the engine - size, fuel injected vs. direct injected, etc. Even if you save a little gas, you're also putting more wear on your starter. TL;DR not worth the hassle either way. It's going to be, at most, pennies of savings.If you drive a fuel injected vehicle, then yes. Non-fuel injected vehicles use more gas than at idle to start the engine.It's too dependent of a situation. If the red light lasts 1 second than no, you do not save anything, if it lasts 30 seconds you do , depending on what your car is. If your car is a simple civic, you will not burn significant gas keeping it on, if it's a teched out with on screen controls etc, it will. It's very situation dependant, and in the end the gas you save is not worth the hassle.
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How do people figure out what colors to use when coloring an old black and white photo?
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"Black" and "white" are actually a ton of different shades of grey. If you know the method the picture was taken with and how it converts visible light into something that can be put onto film in greyscale, you can tell with a pretty high degree of accuracy which shade of grey corresponds to which visible light colorHistorical perspective, contextual clues, hues and saturations, going with "expected colors". The sky is blue, the grass is green, cement is gray. Certain militaries wore certain colors, we have their uniforms today. Once you get through the "basics" and what we expect to see, you have quite a bit of info there. Then the other clues can help fill that in. All the colors may not be perfect, but there is still plenty of information in a photo to get buy and colorize it.
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How does my car radio display the station's call letters?
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Via [RDS]. There's another signal tucked away inside the FM broadcast that can carry information like text. The station chooses what to send. This is also how radios can identify the type of music playing like 'Rock' or 'Jazz'.
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From a technical standpoint, how are hackers able to "crack" online passwords?
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On most sites user names are very easy to find. For example I can see yours right on this page, SonicPavement. For every way a website tries to block hackers, those hackers will come up with some clever way to get around it. For example, they could use a botnet to get around password attempt limits. Longer/more complex passwords make botnets less effective. There's also the issue that the password database could get hacked. In this case you wouldn't want the actual passwords to be available, so they are hashed . If a hacker gets ahold of the hashes a guess attempt limit cannot be enforced and therefore a complex password is very important. There have been quite a few major sites which have had their password databases hacked recently, [Evernote being one of the latest]. [_URL_0_]
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Do special forces count as "boots on ground" or do they have their own separate rules?
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"Boots on the ground" isn't a really helpful term since it basically means whatever the speaker wants it to mean. That said, it doesn't typically apply to special forces or "advisers" or the like. Assuming the figures in [this article] are correct, the US has/had 1,000 advisers in Iraq while insisting that there weren't "boots on the ground". Clearly there are literal boots on the literal ground. But the phrase there refers to "ground troops" or the like rather than advisers or special forces. Also, we aren't enemies with Iran. There are clearly plenty of problems between our two countries, but we can still work together when it benefits both of usThey don't count as boots on the ground in political terms. "Special operations" or sometimes "military advisors" would be the terms tossed around. Also, we are at odds with Iran but we have a common interest in stabilizing Iraq that neither group could do on its own. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, something like that?', "The President makes the rules for everyone in the military. He has help from a bunch of people, but he's the boss boss. The President lets some people do sneaky things for him. He wants them to be sneaky because if they get caught doing these things, people may not like the President as much. Most of these people doing sneaky things work at a place called JSOC. The people at JSOC are like the President's sneaky ninjas. When the President is telling people about what he's doing, he doesn't usually talk about his ninjas, but sometimes, when the ninjas have done something really good, and the President is proud, he'll tell everyone what happened. The whole point of the ninjas though, is that the President can choose if he wants to tell people about the good things, or not tell people about the bad things.
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how did we as humans collectively decide on the location of the international date line?
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It didn't. The date line is the opposite side of the globe to the Prime Meridian . There were multiple Prime Meridians throughout history, typlically countries with large a large navy or merchant shipping fleet would have their own. Eventually they all lost out to the current PM.
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How do self-driving cars reduce accidents
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> Can a self-driving car keep tabs of all the pedestrians around it too? Yes. A self-driving car also has a 360 degree field of vision, and has a reaction time that exceeds human reactions by an order of magnitude. A computer can begin stopping the car before you've even *noticed* the child in the road.
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Is the heart like a ticking time bomb, or are we harming it over the years before death?
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Usually not. It's usually a gradual process. There are many different things that can go wrong with your heart, the most well known is a heart attack, in which some of the muscle tissue actually dies. But there are many other things that can cause problems in your heart. However, usually when something does go wrong, it's pretty sudden. For example, most heart attacks are caused when you get a blood clot in one of the blood vessels that goes to your heart. This causes the muscle to die because of a lack of oxygen and this causes a heart attack.
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Why is it not possible to control your heart the way you do your lungs or any other muscle?
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Two points here: 1) Your body is programmed not to die, so for example it's extremely difficult to hold your breath until you die or even until you pass out. Your autonomous nervous system keeps necessary functions going regardless of what the conscious passenger in your body thinks it wants. 2) I understand you can in fact control it to a certain extent. I believe it's possible to learn to increase or decrease your heart rate at will. I think it needs some concentration. I think I read something by Derren Brown on the subject.
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Why did Sarkozy call Netanyahu a liar? What did he do?
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Palestine and Israel are pretty much enemies today, though they would like to share the same land. So, a lot of other countries want peace to appear there. Sarkozy probably had some verbal agreement with Netanyahu. Sarkozy put some weight on the discussions between Israel and the EU. He also helped Israel being a member of the OECD. He also asked Abbas to remove his proposal to make Palestine part of the UN. So, I think he was fairly angry when the quartet asked for the restart of discussions between Palestine and Israel and Netanyahu said no to all initiatives. That's not very nice, and probably in contradiction to what he agreed with his friend Sarko.
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Why was Princess Leia on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan if she was *FROM* Alderaan?
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The Galactic Senate wasn't on Alderaan, she could have presumably been heading home between legislative sessions. Of course nobody in the galaxy bought that story either way, since Tatooine isn't close to either.I think it's unusual, but makes sense. Let's think of it this way: **It's 4am at Schipol Airport, near Amsterdam. You're a customs inspector at the arrivals gate.** **A woman approaches you with her passport and documentation. Her documents say she's the British Ambassador to Japan. You ask,** "What's the purpose of your trip?" ** and it wouldn't be unreasonable for her to say,** "I'm a member of the HMDS and I'm on a diplomatic mission to Britain." It's a *bit* of a strange phrasing, but not entirely out-of-place. Remember, it's 4am and she's probably tired; Leia in the movie was at gunpoint and stood in front of Darth Vader.Let's say a guy is born in Yorkshire. After college he goes to work for the UN. One day he is sent with a team to London to assist in the negotiation of a treaty. He would be on a diplomatic mission to the UK, even though he's from the UK. Leia was a member of the Galactic Senate, they or agencies under their domain could have relations with any number of planets/system, so it's entirely conceivable that she was travelling with diplomatic envoys to Alderaan as part of her duties as a Senator.
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How can a 64gb SD card hold more data than a 32gb SD card if they are the same physical size?
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We're talking about storing information, not an actual physical substance. If we're talking about something physical, like water, it would make sense that two buckets the exact same size would hold the same amount of water. However, we are talking about information, and information can be represented smaller and smaller as technology improves. How many letters can you fit on a page? if you halve the size of the letters, you have suddenly doubled the amount of letters you can fit on the page, without changing the size of the page. This is analogous to what we see with electronic data storage.
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Why can I watch Netflix or porn online seamlessly but when I watch a video on _URL_0_ it's choppy as fuck?
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ESPN has horrible video technology. They use an in house video player that hasn't been updated in some time. On the other hand, Netflix and Youtube's whole business model relies on having good video service. They spend a lot of money making sure they have a great video player.Bandwidth and just expertise. Youtube has very good technology, specifically to handle this, files in different qualities and formats to work seamlessly, stored in many many servers to deliver it to you.
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Would you die if you injected water into your bloodstream?
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Depends on how much water you injected. A small amount probably won't kill you. A larger amount would cause your blood cells to rupture because the concentration of water inside and outside the cell would be different. Water would rush inside the cell and blow up the cell membrane. If you kept injecting water eventually enough cells would blow up that you'd die. Even assuming that the cells could survive blowing up, you'd still die from your cells not being able to perform certain functions which require exact salt and sugar concentrations in your blood.But what about when people shoot up, they use water in the drugs. Is it because of the small amount?Depends on how much and what type. Tap water, perhaps since its not sterile. Sterile water, well too much of it would decrease the concentration of electrolytes in your blood. This would lead to problems. Your low Na would cause neurological problems and the low K would cause cardiac problems. Also your cells would lyseI have read that nursing students learn to give injections by first practicing on inanimate objects Then they practice on each other with injections of sterile water. But perhaps this referred to saline solution. I could not find a good link on this topic.
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Why do industries stay close together geographically
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A lot of it is because that's where the good employees are, because that's where the jobs in that industry are. That's kind of a chicken and the egg thing, but it's there now, so it perpetuates. There are businesses that do that there, so the colleges start having curriculum around that industry, and it snowballs. Why did it start in the first place? Maybe tax incentives, maybe 1 or 2 big companies started there, maybe a college doing research. In silicon valley's case, it's because of Stanford. You can read about it on the wikipedia page: _URL_0_
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How do skulls and, specifically, brain cavities grow in humans?
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The skull does not start out as one solid chunk of bone. At birth, it consists of multiple plates connected by cartilage. Infants have a soft spot, aka a fontanelle, where you can feel that bone has not fully formed and even see the baby's pulse. The plates grow larger and the cartilage is replaced by bone, which eventually fuses the plates together into one solid skull.
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.. How can H & R Block afford to give away 1000$ everyday for a year?
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H & R Block is valued at [over 8 billion dollars]. $365,000 is basically nothing on that scale.
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why does South Park have all of its episodes to stream, for free, on the internet?
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If you're talking about the southparkstudios website, they show ads during the episode streams, and since they've been doing it for a long time, they probably make enough money from those ads that the website turns a profit.
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How do people who make song mashups isolate the vocal tracks to songs?
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Vocal-only tracks for many songs can be found publicly. For many songs for which vocal-only tracks aren't publicly available, producers of those mash-ups may have connections to labels/artists and can get the vocal-only audio for a track privately. I 've done music composition/DJing/remixes for 20 years , and have found vocal-only tracks with which to create remixes. I 've also taken songs just as they are - including instruments and vocals and all mixed together - and remixed them, splicing different sections together and overlaying additional instruments. I 've been surprised with how well that works in some cases. You can search for "acapella version" or "acapella mix" on services like the iTunes music store or _URL_0_ & you'll find a lot of vocal-only tracks perfect for remixing. Have fun!Easy. Most of the music tracks come out with an instrumental version. Audio edition software like SoundForge etc have a function called "Invert Phase". In simple words it allows you to "cut-out" vocal version out of full track if you have same track instrumental version. For best clean effect Both tracks have to be same duration same quality and same tempo and volume level. Other than this if you do not have an instrumental version you can mess with qualizers and cut out most of the unwanted sound frequencies. But that acapellas are mostly garbageUsually if you isolate the center channel, most mixes carry the majority of the vocals up the middle.
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Why did Obama Care raise the cost of private health insurance for many middle and upper class Americans?
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Insurance is pooled risk. Everyone puts in a dollar in case they need 10. The company collects 100 knowing that they will only need to pay out 3 lots of 10. Everyone is still paying a dollar so all is well. However the company knows that some people are at a higher risk than others, to protect its profits it either makes these people pay 8 dollars or simply turns them away. Obama care to my understanding removed the ability for the insurance company to turn people away, even based on history. So they were forced to take people who they know will need to claim 10 every 3 months. To cover this they had to increase everyone how was paying a dollar now has to pay 3 to cover the companies profits and the people who would normally have been turned away.
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In movies and TV shows, why are streets at night always wet, like it just rained?
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Because it looks better on camera. Lights reflect in the surface and it just gives it a better look on screen. The movie crews generally wet down the street before rollingBecause it looks cooler. TV and Film are a visual medium, and the realism of "how could it always have been raining?" is ignored over "Man, this makes the colors and light in this shot so much prettier!" There are a lot of things that films do which don't happen in reality because it looks nice.
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How do power-washers only take the dirt and grime away and not the underlying paint on a car or house?
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Dirt and grime are only physically stuck to the paint. Paint actually undergoes a chemical reaction and becomes chemically bonded to the underlying surface. You could remove it with a pressure washer set to high enough pressure or pointed at it for enough time just as you could sand it off. but the dirt and grime are much more loosly stuck on compared to that chemical bond, so a pressure that wouldn't take off the paint can take off the dirt.Paint that is already chipped will remove under the pressure of a power washer, moving the nozzle at a quicker rate over paint avoids damage. Dirt and grime will always have more density than paint.
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Why are cork caps still used in wines when they only pose a risk for the wine to taste like cork?
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The short answer from what I can find is that it's more tradition, and a wine-drinking populace that is unwilling to accept that a screw cap could treat their wine better than a cork when cork has been used for ~~millennia~~ several centuries to keep wine sealed and aging well.
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Why is that when I drink water or soda, I feel full after a while, while with beer, there's no stopping me?
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By the time you have drank enough to feel full [for me it is 3 glasses of water] you have had enough alcohol for the fun to start. Lack of inhibition is enough at that point to make you want to drink more. On top of that the ethanol being metabolized in your liver causes a sudden blood sugar drop. Drops in blood sugar encourage eating and drinking so you want even more. Plus who really wants to stop drinking? TL; DR: Beer makes you dumb n thirsty.If you're like me, alcohol makes you urinate every 30 minutes. So maybe you're able to drink more?
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Why are Junior, the II, the III etc. only used for males? Is there a female equivalent? & if there is, why isn't it used as often?
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I 'd think it's because 99% of sons keep the same first and last name their whole lives. Then you can have Bill Jones, Bill Jones Jr, Bill Jones the Third, from birth onward and the name sticks. Whereas women are much more likely to change their names. Mary Smith's daughter is Mary Jenkins, her daughter is Mary Franklin, so it 'd make no sense to say "Mary Jenkins Jr" when there is no Mary Jenkins Sr. Sure, daughters originally share the same last name as mom but usually not after marriage.Historically, a married woman's identity was determined by here husband's family, not hers, and her daughter's identity would be determined by their future husbands. The man had the trade and the property and the reputation and his wife was subsumed into all of that. Giving his son his same name was a way to capitalize on and extend his legacy. Since woman didn't really have identities apart from their husband, extending that identity to their daughters didn't server any purpose.
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Why doesn't the strength of the strong interaction (of the fundamental interactions) diminish with distance?
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There is no fundamental law that forbids forces from exhibiting "weird" and non-trivial behaviors, and the strong force is an excellent example of a very, very non-trivial force. Between quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, it doesn't fall off with distance, but rather grows stronger. This actually means that you can never find a quark all alone, they will almost come in at least pairs, or in triplets like in the proton and neutron, which each is built out of three quarks. Now, the strong force also acts in between pairs or triplets of quarks, which is why the atomic nuclei holds together. But when it does this, its strength does fall off with distance, in fact much quicker than the electromagnetic force. So thats why we don't see arbitrarily big chunks of protons/neutrons, but only see tiny atomic nucleons. How all this works is really very complicated, and one has to employ a lot of clever mathematics, or simulate it on a computer, to understand how it works. As for why the neutrons doesn't get crushed, well neutrons and protons and quarks and so on are not really small physical balls that can "get crushed". They are rather much weirder, quantum particles, that we believe are point-like, i.e. with zero size.> Why wouldn't distance make it weaker/stronger? I'm not sure this has a meaningful answer. It just doesn't; there's no reason to expect that all interactions *should* exhibit that kind of variation. > Doesn't it being unlike all other interactions in this regard make it strange/unrealistic? Yes! It's very weird, and very unintuitive. > If the strong force is what is holding the nucleus of an atom together, why don't the neutrons get crushed? The strong force between neutrons mostly cancels out to zero. The interaction that isn't cancelled out *does* decrease with distance.
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The supposed manifestations of 'Qi' ("Chi")
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Parlor tricks. The tips of the "spears" are rounded. Line them up carefully with a meaty part of your leg and they'll hold you up with enough "comfort" and cushion to not cut into you. Line up the third with a relatively cozy spot between your chest while holding yourself up with your arms and you do the "magic". I promise that if you replaced those spears with sharpened tips, he wouldn't do the same trick. The drillbit is dull and he's the only one controlling the pressure of the drill. It helps him safely put the show on. I only watched a small bit of the video because it seems to be little more than romanticized far-east mysticism. The term "Bullshito" applies as well.
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I've read that the simulation hypothesis is extremely unlikely because of something called Lorentz Invariance, but I don't know enough about physics to understand why.
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LmOver isn't quite right. You 've got it right, though! Lorentz invariance is a symmetry of spacetime that can be easily understood as rotations . If the universe was a simulation, then the most practical way to compute anything in it would be to have a grid defining every point in space. However, the moment you have a well-defined grid on your spacetime, you break Lorentz invariance - you can't rotate by any tiny angle you want - only specific intervals of angles would maintain the symmetry . But, Lorentz invariance is a fundamental symmetry of the laws of physics that we think the universe obeys. If it didn't obey this symmetry, we certainly would have noticed it by now. In fact, there are very strong experimental bounds on the maximal size of the grid before we would notice it - and it would be way smaller than anything we could measure, if it exists.I think the idea is that simulations have an absolute time . Lorentz transformations transform time too so any viewpoint has it's own time. If all viewpoints are equally valid then there is no absolute time for the whole universe. Of course the simulation may take all that into account and simulate a separate progress of time for everything. Then it is weird why the simulators deal with the complexity of non-absolute time even though they could have easily avoided it
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why do houses tend to go up in value?
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It's not so much the house as it is the property that the house sits on. Land is expensive and continues to grow in value because we can't make more land.
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Why is wine only served in 5 oz (150 ml) portions, while other alcohol may be portioned out differently?
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It's not, really. It's just that 5 oz of wine is a good measure to use to compare to a 1.5 oz shot of liquor, or 12 ounces of beer in terms of alcohol content. Of course, it's not perfect as beer and wine can vary in the amount of alcohol they have per ounce. Liquor, on the other hand, is almost always the same amount of alcohol per ounce.In the UK pubs usually offer a large/small glass choice. They are 250/175ml IIRC.
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Why bugs come towards you when you spray them with Raid.
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If it looked something like [this] they are called basement / cave / camel crickets. They will jump after you if they feel threatened to scare you away. It is their only defense mechanism for large predators and it works like a charm! These have sent me running on several occasions. We had a large group of them in our basement and they would send out one at a time to attack us. It was horrifying at 10 years old. Next time, have a tennis racquet handy. Not so sure raid will kill them.
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How does the army work? How does one get a promotion and such?
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Military promotions are not nearly as sexy as they appear on TV. If you're enlisted, you earn rank by passing formal tests, doing your job well, and earning time in rank/service. If you're an officer, you earn rank by earning time in rank/service, meeting educational goals , and doing your job well. You then get to be evaluated by a board, who puts you against everyone else who is up for another rank, and they decide if/when you get to be promoted. Battlefield commissions and promotions really don't happen anymore, because officers are required to have 4-year degrees and graduate from a commissioning program.
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Why doesnt your soda get "shaken up" when it falls out of the vending machine?
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Two reasons that both contribute: 1) The vending machine acts as a fridge, and at a colder temperature the CO2 gas requires more force to seperate from the liquid But more importantly: 2) The "drop" you see in these machines isn't as dramatic as you may think. There are [columns] of each different type of drink and the bottom drink has a 5-10cm fall to the slanted surface that brings the drink to them. The ~~kinetic energy~~ forces acting upon it during the 5-10cm fall and sliding down the slant is barely more than how much you impart when you put the drink down, so it doesn't get shaken up that much.
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Why do dogs have to sniff about before going for a dump?
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It's an instinct from when they were hunters in the forest. If they poop near a game trail, the deer will be scared from that trail because they can sense that a predator was nearby recently, and then the wolf will lose a food source. By making sure they always poop far from game trails, they increase the likelihood they get to eat. In addition, they use poop to mark their territory, and they are checking around to make sure they aren't marking anyone elses' territory before going.
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How is it possible to program a random number generator? Wouldn't it need an algorithm
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The programmer provides the seed number, often choosing the time in milliseconds . Encryption software uses stronger methods of randomness like asking you to move the mouse for a few seconds and pulling random data from that.
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How can someone with type AB blood be the universal recipient for blood donations, and only eligible to donate blood to other type AB patients, yet is the universal donor for plasma?
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[This image kinda sums it up]. The important thing in blood donation is that the plasma can't have antibodies against the antigens on the red blood cells. You either have A-antigens on your red blood cells or anti-A antibodies in your plasma. B-antigens and anti-B antibodies are the same way. So because someone of type AB has neither anti-A nor anti-B antibodies in their plasma, they can accept anyone's blood cells and anyone can use their plasma. Someone of type O has neither A-antigens or B-antigens on their blood cells, so their blood cells won't react with the antibodies in anyone else's blood plasma. On the other hand, they can accept anyone else's plasma but can't donate it because theirs likely has antibodies to everything.
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What is a blind and a double blind experiment in science?
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Blind: The participants in the study don't know whether or not they're receiving the treatment being tested. Double-blind: Neither the participants nor the researchers know which participants received the treatment being tested .Think of it this way: suppose you were testing a new cancer treatment. In order to determine if the treatment is effective, you need to create a "control," a second group that doesn't receive the treatment. In order to ensure that the placebo effect isn't responsible for any improvement, it is good practice to do everything to the control group that you do to the test group: put them in the same room, tell them all the same things, and administer a fake version of whatever treatment you're testing . You can't tell the test subjects which group they're in, because it would affect the results of the test. That's called a blind study. If you tell the subjects, then the placebo effect may be responsible for any benefits or detriments the subjects experience. However, if you were the person administering the pills to these patients, you shouldn't know which pills have the medicine either. Consciously or unconsciously, you may treat the control group differently and compromise the study. Maybe you have more sympathy for the control group that isn't getting the medicine, or maybe you treat them with more disinterest because you want to get back to the non-control group and see if there's improvement. Either way, the experiment is compromised. If the people administering the medicine don't know which pills have medicine and which don't, there's less chance of the study being compromised. That's a double-blind experiment. Remember, the purpose of an experiment is to alter only a single variable. Controlling people to that level is basically impossible, so it's best if the people administering the treatment don't know which is which.
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why movies with good screenplays only have one or two writers, while the typical (and bad) blockbuster scripts often have up to three to four writers?
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Because with more writers some movies tend to get written and rewritten, to the point that the story makes no sense anymore. An example would be [Prometheus], which was passed repeatedly between two writers. Obviously a screenplay with one or two writers would be more "focused". Of course that does not always apply, but that's a pretty realistic scenario.You end up with a diluted artistic vision. A single writer knows and understands their characters and plot inside out, and can devote every single word in the script to bringing that out. With two writers they have to communicate and make sure that their interpretations of the characters are the same. But they can also bounce ideas off each other. However, if they disagree on something important or disagree on too many things then they try to pull the script in different directions, and it doesn't make sense. With three or four writers this is far more likely to happen: you only need one writer who doesn't get it to ruin things.A single writer, or a duo, are probably more in sync. Having more writers usually means that there was something wrong with the original script, and it needed to be improved upon. Note that there's a difference between " & " and "and" in the credits for hollywood movies. A " & " between names means that they worked together, "and" that they came in at another time and fixed/rewrote parts. For example, "Written by: Ube & Kame and TheCaperman" means that the team "Ube" and "Kame" worked together, then at some other time "TheCaperman" also worked on it . _URL_1_', "If a screenplay needs that many rewrites it probably wasn't too coherent to begin with.
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Why is it that some food items, when we taste them once, we continue having more and more, even if our appetite is full already?
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Because things like fat, sugar, and salt are rare in nature. You are biologicaly driven to consume them in excess to create reserves. The food industry takes full advantage of these innate addictive properties.
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Why can non-American actors so commonly mimic a perfect American accent, but rarely can an American actor accurately mimic a foreign accent?
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In part there's a survivor bias. If you can't do an American accent, you won't land a role playing an American. So we don't get to see actors with poor American accents.
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- Do bees know they are going to die if they sting you? If so how?
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No. Bee stings are supposed to work against other insects, so they shred the carapaces with their barbed stings. But humans have soft and spongy skin, so the barbs get stuck inside, instead of shredding anything, and the bee accidentally rips out half it's organs trying to fly away. A single dead bee is not really that dramatic for a hive, because workers are disposable and don't lay eggs, so they never evolved to counter that one specific case, but other bees pick up on the death and go into defense mode. And as others already said, bees don't really think or learn like we do. It's propably easiest to imagine them as little robots that see things and act according to their programming. Flower? Eat! Danger? Sting!
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Is Everest growing or getting smaller?
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Mount Everest is subject to erosion, such as wind BUT the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates are still colliding, pushing the Himalayas upwards. The latter is more significant than the former, so Mount Everast is actually increasing size/height.
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Why can't the prison system agree on a "painless" execution method, when any veterinarian in the country can painlessly put down a dog?
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Part of it is, it's getting increasingly more difficult for states to get the drugs necessary. Some drug companies will not sell the drugs to states if they know it will be used in executions. If the states could get all the drugs they need for an execution, instead of having to alter the process, or use off-label drugs, it probably would be as painless as a euthanized animal. There is a reality that some people don't want the state to execute people and trying to make it difficult for the state to do so.
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How do programs like Tor help to provide anonymity on the Internet, and are the methods they use effective?
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Tor creates a mesh of connections. A simple way of people figuring out who you are is based on your IP address. For example, your home connection has the IP address of 123.123.123.123. When you connect to a website, say _URL_2_, reddit's servers will see a connection originating from 123.123.123.123, thus partially being able to identify you . Tor actually has a page describing how it works, at: _URL_0_ _URL_1_ This shows how your computer, "Alice" want to connect to the server "Bob". Normally, without Tor, Alice would connect directly to Bob, so that will make Bob see Alice's IP address. What Tor does is route this connection trough several nodes in the "Tor Mesh" . Why 3, you ask? Well, let's call the nodes in the network N1, N2, N3; In this case, Alice connects directly to N1. N1 will be the ONLY node in the network, on the path, that will know Alice's IP address. Once N1 receives the data, it will forward it to N2. N2 doesn't know Alice's IP address. It only knows N1's IP address. Even more, N2 will pass it's information to N3. N3 will not know the IP address of N1 or N2! After that, N3 will forward the data to Bob, the server that Alice wanted to talk to in the first place. Bob will only know N3's IP address. It doesn't know N2 or N1 or Alice's IP address. Thus Alice remains, technically, anonymous. Please keep in mind that other applications on your system could leak your private information thus making identifiable. This is a much more complex process that I won't go into.
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how can my cat crawl under a mountain of blankets on my bed and sleep comfortably for hours but I feel like I'm suffocating after just a few minutes?
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The amount of oxygen a mammal needs is directly proportional to its mass, ergo your cat is way smaller than you are and needs a lot less air than you do. Basically it's just pure math, a cat that is 1/100th your size will need 1/100th the air.
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Why aren't electrical outlets universal?
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The infrastructure was created independently, and once it made sense to standardize it was just too expensive.The different international organizations that control the power grid set different standards for the amplitude and frequency of AC power that comes through a wall socket. When each organization developed these standards, they probably weren't considering the other organizations, or they had special reasons for setting their standards that way that differ from the others. Originally, electrical appliances were static. You'd plug something in and probably not unplug it unless you were rearranging your furniture. Thus, when people from America travelled to Europe, there wasn't much of a problem because people didn't bring American appliances with them and just used the European ones that were already plugged in. It was likely that people didn't even know the plugs were different. But then along came mobile appliances like cameras or projectors, and eventually the rechargeable battery. Suddenly, people had to frequently plug in and unplug things, and would often bring things with them when they travelled. Imagine if the American and European sockets looked the same, and someone brought an American appliance to Europe and plugged it in. The amplitude of the AC power in Europe is double that of America. The device would be fried. It was likely that the sockets were different from the beginning, but the reason they are still different is to prevent accidents like that from happening. Bring an American appliance with you to Europe? You need an adapter if you want to plug it in at all. Those adapters contain transformers that step down the voltage to match the American voltage standards.
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How is our sense of taste and smell connected?
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> How is our sense of taste and smell connected? Most of what you think of as "taste" is actually smell. For instance, an apple and a raw potato taste almost exactly the same. If you hold your nose , you can't tell if what you're biting into is a raw potato or an apple . The only things you can actually taste are: salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami. All the rest is smell. > And how is it that some things smell great, like perfume or cologne, but taste awful? This is usually because the chemicals used very strongly activate the taste buds that react to bitter, which you can taste, but not smell. It's just like if someone dumped an entire salt shaker into your soup. It would smell just the same, but it would taste way too salty.taking a stab at this, but i think they're similar because they're the only 2 senses whose receptors each work solely by binding molecularly to the 'sensed' objects. By doing so, both smelling and tasting identify the chemical composition of the foreign substance And I'd say for something like a perfume or cologne the human brain has developed to recognize those compositions as pleasing to be around but not acceptable for passage into the digestive system through consumption
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Why do my computer speakers occasionally pick up radio or (phone?) conversations?
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A piece of wire can be used as a radio antenna, as a conductive material can pick up the electromagnetic radiation that makes up radio waves. Your car radio, for example, has an antenna that picks up electromagnetic waves, and the tuner in the radio isolates which frequency to isolate. From there, the received signal is amplified and played through speakers. Your computer speakers, external I'm assuming, are picking up radio waves, which are then being amplified and played through your speakers. This is due to poor shielding in your speakers. It just happens that your location and speakers are tuning in to a particular frequency consistently. Try wrapping aluminum foil around the back and sides of your speakers and around the cables connecting them/coming from your computer.
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How can a camera take a clear picture underwater, yet when I open my eyes everything is blurry?
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Light bends when it changes the stuff that it is going through. Lens bend light in a special way to help cameras and eyes see. How much the lens works depends on what the light is moving from before it enters the lens. The lens in your eyes work when light moves from the air into them. When you put your eye in water, the lens doesn't work as well. Imagine when you are playing with a pair of wheels connected side by side. If you roll this wheels down the sidewalk and they hit a patch of mud, the wheels will slow down. If the wheels hit the mud at an angle, one wheel wheel hit the mud before the other. Because one wheel is still rolling on the sidewalk, it goes faster than the other wheel until it too hits the mud. That little bit of time when one wheel is traveling faster than the other causes the wheels to turn. If the wheels start out in mud, and travel into slightly different mud, they won't change directions much. The air is like the sidewalk. Light can travel through it easily. The lens in a camera or your eye is like mud; light has more trouble moving through it. Water is also like mud. Just like wheels that wouldn't change direction going from mud to mud, the light doesn't bend much when it goes from water into your eye's lens. Because the light doesn't bend as much when your eye is in water, the lens doesn't work as well. This is what makes the world look blurry. Underwater cameras have a special lens that bends light enough in water to see clearly.
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How does smell transmit? Does it radiate like sound or 'float' like gas?
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Odor is carried by molecules. When you smell lemon, for example, little molecules from the lemon are making their way through the air to your nose. Now think about what happens when you smell shit ', "Think of smell as water. If I poured water on a surface, it naturally spreads out right? Just the same with Smells. The smell moves from a high concentration to a low concentration. From the point or origin to everywhere else it hasn't been. And the way it moves and the speed it moves depends on the current humidity, wind speed and other variables that are going on. Source: Learned this in college in one of my Chemistry Classes
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