q_id stringlengths 5 6 | title stringlengths 0 304 | selftext stringlengths 0 39.2k | document stringclasses 1 value | subreddit stringclasses 3 values | answers dict | title_urls dict | selftext_urls dict | answers_urls dict | split stringclasses 9 values | title_body stringlengths 1 39.1k | embeddings list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
10zk3h | How do some noises make your teeth feel
weird? | For example, I find a lot of metallic noises make my teeth hurt like theyre being drilled or something. It seems to be a common thing, what causes it? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c6i1een",
"c6i4h5b"
],
"text": [
"The only thing I can think of is [resonance frequencies](_URL_0_). Mythbusters did an episode on the myth that it was possible to break glass with the human voice, in which they studied how each object has a specific resonance frequency. Any time an object is affected by a sound or force at that frequency, it oscillates with the sound/force. You may notice that if you sing in your shower (depending on the material) the shower starts vibrating. Same thing happens with water bottles.\n\nMy theory on this is that when teeth are exposed to their resonance frequency, it causes them to feel weird.\n\nPlease feel free to refute this.",
"I can't stand the thought of my teeth scraping a Popsicle stick.."
],
"score": [
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance"
]
} | train_eli5 | How do some noises make your teeth feel weird?
For example, I find a lot of metallic noises make my teeth hurt like theyre being drilled or something. It seems to be a common thing, what causes it? | [
-0.007291022222489119,
-0.10642431676387787,
0.02469373680651188,
0.034787073731422424,
-0.0866025909781456,
-0.030995797365903854,
0.007684076204895973,
0.019003136083483696,
-0.008526384830474854,
0.03221212327480316,
-0.09717358648777008,
-0.1191411092877388,
0.04571036249399185,
-0.009... | |
2i1nsr | Why do Modern Art exhibitions showcase pieces that lack technical skill? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ckxzruy"
],
"text": [
"Technical skill is not the sole criterion for judging the value of a piece of art. Look at the music world, bands like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones are considered greats, and you could play their songs with minimal training."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do Modern Art exhibitions showcase pieces that lack technical skill?
| [
0.04009375721216202,
0.053814418613910675,
0.05873739719390869,
-0.020315904170274734,
0.04394598677754402,
0.007907072082161903,
0.006737338844686747,
0.010817545466125011,
-0.02453058958053589,
-0.010182012803852558,
-0.0986129492521286,
-0.002432582899928093,
0.0034974270965903997,
0.07... | ||
60gq2y | I've seen this more and more, but why do people put their cell phones on speaker and then hold the phone an inch from their mouth? | I was out and about yesterday, and saw several people with their cells on speaker. Passerby could hear every word of the conversation. But they were walking down the street, and putting the cell phone mic directly in front of their lips for the entire conversation (or at least several minutes).
When I first saw some people doing this, I thought it was because their cell was malfunctioning in some way, but I'm seeing it more and more over these past few months. Is this some sort of pop culture trend I'm unaware of, or is there a logical explanation? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"df68rhq",
"df693vt",
"df67eq7",
"df6eqes",
"df6i18v"
],
"text": [
"I don't know about men that do this, but women do it so you don't end up with a phone covered in make-up and hair products. Also, depending of your earrings, you can get a clanking sound when your earrings hit the phone. Source: my wife.",
"I think in some cases the earpiece isn't loud enough in some environments, even at full volume, whereas the speaker is quite a bit louder.",
"As far as I'm aware, they are using the speaker so they can hear it without putting it up to their ear, but want to make sure they are heard. Kind of pointless imo.",
"I feel like reality TV has something to do with it. The actors are always taking their calls like this, so that the TV audience can hear both sides of the conversation. The easily impressed then imitate the behaviors of their favorite characters.",
"A good buddy of mine does this and he says it's because of his oily face. The phone gets disgusting and grimy if it touches his face so he puts it on speaker phone instead."
],
"score": [
11,
7,
4,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | I've seen this more and more, but why do people put their cell phones on speaker and then hold the phone an inch from their mouth?
I was out and about yesterday, and saw several people with their cells on speaker. Passerby could hear every word of the conversation. But they were walking down the street, and putting the cell phone mic directly in front of their lips for the entire conversation (or at least several minutes). When I first saw some people doing this, I thought it was because their cell was malfunctioning in some way, but I'm seeing it more and more over these past few months. Is this some sort of pop culture trend I'm unaware of, or is there a logical explanation? | [
-0.02998383715748787,
0.010390342213213444,
0.09327783435583115,
-0.06880389899015427,
-0.09844615310430527,
-0.03849644213914871,
0.07905276119709015,
0.062298454344272614,
0.12191540747880936,
-0.05371268093585968,
0.015954826027154922,
0.07226600497961044,
-0.0340697355568409,
-0.011257... | |
29wdou | Why do many businesses, especially those with long term aspirations lease vs buy their buildings? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cip4g8e",
"cip48nw",
"cip5y17",
"cipblv0",
"cipbcs5",
"cip4mr8",
"cip8doy"
],
"text": [
"Lease payments are deductible business expenses. Leasing property or equipment reduces a company's taxable income dollar-for-dollar.\n\nA building owned by the company is an asset. Depreciation reduces taxable income, as well as does interest on loans taken to acquire business assets, but in general leasing is the better option for tax purposes.\n\nOf course, there is less risk involved with leasing than with ownership. Ask anyone who has moved to a new house while being unable to sell the old one.",
"I am no expert, but I will say it's because they are not in the commercial real estate business. If I have an IT business, I want to focus on that business alone, not also worry about maintaining a building. Plus, it's easier to grow or shrink if you are renting.",
"I ill (start to) answer your question, with a question: Why would you buy a building, if you have long term growth aspirations?\n\nLet's say you've got a new start up retail business, and you have the choice of buying or leasing, a 1000 sq ft space, you can sign a least for 15 years, or take a mortgage on it for 5 (probably not real, the mortgage would almost definitely be a longer time but for illustration I'm going to go with the same time range). The lease will cost you less (because the holder of the property will still own the building when the lease expires, so they don't need to get full value from you for it), you won't have as many expenses for repairs and what not, and at the end of the 5 years, if you've grown enough, you can get a new place.\n\nIf you buy: the mortgage will cost you more (you're buying the building, and the land), and you'll be responsible for repairs. At the end of 5 years, you own the building, thats \"ok\", if you haven't grown (wasn't your goal when you were buying it!) but if you've grown, and you're ready to upgrade, you're now responsible for re-selling the building you have (or maybe you'll grow by adding a new store, in which case, I suppose owning would be ok too but we'll assume you're expanding into a larger place) So, now, depending on what market prices have done, your lot may have less value than it did when you bought it, other areas where you're looking to expand into might've gone up, and you could be maintaining two buildings while you try to sell.",
"In almost all realms of commerce, participants understand that there are unique pros & cons to both renting and owning stuff (real estate, equipment, anything). Participants seek to make good decisions, balancing those pros & cons to buy when it makes sense, or rent/lease when it makes sense.\n\nThere is one exception. Due to 80 years of government proselytizing, vast swaths of North American culture believe that there is only one correct way to provide housing, for all types of people and all types of lifestyles: buy.\n\nIf the most hard nosed commercial enterprises, focussed on ensuring they are profitable, do the math and decide renting/leasing is often a good option, then the real question would be, why do governments encourage home ownership and why do people go along with it?",
"1. It keeps money from being tied up in non productive uses. (The company only has to pay smaller monthly lease payments vs. a large lump sum)\n\n2. Tax deductibility: it is a current business expense and comes off this years income. With owned property it is more complicated.\n\n3. Reduces risk: generally lease terms are shorter allowing for more flexibility. Also there isn't as much of a chance of the underlying propertys value declining.",
"Lots of reasons, some of them very similar to why an individual would rent vs buying. \n- Don't have enough capital/credit\n- Not sure where they'll be in 10-30 years\n- Leasing usually requires less of your cash flow\n\nAnd a biggie, is that they may just feel that putting the capital to use by reinvesting in their company would be a better investment than the investment of real estate.",
"Businesses lease instead of buy because of the depreciation tax laws. When they lease its a 100% deduction in taxes and when someonbe buys, over the years, less is estimated in deductions (or can be evenly divided over a certain period of years still resulting in less percentage of taxable deductions)"
],
"score": [
22,
19,
4,
2,
2,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do many businesses, especially those with long term aspirations lease vs buy their buildings?
| [
0.08103213459253311,
0.0020449659787118435,
0.08772938698530197,
0.008516818284988403,
-0.02525090053677559,
0.00882146880030632,
-0.05181027203798294,
-0.005198298022150993,
0.10938034951686859,
0.0035615311935544014,
0.028467217460274696,
0.08086515218019485,
-0.01594497635960579,
0.0113... | ||
2b4bgq | How astronauts digest food in space | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cj1oemo",
"cj1nx25"
],
"text": [
"Astronauts eat three meals a day (plus periodic snacks), just as they do on Earth. Meals are organized by the order in which astronauts are going to eat them, and stored in locker trays held by a net so they won't float away. When mealtime rolls around, astronauts go into the galley area in the shuttle's middeck. There they add water to freeze-dried foods and dehydrated drinks from a rehydration station that dispenses both hot and cold water. They heat foods in a forced-air convection oven that's kept between 160 and 170 degrees Fahrenheit. It takes about 20 to 30 minutes to rehydrate and heat an average meal.\n\nEach shuttle packs enough food to last the length of the mission, and then some. A Safe Haven food system provides every astronaut with an extra three weeks' worth of food -- 2,000 extra calories a day -- just in case the crew encounters an emergency. These foods are typically dehydrated for a longer shelf life.\nAstronauts may have plenty of food to eat, but being in space can put a damper on their appetites. Without gravity, food aromas waft away before they make it to the nose. When you can't smell food very well, you can't really taste it, either. And because fluids tend to rise to the top half of astronauts' bodies, the crew members usually have perpetually stuffy noses. Salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise are available to enhance the flavor of the food, but even then, the condiments are different from their terrestrial counterparts -- salt and pepper have to be suspended in liquid so the particles don't float away.",
"Food digestion and movement of food and waste through the digestive tract does not require or rely on gravity. Instead, the muscles of your digestive tract contract and squeeze the food through your digestive tract through what is called peristaltic action."
],
"score": [
5,
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How astronauts digest food in space
| [
0.08463484048843384,
-0.011874739080667496,
0.02412906102836132,
0.01836545765399933,
-0.02581203542649746,
-0.060985248535871506,
0.09057044982910156,
-0.0381755568087101,
0.004374065436422825,
-0.02648782916367054,
0.010811835527420044,
-0.00831390917301178,
-0.07181708514690399,
-0.0171... | ||
20tvg7 | Why do Men Go bald on the top and sides of their heads but not in the "beard/mustache" areas? | Are there any cases of Men going "bald" in the beard/mustache areas of the face? Why does balding seem to only happen on the top and or sides of the head? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cg6o0i5"
],
"text": [
"It has to do with the follicles on that part of the head. Men with male pattern baldness have follicles on the tops of their heads which react to a specific hormone that causes them to recede and eventually stop growing hair (that's why hair transplants take hair from the back of the neck area. Those follicles are resistant to the hormone)."
],
"score": [
6
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do Men Go bald on the top and sides of their heads but not in the "beard/mustache" areas?
Are there any cases of Men going "bald" in the beard/mustache areas of the face? Why does balding seem to only happen on the top and or sides of the head? | [
0.07431497424840927,
0.042913105338811874,
0.044177208095788956,
0.008154272101819515,
-0.021800246089696884,
-0.046837154775857925,
-0.014320235699415207,
-0.030936719849705696,
0.0373067632317543,
0.030078809708356857,
0.06962920725345612,
0.01577857881784439,
0.0019320015562698245,
-0.0... | |
3wyau2 | - How is it that every 'picture' of the milky way shows a zoomed out version if we're inside the milky way? | For example: _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cxztw0k"
],
"text": [
"Those pictures will be either computer renderings/artist impressions or just other spiral galaxies."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://qz.com/452452/where-are-all-the-aliens/"
]
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | - How is it that every 'picture' of the milky way shows a zoomed out version if we're inside the milky way?
For example: _URL_0_ | [
0.02147744596004486,
0.027035381644964218,
0.06791536509990692,
-0.03364676982164383,
0.029383542016148567,
-0.0647532269358635,
-0.04369233548641205,
0.043844375759363174,
0.07165687531232834,
-0.05413715913891792,
0.08198715001344681,
-0.006537276320159435,
0.004560917150229216,
-0.04785... | |
4jjfta | Photo analysis/Face detection algorithms (snapchat face filters) | Hello, something that has been bothering me lately is the programming that goes behind stuff like snapchat's face filters. If you don't know what it is, it's essentially a feature in an app that (apparently) detects the contours of your face and uses that to apply a visual mask fitting your face.
As a programmer, It boils down to a bunch of pixels. I understand there is probably abstraction methods in use for most face analysis programs currently, but what does it all come down to in the end? How is it making sense of that pixel data?
Thanks in advance! | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d37ddlq",
"d375ekb"
],
"text": [
"I don't really have much experience in this field. But as far as I know it goes something like this:\n\nFirst of all the algorithm is trained on low-resolution images of faces from different angles. Several filters are applied to the training images to enhance facial features (I usually do something like: threshold, grayscale, contrast). Here's an example: _URL_1_\n\nNow for the image you want to detect faces on:\n\n1. Apply the same filters and make the image low resolution to save computational power. You just need the features to be enhanced.\n\n2. Compare pixel data to training data. (Various ways to do this... see: _URL_0_)\n\n3. If the training-data has facial regions defined you can extract and pinpoint them.\n\n4. You should now have a box of where the head region is, making it easy to add a mask.\n\nFor more... look at OpenCV.",
"It's hard for me to ELI5 this, but here's an interesting article I read recently when I was curious of the same\n\n_URL_2_"
],
"score": [
4,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://stackoverflow.com/questions/843972/image-comparison-fast-algorithm",
"http://www.shervinemami.info/facerecEigenfaces.jpg",
"https://matthewearl.github.io/2015/07/28/switching-eds-with-python/"
]
} | train_eli5 | Photo analysis/Face detection algorithms (snapchat face filters)
Hello, something that has been bothering me lately is the programming that goes behind stuff like snapchat's face filters. If you don't know what it is, it's essentially a feature in an app that (apparently) detects the contours of your face and uses that to apply a visual mask fitting your face. As a programmer, It boils down to a bunch of pixels. I understand there is probably abstraction methods in use for most face analysis programs currently, but what does it all come down to in the end? How is it making sense of that pixel data? Thanks in advance! | [
-0.07467871904373169,
0.0580165833234787,
0.020862309262156487,
-0.026840029284358025,
0.03205862268805504,
-0.10467710345983505,
0.05005929246544838,
-0.03443578630685806,
-0.04963735491037369,
-0.04783733934164047,
-0.012472517788410187,
-0.06196799501776695,
0.038166485726833344,
0.0041... | |
4fsqhs | How was Thomas Young's light wave theory proven? | Hi,
Please explain how Thomas Young's light wave theory was proven, against Isaac Newton's light particle Theory.
Thank you! | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d2bmmq3"
],
"text": [
"What was Young's experiment to prove the wave nature of light? The double slit experiment. If you don't already know what it is, two slits were made that were kept a very tiny distance from eachother, and using a single source, or two sources in phase, light was shone through both these slits (I tried this at home, very interesting experiment and very easy to do too). The observation was that you'd get bright and dark fringes. What did this mean?\n & nbsp;\n\nThis meant that light can interact with eachother. There are two types of interactions, known as constructive interference and destructive interference. Constructive interference is basically the bright spot, where the light from both the slits add up and you get a bright fringe. Destructive interference is basically the dark fringe you get, where both the light waves from the slits cancel each other out. This proved the wave nature of light (as photons can't really cancel each other out)."
],
"score": [
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How was Thomas Young's light wave theory proven?
Hi, Please explain how Thomas Young's light wave theory was proven, against Isaac Newton's light particle Theory. Thank you! | [
-0.08848823606967926,
0.029215268790721893,
0.050608500838279724,
0.12211490422487259,
0.017511872574687004,
0.028258319944143295,
-0.029263192787766457,
0.058639515191316605,
-0.09394627809524536,
0.04547746106982231,
0.10918711870908737,
0.014478541910648346,
-0.03710266947746277,
-0.035... | |
223i7f | Why do rocket engines look so complicated if they're just an opening for a controlled explosion? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cgiz6pw"
],
"text": [
"Because it's a massive explosion and everything massive is complicated to control.\n\nYou need to be able to keep watch on (i.e. complicated sensors) and influence (i.e. complicated mechanics) massive ammounts of fuel flow. You have to be able to control the direction (\"gimbal\") somewhat (complicated mechanics). You have to take care of a massive cooling system too.\n\nAnd probably a lot of other things I can't think of from the top of my head."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do rocket engines look so complicated if they're just an opening for a controlled explosion?
| [
-0.006049149204045534,
-0.013820488937199116,
0.029539886862039566,
-0.01466223131865263,
-0.00706136878579855,
-0.025989385321736336,
-0.07034869492053986,
0.037644289433956146,
0.06384704262018204,
0.0014850838342681527,
-0.03815086558461189,
0.06833794713020325,
-0.035245295614004135,
-... | ||
8nqjcn | How do chocolates (during the late 1800s) survive in temperate climates like in the Philippines without refrigeration? | I was reading Noli Me Tangere recently, and chocolate was mentioned a couple of times. I wondered what does it look like and where do they store it? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dzxjn46",
"dzxqmsx"
],
"text": [
"[Ice box](_URL_0_) \n\nIt’s like a cabinet that has a huge area for one massive fucking ice block and then the other side has the storage area and below was water collection",
"Now, for something that needs middling storage temperatures, like a modern chocolate bar, a cellar will likely keep it intact for some time. Chocolate of that nature will keep for some time at 30c, thought it isnt as firm.\n\nIn the 19th century however, 'chocolate', was normally used to refer to what we would today call 'Hot Chocolate', a drink from processed Cocoa powder, which doesn't melt, not having read the book though, I can't say if that is what was meant."
],
"score": [
4,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/56/Icebox_1.jpg"
]
} | train_eli5 | How do chocolates (during the late 1800s) survive in temperate climates like in the Philippines without refrigeration?
I was reading Noli Me Tangere recently, and chocolate was mentioned a couple of times. I wondered what does it look like and where do they store it? | [
0.020748449489474297,
-0.010441257618367672,
0.003587095532566309,
0.13456909358501434,
0.019593646749854088,
-0.001737798098474741,
-0.0513586662709713,
0.021791866049170494,
-0.05960347130894661,
0.04672158882021904,
0.07667624205350876,
-0.0762157067656517,
-0.03786477819085121,
0.00701... | |
3vfhe0 | Why does the government provide “stimulus” to banks rather than just larger returns to low to middle income earners? | To understand this question I guess you need some familiarity with economics. The way government quantitative easing works, whether domestically or internationally by the ECB, the govt pumps up the economy by printing more money and giving it to banks in exchange for Treasuries and mortgage backed securities. The theory is that banks will re-lend the money out, thereby stimulating economic activity. The truth, however, is that many banks simply hoard the deposits for capital reserves or use the funds for purposes other than lending. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the government to spend these billions by giving larger tax returns to low to middle income earners who are more likely to spend it out of necessity? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cxn1akh",
"cxn8e9b"
],
"text": [
"they did do that. _URL_0_\n*almost* everyone got $600 cold hard cash.\n\nUnfortunately this money was quickly blown, often on imported goods that did nothing to support the US economy.\n\nQuantitative easing was a more direct route to not just subsidize spending, but to facilitate liquidity for the market to operate naturally.\n\nThere was also cash for clunkers, which IMO was a fairly ingenious plan to support the auto industry while reducing pollution. Unfortunately it turned out to be insufficient.",
"The most recent Freakonomics podcast was an interview with Ben Bernanke which explains this from his view and makes fun of him, just a little bit. I'd link but I'm on mobile."
],
"score": [
10,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Stimulus_Act_of_2008"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why does the government provide “stimulus” to banks rather than just larger returns to low to middle income earners?
To understand this question I guess you need some familiarity with economics. The way government quantitative easing works, whether domestically or internationally by the ECB, the govt pumps up the economy by printing more money and giving it to banks in exchange for Treasuries and mortgage backed securities. The theory is that banks will re-lend the money out, thereby stimulating economic activity. The truth, however, is that many banks simply hoard the deposits for capital reserves or use the funds for purposes other than lending. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the government to spend these billions by giving larger tax returns to low to middle income earners who are more likely to spend it out of necessity? | [
0.020776208490133286,
-0.07390057295560837,
0.02122289501130581,
0.003712402656674385,
-0.004129061475396156,
0.01910436525940895,
0.026740942150354385,
0.08114559203386307,
0.05044354125857353,
0.00387308606877923,
-0.05476289987564087,
0.05878477916121483,
-0.05954201519489288,
-0.041298... | |
3alyfq | Why can I adore the smell of a certain food, but dislike the taste? Is there no connection between how a meal smells and tastes? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"csdvvdd"
],
"text": [
"Aromas are much more complex than taste. But what we perceive as flavor is the combination of the two. Our brain smells coffee and appreciates the complex hydrocarbons from the roasted beans. Our brain tastes hot water."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why can I adore the smell of a certain food, but dislike the taste? Is there no connection between how a meal smells and tastes?
| [
0.04719960317015648,
-0.05234649032354355,
0.02773059904575348,
0.04386153072118759,
-0.008610563352704048,
-0.010279696434736252,
0.05339973419904709,
0.010974926874041557,
0.09530316293239594,
-0.02057342417538166,
0.00853410642594099,
-0.06883463263511658,
-0.017491741105914116,
-0.0554... | ||
69k6ny | How were Double Role movies shot back in the day when their was no CGI | When the same actor is present in a shot playing 2 different roles. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dh7dhct"
],
"text": [
"This is my first time posting here, and I don't know if you can post links, but I just saw a great video by \"Crash Course\" explaining how early cameras created illusions. It should answer your question.\n\n_URL_0_"
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://youtu.be/L8is28gAOTc"
]
} | train_eli5 | How were Double Role movies shot back in the day when their was no CGI
When the same actor is present in a shot playing 2 different roles. | [
-0.053122371435165405,
-0.04793854057788849,
0.021326402202248573,
-0.02261807583272457,
-0.04795033857226372,
0.049585118889808655,
-0.009049353189766407,
0.021059345453977585,
0.06776919960975647,
-0.03784899413585663,
0.04402948543429375,
0.009641123004257679,
0.00032282446045428514,
0.... | |
6q61qi | How do we inherently know what notes to whistle? | I learned how to whistle when I was about...five years old. Since then, I've noticed that everybody who can whistle, no matter how long they've been whistling, can whistle any note they like, on command. (Not to say that you ask them to whistle a C and they do it, more like they can whistle any song they know on command). How are we capable of knowing the specific way to move our lips and tongue to perform this trick?
This was worded really badly, I know.
(I also have no idea what to flair it, I think it fits into the category of physics so I flaired it as such) | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dkuui9l",
"dkutl1v",
"dkux2c9",
"dkuu1kh"
],
"text": [
"There's isn't any \"real\" notes. Even the idea that everyone \"should whistle the same notes\" is only around 200 years old. Before that, every place (even different city/towns) had different notes (hertz) they played on. The frequency \"C\" of today is absolutely arbitrary. Which means we don't need any prior information to whistle, everyone knows to just go up-down-up-down-up-up (or whatever) in frequency (to sing). It also means the Mozart you hear today, isn't the way Mozart wrote it (his \"notes\" were a half step below the \"standard\" today) Essentially there aren't any (right) notes (perfect pitch), there's just an up-down-up-down sequence. People with perfect pitch just happen to do their \"up and downs\" at the already arbitrarily agreed upon frequencies we have today (something they usually learn very young). *this doesn't necessarily make them a good singer --just better at singing along.",
"Musical pitches (more technical name for a \"note\") all have a specific *interval* between it and the next pitch in any given melody. Those intervals are called steps and in western music you have whole and half steps. So if you are whistling a \"C\" then you can blow an \"F\" by adding three steps. Or an E-Flat with 2.5 steps. \n\nYou may not know the pitch but you can judge the interval well enough from memory. Same if you were just picking out the melody with an instrument.",
"It is not any different from humming notes. You dont inherently know how tight you have to squeeze your vocal folds to sing or hum notes.\nYou learn it just like whistling. Same as any other ... instrument.",
"We don't initially know; this is something we learn from years of practice making sounds with our mouths."
],
"score": [
4,
2,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How do we inherently know what notes to whistle?
I learned how to whistle when I was about...five years old. Since then, I've noticed that everybody who can whistle, no matter how long they've been whistling, can whistle any note they like, on command. (Not to say that you ask them to whistle a C and they do it, more like they can whistle any song they know on command). How are we capable of knowing the specific way to move our lips and tongue to perform this trick? This was worded really badly, I know. (I also have no idea what to flair it, I think it fits into the category of physics so I flaired it as such) | [
-0.02536636032164097,
-0.06686881929636002,
-0.022508949041366577,
-0.023956840857863426,
-0.0737457126379013,
0.052346114069223404,
0.04859434813261032,
-0.04216502234339714,
-0.014450645074248314,
0.031521812081336975,
-0.01297675259411335,
-0.07033680379390717,
-0.05303715541958809,
0.0... | |
3aicgy | Why don't we put solar panels on wind turbines? | You think this would be a thing by now, with more energy generation and less space used to generate said energy. So why don't we do it? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cscvh48",
"cscvpr7"
],
"text": [
"Some panels are placed on the supporting structures but placing them on curved surfaces isn't that easy. Placing them on the blades isn't practical for a whole host of reasons.",
"Because solar panels have to be very specifically angled to be efficient. For example tracking the sun is the best. If it is angled and doesn't track the sun it loses ~40% (but tracking is expensive), if it is not angled correctly, another ~20% (which is why solar panels on roads and pathways is a terrible, terrible idea). If it were on a wind turbine, this would be a nightmare to maintain, solar panels are fragile and definitely not something you want near heavy cloudy storms.\n\nThe thing about solar panels is that space is not the current limiting factor. If we had every single roof, sides of streets, walls, windows all covered with solar panels, then yes maybe we would be irking out creative places to put them. The problem is that the materials we use to make them are extremely expensive, they suck (in many places they would never repay the cost, in other places it may take > 10 years to which may only give you 5 years to gain profit), and their energy production doesn't match usage (you can't cheaply store solar energy, so at night we still need something else)."
],
"score": [
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why don't we put solar panels on wind turbines?
You think this would be a thing by now, with more energy generation and less space used to generate said energy. So why don't we do it? | [
-0.04391085356473923,
0.03246535360813141,
0.009022742509841919,
0.027290629222989082,
0.04915011301636696,
0.008463816717267036,
0.017742732539772987,
-0.028580624610185623,
0.09436369687318802,
0.023175934329628944,
0.026807159185409546,
0.06387904286384583,
-0.018163705244660378,
-0.039... | |
4yra9h | Why some pre-modern societies developed base-2, base-12, or base-20 numbering systems, instead of base-10? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d6pu0um",
"d6pvv5o"
],
"text": [
"Actually, 10 based system doesn't have any advantages. The only reason we use it is because we have 10 fingers. 2 based system is very comfortable for computing. 12 based system is comfortable because 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6.\n\nAbout cycling - it is in any system. If you add 10 hex to 4 you get 14 hex.",
"I think perhaps you are failing to realize how arbitrary base-10 is.\n\nThe only reason why cycling every 10 numbers appears to make more sense is because we arbitrarily decided to create 10 digits (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) to work with our base-10 number system.\n\nIf instead we used a base-12 system, we would simply develop another numbering system with separate symbols/characters for all 12 digits. \n\nFor example, let's take this hypothetical numbering system which is just like ours but with the characters ∆ and Ω added to represent the values 10 and 11 respectively. In this system, counting would look something like this:\n\n0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ∆, Ω, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1∆, 1Ω, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 2∆, 2Ω, 30, etc.\n\nNote that there is a repeating pattern just like we have in base-10. The only difference is that there are two extra numbers before the cycle repeats. That means, for example, that \"20\" in this hypothetical base-12 numbering system would actually represent the number \"24\" in our base-10 numbering system.\n\nSo yes, the powers of 10 would not be emphasized, however powers of another number (like 12) would be emphasized instead and the only reason powers of 10 seem important to us is because we arbitrarily decided they were important and they happen to produce nice round numbers (ending with zeros) in our base-10 numbering system.\n\nHowever, if you used the hypothetical base-12 numbering system above, realize that it would instead be powers of 12 that produce nice round numbers (example: 10 = 12, 100 = 144, 1000 = 1728, 10000 = 20736, etc.) while powers of 10 would appear more random (without nice round numbers). So once again, it's really just arbitrarily determined by the numbering system you use.\n\nAlso, as others have pointed out, base 12 has other advantages like being divisible by more numbers (2, 3, 4, and 6)."
],
"score": [
4,
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why some pre-modern societies developed base-2, base-12, or base-20 numbering systems, instead of base-10?
[removed] | [
-0.022009581327438354,
0.01934102177619934,
-0.029914969578385353,
-0.08868510276079178,
-0.003968784119933844,
0.02396511659026146,
-0.0972694680094719,
0.1136464774608612,
0.04792015627026558,
0.03701595962047577,
0.04022364318370819,
0.07317758351564407,
0.028521157801151276,
0.01585613... | |
33haox | Why are cats so fascinated by boxes? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cqkvv3z",
"cqkv7h3",
"cqky8n6"
],
"text": [
"The safest place in nature is a hole or cave where you're protected on 5 sides and only exposed on one. Evolution favors safe behavior like this, so it has become instinct.\n\nAn open box is the modern equivalent-only open on one side, danger can only come from one direction, so they feel safe.\n\nIt's also the reason cats (and dogs) will \"knead\" the ground and walk in circles before laying down-they're checking for anything pointy that might hurt them. Not so important for a box in the living room, but a good thing to do when laying in a hole that might have a thorn or pointy rock at the bottom out in the wild.",
"From what I've read, they feel safer. I'm sure there is more to it but that is the basic reason",
"They are, essentially, den animals. Feral cats will live in dens."
],
"score": [
18,
4,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why are cats so fascinated by boxes?
| [
0.09997007250785828,
0.014499792829155922,
0.04248560965061188,
0.06393375247716904,
-0.017049862071871758,
-0.029445797204971313,
0.02903471328318119,
-0.03249711915850639,
0.016695523634552956,
0.02879074215888977,
-0.04370473697781563,
-0.0015899772988632321,
-0.013559296727180481,
0.02... | ||
8t67ha | Why do fly’s rub their hands together? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"e152obo"
],
"text": [
"The fly's mouth ([proboscis](_URL_0_)) extends straight down, so as a result flies usually stand ON the food they eat. And they like various liquids (from raw meat juice to anything sweet), which they suck up (flies don't chew). \n\nSo they rub their legs to clean them."
],
"score": [
11
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proboscis"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why do fly’s rub their hands together?
[removed] | [
-0.014084543101489544,
0.053033482283353806,
0.04990970715880394,
0.036758922040462494,
0.00483789574354887,
-0.019154135137796402,
0.19213218986988068,
-0.10110484808683395,
0.04116024821996689,
-0.016542581841349602,
0.0545252189040184,
0.04327355697751045,
-0.08008366823196411,
0.018780... | |
1f1xuf | Why do some languages adopt new words for recently invented items? | For instance when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone why didn't the name stay as "telephone" as it was introduced to non-native English speaking countries. In Japanese it is 電話(pronounced "denwa") | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ca5zlob"
],
"text": [
"Quite often a word will be used that literally describes the object, or what the object does, this could be for convenience as sometimes the inventing country's word might be difficult to pronounce.\n\nIn a few countries it is common to adopt the inventing country's word though. In fact inventing a new word might be for different reasons: Interestingly South Korea will use the English word for Western inventions, while North Korea refuse to and will invent their own word."
],
"score": [
8
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do some languages adopt new words for recently invented items?
For instance when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone why didn't the name stay as "telephone" as it was introduced to non-native English speaking countries. In Japanese it is 電話(pronounced "denwa") | [
-0.08466807007789612,
-0.07127843052148819,
0.032727405428886414,
-0.005212976597249508,
-0.07265617698431015,
-0.053965967148542404,
0.07258018851280212,
0.011543354019522667,
0.08237705379724503,
0.06543591618537903,
0.10993395000696182,
0.05008662864565849,
0.008386791683733463,
0.02893... | |
nug0p | Why is the Linux OS so popular to use in science and research equipment? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c3c0ocu",
"c3c0psv"
],
"text": [
"It's really flexible, so it can be used more efficiently for highly specialized tasks. \n\nAlso, a lot of research software is written for it.",
"The thing about linux is that almost all of the code is open-source, meaning that anyone can access it and change it to their liking. That's why companies like Google use the Linux operating system to make complex OS's like [BigTable](_URL_0_), due to the fact that its open-source. The other two main operating systems, windows and the mac OS, are proprietary, and do not allow changes to the coding of the operation system (this is not strictly true, but the actual coding for the operating systems is not published, so doing so would be a major hassle). Another operating system now that has been created as a competition for the Linux OS is the Chromium operating system created by Google, which is open source and customizable."
],
"score": [
10,
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why is the Linux OS so popular to use in science and research equipment?
| [
0.019376900047063828,
-0.009195630438625813,
0.014421389438211918,
-0.033531080931425095,
0.13239529728889465,
-0.06545330584049225,
-0.06168607622385025,
0.16279003024101257,
0.07161637395620346,
-0.0006697842618450522,
0.006475815549492836,
0.05880795419216156,
-0.05770326778292656,
-0.0... | ||
1tkm1z | Why my pubic hair grows so much faster than my facial hair. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ce96474",
"ce963c0"
],
"text": [
"speak for yourself, its neck and neck over here",
"Pubic hair is the same kind of hair you have in your armpits and to a lesser degree your eye brow/lash hair, your facial hair is the same kind as your normal head hair, so they grow in different ways and to different lengths."
],
"score": [
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why my pubic hair grows so much faster than my facial hair.
| [
0.06890958547592163,
-0.03603262081742287,
-0.037542082369327545,
0.0034812847152352333,
0.02248449996113777,
-0.09023915231227875,
-0.021819058805704117,
-0.013091588392853737,
0.056363750249147415,
0.04290662333369255,
0.06702608615159988,
-0.033080775290727615,
-0.0477936714887619,
0.04... | ||
68iyz6 | In the UAE, the salaries for some professions can reach $20k a month and tend to start at $5k. Dubai has run out oil but can sustain these salaries. Why can't Londoners earn $5k starting salary? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dgytqzd",
"dgz00un",
"dgzcg58"
],
"text": [
"Dubai makes its money through financial services for the nearby petro-states that *do* have vast reserves of insane oil money.\n\nYou don't actually need barrels of oil to get rich on oil, you just need rich friends.",
"Londoners can earn $5k/month starting salaries, if they are starting in the right fields and with the right qualifications/connections. Also, they get to live London, and don't have to live in Dubai.",
"Simply put, it's all about talent. How many top universities can you think of in the entire Middle East? There's no harvard, or oxford equivalent in the region.\n\nSo in order to lure Western talent here, they have to pay more than they would in the West."
],
"score": [
4,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | In the UAE, the salaries for some professions can reach $20k a month and tend to start at $5k. Dubai has run out oil but can sustain these salaries. Why can't Londoners earn $5k starting salary?
| [
0.03664934262633324,
-0.05652051419019699,
0.11037210375070572,
0.045985832810401917,
-0.015164066106081009,
-0.018059495836496353,
-0.014929598197340965,
-0.07457563281059265,
-0.003919103182852268,
-0.020512601360678673,
0.004783266223967075,
-0.03615450859069824,
-0.03914928808808327,
0... | ||
8myi44 | how do we “forget” things? And where do those memories go? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dzrc8dx"
],
"text": [
"Memories are formed by connections between cells called neurons in your brain. Each memory is a unique *wiring* up of neurons. When electrical nerve signals pass through the wiring structure you remember the memory. \n\nYour brain has an amazing capacity but it is still finite in size and has to prioritise the information it chooses to store. As a result, it is constantly rewiring and changing connections between neurons as you learn new information and make new memories. This means that old memories or lesser-used knowledge gets vaguer as the wiring associated with these is restructured by the brain to accommodate new information. It will probably never be completely gone but will become much more difficult to recall or will possibly change as the wiring in your brain changes."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | how do we “forget” things? And where do those memories go?
[removed] | [
0.0527442991733551,
0.006046092603355646,
-0.028055185452103615,
0.11540970206260681,
0.024610435590147972,
0.06091685965657234,
0.06510382145643234,
-0.05653591826558113,
0.08931708335876465,
-0.06208784133195877,
0.013048318214714527,
0.10280732065439224,
-0.011220177635550499,
-0.010533... | |
372y39 | What is the difference between a Loner, an Introvert, and an Antisocial person? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"crj95ua",
"crj8jpa",
"crj9mg8"
],
"text": [
"I think you might be confusing the terms asocial and antisocial. If you are antisocial you are being unkind or abusive towards other people. If you are shy you are being asocial.",
"I'm would say a loner is happy in there own company but can handle groups fine.\nAn introvert does not necessarily want to be alone but does not cope well in unfamiliar or large group situations.\nAn antisocial person does not handle social situations well and acts out accordingly.\n\nNot an expert, just my opinion",
"Loner: Prefers to be alone or doesn't have many friends; but doesn't really oppose to the idea of friends. He just doesn't go out of his way to get them or feels he is incapable of obtaining them.\n\n.\n\nIntrovert: A gradient scale that describes a person that gets exhausted or experiences certain symptoms when exposed to social situations for extended periods of time depending on where the gradient scale fits them. States nothing about the actual social interaction of said person: an introvert can be a social butterfly and have a large group of friends: but they have a point where they have to be alone and recharge. F.i I myself am introverted, a mild one, but still. I love to partace in social life and surround myself with people, but spending too long (f.i 3-4 hours at a party) gives me headaches, depression like symptoms, disconnects me from my surrounding and makes me crave silence. the opposite end of the extrovert spectrum \n\n.\n\nantisocial: Detests all forms of social interaction and not only prefers to be alone, but does not want anything to do with anyone. Thus, A antisocial people are almost always loners, but loners are not antisocial by definition."
],
"score": [
6,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What is the difference between a Loner, an Introvert, and an Antisocial person?
| [
-0.013251611031591892,
-0.05430064722895622,
-0.028354329988360405,
0.06233331188559532,
0.07821151614189148,
-0.06438679993152618,
0.04099220782518387,
0.03479495644569397,
0.016712339594960213,
-0.02713264711201191,
0.1407497376203537,
-0.03397181257605553,
-0.005276974756270647,
-0.1240... | ||
480u64 | Would a modern version of Spartan way be more effective, in theory, than traditional military effectiveness? | To clarify, the Spartans thousands of years ago raised their men from the age of 7 to be killing machines and they were easily the most effective fighting force in Greece.
Would that work in the modern era? Forget the ethics, but would taking a child and giving him/her professional military instruction since a young age produce soldiers much better than say a guy who joined at 18 and did his/her thing? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d0gpizf",
"d0gpmdo"
],
"text": [
"> easily the most effective fighting force in Greece\n\nPer unit, yes. As a whole, I highly doubt it.\n\nSpartans *were* badass as fuck. But there weren't very many of them. They only won the battle at Thermopylae because they had a terrain advantage.\n\nThere's a reason they mass produce modern soldiers the way they do. A single badass never trumps 10 'good enough' men, because it only takes on bullet to stop him. The best fighting force is easy to train, equipped by the lowest bidder and utterly replaceable.\n\nSad truth is that is how the military works. Because it's the most *efficient* way for it to work.",
"We are already doing this, just differently through industry.\n\nIt isn't about having the most motivated men. \n\nNorth Korea has required military sign ups for males who their whole lives have been bred to see everyone as the enemy.\n\nTheoretically their Sparta. March your whole 1 million+ army to South Korea and challenge their 500,000 strong force.\n\nWe simply press a button and 20 ICBM's fly to their GPS location within 5 minutes.\n\nWe don't breed fighters, we breed ideas instead\n\nA programmer isn't a killing machine. But they can code a navigation protocol for missiles\n\nAn aerospace engineer can design a high tech stealth military aircraft\n\nA robotics lab can design a light weight exoskeleton that allows soldiers to carry twice their weight."
],
"score": [
7,
5
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Would a modern version of Spartan way be more effective, in theory, than traditional military effectiveness?
To clarify, the Spartans thousands of years ago raised their men from the age of 7 to be killing machines and they were easily the most effective fighting force in Greece. Would that work in the modern era? Forget the ethics, but would taking a child and giving him/her professional military instruction since a young age produce soldiers much better than say a guy who joined at 18 and did his/her thing? | [
-0.055722594261169434,
0.049320779740810394,
-0.009293227456510067,
-0.03990107774734497,
-0.026570981368422508,
-0.0006665211985819042,
-0.03935239091515541,
0.003337226575240493,
-0.1197829321026802,
0.06844870746135712,
0.015646079555153847,
0.13695672154426575,
0.029341503977775574,
0.... | |
235ldv | how do game mods work? | How are they created and then installed in the program, what software is use to make them and what language are they written in? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cgtnyjb",
"cgtu6qc"
],
"text": [
"Let me try to answer at least some of this, though my knowledge is very rusty. In short, however, the answer is a big, fat, \"it depends.\" Specifically, it depends a great deal on the specific game, and the specific mod, and a lot of it deals with just how modular the game is and how much support the developers built in for add-ons.\n\nThere are two parts of most games - an engine and scenario data. The game engine is the core program, and it is deliberately written to be flexible. Scenario data is what the actual levels are, pictures, sounds, etc. It tells the game engine how to make an actual game. Many mods are just extra scenario data, which allow for levels to be added. Engines often have a built-in scripting language of one sort or another, allowing for programmed or scripted content to be added on. These languages are usually proprietary, so they would vary depending on the specific engine, or possibly the specific version of a specific engine, as much of the time modern engines are not written from scratch, but purchased as a package and customized or upgraded as the game developer needs.\n\nThe tools, likewise, would be different depending on the game or the engine. Some are written and published by producers that embrace mods more eagerly. Others may have mod tools cobbled together by the community - the original Doom, for instance, never, so far as I know, released the development tools used, so the fans had to write their own tools in order to make newer levels. Doom is relatively primitive compared to most modern engines, but nevertheless it illustrates the concept. It also demonstrates the pitfall of this approach, as many of the map editors spent more time crashing than constructing useful data. Once you have scenario data that is more-or-less usable, you'll need to get it to the game. This usually comes in the form of large, compressed archival files. These files are usually specific to the game or engine, and like everything else, may have official tools or community-authored tools. Some games may have specific versions of the formats for mods, in order to discourage people from pirating or modifying the original scenario data, but allowing extra scenario data to be added.\n\nOf course, not all mods are like this, and some are actual executable code. In these cases, it may be written in a conventional programming language with conventional programming tools, likely with the help of code libraries that help the new code link with the game code. This would mean that the mod is written in, for instance, C or C++, likely using Visual Studio. But, it can't necessarily hook on to the game program without help. These mods would generally use code provided by the game maker, or possibly reverse-engineered by the mod community, in order to be able to connect the new code with the old code. Assuming this is successful, the engine then takes on this code and essentially makes it a part of its core program.\n\nSome mods may go even further and modify the actual game engine, although to the best of my knowledge this is relatively primitive and very rarely done for this day and age. As an example of this, let's take an old, but good, early game cheat device - Game Genie. With Game Genie, you could, for instance, take the memory that represents how many lives Mario starts with (3) and load it with 99 - and possibly keep it 99, so the rest of the game engine never realizes that it's infinite lives.\n\nUltimately, as stated, it depends on the specific game, but these are the basic strategies used, both for games that officially support mod communities, and those that rather disdain them - but if a game has enough popularity, generally what the maker wants in this regard is of little consequence, as someone will break the protection and make it mod-able anyway.",
"I can speak only for skyrim mods, because those are what I dabble in.\n\nSkyrim has a tool called the Creation Kit, which is the tool you use to make the mods. You can get it off Steam. Within the Creation kit, you have access to a bunch of pre-made pieces and effects, which can be put together to make a dungeon/building of some sort. If you want to make a quest, you can use default character \"templates\" to create an NPC, then you use a programming language called \"Papyrus\" to give the NPC some scripts so that he has the dialogue to give you the quest, gives you the key to the dungeon or whatever. To install the mod in YOUR version of the game, you just save it to a new folder within the main Skyrim.esm file. You can then upload to the Steam worshop using a button in the Creation Kit. This is a very simple overview of modding for skyrim, mind. A lot of the work is in the fine-tuning, making sure all the pieces of the dungeon fit, that everything is lit well, that the character's dialogue is clear and fluid and so on."
],
"score": [
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | how do game mods work?
How are they created and then installed in the program, what software is use to make them and what language are they written in? | [
-0.040864620357751846,
-0.006490231957286596,
-0.051575466990470886,
-0.0737433061003685,
0.017219282686710358,
-0.02134506218135357,
0.07447690516710281,
0.02669520303606987,
-0.014318233355879784,
0.04234093055129051,
0.020724397152662277,
0.008742532692849636,
0.021715449169278145,
-0.0... | |
7bo2fh | If conjoined twins share a stomach, do they both feel full or hungry at the same time? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dpjhsg2"
],
"text": [
"It's hard to make general statement about conjoined twins because literally every case is different, but the feeling of hunger is regulated by hormones, most importantly Leptin and Ghrelin, which circulate in the blood. So if the conjoined twins share their circulatory system (which they *have to* if they share a stomach), then these hormones will always affect them at the same time. However, there might still be a different reaction in the brain to the hormones."
],
"score": [
10
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | If conjoined twins share a stomach, do they both feel full or hungry at the same time?
[removed] | [
0.02471725083887577,
-0.03065660409629345,
-0.05819622799754143,
0.014940034598112106,
-0.052014485001564026,
-0.05519711971282959,
0.047323279082775116,
-0.009821937419474125,
0.001397096086293459,
-0.05395454168319702,
0.006901565473526716,
-0.020466970279812813,
-0.025939157232642174,
0... | |
6mlizb | Why are there so many different species of animals, yet we as humans are all one species? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dk2gheg",
"dk2fz9b",
"dk2gaoi",
"dk2gayk",
"dk2gck1",
"dk2g412",
"dk2gisb"
],
"text": [
"There have been many different species of \"humans\" that did coexist at times. This site has a list of some of our relatives that died out along the way, with approximate times of extinction so you can compare and see which ones lived alongside each other, if you like. _URL_0_ \n\nExactly why our line is the only one left is up in the air, but most likely includes the same list of reasons other species die out - someone better comes along and wipes you out, you don't adapt to changing environmental conditions, etc. There's evidence that Neandethals didn't necessarily die off, but merged with homo sapiens at some point as their DNA can be found in modern Europeans and Asians (_URL_1_).",
"I don't understand the question. If you single out a specific species, there's only going to be one of it as well.",
"It hasn't always been this way. There used to be other humans (ex, Neanderthals). There's debate about why exactly we're the only ones left, but the common theme is that there's really only room for one species in our particular niche. We could have assimilated others through interbreeding, outcompeted them directly, survived hardships more often, etc.",
"there used to be other kinds of humans like the neanderthals and the denisova human, but (jury is still out on that as far as i understand) we eather superseded them in our competition for their habitats, or they are integrated into the homo sapiens sapiens (modern human) because of interbreeding.",
"You misunderstand the term species. All dogs are part of the same species, even though they vary wildy in size, appearance and behavior. A chihuahua and a great dane are still both dogs, thus part of the same *species*, even if we categorize them into different *sub-species*, or breeds.\n\nWe also do that with humans - Caucasian, African, Hispanic, Arab, Asian etc - all those groups are part of the homo sapiens species but just like with dog breeds we categorize them into different races. It's considered taboo and unethical to highlight differences between the human races so it's not done to the same extent as with animals.",
"The human race's intelligence far surpasses any other animal. This gives us the ability to alter our environment rather than our environment altering us. We see an animal with a nice warm coat, and we say we will have it off them. \nThis is how we spread as a species rather than going through speciation. \n\nEdit: spelling",
"We are one species of the great ape family, which includes gorillas, chimps and orangutans.\n\nThere are no other species of humans because they were less adaptable to changing environments and also because we killed them, with short breaks for interbreeding. Tool-making FTW."
],
"score": [
35,
32,
12,
9,
8,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.ancienthistorylists.com/people/7-homo-species-close-present-human-existed-earth/",
"https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/neanderthal/"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why are there so many different species of animals, yet we as humans are all one species?
[removed] | [
0.030665256083011627,
-0.008360440842807293,
0.0731818750500679,
0.05394519865512848,
0.011103359051048756,
-0.0493776910007,
-0.02322937361896038,
-0.08629556745290756,
0.13121142983436584,
0.05050835758447647,
0.04289184510707855,
-0.06926631927490234,
-0.07272527366876602,
-0.0064088343... | |
19c9jb | How do you test something for randomness? | I read this: _URL_0_ and I'm still a little baffled I guess. For instance, if I mix up a Rubik's Cube, how could someone test if it was truly random or not? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c8mq9kz",
"c8mqj6j",
"c8mrtga"
],
"text": [
"Randomness usually means unpredictability. It's hard to prove that something is random. But, it's easy to show something is NOT truly random.\n\nLet's say someone shuffles a deck of cards and then shows you the top card. More specifically, let's say they do this a trillion times in a row. After each shuffle and display, you write down which card they showed.\n\nYou would expect that after each shuffle, every card would have the same chance of ending up on the top of the deck. So, after the trillion retries, you look over your notes and see whether this is the case. If each card shows up in your list about 1/52 of the time then you can say the shuffling was pretty well randomized. If the King of Hearts shows up 95% of the time, then you would assume that something is funny with the shuffling technique.\n\nLikewise, if you can begin to predict which card will appear, then that definitely indicates it is not truly random. If you see from your list that the same pattern of cards ALWAYS repeats then that is a sign that the shuffle is not truly random.\n\nIf you handed someone a Rubik's Cube then they couldn't really say whether your mix up was random or not. But, if you did it a bunch of times and no pattern emerged then they could say you were mixing it randomly.",
"Reminds me of a joke: a brilliant computer scientist claims to have invented a computer that can generate truly random numbers (not psuedorandom, but truly random). He assembles a room full of mathematicians and scientists to demonstrate it. He asks the machine to give him a truly random number. The machine responds \"1\". Someone else in the room asks for another truly random number. The machine responds \"1\". A third person in the room asks for another truly random number, and the machine responds \"1\". At this point, everyone turns a cynical eye on the inventor and someone asks, \"are you *sure* these numbers are truly random?\" The inventor replies, \"well, that's the problem with truly random numbers, it's impossible to tell.\"\n\nOn a more serious note, in your Rubik's Cube example, there are only a finite number of positions that it's possible for a Rubik's Cube to be turned to, so the \"randomness\" of any given starting position is just one divided by the total number of possibilities.",
"gndn's joke is very on point to your question. Testing for randomness is very difficult in general. Testing a single sample for randomness is completely impossible. \n \nFor example, you ask me to guess an integer between one and a million, and I say \"4\". It *seems* to you that I didn't really select the number at random. After all, if you inspected a lot of random numbers in that interval, most of them would have six digits, so a small number like \"4\" seems rather unlikely. \n \nBut mathematically, every number in the interval is equally likely, since that's what randomness implies. So the number certainly could have been \"4\". Or even \"1\". Or \"999,999\". You simply haven't seen enough examples to have any way to gauge whether or not my method of randomly selecting numbers seems to be a good one. \n \nAnd even if you have a large number of samples, there's always the possibility that pure dumb chance has resulted in a \"funny looking\" set of numbers coming out of a good, random number generator. With a large sample it will be *improbable* for this to happen, but it won't be *impossible*. So your tests of randomness can only provide *chances* that the set of results was not random, not certainty."
],
"score": [
6,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_tests"
]
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How do you test something for randomness?
I read this: _URL_0_ and I'm still a little baffled I guess. For instance, if I mix up a Rubik's Cube, how could someone test if it was truly random or not? | [
-0.0020170914940536022,
-0.053869813680648804,
-0.0048692794516682625,
0.05076531693339348,
0.020777424797415733,
-0.07181081175804138,
0.05578524246811867,
-0.09147115051746368,
0.022058092057704926,
0.0028644942212849855,
-0.045232612639665604,
-0.0434664748609066,
0.023503491654992104,
... | |
6pq568 | If the primary colors are Red, Yellow, and Blue, then why are pixels made to only show Red, Blue, and Green? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dkrambz",
"dkrejn7",
"dkrdwgk"
],
"text": [
"RYB are the subtractive color primaries, which works with paints and reflective surfaces where adding more tends to make things darker. \n\nRGB are the additive color primaries, used on screens and projections, working with light sources where adding more tends to make things brighter.",
"Primary colors as RYB (Red, Yellow, Blue) is mostly just for art, the scheme was created based on the way paint mixes. Unlike RGB (Red, Green, Blue) which is the basic or primary color scheme as defined for physics and chemistry texts and is used for electronics. RGB is also known as \"additive colors\" adding RGB together will produce a white light which is the basic principal behind TVs and other monitors.\n\nTo get more into it RYB is for paint mixing and the like and RGB is for light. Because when you mix RGB light, mixing darker colors will produce lighter colors (i.e. mixing red and blue will produce a light pink). Where mixing paint darker colors give dark results (i.e. mixing red and blue will produce purple). So when it comes to colors the medium you're working with will decide what base color scheme is used.",
"The difference is pigments (paints, ink, etc) are subtractive colors. Light is additive.\n\nImagine this: mix together the primary colors of paint. You get a muddy brown. Mix together Red, Green, and Blue light (maybe with one [of thses](_URL_0_) bad boys.) You get white light.\n\nPigment primary colors are actually Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (you may have a printer that takes CMYK ink cartridges, K is black.) Since the pigment is absorbing many frequencies (colors) of light and only reflecting a certain few, we call it subtractive.\n\nWhite light is made of many colors, and this can be seen in a rainbow or a [prism](_URL_1_). Imagine you had a white sheet of paper with red text on it, and you only had a red light source. What would happen? The text would be invisible. Since the only color of light you have is red, only red can be reflected. If you add another color, then you will be able to see the red text, since the white paper will reflect both colors, while the red text will only reflect red."
],
"score": [
20,
4,
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://nothingbutnostalgia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Flashlight-PlaySkool.jpg",
"https://ssl-static.libsyn.com/p/assets/b/a/4/9/ba495a92060ba1b6/prism.jpg"
]
} | train_eli5 | If the primary colors are Red, Yellow, and Blue, then why are pixels made to only show Red, Blue, and Green?
[removed] | [
0.008822509087622166,
0.0114238066598773,
0.03260457143187523,
-0.06783797591924667,
0.06963767111301422,
0.0005494406796060503,
0.06095350161194801,
-0.07159335166215897,
0.11808030307292938,
-0.021008212119340897,
-0.03498276695609093,
-0.0073497360572218895,
0.05144539475440979,
0.00741... | |
7cinnr | Beveridge Model vs Single Payer system | On the Wikipedia page for [Single Payer Healthcare](_URL_1_), the [single payer section](_URL_0_) and the ["Beveridge Model" section](_URL_1_#Regions_with_.27Beveridge_Model.27_systems) both have different countries listed, but aren't they synonymous? What's the different between a Beveridge Model and a Single Payer Model? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dpq6uk5"
],
"text": [
"The answer to your question is written in black and white in the links you provided. From the Beveridge Model section:\n\n > The term 'Scandinavian model' of health care systems has a few common features: largely public providers, limited private health coverage, and regionally-run, devolved systems with limited involvement from the central government.. Due to this third characteristic, they can also be argued to be single-payer only on a regional level, or to be multi-payer systems, as opposed to the nationally run health coverage found in Canada, Taiwan and South Korea."
],
"score": [
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_healthcare#Regions_with_single-payer_systems",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_healthcare",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_healthcare#Regions_with_.27Beveridge_Model.27_systems"
]
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Beveridge Model vs Single Payer system
On the Wikipedia page for [Single Payer Healthcare](_URL_1_), the [single payer section](_URL_0_) and the ["Beveridge Model" section](_URL_1_#Regions_with_.27Beveridge_Model.27_systems) both have different countries listed, but aren't they synonymous? What's the different between a Beveridge Model and a Single Payer Model? | [
-0.0048780301585793495,
-0.04259902611374855,
-0.017001034691929817,
-0.040481142699718475,
0.002449898747727275,
0.03573673591017723,
-0.06909447908401489,
0.06165899336338043,
0.041259873658418655,
0.015171361155807972,
0.06432422250509262,
0.04460414871573448,
0.056947413831949234,
-0.0... | |
40ubbs | Why do we have fiction stories (books, movies, games)? | I get that it's fun. I do it all the time. I like watching movies, even if it takes hours of my time and gives me nothing back. But what exactly pushes us to do this? And why do some people not care at all for fiction? It feels like we don't get anything from it.
I guess it can be used as a sort of coping mechanism to escape everyday life but I doubt it's the only purpose of fiction.
Thanks | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cyx61qi"
],
"text": [
"Stories help us learn about the world and the values of our culture. Consider the movie *Twelve Years A Slave*. You could learn the details of slavery through a textbook and learn about the morality of slavery through moral treatises, but it won't have the same effect as watching a movie telling the story of a man who is enslaved.\n\nStories can help us communicate things that we have trouble putting into words. It's a lot easier to tell stories about good people and bad people or people doing good and people doing bad than it is to work out a systematic morality that can guide how we should live."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do we have fiction stories (books, movies, games)?
I get that it's fun. I do it all the time. I like watching movies, even if it takes hours of my time and gives me nothing back. But what exactly pushes us to do this? And why do some people not care at all for fiction? It feels like we don't get anything from it. I guess it can be used as a sort of coping mechanism to escape everyday life but I doubt it's the only purpose of fiction. Thanks | [
0.060939230024814606,
-0.06213570013642311,
0.0789477750658989,
0.053122956305742264,
0.05252785235643387,
0.082110695540905,
-0.03352486714720726,
0.054458245635032654,
0.21229365468025208,
0.04778251051902771,
-0.06803862750530243,
0.07510792464017868,
-0.015989504754543304,
0.0057192817... | |
1q7l3t | Why does the barometric pressure drop when a storm is overhead? | I've read some complicated explanations, but a simple one would be great.
I would have thought that when a big heavy, full of rain/snow/hail cloud was overhead, that the air pressure would increase because of the weight of the cloud. But no, the air pressure drops, sometimes significantly, during a storm. Why? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cda6g07"
],
"text": [
"From what I understand, the pressure is not low because the storm is overhead. The storm is overhead because the pressure is low. Take a ziplock bag and fill it a quarter of the way up, the lay it on its side. If you apply pressure, the water moves out of the way to where there is less pressure. When pressure is low, the moisture gets forced higher in the atmosphere. The higher it gets, the more condenses and starts falling back to earth. The swirling from the air and moisture moving up cause static electricity. Mix that all together and you've got a storm."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why does the barometric pressure drop when a storm is overhead?
I've read some complicated explanations, but a simple one would be great. I would have thought that when a big heavy, full of rain/snow/hail cloud was overhead, that the air pressure would increase because of the weight of the cloud. But no, the air pressure drops, sometimes significantly, during a storm. Why? | [
-0.03898705914616585,
0.0789305791258812,
0.13354969024658203,
0.03811432421207428,
0.03330141678452492,
-0.016736986115574837,
0.07544302940368652,
0.0044525363482534885,
0.09682709723711014,
0.013607039116322994,
-0.030852923169732094,
0.002451965119689703,
0.055018939077854156,
-0.08857... | |
1pi91a | How can we sense someone behind us even if the person is dead quiet? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cd2kohx",
"cd2kfbq",
"cd2kevn"
],
"text": [
"You sensed it either through smell, sight, touch, or hearing. You may not have been consciously aware of it, but that's what happened. There's also a good deal of confirmation bias because you remember all the times you turned around and someone was there, but don't remember the times you turned and nobody was around.\n\nAnyway, this gets asked a lot, so please search first.",
"I've always wondered this too. Also, how is it when you glance at someone it nearly never fails that they look at you a few seconds later? Some x-files shit, man.",
"Reflection off the screen, you cast a shadow, blocked some air currents, hell, maybe you smell. How should we know?"
],
"score": [
2,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How can we sense someone behind us even if the person is dead quiet?
| [
0.03424157202243805,
-0.06919332593679428,
-0.013950690627098083,
-0.040010616183280945,
0.057291146367788315,
-0.018536929041147232,
0.08163663744926453,
-0.11076939851045609,
0.0383443646132946,
-0.06607408821582794,
0.048623502254486084,
-0.032166656106710434,
-0.02820839174091816,
-0.0... | ||
11uz8w | The Terminator series of movies | I understand the basic plot lines to the terminator series of movies:
The Terminator
T2: Judgment Day
T3: Rise of the Machines
T4: Salvation
But when trying to explain these to my son, I couldn't quite get the correct series of events through my brain and out of my mouth. Can I get some help please? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c6ptqr7"
],
"text": [
"I'll give it a go. \n \n**Prequel)** So, at the beginning of the first movie, the basic premise is that humanity, led by John Connor, has won the war against the machines. Skynet sends a single T-800 (Arnie) back in time as a last, desperate attempt to change history by killing Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before John Connor is born. John personally assigns Kyle Reese the mission to be sent back to stop the T-800. \n \n**1)** During the events of The Terminator, Kyle Reese stops the T-800 and becomes John Connor's father before dying. The impression at the end of the film is that all this was supposed to happen - that John knew exactly what he was doing when he chose Kyle to be the one to go back. \n \n**2)** In T2, we basically learn that the day Skynet achieved sentience and launched its war on mankind is known as Judgement Day, and that the future was changed to a certain extent. Skynet is somehow able to send back a 2nd terminator back from the future, the 'advanced prototype' T-1000 (Robert Patrick), this time to kill John Connor as a child (Edward Furlong). Humanity sends back a reprogrammed T-800 (Arnie again) to stop the T-1000. \n \nDuring the movie we learn that Cyberdyne Systems is using the wreckage of the T-800 from the first movie (just a single arm) as the basis for a new type of computer chip - the one that will eventually end up in the T-800. The movie ends with John and Sarah alive, but the T-1000, the Cyberdyne Systems building, the arm, and the second T-800 all destroyed. We are led to assume that shutting down Cyberdyne's research, and destroying all other possible sources for it, should prevent Judgement Day. \n \n**3)** In T3, the movie starts after Judgement Day should have happened. Sarah Connor lived to see the day come and go, but later died of leukemia. Johh Connor is living 'off the grid', hoping that the future really has been saved, but being careful so that Skynet cannot trace him if the worse does come to pass. Which of course it does. We learn during the movie that Judgement Day is inevitable, and that it was merely postponed by the events of T2. \n \nSince Skynet cannot find John Connor, the T-X (Kristanna Loken), an 'anti-terminator terminator' is sent back to find and kill John Connor's highest lieutenants before the war starts. Again, a reprogrammed T-800 (Older Arnie) is sent back to help John Connor and his future wife Kate (Claire Danes). Kate's father is a military man, and it turns out he is in charge of the US Cyber Warfare Division, developing a military AI known as Skynet. \n \nWe learn that the future has been changed again, and that this T-800 was sent back by Kate Connor in the future, because John Connor had already died before the war was won. John and Kate believe during the whole film that the T-800 is supposed to be helping them to avert Judgement Day, but it is later revealed that he is merely helping to make sure they survive it. The film ends with John Connor professing himself to be in command of the underground military bunker where he and Kate are holed up, with military chiefs talking to him on a radio as nuclear bombs fall over the world. \n \n**4)** I'll leave most of T4 to somebody else, because frankly I don't recall it as vividly as I do the other three films. But basically the war is under way and Skynet is harvesting humans to use their tissue/blood in the production of the T-800s, the first prototype of which is just about to roll off the production lines."
],
"score": [
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | The Terminator series of movies
I understand the basic plot lines to the terminator series of movies: The Terminator T2: Judgment Day T3: Rise of the Machines T4: Salvation But when trying to explain these to my son, I couldn't quite get the correct series of events through my brain and out of my mouth. Can I get some help please? | [
-0.04868941381573677,
0.0003752589109353721,
-0.007080075331032276,
-0.05472284182906151,
-0.03630746528506279,
0.08411375433206558,
0.050623271614313126,
0.00201732967980206,
0.0552251935005188,
0.022039229050278664,
-0.0015580242034047842,
-0.009676839224994183,
0.014498124830424786,
0.0... | |
wpqez | Why are peanut allergies so often really serious? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c5feil3",
"c5fhx6b"
],
"text": [
"Peanut allergens, since they are a food product, can come in direct contact with the internals of the body. The swelling they cause can cut off the ability to breathe. And let me tell you, suffocation is a very serious problem that can kill you quickly.",
"Sampling bias. \n\nYou don't hear about the people with mild nut allergies, since they don't make a big deal about them. I'm allergic to nuts, but if I eat them, all that happens is I throw up and feel like crap for a while. I can sit next to people eating nuts, and probably (I haven't tested this) kiss someone who had just been eating nuts and not have any issues."
],
"score": [
5,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why are peanut allergies so often really serious?
| [
0.02782069519162178,
0.006296003703027964,
0.02384759671986103,
0.0335833914577961,
0.06312023103237152,
0.01527946162968874,
-0.002398973796516657,
0.13539929687976837,
-0.02042139135301113,
0.035516541451215744,
-0.0013379576848819852,
-0.011044047772884369,
-0.037442389875650406,
-0.052... | ||
8sqs2n | Political leanings | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"e11hxfb"
],
"text": [
"Anarchism: No body should regulate the cookies. I should have to go out and earn my cookies. If you take my cookies I'll kill you with a garbage can. \n\nCapitalism: People should get a number of cookies based on how much they work\n\nCommunism: Regardless of how much someone works, everyone should get the same number of cookies. Also I get to control all the cookies. I promise I won't get greedy.\n\nDemocracy: We should all have a say in how many cookies everyone gets. \n\nDictatorship: I get all of the cookies. You don't get any unless I like you. Also I think you're conspiring to steal the cookie jar so I'm going to throw you out of a helicopter\n\nOilgarchy: Me and all of my friends get all the cookies. Also, I'm going to tell the baker to make vanilla chunk because it's my favorite. \n\nNationalism: We make the best cookies. No body else's cookies even compare. Only we get our cookies."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Political leanings
[removed] | [
0.012059241533279419,
-0.010480617173016071,
-0.023112544789910316,
0.04988471046090126,
0.06854681670665741,
0.07259434461593628,
0.0334559865295887,
-0.022338705137372017,
-0.015743756666779518,
-0.004412415903061628,
0.04986314848065376,
0.09942902624607086,
0.017972148954868317,
-0.079... | |
5g4r5x | How do two dimensional objects interact or "see" each other if there is no height? | I just watched the Carl Sagan video that was explaining what the 4th dimension is, that is trending. He goes into explaining what the flatlanders are and their two dimensional world. I've seen/read many times about the flatlanders, but I never understood how they really interact with each other. I know as a 3 dimensional creature it's generally hard to comprehend other dimensions with a great understanding. The thing that I just cannot grasp, is when they speak about the 3 dimensional object passing through the 2nd dimension and the "planes" or "sections" pass through the 2nd dimension.
If the 3 dimension objects planes are perfectly flat when they pass through (no height) how do they "see" it? Even a line has some height.
Thank you in advance for your answers. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dapgho1",
"dapi5ro",
"dapg2ed"
],
"text": [
"This may help conceptualise a three dimensional object passing through a two dimensional plane: imagine a basketball sinking through a sheet of paper. As the basketball sinks thru, all that would be visible on the surface of the paper (to Flatlanders who live on the sheet) would be a circle--the circumference of the basketball. When it first dips thru the paper, that circle would be really tiny--it's the tip of the ball, and it would grow as the basketball's middle passes through, then shrink again as the top of the basketball passes through.\n\nHowever what is meant by \"sight\" for Flatlanders is purely conceptual, since they don't have enough dimensions to see things the way our eyes do. If they could see, they'd just perceive lines of different length cutting through their universe. For example, for a Flatlander to walk around a circle they'd have to go above it, almost like Mario jumping over an enemy. They'd only be able to surmise that the circle is circular by having traveled around the line that represents it in their universe.",
"There's a great book called *Flatland* that illustrates exactly this idea - the second half is pretty trippy as they take the two-dimensional main character (A Square) through one-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds.\n\nBut the first half of the book covers his life as a 2-D being, and how things work. So think of it this way: if you look through one eye, you are seeing (basically) a 2-D image of the world in front of you, and when you open your second eye, your brain can use clues to get you a 3-D picture by noticing the angles, shadows, relative sizes, etc of everything.\n\nWell, 2-D would work the same way, if we imagine that eyes and such things could exist in our magical 2-D world. With one eye open, you would see a 1-D world in front of you - you'd see either lines, or the absence of lines (empty space). With the second eye, you could figure out the shadows and angles necessary for your brain to figure out the second dimension.\n\nThat's how it works in the book, at least. When a pentagon walks past the Square, the Square is really just seeing the line and the angle of his closest sides, and through that he can figure out the angle and know which shape he's looking at. Which is why it freaks him out when he meets a Sphere. As it passes through his 2-D world, he sees it as a circle, which has no angles he can judge.",
"In short, there are no actual two-dimensional objects in our universe. Even the thinnest objects (like a sheet of graphene) are made of three-dimensional particles."
],
"score": [
3,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How do two dimensional objects interact or "see" each other if there is no height?
I just watched the Carl Sagan video that was explaining what the 4th dimension is, that is trending. He goes into explaining what the flatlanders are and their two dimensional world. I've seen/read many times about the flatlanders, but I never understood how they really interact with each other. I know as a 3 dimensional creature it's generally hard to comprehend other dimensions with a great understanding. The thing that I just cannot grasp, is when they speak about the 3 dimensional object passing through the 2nd dimension and the "planes" or "sections" pass through the 2nd dimension. If the 3 dimension objects planes are perfectly flat when they pass through (no height) how do they "see" it? Even a line has some height. Thank you in advance for your answers. | [
0.08722127974033356,
-0.09513646364212036,
-0.028666933998465538,
-0.0015439363196492195,
-0.013141338713467121,
-0.030240975320339203,
-0.06348492205142975,
-0.0003630193241406232,
0.09290499240159988,
0.007130291312932968,
-0.0565071664750576,
-0.050307318568229675,
-0.049588240683078766,
... | |
4bnayt | Why is Belgium a really powerful and influential country given the size as they are home of the EU headquarters? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d1ao5h6"
],
"text": [
"It isn't... it fact quite the opposite.\n\nIt is such an irrelevant little country that it was *perfect* as the place for EU HQ. Putting it in Germany would have annoyed France... and having it in Paris would have pissed off Germany... and of course the UK would be pissed regardless....\n\nBut Belgium... well nobody can be offended by that choice."
],
"score": [
15
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why is Belgium a really powerful and influential country given the size as they are home of the EU headquarters?
[removed] | [
0.1280030608177185,
0.022660383954644203,
0.04424026235938072,
0.023929646238684654,
0.055094700306653976,
-0.02693828195333481,
-0.04790662229061127,
0.051077164709568024,
0.016011808067560196,
-0.05624241754412651,
-0.026866303756833076,
0.013743807561695576,
0.01675855927169323,
-0.0385... | |
3nnn0z | Why do all deaf people speak with that specific tone in their voice? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cvpo1x9"
],
"text": [
"They can't hear, so they can't hear the voice inflections that we all have. This means they have never learned how to properly use voice inflection. Instead they have just been instructed on how to properly form letters and words. This is difficult enough to teach someone who can't hear, and voice inflections aren't totally necessary, so they get dropped in favor of spending more time on the pronunciations."
],
"score": [
5
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do all deaf people speak with that specific tone in their voice?
[removed] | [
0.05293365195393562,
-0.01028093695640564,
0.042351990938186646,
-0.02067173458635807,
-0.025059852749109268,
0.009731180965900421,
0.1352444738149643,
-0.022199152037501335,
0.021379485726356506,
-0.04184131696820259,
0.010996706783771515,
0.007341904565691948,
-0.020962335169315338,
-0.0... | |
722fwr | ; why is it that people snore when they are asleep, but don't have the same breathing pattern when awake? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dnf85h3"
],
"text": [
"When people lie on their back the soft tissue (tongue, soft palate) hangs farther toward the back of the throat because of gravity, partially or completely closing off the airway. When people breathe in, the negative pressure flaps this tissue and causes noise, which is snoring. \n\nWhen people are awake gravity doesn't pull the tissue in this direction so no noise is created."
],
"score": [
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | ; why is it that people snore when they are asleep, but don't have the same breathing pattern when awake?
| [
0.06378394365310669,
-0.02063017711043358,
-0.016161255538463593,
0.00043138590990565717,
0.017238104715943336,
0.04592694342136383,
-0.0054190391674637794,
-0.053245119750499725,
0.08188942819833755,
0.013974355533719063,
-0.015254870057106018,
0.016754893586039543,
0.008079422637820244,
... | ||
2brce3 | What would happen if, after centuries of calculations, it was discovered that pi DOES have a definitive end? | I understand that for centuries mathematicians have made numerous contributions to furthering our understanding of pi, and many strides have been made in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I'm wondering what the mathematical implications would be if either an end to pi or an infinitely repeating pattern were discovered. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cj8582f",
"cj859m8",
"cj85wqn"
],
"text": [
"This won't happen. [Pi has been formally proved to be irrational.](_URL_0_)",
"Even though it is irrational... if this were to happen (which it can't), there is no real reason for anything to actually change, for pi isn't used to the extent of whatever ending digit it may contain. It's shortened to 3.14159 or similar for most calculations, as there is a point of diminishing returns. As in, there's no need to go beyond a .00001 percentage of certainty, so if the last digit of the result of using pi in an equation is changed from 6.90375029846235268 to 6.90375029846235267, it's pretty likely that nobody, ever, will see the effect in a structure, simulation, etc, ad nauseum.\n\nOh, sure, there'll be punch and pie and hoorays and all that for the achievement, but much like when another prime number is found... meh, overall.\n\nThat's the thing about digital numbers and analog life... sometimes you just gotta stop counting and let it be irrational/unending/rounded.",
"First off, we would have to spend another few centuries doing our calculations over to find out where we made the error.\n\nBut as /u/dead_mans_hand pointed out, we have formally proved that pi is irrational. If it were indeed confirmed that pi is rational, then we would have to revisit all we know about mathematics. Mathematical theorems build on each other. Many other mathematical facts have been proven under the assumption that pi is irrational or using the same reasoning and previous theorems that were used to prove pi is irrational.\n\nThis would mean that either the mathematical reasoning we have been relying on is faulty or that somewhere there is an error in the basic theorems that we assume to have been proven. We would first have to launch a search for our error and after we found it, we would have to revisit everything we thought was true that relied on those theorems or that reasoning."
],
"score": [
11,
6,
4
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrational"
]
} | train_eli5 | What would happen if, after centuries of calculations, it was discovered that pi DOES have a definitive end?
I understand that for centuries mathematicians have made numerous contributions to furthering our understanding of pi, and many strides have been made in the 20th and 21st centuries. I'm wondering what the mathematical implications would be if either an end to pi or an infinitely repeating pattern were discovered. | [
-0.12199127674102783,
-0.0003865688922815025,
-0.0005178788560442626,
0.011242011561989784,
-0.06420043110847473,
0.023953450843691826,
-0.11599171906709671,
-0.006543430034071207,
0.07144571095705032,
0.009563327766954899,
0.01622488535940647,
0.08438575267791748,
0.007187784183770418,
0.... | |
1jz7to | What is the receipt of retired pay? "Would you be entitled to receive VA disability benefits but for the receipt of retired pay?" | "Would you be entitled to receive VA disability benefits but for the receipt of retired pay?" | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cbjq646"
],
"text": [
"> \"Would you be entitled to receive VA disability benefits but for the receipt of retired pay?\"\n\nIn other words, would you be entitled to VA disability *if* you weren't receiving retirement benefits (a pension or the like) from a different source?"
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What is the receipt of retired pay? "Would you be entitled to receive VA disability benefits but for the receipt of retired pay?"
"Would you be entitled to receive VA disability benefits but for the receipt of retired pay?" | [
-0.04695258289575577,
0.12061034142971039,
0.006233175750821829,
-0.01816651225090027,
0.05314680561423302,
0.12231718003749847,
0.10491336137056351,
-0.031078778207302094,
-0.013544168323278427,
0.018086256459355354,
0.04513108357787132,
-0.03416169807314873,
0.03452411666512489,
0.003593... | |
j8a4n | Want to check if your answer is appropriate for a 5 year old audience? Use this simple tool to measure grade level of your writing. | [The "SMOG" index](_URL_0_) | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c29yqnx",
"c29zo2t",
"c29zem0"
],
"text": [
"Thanks! Alternatively, you can calculate an actual grade level of readibility (e.g. 7th grade, 9th grade [US System]) by using the [Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula](_URL_0_). I don't know any good calculators for this online, but I do know you can calculate it instantly by pasting the text into Microsoft Office, and then spellchecking. You will have to change your spellcheck settings and check the box that says something like \"display readability information\". I've found that systems like Flesch-Kincaid have worked very accurately with papers I wrote in Jr. High.",
"I put the word \"elephant\" in 56 times and received a SMOG level of 43.99 - in other words, more than twice as difficult as the IRS Code that requires a post-graduate degree to understand.",
"This is definitely useful for determining when someone is using too many big words, but we should be careful to distinguish between *reading* ease and *understanding* ease. Five year olds can barely *read* at all, yet that's what this index is measuring.\n\nIt's also [based](_URL_1_) entirely on the number of 3+ syllable words per sentence—meaning that \"elephant\" would count as an advanced word, while \"quark\" would not.\n\nSo, potentially helpful as a guideline, but far from infallible."
],
"score": [
3,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.wordscount.info/hw/smog.jsp"
]
} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_test#Flesch.E2.80.93Kincaid_Grade_Level",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMOG#Formulae"
]
} | train_eli5 | Want to check if your answer is appropriate for a 5 year old audience? Use this simple tool to measure grade level of your writing.
[The "SMOG" index](_URL_0_) | [
0.004791839048266411,
-0.005116766784340143,
0.0537899024784565,
0.058052703738212585,
0.06725749373435974,
-0.038972947746515274,
0.0011291294358670712,
0.002416334580630064,
0.014774398878216743,
0.05847199261188507,
-0.026053082197904587,
0.04753085970878601,
-0.0015678965719416738,
0.0... | |
1m7e0m | What happens in the engine if you put diesel in a petrol car? | Not just "it stops" but what happens in all the different components of the engine? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cc6gm6z",
"cc6gwdw"
],
"text": [
"If you have some petrol in your car and put diesel in it, it will start but smoke heavily through the exhaust. Damage will not be great to the engine though.\n\nHowever, if you fill in an empty tank of a petrol car with diesel fuel it will never start. If you've ever compared gasoline to diesel fuel, you know that they smell different. They also feel different -- diesel fuel is oily. Like oil, diesel fuel doesn't evaporate like gasoline does. Plus, diesel fuel is heavier. A gallon of diesel is about a pound heavier than a gallon of gasoline.\n\nThere is the requested summary of what's happening in the engine: The fuel injectors in your engine would inject the diesel fuel into the engine's cylinders. The spark plugs would fire, but nothing would happen after that. Because the diesel fuel doesn't evaporate very well, the spark plugs would have nothing to ignite, and the engine would never start.",
"Also, you would likely hydrolock the engine and have to wait for the diesel fuel to seep past your piston rings and into the oil sump before you could try again. Do this enough times and you can cause damage to the oil pump. Hydro lock enough times and I believe you can damage the crank and cams."
],
"score": [
7,
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What happens in the engine if you put diesel in a petrol car?
Not just "it stops" but what happens in all the different components of the engine? | [
-0.005837532225996256,
-0.044853273779153824,
-0.042572371661663055,
-0.002823718823492527,
0.014953482896089554,
0.05248722806572914,
-0.027510730549693108,
0.020087800920009613,
-0.004315770696848631,
-0.07878392934799194,
0.01144701149314642,
0.04313986748456955,
-0.03802170604467392,
-... | |
2xk7zx | How could a star be forced to explode? | I am busy writing an (sci-fi) epic-fantasy novel, in which an advanced alien race 'detonates' a star in order to wipe out an entire system. What could a plausible method be to accomplish this? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cp0uobw",
"cp0tkak",
"cp0tota",
"cp1464o",
"cp0ua4l",
"cp19kmo",
"cp0tcte",
"cp137bs",
"cp1alcp"
],
"text": [
"Since there's a lot of speculation and almost no one talking from a scientific perspective here, I figured I'd chime in with a basic overview of explosions, supernovae, and nuclear astrophysics. I'm going to ignore methods of destroying a start that would take more than a few weeks.\n\nSo, if you want something to explode, you generally put a lot of energy into it at once and wait for the energy to go away, taking a lot of the thing you're exploding with it. This is easy to do on the very small scale (conventional weapons), not too difficult on the small scale (nuclear weapons), a little difficult on medium scale (volcanoes, asteroids), difficult on the planetary scale, and downright ludicrous on the stellar scale. The Earth has a gravitational binding energy of about a week's worth of solar output. The Sun's binding energy is about 7x10^41 Joules; around half the relativistic energy of the Earth's mass, or the energy production of the United States for another 3,600,000,000,000 times the age of the universe. Any civilization that can harness this power to destroy a star is beyond comprehension or any rational need to do so.\n\nBut, ignoring that fact, let's look at ways you could do it. For starters, you could just dump that much energy in. There are few conceivable options here, and the only one that comes to mind is a matter/antimatter explosion. Like I pointed out previously, the Sun's binding energy is about half the Earth's relativistic mass energy. Dumping about a quarter of Earth's mass in antimatter (the other half of the mass required for the energy comes from the star itself) on the Sun would produce enough energy quickly enough to send most of the Sun's matter shooting off into space. Good luck devising a method to produce and store ~20 times the Moon's mass worth of antimatter and dumping it on the Sun.\n\nNext, you have supernova. Now, contrary to common sense, more massive stars go through the stellar life cycle more quickly than smaller stars. They do so because they burn through their energy supplies disproportionately more quickly, and less efficiently. As a star gets larger, it must produce more and more energy to overcome the force of gravity, forcing it to fuse more quickly and more heavily in it's core. So, one way to induce a supernova would be to dump more material into the star.\n\nDumping a Jupiter size mass onto the Sun would cut several million year's off of it's life. Assuming you want the timeline to take less than a few billion years, that's not going to cut it. You need to add hundreds, even thousands of stellar masses in a short period of time. As mass builds up, pressure and heat will build in the core. Eventually, it will start fusing iron, and go through a regular(ish) supernova. It'll have an abundance of light elements in the emission spectra, and it'll look really weird to some astronomers a few hundred or thousand light years away, but it'll do.\n\nNext, let's take a look at what actually induces a supernova. A star doesn't just decide \"well, I've run out of stuff to fuse, time to send the rest into space\". Once iron forms in the core, fusion takes energy instead of producing it. So the core stops fusing. As it gains mass, and the expanding shells of fusion of lighter elements outside the core continue to lose energy to propping the star up against gravity, eventually the core loses it's own fight against gravity and collapses. This is a ball of iron many times the mass of the Earth, and it instantly collapses until neutron degeneracy pressure can halt the collapse. The outer layers of the star take longer to fall, but gain quite a bit of speed, and eventually impact the super dense core at relativistic velocities. They then bounce off at hundreds of km a second, well over the escape velocity of the star.\n\nSo, another theoretical option is to mimic this. Induce collapse in the core somehow, and something like a supernova will follow. Even if the star recovers eventually, the stellar system's dynamics will go haywire. Either remove the mass of the core and the star will collapse until it can reform a fusing region, or replace the core of a massive star with a small compact object (neutron star) and the star will do it's business.\n\nOf course, slower options exist. Send in a black hole to consume the star. Siphon off material quickly enough to lower the pressure beyond the fusion lower limit. Blow up every planet or object bigger than 10 m across in the star system (much less energy and technology required). Provide enough free energy and resources to reduce all strife and need.",
"Maybe injecting it with a giant ball of iron. Stars supernova when their core turns to iron iirc.",
"I think they did this in a star gate episode. They warped a gate into a star and had the gate open to a world with a black hole. The black hole siphoned off enough mass to cause the star to explode. I have no idea if this is even remotely plausible if you factor out the concept of stargates and teleportation but it was a goodish episode.",
"Force it to go to college and work 40+ hours a week.",
"Forcing enough mass into the star would cause the fusion to happen more aggressively. Landing another star on it might eventually cause it to explode. It'd still take many years to happen. Doing it quickly might make a large burst of energy. Too fast, and it would make the core shoot through the other side, leaving most of the stars remaining mass behind. That might get the desired results.",
"Shoot the star with an Anti-Gravedo (Gravity torpedo). These devices release a quick pulse of energy specifically calibrated to interfere with (and cancel out) the graviton (gravity force-carrying particle). Now, cancelling out the force of gravity takes a tremendous amount of energy, so sustained cancellation (more than a few milliseconds) simply isn't possible, even by the most advanced alien species. For that reason, the technique of Gravitational Cancellation only has one application; the destruction of stars.\n\n As we all know, stars exist due to the nuclear fusion occurring inside of these massive furnaces pushing energy OUT, while the force is gravity is constantly pushing IN, resulting in an equalibrium of sorts. Remove gravity, even for only a millisecond and the star will blow itself apart. \n\nSince this is their only application, Gravitational Cancellation devices have been banned throughout the galaxy. Only those species with zero regard for life and nature engage in the practice.",
"You might try finding the corresponding episode of \"Cosmos: A space time Odyssey\" for some springboard ideas.\n\nUsing our current understanding I think the only plausible way is going to be grabbing a snickers and waiting a long long time. Granted, I'm sure space aliens can be imagined to have all kinds of cool toys.",
"Antigravity is a popular SciFi theme, so just negate the gravity inside the star. It will fly apart literally like a stellar sized nuclear weapon, because that's what it is.",
"Take a moon from that system, compress it into a black hole and shoot it at the star. Bye bye star"
],
"score": [
28,
8,
5,
4,
3,
2,
2,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How could a star be forced to explode?
I am busy writing an (sci-fi) epic-fantasy novel, in which an advanced alien race 'detonates' a star in order to wipe out an entire system. What could a plausible method be to accomplish this? | [
-0.022053753957152367,
0.05153265967965126,
0.06825936585664749,
0.07715000957250595,
-0.07076068967580795,
-0.10501952469348907,
-0.0021583489142358303,
-0.018220191821455956,
0.02592848241329193,
0.0033339851070195436,
-0.0793381929397583,
0.06944197416305542,
0.04914068430662155,
-0.065... | |
7t3wxz | How is it possible that I copied a file without copy all of its content? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dt9msrl",
"dt9oiue"
],
"text": [
"I would make another copy, and get the user to try to put more data into the file as they had done before - see if it shows up.\n\nMy brain goes to PICNIC error first here. If your system said the file copied successfully, then it most likely did (unless you mean that computer 1 died during the transfer?). It's extremely unlikely (probably impossible) for a copy operation to keep a file in a readable format, but leave out some data.",
"If the modify date is four years ago, then the file won't have data in it that is younger than four years.\n\nWas it a backup folder that you copied? Maybe the backup has not been working for four years.\n\nEven if computer 1 died, some or all of the files on the disk may still be readable. Remove the disk and put it in another computer or a external disk enclosure, and see if you can access the data.\n\nEDIT: If the copying of a file is interrupted in Windows, the file will look to have the right size and dates, but the internals of the file will be missing or truncated, and if it is a formatted file like a database or backup, it won't be readable. That doesn't sound like your problem."
],
"score": [
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How is it possible that I copied a file without copy all of its content?
[removed] | [
-0.05426933616399765,
0.022778015583753586,
-0.02830396220088005,
0.049861591309309006,
0.1224852055311203,
-0.08156298846006393,
0.033145930618047714,
-0.05009279400110245,
0.10113386064767838,
0.014073596335947514,
0.09083091467618942,
0.09163342416286469,
0.011528026312589645,
-0.071372... | |
1uieml | is he show QI factual? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ceiepoj"
],
"text": [
"Because your post isn't asking a simplified conceptual explanation, but rather for an answer, its been removed.\nYou should try /r/answers instead."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | is he show QI factual?
| [
-0.07068712264299393,
0.0448479950428009,
-0.02155224420130253,
0.0007587941945530474,
-0.07186796516180038,
0.03277065232396126,
0.03880459815263748,
-0.026602748781442642,
-0.0028733760118484497,
-0.08138085901737213,
0.02573523297905922,
-0.06648331880569458,
0.11934387683868408,
0.0804... | ||
44r40v | Why does it hurt getting water up your nose when swimming, yet having a runny nose isn't the least bit uncomfortable. | Just had a bath and forgot to hold my nose when dunking my head under, loads of water went up it and it's ever so uncomfortable....yet (excuse the vulgar word) snot is liquid and apart from being annoying, isn't painfull at all. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"czs7td7",
"czsdk9k",
"czs81xt"
],
"text": [
"First of all, if you think a runny nose \"isn't the least bit uncomfortable,\" you've not had a real runny nose! It can be *extremely* uncomfortable. \n\nNow, your nose is designed to let liquids drop out, not to take them back in. When you get water (or whatever) up your nose, it goes into all the nooks and crannies that nothing's supposed to go into, and where if something's flowing *out*, it'll just glide over.",
"Clean water irritates the lining of the airways. \n\nIt's not supposed to be there and that \"skin\" is not used to that kind of staff. \n\nThere is not enough salt in it, and the acidity is wrong, and if it's a bath there is probably soap, right?\n\nSalty water, for example, fits the bill better and doesn't cause so much trouble.",
"It's just the force that the water enters your nose. If you use a netti pot to clear your runny nose, it doesn't hurt to put water up your nose. It's uncomfortable sure, but not painful."
],
"score": [
5,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why does it hurt getting water up your nose when swimming, yet having a runny nose isn't the least bit uncomfortable.
Just had a bath and forgot to hold my nose when dunking my head under, loads of water went up it and it's ever so uncomfortable....yet (excuse the vulgar word) snot is liquid and apart from being annoying, isn't painfull at all. | [
0.08083022385835648,
-0.07398688048124313,
0.06405466794967651,
-0.001781138009391725,
0.032784294337034225,
0.05501401424407959,
0.07140534371137619,
-0.0015977052971720695,
-0.0663597583770752,
-0.0053436486050486565,
-0.05589115247130394,
-0.07227855920791626,
0.06271686404943466,
0.154... | |
11c65i | Why do dark-skinned or black people have their palms and soles paler than the rest of their body? | I've always wondered, thanks for the answers! | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c6l9eye",
"c6ldr4o",
"c6lfuva"
],
"text": [
"A layer of skin called the stratum lucidum is found in frequently used areas of the body, like your palms and the soles of your feet. The added protection of this extra layer means you don't need extra melanin in your palms or feet, so the skin is lighter.\n\nEDIT: To clarify. Melanin is what makes skin dark, and it protects the body from many things. Perhaps its most important job is to protect the body from harmful UV rays emitted by the sun. That is why people with darker skin typically have ancestral origins in places where the sun's rays have more power (i.e. nearer to the equator). Even though melanin is good for protecting against the sun, it does have its downsides, too. For example, melanin obstructs the body's absorption of vitamin D from sunlight. This can have a negative impact on health. So, if certain factors dictate that the body doesn't particularly need melanin (e.g. people in northern climates, the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet), then evolution will weed it out. \n\nEDIT 2: A word",
"Come on people what's with all the shitty answers? Don't be sarcastic or condescending if you don't have an answer, just let someone else answer the question.",
"\"Because we stood against the wall in the frisk position when god spray-painted us.\" - Chris Rock"
],
"score": [
154,
10,
8
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do dark-skinned or black people have their palms and soles paler than the rest of their body?
I've always wondered, thanks for the answers! | [
0.009490988217294216,
0.010313625447452068,
-0.023005425930023193,
0.0838296040892601,
-0.00806477852165699,
-0.10447545349597931,
0.02569943107664585,
0.003859307151287794,
0.03617783635854721,
0.0003342207637615502,
0.05080968141555786,
-0.07948236167430878,
-0.06710787862539291,
-0.0534... | |
455wz5 | How does taste work? Why does a person A like spinach, but person B does not? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"czvfxnl"
],
"text": [
"There could be a million reasons why someone doesn't like a food; maybe they ate it while feeling sick one time, and learned to associate the sickness with the taste. Perhaps they were made to eat something all the time as a kid so they're just totally opposed to eating it as an adult. The reasons could be either mental or physical (conditions such as [anosmia](_URL_2_) affect a person's ability to smell, and therefore taste, and cigarette smoking has a similar but much less severe effect), and there are too many potential options to explain them all in detail.\n\nOne relevant issue here, however, is that several aspects of taste are actually determined genetically. Some [bitter foods](_URL_1_), such as grapefruit, only taste bitter to people who have the correct genes to taste such a flavour. So what you like, or don't, might have been determined for you at birth.\n\nA relevant side-note: there is a fruit, known as [miracle fruit](_URL_0_), which temporarily blocks the sour receptors on the tongue, which basically completely changes the way you taste food. Lemons are sweet, beer tastes like chocolate milk, and so on. You should try to acquire some, and see how it affects you; it essentially allows you to taste things as if you were a different person and it wears off after a short time."
],
"score": [
14
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum",
"http://news.psu.edu/story/159262/2011/04/01/research-shows-taste-perception-bitter-foods-depends-genetics",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosmia"
]
} | train_eli5 | How does taste work? Why does a person A like spinach, but person B does not?
| [
0.024180123582482338,
-0.10648644715547562,
-0.04420746862888336,
-0.007554621435701847,
-0.08164143562316895,
0.003379420842975378,
0.03516463190317154,
0.0068653421476483345,
0.04778352007269859,
-0.0040365662425756454,
0.05065567046403885,
-0.045990411192178726,
-0.018053250387310982,
-... | ||
6eex9n | Why do phone manufacturers make carrier specific phones when they could just make phones that work on all carriers and have the carriers lock them, wouldn't it be lower cost to just make one type of phone? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"di9xkra",
"di9pzb4"
],
"text": [
"They are generally the same phone locked by software. So there's no extra expense making them.\n\nAnd the whole point of making a phone for a specific carrier is because that carrier paid you a load of money for exclusivity. If you want the latest phone, and it's only on carrier X, then carrier X is going to get your business without having to do any work.",
"Actually, that is the way it often works. iPhones, for instance, are offered on all carriers."
],
"score": [
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do phone manufacturers make carrier specific phones when they could just make phones that work on all carriers and have the carriers lock them, wouldn't it be lower cost to just make one type of phone?
| [
-0.07044544816017151,
0.019267210736870766,
0.06477843970060349,
-0.021606748923659325,
-0.022878052666783333,
-0.017108114436268806,
0.029327519237995148,
0.036095086485147476,
0.11636291444301605,
0.0185867827385664,
-0.008953521959483624,
0.061203476041555405,
0.04182511940598488,
-0.01... | ||
39sivk | How are ancient structures buried? | Where do all the layers of soil above, that archaeologists have to remove, come from? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cs61rrd"
],
"text": [
"In dry, dusty areas the wind blows in sand and sediment. Once someone stops living there to clean up it will build up.\n\nPeople also like to build on river banks and river deltas, very fertile for crops and easy access to water, but the river brings sediments and floods.\n\nIn some places a populated site persists for hundreds or thousands of years, building on top of old stuff in layers. Without heavy machinery it's easier to leave stuff behind and build on top of existing foundations or layers."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How are ancient structures buried?
Where do all the layers of soil above, that archaeologists have to remove, come from? | [
-0.048584211617708206,
0.1028992086648941,
0.0724673941731453,
0.010658674873411655,
-0.0028467357624322176,
-0.15054439008235931,
-0.06928280740976334,
-0.0434560663998127,
0.031967949122190475,
0.030063122510910034,
-0.015354882925748825,
-0.04938962683081627,
-0.06152811273932457,
-0.00... | |
38y0og | Taxi Medallions, what is this system? | I was reading an article on NYC taxi driver's and why they feel Uber is a threat to them, one of the drivers mentioned how he inherited the medallion from his father and that it was an investment as it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at one point. Why is this? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cryq1y6"
],
"text": [
"There are large areas of NYC where only a taxi with a medallion can operate and they limit the number of medallions that they allow to operate in a given year. This registration system generates income for the city and ensures that there are not too many taxis on the roads of the overly congested city. \n\nUber bypasses this system. This means that they are not only competing in areas that are reserved for the medallion taxis, but they are not paying the proper fees and taxes to the city for operating a taxis service. They also do not have the background checks to protect passenger safety that taxis do."
],
"score": [
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Taxi Medallions, what is this system?
I was reading an article on NYC taxi driver's and why they feel Uber is a threat to them, one of the drivers mentioned how he inherited the medallion from his father and that it was an investment as it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at one point. Why is this? | [
-0.016654198989272118,
0.05406187102198601,
-0.06269729882478714,
-0.031094912439584732,
-0.09987442940473557,
-0.021698391065001488,
0.07443942874670029,
0.043952956795692444,
-0.006299922242760658,
0.010745768435299397,
-0.008540994487702847,
0.06186562404036522,
0.03974554315209389,
-0.... | |
868o61 | If English is a Germanic language, why is it so difficult to read texts/understand speech in other Germanic languages? | I also speak Spanish, and I find it a lot easier to read text/partially understand spoken Portuguese and French (both of which are Romance languages), whereas the other Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Danish, etc.) are almost completely indecipherable for me as a native English speaker. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dw37fhd",
"dw38v4l",
"dw39h42",
"dw3eck0",
"dw4p87e",
"dw3j6b9",
"dw3g2kd",
"dw3hc9n",
"dw6p2lp",
"dw3ygb2",
"dw52rtp",
"dw43urt"
],
"text": [
"English is the dirty bastard of Germanic languages.\n\nIt is not German, it is rooted in the same early language group that gave us modern German/Dutch/Icelandic and the rest.\n\nEnglish was heavily influenced by the Romance language group, particularly through old French, when the invading Normans brought it along. Toss in some Gaelic influence, more Latin for the 'scholarly' types, and you end up with a language that bears only a passing resemblance to its Germanic cousins.",
"Our grammar is similar to German, but a lot of our words come from Latin.\n\nGerman also has a couple extra elements that make it hard for English speakers to scan the words, including agglutination (stringing multiple words together to make word for a complex idea) and noun declension (changing nouns to reflect whether they are subject, object, etc. as well as to show gender and other information).\n\nOnce you know how German words work, they're a little easier to parse as an English speaker, but German and English aren't as closely related as French and Spanish or as German and Dutch.",
"If you knew old english, you'd understand german better. Old English and modern english are structured differently. A good example of a different English structure is the way YODA talks in star wars.",
"English is a historical mess.\n\nIt came to Britain around the 5th Century when Germanic tribes settled in the island, mixing with the Gaelic family languages and Latin that as spoken there. Then exposure to Vikings reinjected different Germanic languages from the Nordic branch, followed by Normans who brought their dialect of French. All the while, Gaelic influences kept bubbling from their Gaelic neighbors in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.\n\nLatin, on the other hand, split into the Romance languages a bit later, and had fewer external influence. French being influenced by Spanish and Italian isn't nearly as disruptive as English being influenced by more distant language branches.",
"Ahhh, my old favourite bugbear. Let me just tag a few people:\n\n/u/malwayslooking /u/existentialpenguin /u/EvoEpitaph /u/RandomPerson73 /u/ta1901 /u/TheThirdJoe /u/kouhoutek /u/bradles0 /u/chockychockster\n\nOK, so while it's sort of true that English has been influenced by many different languages, this is neither unusual for a European language (or any language, for that matter), nor as extensive as most people think.\n\nThere are some misleading statistics around, such as that only 26% of words in modern English are Germanic.\n\nFirst, that's incredibly hard to determine for lots of reasons (mainly, deceptively simple questions like \"what is a word?\" are surprisingly difficult to answer). Second, in normal speech, we use mainly Germanic words. A huge number of non-Germanic words are words you almost never use, unless you are (for example) a scientist, a doctor or a university professor who likes to show off how incredibly well-educated he is.\n\nBritain is not the only country to have been invaded by people from lots of different places. In fact, most of European history is about invasions and migrations, and to a lesser or greater degree, virtually all European languages have long had bits of other languages mixed in.\n\nFor example, French is a Romance language, and it's pure and unsullied, right?\n\nWrong. French began when Latin mixed with the Celtic Gaulish languages (the word for \"horse\", \"cheval\", is an example of a word of Gaulish origin); later, France was invaded by Germanic tribes -- indeed, the very name of the country, \"France\", comes from the name of these invading Frankish tribes. The Frankish influence on the language was surprisingly profound, even affecting the pronunciation.\n\nMeanwhile, the influence of Norman French on English is often overstated. There are a few obvious quirks that come from this period -- that we say \"cow\" for the animal but \"beef\" for the meat, for example -- but they are extremely rare. Mostly, Norman French gave us some words for the things that the Normans took over or set up: royalty (but not, strangely, the words \"king\" and \"queen\"), government, jurisprudence and the military.\n\nMost of the Latin and Greek words we use in English were imported much, much later -- in the last 200 years or so -- and they were imported into other Germanic languages as well.\n\nHere's a typical English sentence (it's attributed to Jim Carrey), with all the non-Germanic words highlighted:\n\n > I think if we all **acted** the way we felt, four out of eight **people** at a **dinner party** would be sitting there sobbing.\n\nHere's a typical German sentence, with all the non-Germanic words **bolded** and a couple of very recent imports from English (this is very common in modern German) in *italics*:\n\n > Das vielleicht **extremste** Beispiel ist wohl die Hamburger Reeperbahn, die sich von der sündigen **Amüsiermeile** zum *trendigen Open-Air-In-Club* für Jung und **Pseudo**-Jung gewandelt hat.\n\nOK, so that's not really good enough as an explanation.\n\nBasically, it's more like this. Spanish and Portuguese have diverged very little from each other -- in fact, they are so close to each other, they're almost variants of the same language (I hesitate to use the word \"dialect\", as it's a very inaccurate and loaded term). They have diverged a fair amount from French, but not by a huge amount: knowing Spanish, you can probably figure out the meanings of some simple sentences.\n\nHowever, I'm willing to bet that you'd have great difficulty deciphering Romanian. That language is also a Romance language (and relatively free of influence from other languages), directly descended from Latin military slang.\n\nWith the Germanic languages, the situation is probably more interesting. Icelandic is out on a limb and has changed very little. The Scandinavian languages split off from the rest quite early on, but have remained very close to each other. English and German have diverged a fair amount -- not as much as you might think, but German has acquired a really quirky word order that messes things up a great deal. German and Dutch, though, are still very close, and if you know German, you can probably -- with a bit of effort -- read a children's bed-time story in Dutch.\n\nSimilarities between languages, though, are often really well hidden. Here's a German sentence:\n\n > Neu ist das nicht.\n\nOne word at a time:\n\n* neu: This is not difficult to recognize as \"new\".\n* ist: Clearly \"is\".\n* das: A couple of things have changed with the English version of this word. The \"d\" became pronounced with a sort of lisp, while the \"s\" has (through a very well-understood process) transmogrified into a \"t\". The word is \"that\".\n* nicht: The German \"ch\" sometimes corresponds to English \"gh\", which in English has become silent. The English equivalent is \"nought\", which you sometimes still see when it means \"nothing\". But in this sense we have abbreviated it to \"not\".\n\nSo the translation would be \"New is that not,\" but that's gibberish. This is because while German word order is still quite flexible, English has lost a lot of that flexibility, so we have to unscramble the sentence to give us \"That is not new.\" Or, perhaps more naturally, \"That is nothing new.\"\n\nSo really, the similarities between English and German are quite striking. It's just that these days, you need a trained eye to spot them. I mean, \"eye\" and its German translation \"Auge\" come from the same Germanic word, but you wouldn't know it just by looking at them.",
"If you understand the consonant shifts between English and German it gets easier, at least for simple sentence.\n\nExample: wasser=water, besser=better; apfel=apple, reif=ripe; \nBad=bath; beide=both",
"When people learn a second language, the structural differences between the first and second languages tend to be the hardest to pick up. For example, if your first language doesn't have honorific speech levels like Japanese or Korean, then you may never pick them up if you can communicate (albeit roughly) without them. Another example might be a complex case system like [Russian](_URL_0_). If you can make yourself understood in the second language without all the subtlety of total mastery then you may never take the time (or even be able) to master it.\n\nThe history of England (and the British Isles in general) is one of repeated invasion. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes displaced the Britons. The Vikings invaded and displaced the locals. Then the Normans invaded a thousand years ago and replaced the elite. Each invasion and displacement rubbed away some of the complexities as locals and invaders alike learned to communicate, and each introduced a layer of vocabulary. As a consequence, English now has very few of the grammatical features that make Germanic languages Germanic. John McWhorter put it like this: \n\n > English's Germanic relatives are like assorted varieties of deer - antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on - antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echolocating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has.\n\nFor a very easy introduction to English (and the source of that wonderful analogy) see [Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue](_URL_1_).",
"English is Germanic in structure, but the vocabulary came from basically everywhere in Europe (Celtic, Latin, German, Danish, AND French speaking cultures each had their turn ruling the island). So the grammatical form and sentence structure is consistent with the other Germanic languages, but all the vocabulary is different.",
"The most basic vocabulary of English tends to be clearly Germanic. That is, if you make a list of the words you guess were most likely invented first as humans developed speech, those are the words with the most obvious English/German equivalents.\n\nAs you move up to more advanced vocabulary in English, you start to see a lot more Latin influence.",
"They’re not always so different, I’ve noticed. What’s interesting is that knowing a little Dutch helps you know a little more German. And visa-versa, I suspect.\n\nMeine Hand ist warm\nMijn hand is warm\nMy hand is warm",
"Modern English is what you get when the old French, German, Celtic, and Latin languages get put into a blender.\n\nOld English is closer syntactically and linguistically to modern German than it is to modern English.",
"This is a pretty good explanation of why English is such an odd language in general:\n_URL_2_"
],
"score": [
86,
19,
13,
11,
5,
5,
4,
4,
3,
2,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://russian-language-for-couples.com/img/russian-cases.gif",
"https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521707136&sr=8-1&keywords=our+magnificent+bastard+tongue",
"https://youtu.be/zhqr-GNNgGo"
]
} | train_eli5 | If English is a Germanic language, why is it so difficult to read texts/understand speech in other Germanic languages?
I also speak Spanish, and I find it a lot easier to read text/partially understand spoken Portuguese and French (both of which are Romance languages), whereas the other Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Danish, etc.) are almost completely indecipherable for me as a native English speaker. | [
0.11140140891075134,
-0.11621896922588348,
0.05049116164445877,
-0.06282499432563782,
-0.015184283256530762,
-0.002016524551436305,
-0.009559457190334797,
0.05812293663620949,
0.06649873405694962,
-0.024532917886972427,
-0.005694741848856211,
0.0011047432199120522,
-0.07408261299133301,
0.... | |
3t3nvi | What would happen if the Earth suddenly started spinning the wrong way? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cx2t37q",
"cx2wdya",
"cx2uu7z",
"cx2u665"
],
"text": [
"If the earth stopped suddenly and started to spin the other way it would not matter because we would all be dead anyways.",
"Suddenly? Everything would be killed/destroyed/flattened/thrown around from massive lateral G forces, Even if it takes a full second to reverse, going from 1670 km/h to -1670km/h at the planet's surface is ~340,000 G-forces. 49.2 is the highest recorded horizontal g force survived.\n\nAnything not anchored down to something that could survive that force (nothing could including much of the earth's surface) would be flung across the surface of the earth at around 3000 km/h\n\nDepending on the type of force that would cause this to happen. The earth rips apart.",
"If there was an immediate acceleration, the earths crust would probably fly off and everything would be obliterated.\n\nIf it just happened to be spinning the other way like Venus then there probably wouldn't be much different.",
"Everything on the surface of the earth would be destroyed due to multiple thousand mile per hour winds."
],
"score": [
4,
3,
3,
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What would happen if the Earth suddenly started spinning the wrong way?
[removed] | [
-0.028399448841810226,
0.02042248286306858,
0.05583275482058525,
-0.012295950204133987,
-0.0005716728628613055,
-0.06116962060332298,
-0.07877129316329956,
-0.032491981983184814,
0.04058212786912918,
-0.0018079299479722977,
0.09391506761312485,
0.044544413685798645,
-0.0073727997951209545,
... | |
21azj2 | Why do cigarettes have so many chemicals in them, why not just tobacco? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cgbbfpd",
"cgbcoz1",
"cgbe3wi",
"cgbhsku",
"cgbd8tx",
"cgbbo4u",
"cgbda6y",
"cgbc35n",
"cgbfjjt",
"cgbcyf0",
"cgbdwve",
"cgbg6r8",
"cgbdp0k",
"cgbpnh3",
"cgbeahl",
"cgbhaav",
"cgbfwqo",
"cgbdexv",
"cgbgp14",
"cgbflu2",
"cgc4hj5",
"cgbi4ky",
"cgbfpeq",
"cgbgud0",
"cgbgqbc",
"cgbbdq8",
"cgbdcp3",
"cgbeu59",
"cgc0afi",
"cgboj52",
"cgbm45v",
"cgbxhv5",
"cgbldgo",
"cgbds9q",
"cgbn9qj",
"cgbt6fm",
"cgbe7ck",
"cgbcf73",
"cgbedqh",
"cgbnldq",
"cgboc08",
"cgblur2",
"cgbmd4d",
"cgbfu0f",
"cgbh38y",
"cgbmor3",
"cgbu6cj",
"cgbeacz",
"cgbnmbb",
"cgbbwum",
"cgbm17f",
"cgbmihn",
"cgbniwg",
"cgbybhn",
"cgbe1kq",
"cgbmf58",
"cgbrhow",
"cgbir99",
"cgbbm9u",
"cgbr9jx",
"cgbiipr",
"cgbqlv9",
"cgc06vc",
"cgbdzg1",
"cgbkt2d",
"cgbisrk",
"cgbpayo",
"cgbnhue",
"cgbl5fk"
],
"text": [
"Some of the chemicals are to ensure that the cigarettes stay lit once you light them. I know the first time I had a higher quality smoke after being used to \"factory cigarettes\" I was surprised that it went out when I left it unattended for a moment.\n\nEDIT: This comment has gotten a lot more attention than I expected. I'd like to clarify that I am in no way an expert. I based this on an anti-smoking ad I saw once in my doctors office. People a lot smarter than me have confirmed in the comments that there are combustible chemicals as well as oxygen releasing crystals in cigarettes (or cigarette paper) to keep the cigarettes burning. There are also in \"fire-safe-cigarettes\" a different chemical to stop it from burning if left unattended. Also note that this whole comment thread ignores entirely chemicals that are added to enhance the taste and the texture of the cigarettes, and chemicals that are put on the tobacco plants just like any other plant, which are discussed in the other comments.\n\nOh, and by the way, _URL_0_",
"most of the dangerous chemicals come from the incomplete burning of the tabacco. Because you dont burn it with enough oxygen there are hundrets of side reactions which make polyarmatic rings carbenes and other nasty stuff. tabacco is a natural product thats why it contains a multitude of chemical building blocks.\nIf you burn wood you get ash and CO2 mostly but when you heat it without air you get coke and a nasty liquid called cresolite oil. thats similar to whats happening when you smoke a cigarette.",
"Everything is chemicals god damn it.\n\nEdit: I appreciate the Au.",
"The chemicals serve many purposes. Here are a few reasons they're added:\n\n1. For nicotine manipulation. Nicotine is the addictive property of tobacco that makes you want more of it. Chemicals are added:\n\n -- To aid in the absorption of nicotine. So that when you inhale the smoke you get the maximum amount of nicotine.\n\n -- To increase the potency of the nicotine which makes them even more addictive.\n\n2. To enable the cigarette to stay lit.\n\n3. To make the cigarette slow burning once it's lit.\n\n3. To ease harshness on your throat when you inhale.\n\n4. Tobacco plants are difficult to grow and used to take a long time until they could be harvested. But with the aid of chemicals they can be grown in huge numbers really fast. \n\n\n -- Fertilisers to promote growth\n\n -- Herbicides are used for weed control\n\n -- Pesticides are used to stop insects eating the plants \n\n -- Fungicides to stop the plants from rotting\n \n\n\n_______________\nI've done a fair bit of research on nicotine addiction the tobacco industry. \nThere's a great documentary by [BBC Horizon called We Love Cigarettes](_URL_1_) I recommend people watch which touches on how it all began etc.\n_______________\n\nI smoked 15 cigarettes a day for 7 years, and quit 2 years ago. Nicotine is *really addictive*, but it is possible to kick the habit **easily** - I can't recommend Allen Carr's Easyway book enough. It saved my life. Read it.\n\nIf anyone needs any advice on stopping join us over at /r/stopsmoking",
"\"Just tobacco\" - I've worked with tobacco plants (as a plant scientist, not working for the tobacco industry), and I can tell you that there are plenty of nasty chemicals in the tobacco too... You're burning-up all the phenolic compounds and all the proteins that are in tobacco, which inevitably will result in all sorts of toxic burn-products. Nicotine is only the stuff that makes it addicting.\n\nThinking that the extra stuff they put in sigs is somewhat worse than the tobacco itself is a complete fallacy - there is plenty of crap in fermented plants that will lead to all sorts of toxic shit when burned. \nThere are an estimated 3000 different chemicals in any random plant, plus a bunch of proteins. I wouldn't worry too much about the stuff they add...",
"To spike the nicotine. It's kind of like adding salt to a recipe to bring out other flavours. So tobacco companies add other chemicals to intensify the hit you get from the nicotine and therefore get you hooked quicker for longer. The process is called impact boosting and is covered in the great movie \"The Insider\" with Al Pacino and Russel Crowe. It's the true story of how a former employee of a tobacco company blows the whistle about this and other practices.\n\nEdit:\n\n[Here](_URL_3_) is a link to Jeffrey Wigand's interview on 60 minutes, the story behind this interview is also covered by The Insider\n\n[Link to a study with various sources](_URL_2_)",
"Keep in mind that the main problems with smoking come from the tobacco leaves. If you're smoking additives-free or organic cigarettes instead of normal one for the supposed health benefits, you're fooling yourself. If you want health benefits there's no way around it. You have to quit smoking.",
"Keep in mind there are cigarettes that are just tobacco as well, like American Spirits. They even have organic ones.",
"Just so we're clear, when Darren the Lion told you in D.A.R.E. that cigarettes contain over three hundred chemicals, he's being intentionally misleading. Any organic material has hundreds of chemicals, are grapes poisonous? And when they say on commercials that methane and urea are in both feces and cigarettes, that's also misleading, because urea and methane are also in hotdogs and bananas. Some people have a vendetta against smoking, and it's important to take anything you hear with a grain of salt.\n\n(they're still really bad for you either way)",
"Many of them are naturally occurring in the tobacco leaves themselves. In the same way that someone could say that Marijuana has over 400 chemicals in it.",
"I work for a tobacco company and the government forces us to put alot of the chemicals in. Others are just natural combustion products from the tobacco leaf. The consumer wants products which require consistant draw effort and taste. The paper requires amgp approved glues and not ro mention ballshit legislation covering the paper in gum decreasing the permeability so it extinguishes its self if not puffed on. There are twosmoking regimes and a lot of physical testing that has to be passed before a product reaches market. Products have to last a certain amount of puffs.\n\nAppologies for lack of sentence structure and punctuation currently machine smoking in a lab.\n\nTldr most are natural some have to be there by law.",
"After reading this thread for about a half hour, I've just now quit smoking. Been doing it for about 20 years and I'm 38. The only other time I've quit was during my pregnancy. Had no desire for it. My daughter is 6 years old now and she's caught me smoking secretly once or twice.\n\nI'm glad so many people are against it. Smart generation. My mom use to smoke in the same room as me growing up. Not as neglect or harm, she was an awesome mother, she just didn't know any better. \n\nSo ty, keep the remarks informative and terrifying. More like me will quit.",
"This is just a myth.\n\nProfessor of Public Health Richard Edwards from the University of Otago published an article in the British Medical Journal on the subject:\n\n\"However, evidence shows that RYO [roll your own] cigarettes are at “least as hazardous” as any other type of cigarette, and that they have a much greater concentration of additives than manufactured cigarettes.\"\n\nPer: _URL_4_",
"Something I can speak with a little authority on. I used to work at a law firm that represented one of the big cigarette manufacturers in the United States. As part of our representation, we hosted a meeting with tobacco engineers to bring ourselves up to speed on their product line. This is a throwaway account.\n\nThere are, as mentioned below, plenty of chemicals in cigarettes. They're all in there for a reason; the engineers employed by tobacco companies are some truly smart individuals. My biggest takeaway from those meetings was nicotine delivery. If you look at the top of a filter, there's a line of very tiny laser-cut holes. Those holes increase the amount of airflow when you \"draw.\" That, in turn, increases the nicotine delivery. You can't add more nicotine, so you add the whole to make the cigarette burn faster and increase the nicotine dose per draw. Some of the added chemicals have the same effect. You can't add more nicotine, so let's add chemicals that enhance the biological effect of the nicotine.\n\nThere are plenty of other reasons, too; and some chemicals are less harmful that others. Some increase the burn speed, others are remnants from the growing and drying process. Some help ensure product quality, uniformity and longevity. Not all are in there for nefarious purposes, and there are some by-product chemicals that tobacco companies wish WEREN'T in there (but they're a natural result of the burning).\n\nTo that end, I'll add that this is my biggest fear with legalizing pot. As it stands right now, pot seems pretty natural (I'll never say \"healthy,\" as smoke in your lungs will never be a good thing). But imagine what happens if big tobacco gets into the pot business? The product will be MUCH less pure.",
"This might be a bit of an unpopular opinion on reddit, but those commercials you see stating that cigarettes have hundreds of chemicals are a bit biased. Tobacco itself has a good amount of chemicals on it. A lot of the other chemicals are from the paper/dyes that they use to wrap it. Most of these are federally regulated and the cigarette companies have to have a certain paper type and a certain dye type. Cigarettes are obviously bad for you but the cigarette companies are not intentionally poisoning them. That would be stupid, they would be killing off their consumer base even faster.",
"As someone who is looking into taking up smoking I find this thread very interesting.",
"I don't know what is in cigarettes that do this, but as a former smoker who has switched to ecigs here is something I've noticed: In a very short while (perhaps 1-2 weeks) the cravings for nicotine became very very mild. A craving for a cigarette is demanding. Nothing matters but getting that cigarette. A craving for the ecig, once you're over cigarettes, is like a mild suggestion that you might need some nicotine.\n\nI'm not sure why it's like this, but I would not be surprised if cigarettes were formulated to be as addicting as possible. Ecigs are new and many of us make our own liquids from concentrated nicotine in a carrier (either vegetable glycerin or propolene glycol), so we have full control over the ingredients.",
"I'm not discounting anything anyone else has said. I would like to add that you are inhaling the products of incomplete combustion.",
"I've seen some comments about the chemicals used to keep them burning and others about the chemicals added to keep them from burning too long (to keep them from starting as many fires I believe). But not one about the chemicals added to make them more addictive. The nicotine content has risen, at least in the US dramatically since the 1980's. Also when I travel say to mexico and try a Mexican, let's say Newport, its no where near as satisfying as an American Newport. I'm no expert by any stretch, but I'd bet they get away with more additives in the US than elsewhere.",
"Experts: Explain, then, why smokeless tobacco is so harmful please. Lots of you in this thread are saying it's the COMBUSTION of the tobacco that is hurting you, and that the tobacco itself is fine aside from some random chemicals tossed in to regulate burning and flavor. They are clearly allowed to add nastiness that is contributing to disease.",
"TLDR: There's a lot to discuss about harm caused by tobacco products but the discussion should not be based on bullshit made-up facts.\n\nI work in a laboratory that analyzes cigarettes, filler, and smokeless tobacco for Tobacco Control Act compliance. I am contractually prevented from discussing what I know about cigarette smoke chemistry in detail. However, I can tell you some general information. The majority of the comments that I've read in this thread as bullshit. Self proclaimed experts have learned what they know from other self proclaimed experts that have never analyzed a cigarette in their life.\n\nTobacco is a a natural product that contains a wide variety of compounds, mostly proteins. What makes it different from other natural products are a class of naturally occurring compounds called alkaloids. Nicotine is one of these alkaloids. While addictive, nicotine is not very harmful in mild doses. It is poisonous at large doses. Caffeine has similar characteristics. \n\n1] Combustion byproducts are what makes cigarettes unhealthy. Many of the harmful constituents in cigarette smoke are a result of combustion of the naturally occurring compounds in the tobacco plant.\n2] Companies do not add compounds to make the cigarettes more addictive. The addictive elements are inherent in the tobacco.\n3] The compounds used to control the burn rate are usually food grade chemicals that you ingest daily from other sources.\n4] All cigarettes are required to be self extinguishing if you set them down. Manufacturers are required to prove this for every brand every year. It's called an Ignition Propensity test.\n5] Tobacco is tested to prove the absence of herbicides, pesticides, anti-succulents, etc before it is purchased by the manufacturer.\n6] There are no propellants or crystals in cigarettes\n7] If you understood the chemistry of the combustion you would understand that the concept of spending extra for organically grown cigarettes is foolish. It's about equivalent to thinking that sodium chloride derived from sea salt is better for you than sodium chloride mined in the Utah salt mines.",
"It is also worth mentioning that the chemistry of cigarette smoke is not the same as the chemistry of unburnt cigarettes. Some of the scarier chemicals anti-smoking advocates focus on are actually common byproducts complex combustion reactions. Tobacco is best understood as a mixture of compounds. That is to say that \"elemental tobacco\" does not exist. The elements that make up tobacco not only are typically bound up in relatively large molecules, but there is a huge variety of those molecules making up the plant material.\n\nAlong comes fire, breaking chemical bonds and sticking loose oxygen atoms on things. Within an ember or a flame, many substances burning together will undergo chaotic transformations. Carbon monoxide is a common and often substantial byproduct of these combustion reactions. In trace amounts, much more potent toxins are also likely to occur. It may be true that major cigarette manufacturers dump all sorts of chemicals into their products just as major food manufacturers lace their wares with artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives. However, some of the nastiest stuff in cigarette smoke is a function of it being smoke from combusted vegetable matter, rather than a function of that matter being a cigarette.",
"Ammonia allows nicotine to cross the blood brain barrier giving the user a \"rush\" much like heroin or crack. Immediate. Need I talk about the addictiveness in heroin or crack? Watch a smoker who hasn't got their routine break when they get their first drag. You can watch the rush as they \"calm\" down. This was done intentionally. Marlboro intentionally set out to give a rush and addict people and a chemist discovered ammonia did it. PhillipMorris losing in sales researched Reynolds, who started this technique, and found ammonia and the memo said soon \"people were falling in line.\" Big tobacco was sued. _URL_6_\n\nEffects of Chemical in Cigarettes: _URL_5_",
"I don't have much time to go into it but the partial combustion of the tobacco leaf cause the release of toxins that people commonly reference. These are found in the smoke rather then the cigarette itself.\n\nThere are actually pretty interesting health benefits of nicotine itself if anyone has looked into nicotinic ACh receptors. Some examples include improving working memory and anxiety. Research is actually being done on its possible health benefits with neurodegerative diseases if anyone is interesting in hearing about that as well.\n\nHere's some more information:\n\n_URL_7_",
"a lot of the chemicals added are desighned to be addictive.\nfor instance marlboro laces there tobaco with an essance of chocolate.\nyou therefore get your chocolate fix.\namerican spirit is the only tobacco company that uses zero additives.\nwhen i switched to them i found it much easier to go longer periods of time without smoking and i eventually quit,whithout some of the nagging withdrawl symptoms i was getting from name brands",
"Posting so I remember to come back and check for the explanation.\n\nI really, really miss smoking. It was my one vice and I still crave it after quitting a year ago.",
"I might be wrong so please don't rip into me but I'll pass on what I was told.\n\nNothing is actually added to the tobacco. It might contain chemicals like insecticides but thats true for fruit and veg as well.\n\nTobacco leaves contain about 300 naturally occurring compounds (my memory is hazy on that number). However, once you set fire to it the process of combustion creates about 4000 new compounds (they have not all been identified).\n\nAs for why the cigarette stays lit. Its because the paper allows air through which lets the tobacco smoulder. If you were to wrap it in non porous paper it would go out. The problem with that is it sometimes looks like it's gone out but could still be lit. Also using non porous paper increases the amount of carbon dioxide (or monoxide. Can't remember).\n\nThere is one thing though. If you take the tobacco out of a cig and look at it carefully you might find what looks like shredded bits of brown paper. A by product of cutting up dry tobacco leaves is dust. They sweep that shit up, make paper sheets with it and boom! More tobacco.",
"Nobody's mentioning the political reason--[tobacco was excluded from FDA regulation until 2009.](_URL_8_) That meant that additives were unregulated. Harmful? Addictive? Who knew?\n\nEven now, all we can do is ask for an ingredient list. But just the list--we can'd demand that the companies show that these additives are benign.",
"Chemicals are added to aid everything from burn speed and staying lit to keeping you addicted. The biggest issue is they are/were purposely engineered to be more addictive. IMO there is absolutely no reason why they aren't illegal everywhere.",
"A lot of these chemicals are in the tobacco. Sure, there are a ton of additives to make them burn faster etc., but the deadly chemicals are from the tobacco itself. When tobacco is grown in the US, a popular fertiliser is apatite rock. Now, wherever you find apatite, you are also probably going to find Uranium. Uranium itself is not that poisonous, but some of the products of its decay are. Polonium-210 (Po-210) is approximately 250,000,000x more poisonous than cyanide due to its high rate of alpha decay. Because of this, it isn't very dangerous if it touches you, but if it gets into you, it is. Tiny amounts of Po-210 exist in cigarettes. The flame in the cigarette is high enough to melt the Po-210, and microscopic droplets adhere to smoke particles which are breathed into the lungs. The droplets stick to the lungs, and thus are highly dangerous. **A pack of cigarettes gives of as much radiation as a chest x-ray.**",
"There are many \"chemicals\" in any product someone consumes. Oxygen releasing crystals can be added to papers to keep them burning. Most people would be very surprised at how well regulated the cigarette making industry is. The quality standards are usually higher than for food you buy at the store. Any other additives to the tobacco are subject to strict \"food grade\" regulations. Most of the harmful chemicals you see in tobacco ads are products of the combustion or just simply compounds in the tobacco plant that vaporize that can indeed be very harmful when consumed for a prolonged time.\nSource: I am a chemical engineering major\nNote: I am not a supporter of tobacco products. They are a terrible habit and pose serious health risks. I'm just a fan of edumication : )",
"I read an article and am a former smoker. Over 600 chemicals are used in cigarettes. When burned, it creates over 4,000 chemicals. Many of these chemicals are poisonous and cause cancer. My best guess is big tobacco companies use these chemicals mainly to make the cigarettes more addictive, so that they can make more $.",
"Many of the chemicals serve as a nicotine delivery system to get it into your bloodstream as quickly as possible, giving a bigger \"rush\" than you would with straight tobacco.",
"2/3 of those chemicals are actually in the paper. Specifically if you look you'll see tiny bands in the paper.",
"Because plain tobacco tastes like shit (and cigarettes tastes like horse shit) :)",
"How it's Made - Better to see for yourself. Some of the ingredients that are infused into the fluid that is bonded with the cigarette paper are flavorants, odorants, preservatives and humidity controlling agents and such things. To make the cigarette more pleasant (and addictive!). \n\nWithout such ingredients the uniformity of the product would be inconsistent. It would also not deliver a predictable experience and thus would likely not be as habit forming and addictive. If you have a product that is addictive, it should be obvious that anything you can do to make it more addictive is beneficial to your profit margin.\n\nPart 1\n_URL_9_\n\nPart 2 missing?\n\nPart 3\n_URL_10_\n\nAnother \n_URL_11_\n\n**Misc. Warning (I know it's like beating a dead horse) - Please do not start smoking. It is a horrible habit and it will kill you. It might not kill you right away, but over time you will develop health problems that can and will lead to your death. I have a family of smokers and they are all suffering from these issues. I decided early on not to take up the habit.** But yeah, the documentaries about how they're made are fascinating. And there goes 4 hours of my day looking at how its' made videos. :/ Another habit.",
"@might_be_self - and to all others. The tobacco leaf that makes its way into a cigarette is treated in over 300 chemical processes that contain 3800+ chemicals. Majority of them contain addictive properties that put strain on ALL systems of the body. Our body is the ultimate cleanser, and sends anti-inflammatory factors to relieve damage done. But unfortunately, the systems that send the repair mechanism of the body is damaged and down regulated as well, leading to a synergistic damaging effect with each subsequent inhalation. 1- the chemicals itself 2- the environment placed on the lungs and body by the smoke 3- the damage caused by the body debilitating future repair efforts. \n\nApart from media and advertising in the 40s that made smoking cool, hip and if you can believe it, endorsed by the doctors and the American Medical Association, the only reason cigarettes are where they are is because the effects are not immediately seen. If people got cancer within a year of smoking, we would have many refraining from it.\n\nnative tobacco on it's own has significantly less carcinogenic (Cancerous) effects than the common cigarette, but it's still a stress on the body with the smoke and it's own effect.",
"Something I haven't noticed in these comments is one of the big reasons cigarettes have so many and can have so many harmful chemicals in the USA is due to the way the FDA regulates the tobacco industry. Many additives in cigarettes are normally used as food additives, when ingested these additives are more or less harmless but when burned they produce very harmful chemicals. The two reasons for these additives are, consistency of taste and preservation.\n\nEdit:\n\nWhile I would never attempt to downplay the harmful effects of smoking often when you hear something like \"there are ten thousand harmful chemicals in a cigarette\" what they're really saying is \"When we tested all these different cigarette brands there were all these different chemicals in them but not all of the cigarettes had every single chemical in it.\" The idea that the tobacco industry is using a standardized additive set containing hundreds or thousands of carcinogenic compounds is preposterous.",
"Surprised no one mentioned that some of the chemicals act like anti depressants to get you more hooked on cigarettes. Also chemicals are added to improve the flavour and make more of the nicotine in the cigarette reach your brain.\n\n\nFor those who want a more in depth explanation. Ammonia basing is done to the nicotine to make the nicotine more bioavailable when smoking. Several compounds in the smoke act like MAOIs and SSRIs both terms used for chemicals that improve synaptic transmission of things like dopamine and serotonin (anti depressant effects). I think they also ad ethanols to either make the flavour taste nicer or to make the burning more consistent. Can't remember the specifics about ethanol. \n\nI watched the insider and was very interested about cigarette research so I downloaded a bunch of papers on them and was reading them",
"Acetone – found in nail polish remover\n Acetic Acid – an ingredient in hair dye\n Ammonia – a common household cleaner\n Arsenic – used in rat poison\n Benzene – found in rubber cement\n Butane – used in lighter fluid\n Cadmium – active component in battery acid\n Carbon Monoxide – released in car exhaust fumes\n Formaldehyde – embalming fluid\n Hexamine – found in barbecue lighter fluid\n Lead – used in batteries\n Naphthalene – an ingredient in moth balls\n Methanol – a main component in rocket fuel\n Nicotine – used as insecticide\n Tar – material for paving roads\n Toluene - used to manufacture paint\nThese are all added to make your cigerette more tastey!!! Also ensures a longer burning time.",
"The problem comes from the Triple Phosphate fertilizers they used heavily for years.... the Cadmium and other heavy metals accumulate in the plant because tobacco is excellent and cleaning up heavy metals. \n\nGrow your own tobacco and have a nice medicinal smoke every once in awhile. It's fun, it's safer and you'll appreciate it more. \n\nThat and you can make your own blunt wraps. haha",
"Man, I had a test today which basically spoke about scientists working against the benefit of humanity (not exactly, but that's the simplest way to put it) , and had 2 essays. One was with regard to military applications and drones, and the other was about cigarettes and how they add chemicals to make it more addictive. \n\n_URL_12_.Exam.\nThe insight, *DAMNIT*",
"There are a few reasons:\n\n1) they have chemicals to keep them lit so you don't have to re-light them. Pipes and Cigars will go out if you're not constantly puffing. Cigarettes used to do that too.\n\n2) they have chemicals to enhance the addictive quality so that people want to smoke more\n\n3) they have chemicals for taste",
"Most are preservatives to keep cigarettes fresh, some add flavors and what not but for the most part the preservatives keep them and the rest of the chemicals found while smoking them are actually byproducts that exist in numerous things. Still, one of the dangerous addictions, and still has arsenic, cyanide, rocket fuel, and other such things.",
"As well as chemicals that help cigarettes burn faster/more consistently there are obviously the chemicals that are released when we combust tobacco itself. tobacco that's probably been cultivated in a field using pesticide. Given the relatively low temperature cigarettes burn at, these chemicals are often semi combusted, making for some lovely acute lung disease.",
"People forget, plants are chemical factories that produce their own pesticides, fungicides and other noxious / toxic chemicals. Just because they're are \"Natural\" doesn't mean they're healthy. I wouldn't worry so much about the additives over the 100's of nasty chemicals released from burning the tobacco itself.",
"Tobacco isn't a chemical, its a plant. Nicotine is the main addictive and psychactive chemical in it, but like all other plants, is not the only chemical. Many of the chemicals are natural, but some are added to effect how the cig burns",
"many reasons as there are different types\n\n1) the chemicals are produced by combustion.\n2) additives and flavours\n3) residue of agricultural and production \n4) adhesives in the paper to bind the item\n5) the filter itself reacting with the smoke",
"There are 599 chemicals that are added to cigs that have been approved by the FDA and are also added to food. Those 599 chemicals turn into thousands of different poisons once they are set on fire. Think about it.",
"A lot of the chemicals come from pesticides and other stuff they used to grow the tobacco, the rest is used to make it smell different to other brands to ensure that you stay loyal to your brand",
"Straight up, check out this philip morris video from the 90's\nImportantly around like 6:40\nBasically additions are brand specific to make them unique to that brand. Factory prerolled smokes are designed. \n_URL_13_\n\nTl;Dr- Corporate trade bullshit.",
"How better reform \"criminals\" them give them books that deal with our deepest emotions, anxieties and issues? Most literature does just that. Also, studies have shown that reading increases compassion, something prisoners could probably use.\nBullshit!",
"Over time, manufacturers have innovated ways to make them more addictive and to increase customer satisfaction. That may include a more reliable smoke or a faster/slower burn.",
"Most of the chemicals in cigarettes aren't \"added\", they're just there already or produced by combustion. A lot more is made than just ash and CO2",
"Money!! You're addicted right!? You just need a bit of nicotine to keep you coming back. The rest is the cheapest of cheap filler",
"What the hell do they add to Newports, those things are like 3x more addictive than regular smokes?",
"The more chemicals, the more addictive. You have to be a special kind of stupid to smoke.",
"Some of the chemicals make cigarette more adjective, some affect taste and some have anticarcniginic properties.",
"A lot are just used as preservatives to keep the tobacco fresh once its packaged",
"Price I pay for cigarettes in Ireland, they BETTER come with loads of chemicals.",
"Best explanation of how they are made and the additives and the reason _URL_14_",
"Don't they add these chemicals to get you addicted easier and buy more?",
"The added chemicals are not the problem. Burning tobacco generates carcinogens.",
"The better for you to get addicted to them, my dear.",
"You could say the exact thing about food man.",
"The same reason McDonald's cheeseburgers aren't 100% beef\n\n\nCapitalism",
"You guys should come on over to /r/pipetobacco",
"To get people addicted so they'll buy more.",
"I need a cigarette after reading this thread."
],
"score": [
2247,
790,
722,
500,
440,
98,
81,
44,
25,
24,
20,
18,
18,
14,
14,
13,
12,
12,
10,
10,
8,
8,
8,
8,
7,
6,
5,
4,
4,
3,
3,
3,
3,
3,
3,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://i.imgur.com/vM9lsmV.png",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QzL_eheuU4",
"http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/opinions_layman/tobacco/en/index.htm#5",
"http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/wigand-60-minutes-most-famous-whistleblower/",
"http://www.otago.ac.nz/news/news/otago065097.html",
"http://m.naturalnews.com/news/039233_tobacco_ammonia_cigarettes.html",
"http://14andout.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/big-tobacco-gets-caught-using-ammonia-but-continues-after-paying-off-blue-crossblue-shield-over-5-billion/",
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/12436426/",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_tobacco_by_the_U.S._Food_and_Drug_Administration",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXmofuJPuys",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7VxnhuntKA",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vBtq8-Snm8",
"I.Wish.I.Checked.Reddit.Before.My",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vBtq8-Snm8",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScMESUWHo34"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why do cigarettes have so many chemicals in them, why not just tobacco?
| [
0.043855857104063034,
0.029774276539683342,
-0.01478368230164051,
-0.009686239063739777,
0.021059125661849976,
0.037702880799770355,
0.042200639843940735,
0.07954972237348557,
0.09171254932880402,
0.07999919354915619,
0.01708110421895981,
-0.031244387850165367,
-0.04677374288439751,
-0.024... | ||
3pw7qh | Do Alcoholic Anonymous (and its variations) meetings only involve standing up and sharing your story? | Every time I saw AA meetings in TV shows and movies, it seems that it's the only thing they do (apart from grabbing snacks and coffee). So I'm wondering whether it's the only thing that they do, or there are more to it that's never shown on TV and movie? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cw9y8pl",
"cw9y94q",
"cw9xmsh",
"cw9yr9l",
"cwac3a9",
"cw9y57r",
"cwaqpn9"
],
"text": [
"No, there are different themes of meetings. There's speaker meetings, step meetings, big book studies, etc. The kind you describe are speaker meetings and yeah, it's a pretty popular format. And with a good speaker who knows how to tell a story, they can be a lot of fun. \n\nBut generally what happens is this: They open the meeting with some prayers, a reading of the 12 steps, and some other whatnot. This takes about 15 minutes. Then they go to the \"meat\" of the meeting; A person will speak or we'll read a chapter out of the big book or the 12 & 12 [another popular book on recovery] together, and then the floor is open for anyone to share about what they thought of it, or really to share about anything at all. Unlike most depictions in entertainment, you usually won't go stand in the front of the room to share. Also, crosstalk [speaking up while someone else has the floor] is strongly discouraged. Don't do that. \n\nThe sharing lasts around 25 to 40 minutes, depending, then they close with a prayer again. Bing bang boom. \n\nOh just for the record, the group prayer entirely optional, and it means different things to different people. Most folks do participate, but nobody's going to look at you cross if you don't. Sometimes I do, other I prefer to take that time and reflect a bit on why I'm there that evening. Nobody cares either way.",
"As a medical student, we were required to attend several alcoholic anonymous meetings My impression as an outsider is that attendees shared experiences as a way of explaining how to apply the 12 steps in their lives. Voss their personal stories were more of an instruction on how to follow the system. The steps themselves are not necessarily intuitive and I found this level of instruction helpful in understanding the program. Overall, I found the meetings educational and helpful even for somebody like myself who does not have an alcohol use disorder. I highly recommend that everyone attend a couple, if only to gain better insight into a common problem that is difficult to understand otherwise.",
"I only ever used AA and that's pretty much it. The Serenity prayer is said at the start and finish of each meeting with those who want to talk filling out the middle. I couldn't get on with it. It just wasn't something I was used to. Good luck to those that do find a use for it, but it just was not for me.",
"Quick basics.\n\n- discussion: anyone can share\n\n- speaker: one person has been selected to share\n\n\n- various book discussions: these will specify in your local meeting directory which text they read and discuss from\n\n\n- meditation: like it sounds, then discuss your thoughts afterward",
"As a child in middle school, I actually attended several with my father. Idk why it wasn't weird or maybe it was and I was too young to realize. \n\nCompared to what I see on TV a lot, the AA meetings I remember were run by the members, not driven by some Psychiatrist running the show and making everyone feel awkward. A lot of times on TV they show them in a rehab setting with some asshole running the show. The ones I went to were always in the basement or the fellowship hall of a church.\n\n* You don't have to share if you want to, sometimes listening and opening your mind is just as powerful. As a child with ADHD (who now suffers from anxiety too) who was medicated at the time, I managed to sit there and thankfully I found it interesting and eye opening. I think my father has some form of ADHD and anxiety and just chose to medicate with Alcohol.\n* It was common for people to just sit and share from where they were seated. Really this could be more about how the group chooses to run their meeting. I was too young to understand or remember. Most meetings had a couple of tables where elders sat and then rows of seats for anyone who showed up.\n* At ages 10, 11, 12, 13... I've seen grown men cry... they're stuck, they don't know how to move forward, they're broken emotionally.. I could go on. I can't begin to describe... but I value what I witnessed and I am emotional as I type this. I'm the first one in the line of Fathers- > Sons to not have a drinking problem affect their life/marriage/job in some way in quite some time. When I think back on it, I am thankful for what he did and I am fond of the memories, but really he just couldn't afford a baby sitter when he had custody of me on the weekends....\n* In contrast to TV, on quite a few occasions I've seen elder members just RIP into someone who has shared... but in a good way. They are there to help each other and apply the steps, the elders members have been through it, they know all the games that come with addiction and can cut through someones bullshit when they see it. **EDIT:** *I'm not trying to say people go in there with the intention to deceive, addiction really messes with your reasoning and priorities to the point that you don't even realize it.* I've seen them yell at each other for minutes and then embrace in tears. Sometimes people have to hear the truth and it fucking hurts.... everybody in that room knows it hurts cause they've been there too and it's ok.\n* I never got the impression that the steps carry pressure like homework assignments or something. My father has remained sober and now only goes on occasion when life gets difficult and I am sure he hasn't completed all of them. Showing up on your own volition is practically step one. I would encourage anyone who is considering going to not get hung up on the steps and just go... listen... understand that you are not alone and that there are a lot of total and complete strangers that will go out of their way to help you. \n\n**EDIT 2** I've continually expanded on the bullet points.",
"The reason is because AA (and support groups like it) subscribe to the philosophy that talking about your problems (as in literally stating what's going on and how you feel) helps people come to terms with them and perhaps start trying to resolve them. You know how if you have a problem and you tell another person about it you can feel better even if nothing has actually changed? That's the basic idea. \nThese support groups discourage \"crosstalk\" where people talk when other people are sharing because it interferes with that persons therapy. If you allow cross talk, the extroverts will dominate the discussion and introverts may not get their time to share. You also run the risk of making the conversation all about who ever happens to share first without moving on to another person. \nOf course no therapy is perfect, and some support groups don't subscribe to this particular philosophy, but it does seem to be the most popular.",
"There R speaker meetings, where somebody with a notably worthwhile and interesting story speaks from a podium, there are tag meetings, where one person shares and then calls on someone else to share, and there are ticket meetings, where you take a ticket and put it in the basket and share if ur # gets called"
],
"score": [
39,
6,
3,
3,
2,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Do Alcoholic Anonymous (and its variations) meetings only involve standing up and sharing your story?
Every time I saw AA meetings in TV shows and movies, it seems that it's the only thing they do (apart from grabbing snacks and coffee). So I'm wondering whether it's the only thing that they do, or there are more to it that's never shown on TV and movie? | [
0.009025719948112965,
0.017957137897610664,
-0.05951949954032898,
0.01141614280641079,
-0.05213296040892601,
0.014165777713060379,
0.03523100167512894,
-0.08138494193553925,
0.08206335455179214,
-0.09351344406604767,
0.01703786291182041,
0.059433553367853165,
-0.10103539377450943,
0.041105... | |
1jgud3 | What happens to all the confiscated drugs, such as marijuana, that the cops collect? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cbeje1x",
"cbemign",
"cbelln0",
"cbem5h4",
"cbeyyll",
"cbem9ye",
"cbemnq4"
],
"text": [
"/u/i_is_surf explained it in [this thread](_URL_0_):\n\n > Cop here. Short answer is, it depends.\n > \n > If it's a serious crime and the drugs and money were evidence, the drugs and money will be retained in evidence for 5-7 years for potential appeals, or longer, depending on the wishes of the prosecution.\n > \n > If the crime isn't so serious (as in 2-3 years or less) and the money wasn't proven to be derived from, or in furtherance to, illicit activity, it will most likely be returned to the owner. (This follows the same asset forfeiture laws as vehicles, houses, boats, clothing, etc. so a separate hearing is usually initiated to test/verify if the money was illicit.)\n > \n > Each jurisdiction has their own set of rules, regulations, and laws, but generally the drugs and money will either be disposed of (by at least two witnesses) or they will be kept. (Drugs can be used for training or future investigative operations. Money goes back to the parent government, NOT the seizing agency.) There is usually some forms that need to be filled out and approved by the chief of the law enforcement organization and the prosecutor's office and/or judge.\n > \n > If the drugs are kept, they are stored in the property/evidence room and only checked out for operations/training - they're weighed when they leave and weighed again when they come back. If there's any missing and it wasn't used in an approved training or operation, it would be your ass. The drugs could be used for K-9 training or controlled burns (how do you think that cops and confidential informants know what marijuana smells like - they, like the dogs, have to have it signed off in their personnel/training records.) We will also use it to do field test training for those that don't get a lot of exposure to it (probation/parole officers, investigative assistants, confidential informants etc.) Operations is what you suspect - reverse buy/busts or buy/walks.\n > \n > As I said, money that has been seized (and approved for forfeiture during a hearing) funnels back to the parent government and they disburse it as they see fit. At the Federal level, that is the Department of Justice.\n >",
"Specifically, Marijuana in B.C., Canada - I worked at a lumber mill. They have a [\"hive\" burner - where scrap wood is burned in a 60ft burner](_URL_1_). Late at night, a few times a year, they load bales of marijuana on the conveyer and let it burn. This takes a few hours to complete. \n\nAs a side note: One of the clean up crew on shift went missing one of these times. They found him in the lunch room, mid shift, eyes beyond bloodshot and face so red it looked like he was working on a 2 day sun burn. This was late fall, no sun, he worked only graveyards and was pasty white earlier that night... I guess he was checking how the burn was going... close up... for an extended time...",
"A couple years ago, my local PD nabbed a GIANT marijuana ring. They got hundreds and hundreds of pounds of the stuff.\n\nThe ended up burning it all in one of the hangers at the local airport (military base as well). \n\nMy old criminal justice teacher was a cop at the time and he said more than half of the guys had a contact high that day.",
"Hmm can't speak for anything else but our local police department burns the weed at our local rural fire-brigade branch. They show up with a car load and supervise while the fireys burn it all in a 44 gallon drum.",
"It's destroyed, usually through burning. It's a shame because I could do that myself, and get a lot more use from it.",
"I wish I knew the answer to this. My friends cousin got his SRT8 charger confiscated because he bought it with drug money. I have been watching for it to pop up at a police auction or something but it has been almost 3 years and I have not seen it. I kind of think it may have ended up in some officers driveway for a sweet price. The auctions seem to all be really crappy cars so Im thinking the nice ones go somewhere else. Ideas?",
"In Latin America, recycling is the norm. Cops like money. It's eco friendly, too."
],
"score": [
67,
22,
21,
7,
3,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1igsa0/eli5_where_do_seized_drugs_and_drug_money_go/",
"https://maps.google.com/maps?q=vavenby&hl=en&ll=51.581667,-119.740492&spn=0.001158,0.00284&sll=51.581667,-119.740492&sspn=0.001158,0.00284&t=h&radius=0.07&hq=vavenby&z=19"
]
} | train_eli5 | What happens to all the confiscated drugs, such as marijuana, that the cops collect?
| [
0.0367475226521492,
0.06875645369291306,
0.006697298493236303,
-0.018897660076618195,
0.023426666855812073,
-0.006522389128804207,
0.043181777000427246,
-0.015975743532180786,
0.004014943260699511,
-0.035563625395298004,
0.10332490503787994,
0.08166074007749557,
-0.008207620121538639,
0.05... | ||
8kly3x | How do garbage collection services get caught up from taking federal holidays off? Same amount of weekly trash, collected in fewer days: they work longer hours? they run more trucks? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dz8nlqu",
"dz8po83",
"dz8nkoj",
"dz8o33v"
],
"text": [
"In our city, they work 4-day weeks generally. (M-T-TH-F) \nFor Monday holidays, they move M-T collections to T-W",
"**Please read this entire message**\n\n---\n\nYour submission has been removed for the following reason(s):\n\nELI5 is not for:\n\nStraightforward answers or facts - ELI5 is for requesting an explanation of a concept, not a simple straightforward answer \n\n\n\n---\nIf you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](_URL_0_) first. If you still feel the removal should be reviewed, please [message the moderators.](_URL_1_?)",
"I'm from Australia so maybe things are different but my dad is a Garbo and basically works Monday to Friday.. Whenever he has a day off he works Saturday instead and the bins are picked up a day late leading to Saturday which is ultimately the Friday trash. Then start again Monday back to normal",
"My normal trash day is on Friday. If they have a holiday, they'll pick the trash up on Saturday. So if they don't work on a weekday, they have to make it up on a weekend."
],
"score": [
3,
2,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules",
"http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Can%20you%20review%20my%20thread"
]
} | train_eli5 | How do garbage collection services get caught up from taking federal holidays off? Same amount of weekly trash, collected in fewer days: they work longer hours? they run more trucks?
[removed] | [
0.02719319611787796,
-0.003661025781184435,
0.04655939340591431,
0.023872438818216324,
0.01715490035712719,
-0.05820121988654137,
0.0019725700840353966,
-0.09169045835733414,
0.0307839997112751,
-0.04361102357506752,
-0.01023582648485899,
0.07915796339511871,
0.0023011851590126753,
0.03647... | |
2b5x59 | Why is it that big semi trucks last for hundreds of thousands of miles, but some cars start breaking at just about 100,000? | Small cars have less stress on the engine too, due to the significant weight differences... | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cj267rr",
"cj23cc0",
"cj29cze",
"cj25rw5"
],
"text": [
"I myself work in the mining industry in australia. Recently was at a site near coober pedy in the middle of nowhere. Maintenance is a big part of it. The road trains we had are tri-drive kenworth 908s or something but would do 6 trips a day so close to 600kms a day from site to rail siding and back a few times but every time they pulled into the yard they were checked over. Fluids, belts, tires, filters and signs of new or increasing damage/wear. One thing I noticed was different was service intervals. Regular light vehicle gets serviced ever 5000kms or 10000kms the trucks all get serviced based on hours worked like 250hrs they get fluid samples taken, 500hrs tires rotated and belts inspected or changed, 1000hrs hrs they have the oils and filters changed etc etc so each time certain hours roll around its due for something.\n\nA fair bit would come down to driver abilities/abuse I would imagibe aswell",
"There's a distinct difference in how diesel and regular gasoline engines work, that's part of it. Another part is semis aren't exactly meant for short errand travelling, they're built for long distance running. Lots less starting and stopping means less wear.",
"Cars have the body as part of the structure. If something bad happens to that, it is a write-off quite often. That they are made for the cost does not help.\n\nSemis are built onto a steel channel frame. \n\nTheir value makes mechanical repairs/overhaul prospective.\n\nTheir operators often have a better technical understanding of their vehicle, more than the typical small vehicle motorist. The end result being it gets cared for. Plus there are mandatory inspections.",
"The big trucks get lots of frequent, expensive maintenance. I used to drive busses with anywhere from 100-250,000 miles on them and they worked, but it took a full time mechanic to keep them running."
],
"score": [
3,
3,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why is it that big semi trucks last for hundreds of thousands of miles, but some cars start breaking at just about 100,000?
Small cars have less stress on the engine too, due to the significant weight differences... | [
0.04892413318157196,
-0.020532483235001564,
0.0825507715344429,
0.06974748522043228,
0.07803173363208771,
-0.026119763031601906,
-0.11978693306446075,
0.07183545082807541,
-0.07918812334537506,
0.00997292809188366,
-0.08352967351675034,
0.036280225962400436,
-0.007853379473090172,
0.002905... | |
5f1hgo | How can child-actors play in gruesome movies like Beasts of no Nation? | Just saw the movie Beasts of no Nation on netflix. It was very good, yet also very graphic and brutal in certain scenes.
I was wondering how do directors prevent child-actors (in this movie especially, with all the child soldiers) from actually seeing or experiencing (parts of) these kind of movies? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dagv7by",
"dahhaov",
"dagtvnd",
"daguqn8"
],
"text": [
"There are two routes.\n\nDanny from The Shining did not know it was a horror movie. His scenes were edited so that he did not have an idea that he was supposed to be in a scary movie.\n\nIn Beasts of No Nation they went the opposite way. They were clear with the actors and explained what was happening. They made sure to have the support structure in place to make sure the actors knew what was happening and why certain things had to be done for the story. Remember that Abraham Attah (Agu) was 13 when filming took place. The actors were able to tell what was real and what was fake and were able to distinguish between something bad and something acceptable.",
"Child actors see the preparations for the seen. They see the greenscreens, the Camera team, the director. They see the same scary scene shot a couple of times. They speak and joke with the other actors and the prop and mask team. Even (maybe especially) in Horror movies, scenes have to be filmed over and over because the actors just burst out laughing. Also they see the prop and mask prepration, so for them a scene that has for example, somebody loosing an arm, the don't see that isolated. (Assuming it's not CGI), they see the actor getting a prop arm, fake blood packets attached, etc.\nThe really scary (instead of gory) parts like atmosphere, sound and lightning are only including afterwards. \n\nSo the child actors have a very good grasp on what is reality and what is fiction.\n\nIf they watch the movie later (depends on their parents) they usually also don't see the movie isolated. They are reminded of how they shot that scene, and how they attached the blood packs for example. I remember reading about one child actor (forget the name, even though I know how suspicious that sounds on the internet) who burst out laughing during a rather intense horror scene because she remembered how in one take the monster actor started laughing so badly that he fell down, which looked very strange in his costume.",
"Don't forget just how much editing takes place.\n\nScenes with children can be filmed in isolation, in a fun set, with their parents present, and done more like a game.\n\nThe special effects are added later - combined with scary noises and music, it completely transforms the scene.\n\nMost child actors who are in scary, horror, or violent films never see the finished movie until much later.",
"The actor who played Danny in The Shining did not know it was a horror movie until adulthood. \n\nIt's just a lot of editing for the most part. In a movie about child soldiers, I would say they likely experienced roughly the same stress I did as a child playing \"army\" on the playground. HOWEVER, I haven't seen the particular movie so that's merely assumption."
],
"score": [
5,
2,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How can child-actors play in gruesome movies like Beasts of no Nation?
Just saw the movie Beasts of no Nation on netflix. It was very good, yet also very graphic and brutal in certain scenes. I was wondering how do directors prevent child-actors (in this movie especially, with all the child soldiers) from actually seeing or experiencing (parts of) these kind of movies? | [
-0.003375415923073888,
-0.01750323735177517,
0.010941683314740658,
0.008648659102618694,
0.022886153310537338,
0.03342638164758682,
-0.00750837754458189,
-0.04590851813554764,
0.042595863342285156,
-0.014779066666960716,
0.03970462828874588,
-0.007360057905316353,
-0.004951528739184141,
0.... | |
2r9dhc | Why do people in poverty stricken countries continue to reproduce even though they know their children are likely to starve to death? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cndo9zv",
"cndoep2",
"cndp7f9",
"cndogii",
"cndoirp"
],
"text": [
"Because if you keep reproducing, maybe you will get lucky and some of your kids will grow up to adulthood, get a wife, and farm the scrap of land you own and provide for you when you are old and can't work anymore.\n\nYou know, like how people did for pretty much all of recorded history.",
"I'm not an expert here, so take what I say with a grain of salt.\n\nSex feels good.\n\nLack of education + lack of birth control options = babies",
"Very very rarely are they actually dying of hunger. Most hunger death stats are talking about children dying of diseases which they are extra susceptible to due to malnutrition and poor health.\n\nThere aren't countries, barring perhaps disasters such as recent Somalian famines, where the majority of children who are born don't eat enough to survive and die of actual hunger itself. Poverty stricken countries by and large don't have hordes of skeletal people sitting in the roads like its 28 days later just dying. They just have LESS food, and don't have the correct foods to get all the nutrients they need.\n\nI'd say people in poverty have children for the exact same reasons people in rich nations have children. A desire to have children. Biology, wanting a family with someone you love, unsafe sex, culture pressure to have children, etc etc.\n\nIf you are asking \"why are they having so MANY children\" it's mostly a lack of education, health care, and available contraceptives. People are going to have sex, and if there aren't safe ways for them to do so, they'll have children.",
"because people like to reproduce and cant pay for contraception.",
"Because there is no social safety net and no significant source of wealth aside from labour. You need kids to care for you when you are old.\n\nThere is only one modern economy that has enough children to maintain or grow it's population without immigration, and only one modern economy with no social safety net to speak of. The United States. Coincidence?"
],
"score": [
8,
6,
3,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do people in poverty stricken countries continue to reproduce even though they know their children are likely to starve to death?
| [
-0.019674260169267654,
0.01168824452906847,
-0.03657805919647217,
0.10367318987846375,
0.09413542598485947,
0.04476660490036011,
-0.031131615862250328,
-0.004149212036281824,
0.009955103509128094,
0.08187001198530197,
0.09163755178451538,
0.019297609105706215,
-0.007410069927573204,
0.0037... | ||
4jguqr | What happened to all of the sweepstakes? |
Fox Kids use do to let you send in a 3x5 SASE to enter a contest
Cartoon Network would have you call in Saturday evenings to try and win stuff.
And every so often there would be a commercial for a random cruise or something.
What happened man? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d36gkt2",
"d36jyoy",
"d36og3z"
],
"text": [
"They were replaced by online contests through web forms and social media, which are faster, easier, and cheaper to both organize and participate in.",
"Don't know about the US, but in the UK, this generally stopped after it was discovered that the TV shows where rigging the contests. \n\n_URL_0_",
"They ran out of money because fucking Ed gave it all away to anyone who would open the damn door."
],
"score": [
14,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peter#Fake_phone_competition_winner"
]
} | train_eli5 | What happened to all of the sweepstakes?
Fox Kids use do to let you send in a 3x5 SASE to enter a contest Cartoon Network would have you call in Saturday evenings to try and win stuff. And every so often there would be a commercial for a random cruise or something. What happened man? | [
-0.012894745916128159,
-0.05429290607571602,
0.03385733813047409,
0.005217001307755709,
0.029058251529932022,
0.011613135226070881,
0.0505606010556221,
-0.04125869646668434,
-0.021346984431147575,
-0.0420098602771759,
-0.013038894161581993,
0.0979599729180336,
0.015229524113237858,
-0.0189... | |
75kuw5 | Why do people not get electrocuted when touching a charger? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do6xrve",
"do70pa8",
"do6ym50",
"do8m0wg"
],
"text": [
"There are two ways in which chargers prevent electrocution. \n\nThe first one is that everything that can be covered in plastic or rubber is covered in plastic or rubber. Electricity can't flow through plastic or rubber. \n\nIf something on the outside of the charger or device is metal, the charger (in Australia as the example) will have a third metal strip which allows electricity to be \"grounded\". Electricity flows on the path with the least resistance to the ground, so if is a choice between flowing through you or flowing through the metal wire to the ground, or will choose the wire and you won't be electrocuted.",
"Do you mean a phone charger? If so - one reason is the voltage is too low. Your skin is not a great conductor of electricity, and it takes a pretty good amount of voltage before you can get any real power flowing through you.\n\nThink of voltage like water pressure. If you want it to go through a path that is not a good conductor (the electrical resistance is high) - then the pressure has to be high too if you want to get a reasonable amount of water to go through.\n\nA small amount of current may flow through your skin if you touch the connector the right way, but it is such a tiny amount of power it is basically harmless (I still wouldn't do it on purpose but they are designed to be super safe). And as u/_Awkward_Llama mentioned, they make sure everything is covered up - there *are* dangerous voltages inside the charger, but they protect that from the outside world.\n\nDoes that help to answer your question?\n\n\nEdit: Something to add - if you get a cheap charger with no safety approval, you could get shocked. They could potentially be dangerous (no pun intended).",
"Can you elaborate on your question? What do you mean by touching a charger? Like touching the end of a laptop charger?\n\nFor a round connector like is commonly used on a laptop connector it will be made touch proof so you cannot complete the circuit to get shocked. The output is isolated so the power has no desire to flow to ground through you, the power on the inner pin just wants to get to the outer sheath and since you cannot get your finger to connect them it doesn't flow through you. These will have been designed so that a failure in the power supply does not result in line voltage(the stuff that hurts) getting to the output. Most DC supplies these days are isolated so the only way to get shocked is to touch the power and the common at the same time, but more are such low voltage you'd never get enough current to feel even if you did that.",
"I assume you’re referring to a laptop charger or phone charger. You don’t get shocked because the cable it insulated, it has a cover around the wire. If you stripped off the covering and touched it while powered, you would get shocked.\n\nBonus fact: If you think something is electrified, don’t grab it, the electricity will make your muscles spasm and your hand will lock on to the electrified object, you’d be unable to let go. Instead, use the back of your hand, so that when you touch it you don’t lock on to the object and get electrocuted (bonus bonus fact: electrocuted comes from electricity and executed (if I remember correctly), so it means you die from the electricity. If you don’t die, you haven’t been electrocuted, just shocked)."
],
"score": [
5,
4,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do people not get electrocuted when touching a charger?
[removed] | [
0.017047438770532608,
0.07101618498563766,
0.03277367353439331,
0.06762247532606125,
0.09229719638824463,
-0.05876201018691063,
0.08825433999300003,
0.03874817490577698,
0.01741330325603485,
0.007307000923901796,
0.15235210955142975,
-0.050355326384305954,
0.03135434910655022,
0.1310044378... | |
1oimd3 | Why does real life randomly feel like a dream? | It just randomly happens every now and then. It's really hard to explain, but it feels like the world around me is no longer real life (or, at the very least, I can't think of any convincing reason why it is real life). My connection to the "real world" just sort of fades out.
I don't have panic attacks or anything like that, I don't do any kind of drugs (hallucinogenic or otherwise), and I'm never really all that stressed out. It just sort of...happens. And then, gradually, it will fade away and everything will go back to normal.
Is this a good/bad thing? Is it anything to be worried about? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ccsa5le",
"ccsa4w1",
"ccsc2p4",
"ccsasba",
"ccsca87",
"ccsbq6j",
"ccsbe5x",
"ccsoa40",
"ccsr2bn"
],
"text": [
"What you are experiencing may be some kind of dissociation, most likely depersonalization or derealization. It's neither good nor bad in and of itself, depends on what you make of the experience. As long as you are aware that these dreamlike feelings are just that, only fleeting feelings, you have nothing to worry about. However, if these feelings increase in frequency and intensity, and you find it harder to regain your connection to the real world I would seek some answers as to why your brain is behaving that way. Whether counseling or otherwise.",
"I get the opposite, I'll get this feeling that I'm suddenly snapping back into myself and real life. I have this thought, \"Oh, I'm me again.\" it's very strange.",
"I think I've experienced this exact thing back when I was in middle school. Let me see if I can describe the feeling in a more accurate way.\n\nBack in middle school I remember walking through the hallways, and randomly getting the \"life is a dream\" feeling. It's no realization, it's no cognitive understanding- it just happens, and you experience it. It's terrifying, really. Your body quite literally goes into auto pilot, and you watch yourself go. Everything you do feels as if you have no control over it. Each step, breath, and each movement you make just sort of happens. The lighting (and objects) around you seem to dull, and become darker, while the thing your eyes are focused on remains the same color and brightness. The distance between you and whatever you're looking at grows, while it clearly remains the same in the real world. Your head feels almost weightless. It's almost like feeling light headed, except you don't feel the danger of falling over or passing out. Luckily, the dream sensation wouldn't last for more than an hour, and I wasn't able to drive at the time, so I don't think I was in any real danger.\n\nThe feeling happened to me, more than a few times, and I never told anyone... Ten years later, and I'm perfectly fine. I haven't experienced that dream like feeling since. The only thing I do have to say about the experience is that it was most definitely a terrifying, out of control, feeling. \n\nOn a possible related note, that same year I randomly (out of no where, and for no clear reason) began to experience intense ocular migraines, that eventually turned into an intense migraine that put me out of commission for a few days. I currently wouldn't classify past self as a stressed out kid, nor as a depressed kid, so there's a potential it could have been health related. Either that, or I was fucked up in the head... \n\nTLDR; The dream state he speaks of feels like you're operating on auto pilot. It occurs semi frequently. It's a terrifying experience. My own experiences stopped all together, but migraines became a frequent occurrence. It's been nearly a decade since I've had the dream state, or the migraines.",
"I used to experience this frequently between the ages of 18-25, maybe once a week. Lately, currently 30 years old, its been maybe once every few months. No idea why, or what it is though.",
"I've dealt with this chronically for the past 3 years due to a series of bad panic attacks while on weed. AMA",
"Thank you so much for this post. I've been having the same issues more and more frequently. This thread is very helpful!",
"For me, it is usually a warning sign for a \" low\" or \"depression\" in my mood disorder. It's my indicating that I need to change a habit/behavior before I start on a downward slope.",
"Clearly it is a glitch in the matrix.",
"I've tried that too, so you're not alone.\n\nIt's not so long since I've tried this, but it's definitely a bizarre feeling. It feels like I'm stuck in this body, that I have no control of it. That im like, watching my self from the outside. It's like, i dont even feel alive anymore. Fortunately, it doesnt happen so frequently for me."
],
"score": [
32,
11,
7,
7,
4,
4,
3,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why does real life randomly feel like a dream?
It just randomly happens every now and then. It's really hard to explain, but it feels like the world around me is no longer real life (or, at the very least, I can't think of any convincing reason why it is real life). My connection to the "real world" just sort of fades out. I don't have panic attacks or anything like that, I don't do any kind of drugs (hallucinogenic or otherwise), and I'm never really all that stressed out. It just sort of...happens. And then, gradually, it will fade away and everything will go back to normal. Is this a good/bad thing? Is it anything to be worried about? | [
0.06690187007188797,
-0.10620597004890442,
0.003728907322511077,
0.10809087753295898,
0.09697481989860535,
-0.007938778027892113,
-0.033378247171640396,
0.0024028655607253313,
0.1662202775478363,
-0.06978082656860352,
-0.0553428940474987,
0.022756313905119896,
0.027955645695328712,
-0.0502... | |
41en0b | Why is the word "'nother" so typically said after "whole"? | Would the proper expression be "a whole another noun" or "a whole other noun"? If it's the latter, why is it so generally accepted to add an "n" to "other"? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cz1qdhg",
"cz1thub",
"cz1yje4"
],
"text": [
"This is an infix, a word inside a word to add emphasis (compare with prefix and suffix). It is placing \"whole\" inside of \"another,\" a-whole-nother.\n\nThe only other common infix in English is \"fucking,\" e.g. abso-fucking-lutely and god-fucking-dammit.",
"it is an (american) English colloquialism (meaning it is a way that we say things different from the \"norm\")\n\ntypically the proper way would be either\n\n(1) a whole other (problem) --as someone has mentioned \n\n(2) another whole problem\n\nand yes, as someone else stated, \"fucking\" is another common American English infix",
"I think we just forget that \"another\" is a compound word of \"an\" + \"other\". When we say it aloud, I think our brain breaks the syllables after the \"a\" and we think of it as \"a\" + \"nother\", creating the notion in our brain that \"nother\" is a word."
],
"score": [
77,
7,
5
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why is the word "'nother" so typically said after "whole"?
Would the proper expression be "a whole another noun" or "a whole other noun"? If it's the latter, why is it so generally accepted to add an "n" to "other"? | [
0.04957182705402374,
0.001004394725896418,
0.02354152500629425,
-0.03386770933866501,
0.014090772718191147,
-0.03002745658159256,
-0.05781138315796852,
-0.03079625777900219,
0.1186891496181488,
0.013815169222652912,
0.017051106318831444,
-0.05204727128148079,
0.01940009370446205,
-0.046466... | |
2wxrjk | Why is deforestation such a large problem if it only affects the country where it takes place? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cov2k2m"
],
"text": [
"First, it doesn't only affect that country; the entire earth benefits from having a healthy ecosystem. Second, the health of countries is intertwined; a desolate country that is economically desperate is going to affect adjacent countries."
],
"score": [
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why is deforestation such a large problem if it only affects the country where it takes place?
| [
0.06995466351509094,
-0.0007800772436894476,
0.10680665820837021,
0.0026568265166133642,
0.13037164509296417,
-0.04406658560037613,
-0.04992690309882164,
0.0194597989320755,
0.01577047072350979,
0.13168378174304962,
0.06074029579758644,
0.007191784214228392,
-0.10742423683404922,
0.0559719... | ||
85seyy | how and why animals age differently to humans, and how we are able to calculate their age equivalence? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dvzof9i",
"dvzoqbu"
],
"text": [
"If by \"Age equivalence\" you mean something like \"dog years\" that's simply a rough approximation. If a human lives 10 times longer than a dog, on average, then 1 'human year' is 10 'dog years.' It really has no particular accuracy beyond a rough demonstration of lifespan, and tends to be wildly off on things like 'maturity' or what not.",
"Generally speaking longevity in animals is determined by proteins that are found in long-living animals (humans, elephants, etc...). These proteins help with repairing the body and controlling things like metabolism (the chemical processes that maintain life). \n\nAs far as calculating age equivalence it is very easy, find the average life of two animals and divide one by the other. So if a human lives for an average of 80 years and a cat lives for an average of 12 years than a cat year Is roughly seven human years."
],
"score": [
4,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | how and why animals age differently to humans, and how we are able to calculate their age equivalence?
[removed] | [
0.03292887285351753,
0.07762585580348969,
0.061588943004608154,
0.05244777724146843,
0.009278221055865288,
-0.001263355021364987,
-0.08610136806964874,
-0.013968775048851967,
-0.049124766141176224,
0.06423241645097733,
0.06455840915441513,
-0.060660138726234436,
-0.04553991183638573,
0.089... | |
3dgvio | Why don't invisible rays like wifi and satellite hurt humans or animals? | Or does it give us all cancer? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ct50ltu",
"ct50naa",
"ct52g6i"
],
"text": [
"Does shining a flashlight at you give you cancer? Because visible light is actually on the \"more dangerous\" side of radio waves.\n\nRadio waves, like Wi-Fi, are the same thing as beams of light. The only difference is that we have special chemicals in our eyes that react with the electromagnetic waves we call \"visible light\". On the \"less power\" side of visible light on the electromagnetic spectrum we have infrared and radio waves. These are harmless. On the \"more power\" side of visible light, we have ultraviolet radiation (which is what gives you sunburn), X-Rays, and Gamma Rays (which can kill you).",
"We are all bombarded by \"invisible waves\" all the time. Sound waves, light waves, etc. \n\nBasically, just because something has to do with electricity doesn't mean it's bad.",
"First you have to know why some invisible rays do hurt humans and animals and give us cancer. They knock electrons off of atoms, causing random chemical reactions. If these atoms happen to be DNA molecules, it can damage the DNA, and has a small chance of leading to cancer. In order for this to happen, the rays have to have enough energy to knock an electron off. If they don't, pretty much all they do is heat stuff up.\n\nRadiation that's high enough energy to do that is called ionizing radiation. The lowest energy it can be is ultraviolet light. So you can get cancer from ultraviolet light, X-rays, and gamma rays, but radio waves, microwaves, infrared light, visible light, and everything in between don't give you cancer."
],
"score": [
4,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why don't invisible rays like wifi and satellite hurt humans or animals?
Or does it give us all cancer? | [
0.03598553314805031,
-0.025303132832050323,
0.08959129452705383,
0.07929862290620804,
0.08572238683700562,
-0.005708499811589718,
0.08788956701755524,
0.009009118191897869,
0.0406050868332386,
0.05500147491693497,
0.06292477995157242,
0.029604975134134293,
0.04953781142830849,
0.0057274950... | |
3r9i4x | What causes my brain to associate metal music as good but pop music as bad, even though pop music is designed to sound good to the majority? | Remember guys, I'm 5. Don't make it so long or else I'll be trying to read this stuff for hours. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cwm3drw",
"cwm4p4i",
"cwmgnpc"
],
"text": [
"Metal is also designed to sound good. A lot of sound engineers work to make the music pleasing to listen to for hours as opposed to fatiguing you with harsh frequencies. \nThe lyrical content can appeal to you. The groove of a certain musician can speak to you. The vibe created by the band can move you. The aggression may be what you like. The chords used for metal are different than those typically found in pop. \nBut metal is designed to sound good. Some albums suck and some don't, like pop.",
"It's not a question of good vs bad. People like to preach on about \"real music\" but objectively there are very different styles for different purposes. Pop is a genre which trades off depth for catchiness. Research has shown that songs will do better if they have simpler, more repetitive lyrics and melodies. Face it: at some point in the last year you've had a Taylor Swift song stuck in your head, whether you like her music or not.\n\nNot sure what type of metal you're talking about, but many subgenres have longer progressive compositions and go through multiple passages. In any case there is less focus on the hook of the song, less repetitive lyrics, etc. Though I'd personally rather sit down and listen to music with this kind of depth, the fact is this kind of music is bound to hook less listeners. Pink Floyd did many brilliant 10+ minute songs, but if you ask your average Joe to name a Floyd track, 9/10 times you'll get \"Another Brick in the Wall.\" \n\nThe other factor here is the general aesthetic. Metal is defined by its hard abrasive sound, and even as a metal listener myself its not the first thing I want to hear in the morning. It's much more of an acquired taste quite frankly. Pop on the other hand is intended to be super accessible.",
"There is a lot of evidence suggesting that musical rhythm has interactions with natural brain rhythms (_URL_0_). Basically, neurons in your brain tend to fire in a rhythmic pattern that is associated with the computations that the brain performs (this is what EEG looks at). Although these rhythms are similar between brains, there is a bit of variability between individuals as well as changes that occur within an individual based on the individual's state. It may be that your natural brain rhythms are more in line with the rhythms common to metal than those common to pop (You and I have similar musical tastes by the way). However, the brain is a complex system that is influenced by the environment in ways that we don't fully understand. As [paperrhino](_URL_1_) pointed out, your music preferences may have been influenced by environmental factors such as exposure and your social group. Humans shape and are shaped by the environment in which they live."
],
"score": [
6,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/33213/title/A-Brain-for-Rhythm/",
"https://www.reddit.com/user/paperrhino"
]
} | train_eli5 | What causes my brain to associate metal music as good but pop music as bad, even though pop music is designed to sound good to the majority?
Remember guys, I'm 5. Don't make it so long or else I'll be trying to read this stuff for hours. | [
0.06485776603221893,
-0.10511711984872818,
0.08237318694591522,
0.04218810051679611,
-0.008212571032345295,
0.026084614917635918,
0.08256155252456665,
0.04282977432012558,
0.019934192299842834,
-0.04986666142940521,
-0.05160001665353775,
-0.012889349833130836,
0.05708568915724754,
-0.05668... | |
5ff4tb | RobinHood: SolarCity and Tesla merged. My SCTY shares vanished. | What happens now? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dajqbop"
],
"text": [
"Your SCTY shares will be replaced by Tesla shares (TSLA) at a rate determined by the conditions of the deal. \n\nIIRC it's 0.11 TSLA for every SCTY but I might be wrong."
],
"score": [
6
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | RobinHood: SolarCity and Tesla merged. My SCTY shares vanished.
What happens now? | [
0.011928947642445564,
-0.03864020109176636,
0.04422128573060036,
0.03488849103450775,
0.031507253646850586,
0.078912653028965,
-0.04806308075785637,
-0.004202759824693203,
-0.04957085847854614,
-0.024380015209317207,
0.06991766393184662,
0.05944012105464935,
0.02580682560801506,
-0.0329854... | |
2l7efa | Why do sitcoms have laughter tracks? | Is it purely just to indicate when you're supposed to laugh? Is the sitcom funnier because of them? It seems odd the more I think about it to have a separate noise reacting to what's happening on screen | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cls4zin",
"cls50t6"
],
"text": [
"People tend to laugh more when they hear other people laughing. Laughter is a pretty social phenomenon. Most people are more likely to laugh at a show if it has a laugh track. I don't know how that equates to viewership, but it obviously has some effect or they wouldn't do it.",
"It encourages laughter and it keeps the actor's facial expressions in check as opposed to a live audience."
],
"score": [
6,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do sitcoms have laughter tracks?
Is it purely just to indicate when you're supposed to laugh? Is the sitcom funnier because of them? It seems odd the more I think about it to have a separate noise reacting to what's happening on screen | [
0.03866439685225487,
-0.09759803116321564,
-0.0018092406680807471,
-0.022755492478609085,
0.07338451594114304,
0.041238538920879364,
0.066542848944664,
-0.0035396087914705276,
0.0341096855700016,
-0.13508641719818115,
-0.04339338466525078,
-0.0005885289865545928,
-0.04440946504473686,
-0.0... | |
km9vw | Why does this appear to move? | [This](_URL_0_) optical illusion. Why does it seem like parts are turning? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c2lgpog"
],
"text": [
"It's an illusion that happens because we're constantly moving. Our eyes are jumping around the page while our body is twitching. If you stop all the movement and just stare at the picture, you'll notice it stops moving, too. \n\n(It's also got to do with the colours. The combination of putting dark shades next to lighter shades in a sequence strengthens the illusion.)\n\nPretty sure it's a myth that the picture will move faster if you're stressed though. They probably say this because people sometimes make more rapid movements when they are stressed."
],
"score": [
4
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://mistupid.com/psych/images/optical2.gif"
]
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why does this appear to move?
[This](_URL_0_) optical illusion. Why does it seem like parts are turning? | [
0.01673644408583641,
-0.057195380330085754,
0.04965910688042641,
0.0006846532342024148,
0.008047179318964481,
-0.0431242361664772,
-0.009289246052503586,
-0.03240751847624779,
0.1072922945022583,
-0.015312097035348415,
0.018733112141489983,
-0.019455449655652046,
-0.09396031498908997,
-0.0... | |
4rl7v2 | Why do we have that uncomfortable feeling when sleeping with limbs uncovered or hanging out of the bed? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d523k70",
"d523kcd"
],
"text": [
"Evolution. People who didn't get that weird feeling when dangling their limbs from the trees they were sleeping on were killed by cheetahs.",
"I don't *know* but I would imagine it to be an evolutionary trait related to the idea of being exposed without you knowing what's going on is unsavoury, although a blanket wouldn't logically keep you safe in any event, the human mind sees it as a sort of protection against anything that may inhabit the night and your bedroom"
],
"score": [
13,
5
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do we have that uncomfortable feeling when sleeping with limbs uncovered or hanging out of the bed?
[removed] | [
0.057713303714990616,
0.02248336933553219,
0.03332701697945595,
0.13653278350830078,
0.07185297459363937,
0.017599619925022125,
0.08528637886047363,
0.010434869676828384,
0.08597621321678162,
0.04950161278247833,
-0.01864193007349968,
0.0018376983935013413,
0.037976305931806564,
0.03998456... | |
7piwrz | why can't we have something to measure chemical levels and then make them what they should be in cases of mental illness? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dshlbqi",
"dshlpaf",
"dshm057",
"dshllah"
],
"text": [
"Because mental illness is quite subjective and differences in chemical levels of one person may not/May do more to another person",
"We do! For example, schizophrenia is measured by levels of dopamine and serotonin in the brain. However, correcting this is not always as simple as \"adding/removing\" neurotransmitters.",
"Your brain is shielded from the rest of your bloodstream through a special layer called the blood-brain barrier. It is an extra filter that screens out all but a very small number of specific chemicals (like oxygen and glucose) needed by the brain. It also keeps those chemicals made and used in the brain (like the ones you mention) from leaking back into your bloodstream.\n\nThis is also the main reason that brain cancers are so hard to treat. The vast majority of anti-cancer drugs can't make it into your brain. Similarly, there is no easy way for us to do a direct blood test from your arm to figure out what your dopamine, norepinephrine, seratonin, etc. levels in your brain actually are. The only way to measure would be to go straight into your brain and somehow puncture the barrier, which is a really terrible idea.\n\nThe transmitters we're talking about also don't just swim around in there like a soup. They are released in very sporadic, tight bursts, between individual brain cells. They're there, they bridge the channel, they get absorbed in an instant. So it would be really hard to actually measure an \"average\" background level through a single sample.\n\nWorse, as someone above mentioned, there is no perfect optimal level of these transmitters that are equal across everyone. Genetics, upbringing, environment, etc. all play a role in determining what the ideal \"balance\" actually is for a given individual. Your numeric, ideal levels, would not be the same as mine. And if you haven't gotten a baseline of what is \"normal\" for me, how do you really know if I'm high or low when I come in later?",
"The only reason we say that mental illnesses come from chemical imbalances in the brain is because, if you really think about it, everything that we are and think is some sort of physical matter reacting to other physical matter. There isn't any sort of non-physical \"you\" yet proven by science, so it all has to be some kind of chemical. \n\nThis is *very different* from actually knowing what all of these compounds are, and knowing what the normal, healthy range is. With things like blood tests, it's possible to have a slightly unusual result, but still be totally healthy."
],
"score": [
4,
3,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | why can't we have something to measure chemical levels and then make them what they should be in cases of mental illness?
[removed] | [
0.044881295412778854,
0.0032527430448681116,
-0.005279058590531349,
0.04347233101725578,
0.022505510598421097,
0.07809043675661087,
0.0007886550156399608,
0.0738462507724762,
0.03717535361647606,
-0.020133893936872482,
-0.0034556901082396507,
-0.061419229954481125,
-0.014587904326617718,
0... | |
5778n4 | why are most of the animals born with good enough insticts to survive at birth while humans are so helpless? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d8pj5jl",
"d8pj8ie"
],
"text": [
"Humans are building a biological supercomputer, that takes time.\n\nOur great ape cousins are also pretty useless at birth, as are a lot of other mammals and birds. They're developing complex brains and behavior systems that can't be completed as quickly as basic body development.",
"Part of the reason is that humans have to be born premature, so to speak, while that massive head can still fit through the birth canal."
],
"score": [
7,
7
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | why are most of the animals born with good enough insticts to survive at birth while humans are so helpless?
| [
0.04713203012943268,
0.03620072081685066,
-0.021444279700517654,
0.13441415131092072,
0.0676947757601738,
0.01583809219300747,
-0.008757415227591991,
0.06413943320512772,
-0.04390808567404747,
0.09771113097667694,
0.06388629227876663,
-0.05756211653351784,
0.03393001854419708,
-0.020769169... | ||
1a4gj2 | what do "C" executives (CEO, CIO, etc) do on a daily basis and why do they make so much money? | I work for a large company and recently found out my CEO makes 125x more than me... Does he do 125x the work? Is it the direction of the company? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c8u1j8r",
"c8u0h0f",
"c8u34pu",
"c8tzpq3",
"c8u3q99",
"c8u4n9r"
],
"text": [
"I am the CFO (Chief Financial Officer) of a privately-owned company. Admittedly, the responsibilities of a CFO for a publicly-owned company are somewhat different from my position, but the goal is the same - manage shareholder value. As a CFO, I oversee the accounting (history) and finance (future) functions. My primary objective is to ensure the financial decisions of the organization maximize cash flow and minimize risk, which, in turn, maximizes shareholder value. I do so by understanding and analyzing the company's historical performance (accounting), and use that information to help the company make the best financial decisions in the future (finance). These come in the form of investing, financing, and operating decisions. Simply put, what assets do we invest in, do we pay for the assets with debt or equity, and how do we operate those assets as efficiently as possible? All of these decisions must be put in the framework of cash flow and risk, but must also consider the short-term and long-term impact of the decision.\n\nAs for compensation, this is another area where privately-owned companies differ from publicly-owned companies. However, my compensation is based on my ability to provide information and recommendations that will impact the company favorably. I believe my value to the organization comes from these recommendations, but also from my ability to take complex financial matters, and simplify them in a way that allows for quick, informed decisions.\n\nHope that gives you an idea of what a CFO does, but feel free to AMA. \n\nOh, and even though I'm a \"C\" executive, I still have to cover up my tattoos like everybody else. :)\n\nTL;DR - A CFO's job is to maximize shareholder value.",
"My mom is the Chief Operating Officer of a company and her days are filled with different things such as conference calls, meeting with her staff to make sure everything is on track, dealing with other companies she works with, and a lot more. She also has to travel about once a month to go to meetings with other companies that want to give her company their business and while there she gives presentations on what her company could do for them, and why they should choose them over competitors. Her average work day is about 10 hours, and she normally works 6 days a week with no overtime.",
"C stands for \"Chief\":\n\nCEO: Chief Executive Officer, makes all the decisions, sets strategy with assistance from the board, represents the company at AGM, is responsible to shareholders.\n\nCFO: Chief Financial Officer, manages the money side of things, usually an accountant, often has multiple job roles, in older corporate models was often the CIO or had the CIO report directly to them.\n\nCIO: Chief Information Officer, not always on the board, if so is usually under Senior Accountant, but this is very old school. In charge of IT and IS resources, is usually the first person called when technology infrastucture is hacked.\n\nCTO: Chief Technology Officer, separate from CIO, manages technological aspects of the company, eg automation of production etc, works closely with CIO and COO.\n\nCOO: Chief Operations Officer, is in charge of production and the main revenue stream for the business. Often has a fair amount of interaction with all other departments as the rest of the business exists to support his division.\n\nCLO: Chief Legal Officer, pretty much a very experienced lawyer who is on staff to provide immediate legal counsel to the board, its not very common for them to represent the company in court, but they will work with the legal team hired to represent the company. If the company is large enough to have their legal team in-house than the CLO will be more likely to make court appearances.\n\nCHRO: Chief Human Resources Officer, pretty much runs HR for the company, often works with COO do plan for labour disputes and the like. Ironic that their goal is to represent worker rights, but is part of the senior management team that is often opposing workers in disputes.\n\nCMO: Chief Marketing Officer, pretty much is about keeping marketing and branding in line with corporate strategy, used to be lower on the status ladder but nowadays a lot higher.\n\nTHeres a bucket load more, their presence is determined by how much the field they are responsible for overseeing is important to the company. Its very common for board members to have several titles that are in related fields, eg CIO+CTO+CCO(Communications) are often the same person as these roles have a fair amount of overlap. COO and CFO probably the two most common roles as they cover a huge area of the business.",
"C in these positions stands for Chief. They are the decision makers and as such are difficult to replace. For this reason they are paid well.",
"C position individuals don't do 125x the work. They do work that is 125x more important to the success of the company and are not easily replaceable.",
"Absolutely nothing worth being paid 125 more than you.\n\nIf the company goes bankrupt, don't worry they will be ok even if the decisions they took are the exact reasons the company went bankrupt.\n\nBut the laid off workers will not be okay, at all. \n\nNobody on Earth should make that much money, especially for those kind of jobs. Half of those C jobs are total bullshit. Not saying Chiefs are not necessary for a company, but the salaries are ridiculously high in comparison of what they are actually doing.\n\nJust quoting Wikipedia about the salary of the President of the United States : \n\"The president earns a $400,000 annual salary, along with a $50,000 annual expense account, a $100,000 nontaxable travel account and $19,000 for entertainment.[77][78] The most recent raise in salary was approved by Congress and President Bill Clinton in 1999 and went into effect in 2001.\"\n\nI know, he got a lot of other benefits of course but keep in mind he is the President of the fucking United States! Tell me about a high-pressure job! FYI the median income is around 50K/year. So yes, the President makes \"only\"8x more than the average worker. And 15x less than the CEO of the company you work for.\n\nI know, he as a lot of other benefits but don't worry, CEOs too do have a lot of other benefits."
],
"score": [
34,
9,
8,
6,
4,
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | what do "C" executives (CEO, CIO, etc) do on a daily basis and why do they make so much money?
I work for a large company and recently found out my CEO makes 125x more than me... Does he do 125x the work? Is it the direction of the company? | [
-0.001032134867273271,
0.018627455458045006,
0.02074584923684597,
-0.0050667705945670605,
-0.08089706301689148,
-0.06539998948574066,
0.07224491983652115,
0.04471847414970398,
0.056732501834630966,
0.05275808274745941,
-0.026759576052427292,
-0.026738235726952553,
-0.09095384925603867,
-0.... | |
ne4ih | Early American territories and colonies. Who owned what, and how did they get it, and how/why did they lose it? ie: the Lousiana purchase. Florida and Spain, etc etc. | I'm looking to understand early America and the territories, and a sort of timeline for territories coming and going.
I learned that Spain owned Florida, but lost it in the 7 years war. What other territories were there? How can I research something like this, if I dont know the names? if I dont know what I dont know, how can I learn?
Thanks Reddit! | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c38d2hw"
],
"text": [
"[This is a really good article, and quite readable.](_URL_0_) If, after you read it, there's something you don't understand, please reply and I'll help out."
],
"score": [
4
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_history_of_the_United_States"
]
} | train_eli5 | Early American territories and colonies. Who owned what, and how did they get it, and how/why did they lose it? ie: the Lousiana purchase. Florida and Spain, etc etc.
I'm looking to understand early America and the territories, and a sort of timeline for territories coming and going. I learned that Spain owned Florida, but lost it in the 7 years war. What other territories were there? How can I research something like this, if I dont know the names? if I dont know what I dont know, how can I learn? Thanks Reddit! | [
0.04980193078517914,
-0.062248725444078445,
-0.017266858369112015,
0.066438227891922,
-0.04424699768424034,
-0.011397521011531353,
-0.006557815242558718,
-0.015363485552370548,
-0.07430809736251831,
0.018010783940553665,
0.00856700912117958,
0.03302554413676262,
-0.007257149089127779,
0.02... | |
3vd08j | How do police catch cars using false licence plates? | Considering that the whole point of false licence plates is not to show up on the registry, how do the cops keep track of something they have no record of? What if you keep switching to different licence plates once a month? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cxmf8td",
"cxmf8n9",
"cxmhha2"
],
"text": [
"if you get pulled over, they run your plate and its not listed/different than what your car is you get in a shitton of trouble. you have to be really smart about it, because getting caught with a fake licence plate is often worse than whatever crime you were hiding from",
"They see a car and are suspicious for some reason, so they run it through the database. The license doesn't show up. \n \nOr, a car is caught on red light cameras and doesn't show up in the database. They note the make, model and color of the car and the location, and look around in the area for a match.",
"It not showing up *is* information.\n\nSay I have a list of employee names, you pick a fake name that isn't on my list. I look you up, you're not on my list, so I know you don't work here."
],
"score": [
5,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How do police catch cars using false licence plates?
Considering that the whole point of false licence plates is not to show up on the registry, how do the cops keep track of something they have no record of? What if you keep switching to different licence plates once a month? | [
-0.05206957831978798,
0.01943286694586277,
-0.053757209330797195,
-0.02175469882786274,
0.014862645417451859,
0.017681177705526352,
-0.042882926762104034,
-0.05895005539059639,
0.0345921516418457,
-0.09253790229558945,
0.09262760728597641,
-0.018648674711585045,
0.02703067474067211,
-0.035... | |
nk6ts | Cthulhu | So, i always have had a general idea of what he/she is, like some sort of death god. But i never really understood where it originated from or what it is all about.
The only time's ive heard it has been in video game references, so i assume its a nerdy thing. The first place hearing it was in like 2005 on WoW, and then just continually in different video games. Anyone care to shine some light? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c39qjiv",
"c39sgmw",
"c39rvs3",
"c39s20w",
"c39u2pz",
"c39tv1f"
],
"text": [
"In the early 1900's, H.P. Lovecraft wrote several fantasy/horror novels involving a mythology of his own creation. The main theme is gods are completely alien, non-anthropomorphic beings of unimaginable power and inscrutable motives, often with multiple tentacles. \n\nMerely trying to understand them leads to insanity. They lay dormant or are in some other way blocked from influencing the earth, but someday when the stars align, then will awake and consume us all.\n\nCthulhu is one of these gods, become well know because its name is fun to say.",
"Cthulhu (pronounced kuh-THOO-loo or kuh-loo-oo) is a fictional monster created by the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Cthulhu is a god-like being from another planet, and it (Cthulhu is neither male nor female) is supposedly very ancient. It has the appearance of being a large green dragon with the head of a squid.\n\n\nCthulhu is one of the Great Old Ones, a group of godlike monsters from another place that now inhabit Earth, waiting to rise up and destroy the human race so they can rule the planet. The Old Ones are neither good nor evil, meaning that they do not hate humans, they just do not care about them. They think of humans as if they would be ants. Also, their appearance is so unlike anything of this world, that it is said that any human who so much as gazes upon one of them will go insane.\n\n\nIn one of Lovecraft's tales, The Call of Cthulhu, he said that Cthulhu currently lies in a dreamlike state in the sunken city of R'lyeh (rill-ee-yeh), waiting for the time when the Old Ones shall rise again. R'lyeh is located in the Pacific Ocean (though it is not a real city).\n\n\nFrom the simple english Wiki. \n(_URL_0_)",
"[Here ya go](_URL_1_). Not Lovecraft's first reference to the big guy, but certainly the most pervasive one.",
"There are things man was not meant to know.",
"> That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons death may die.\n\nLord Cthulhu is one of the Elder Gods. He has awesome and terrible powers of otherworldly origin. To gaze upon his visage is to be driven mad. \n\n > In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.\n\nIt is said that one day he will rise again and then it is the dead who will rejoice for they are already free of his grasp.",
"If you have an Android smartphone there's a free app called \"Cthulhuoid\" that has pretty much every short story, book, poem or other writing related to the Mythos or by Lovecraft. I'm relatively sure there's a similar app for iOS as well.\n\nThere are audiobooks available for some of the shorter stories as well. I read and listened to The Colour Out of Space simultaneously and it was terrifying! Currently crawling through At the Mountains of Madness.\n\nA Cthulhu themed expansion was recently released to Magicka. I can't wait to have my friends over to play through it!"
],
"score": [
32,
7,
6,
6,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu",
"http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Call_of_Cthulhu"
]
} | train_eli5 | Cthulhu
So, i always have had a general idea of what he/she is, like some sort of death god. But i never really understood where it originated from or what it is all about. The only time's ive heard it has been in video game references, so i assume its a nerdy thing. The first place hearing it was in like 2005 on WoW, and then just continually in different video games. Anyone care to shine some light? | [
0.018732380121946335,
0.08088639378547668,
-0.06702642142772675,
0.016956059262156487,
-0.05589106306433678,
-0.02206912264227867,
0.05587799847126007,
-0.038277991116046906,
0.07755573838949203,
0.03792601451277733,
-0.06494595110416412,
-0.09311448037624359,
0.028218263760209084,
-0.0899... | |
1p861b | How does a (particular) flock of migratory birds decide *exactly* when its time to go? | I mean, I [understand what triggers the birds to migrate at a particular time of year](_URL_0_), but how does a flock of birds decide all at once to go?
This time of year, you see giant waves of geese and ducks flying south.
I'd assume that a big wave of geese would all be the same flock, inhabit the same marsh etc... How do these flocks form up? Is one bird or pair the "trendsetter"?
"Everyone watch Larry. When Larry goes, grab your gear and go!" If so, if Larry's just flying over to the other side where the good eats are, does that cause a panic in everyone else? "Crap! Larry's goin south! Cmon hon, grab the kids and lets go!"
Or is there the equivalent of this conversation in bird squawks/honks?
"Hey Larry. Doncha think its time to go. Last night was pretty cold."
"Yeah, guess you're right."
"HEY EVERYONE! WE'RE LEAVING IN FIVE!"
"But I'm not done downloading this Battlefield patch..!"
"Leave it Steve! It'll be here waiting for you next year.."
"No Diane, that won't fit in the overhead compartment."
I've google for this, but I'd be interested in hearing from some ornithologists. How do they decide its time to migrate. Right. Now. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cczs4m6"
],
"text": [
"I'm not an ornothologist but I'm a human, and all ornithologists are also human, so that's gotta count for something, right?\n\nI'm guessing all birds have a number of \"thresholds\", with some variation from one member of the flock to the next.\n\nA: the temperature/conditions at which the bird would rather stay, but will start migrating if most others do\n\nB: the temperature/conditions at which the bird would like to migrate, but doesn't want to be the first\n\nC: the temperature/conditions at which the bird says \"fuck it, I'm going\"\n\nAs migrating season begins, some birds will start reaching their A threshold, and nobody does anything. A little later, nearly all members of the flock will have reached A, and a few will be at B and getting a little antsy. Then, one will reach C, start flying, but only a few were at B and will follow, whereas the majority was still at A, and so the impatient ones will say \"fine, whatever\" and come back, seeing that nobody followed them. This might repeat a couple times, with a little more followers, until critical mass is reached and everyone just goes.\n\nDisclaimer: there is a very high probability the above is absolute hogwash."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_migration#Timing"
]
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How does a (particular) flock of migratory birds decide *exactly* when its time to go?
I mean, I [understand what triggers the birds to migrate at a particular time of year](_URL_0_), but how does a flock of birds decide all at once to go? This time of year, you see giant waves of geese and ducks flying south. I'd assume that a big wave of geese would all be the same flock, inhabit the same marsh etc... How do these flocks form up? Is one bird or pair the "trendsetter"? "Everyone watch Larry. When Larry goes, grab your gear and go!" If so, if Larry's just flying over to the other side where the good eats are, does that cause a panic in everyone else? "Crap! Larry's goin south! Cmon hon, grab the kids and lets go!" Or is there the equivalent of this conversation in bird squawks/honks? "Hey Larry. Doncha think its time to go. Last night was pretty cold." "Yeah, guess you're right." "HEY EVERYONE! WE'RE LEAVING IN FIVE!" "But I'm not done downloading this Battlefield patch..!" "Leave it Steve! It'll be here waiting for you next year.." "No Diane, that won't fit in the overhead compartment." I've google for this, but I'd be interested in hearing from some ornithologists. How do they decide its time to migrate. Right. Now. | [
0.058516573160886765,
-0.09874875098466873,
0.044590383768081665,
0.02454354614019394,
0.08506935089826584,
-0.048576731234788895,
-0.008397739380598068,
-0.11562051624059677,
0.08830555528402328,
-0.013574325479567051,
-0.02120964229106903,
-0.009728297591209412,
-0.06974702328443527,
-0.... | |
q2l0w | Can someone please explain the general ideas behind Healthcare Reform and why it is so controversial? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c3u6wkt",
"c3u6ti0"
],
"text": [
"Some people think every citizen in a rich country ought to get health care, even if other citizens must help pay for it. That would require the government to collect money and then spend it on health care. Other people think it isn't fair to make one person pay another person's health insurance bill, or that the government will do a bad job and waste the money.\n\nGovernment health insurance is already happening, in programs called Medicare and Medicaid. Healthcare Reform would make *more* of it happen. But people who think government is wasteful would like *less* of it to happen.",
"It's only controversial in the United States of America.\n\nEverywhere else it's the most decent, honest and fair way of making sure society is healthy.\nYou see most people don't like to watch others die simply because they don't have as much pocket money as other people."
],
"score": [
6,
5
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Can someone please explain the general ideas behind Healthcare Reform and why it is so controversial?
| [
-0.028094124048948288,
0.0436781607568264,
0.0008461413672193885,
-0.056522294878959656,
-0.017417583614587784,
0.052385929971933365,
-0.022643180564045906,
0.015485149808228016,
-0.03458241745829582,
0.04925382137298584,
-0.002240824978798628,
0.16014771163463593,
-0.03405916318297386,
-0... | ||
3mn8wa | What does a volume knob physically do inside a speaker to increase/decrease the volume when you turn it? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cvgg6cw",
"cvggmhi"
],
"text": [
"You're actually controlling a variable resistor, a.k.a. a potentiometer -- which can control the amount current in a circuit. Lower current = weaker sound, higher current = louder sound. Basically, when you turn up the volume, you're allowing more electricity to flow through the circuit that leads to the amplifier.",
"The knob is connected to a shaft that spins a 'wiper' over a little strip of carbon. The wiper is basically a tiny wire that turns. On either end of the carbon is another wire, usually connected to source or ground (or even the wiper). Because resistance varies with length, moving the wiper varies the length. Changing the resistance let's you control how much signal is passed through the resistor and how much is burnt off as heat. Turn it all the way one direction and all the signal goes through, turn it the other way and all the signal is dissipated across the resistor. \n\nNow that's really inefficient. You're amplifying the signal a bunch, then either sending it forward or wasting the energy as heat. \n\nA solution is to use feedback. The way it works is the input to the amplifier circuit is \"differential\" meaning it amplifies the difference between two signals. The resistor controls that difference. It brings the efficiency way up."
],
"score": [
5,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What does a volume knob physically do inside a speaker to increase/decrease the volume when you turn it?
| [
0.026877038180828094,
0.03041781671345234,
-0.08702200651168823,
-0.019485296681523323,
-0.11777780950069427,
-0.024434011429548264,
0.037740569561719894,
0.013443038798868656,
0.1175837442278862,
-0.002611712319776416,
-0.011561214923858643,
0.0465032234787941,
-0.025376969948410988,
-0.0... | ||
3q1r2c | Why do people live in Places like Barrow, AK | I saw this thing about a TV show that was about a football team in Barrow, AK and i was wondering why people live there. I'm not mocking the lifestyle I was just wondering if they had work there or what. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cwbatbe",
"cwbl6ha"
],
"text": [
"Some of them might be Native or just have grown up there.\n\nFor the most part, people live up there to harvest natural resources. Alaska produces a shitload of oil & has lots of mining. It's a rough place to live, so they make a lot of money.\n\nMany people that live in Alaska working those industries will work a few months at a time & then come down to the West Coast for a few months to enjoy their money before going back to work.",
"Also, as harsh as it is, it is an absolutely gorgeous. So if the weather isn't too big of s drawback, and you are fairly introverted, it can be great. If you like having lots of people around or being warm... Not so much"
],
"score": [
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do people live in Places like Barrow, AK
I saw this thing about a TV show that was about a football team in Barrow, AK and i was wondering why people live there. I'm not mocking the lifestyle I was just wondering if they had work there or what. | [
0.10794927179813385,
0.032530277967453,
0.04062784090638161,
0.035979244858026505,
0.032921623438596725,
0.019196966663002968,
0.004307933151721954,
-0.056332264095544815,
0.006969663314521313,
0.0490974597632885,
0.01925879903137684,
-0.016889197751879692,
0.024917038157582283,
-0.0676203... | |
2gfo77 | If homeopathy does not work, why are there so many people and organisations that claim otherwise? | I'm really interested in how SO MANY people can believe in something that is so obviously bogus. I first thought it was just a small handful of spiritual hippies, but I read a few articles by what appear to be well educated individuals and stumbled across several websites like this: _URL_0_[1] . Some of the 'studies' in the evidence section of that website claim that homeopathic treatment works better than a placebo. Why is there such a contradiction of 'science' with this topic? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ckioh1w",
"ckiq3y1"
],
"text": [
"The science is 100% saying it does not work.\n\nYou may have heard the term 'snake oil' at some point in your life. Homeopathy is a snake oil type product. People convince themselves that some product works because \"the establishment\" says it doesn't'. There is currently a large shift in Western thinking to go back to \"natural\" things because people often feel their lives are too artificial. Many different people took advantage of this by marketing products with that kind of tag line. Homeopathic shit falls into that category. \n\nHow this happens is pretty easy. Product A comes to market, gets a few placebo induced evangelists to spread. If it reaches critical mass BEFORE the scientific community debunks it, then attempting to knock sense into people becomes nearly impossible. They are set in their beliefs, and nothing can tell them differently. It is the problem with magical thinking in general.",
"It's all about [Confirmation Bias](_URL_0_), or, to be more specific, a side effect of Confirmation Bias called \"The Backfire Effect\". \n\nConfirmation bias is a cognitive bias that all human being have to deal with. We tend to rank memories and evidence that support our beliefs higher than those that don't. When you see something that supports an opinion you already have, it makes you happy, and you feel good about yourself for being \"right\", but when you're presented with conflicting evidence, you feel uneasy about it and try to deflect it so that you don't have to admit that you're wrong. The Backfire effect is when people are confronted with strong evidence against their beliefs, and they outright refuse to accept it and become even more invested in their (usually false) belief. \n\nAnecdote time: I took part in a psychological experiment once where I was presented with my own horrifying Confirmation bias: I failed to solve a simulated crime, because I was subconsciously searching for evidence to prove my preexisting theory on the suspect and ignoring other evidence as inconsequential. I was familiar with the concept, and I was told to be aware of my confirmation bias before the experiment started, and still I failed to solve both of the cases I was given to \"investigate\", resulting in miscarraige of justice, and a pair of large scale terrorist attacks that I could have thwarted if I looked at the evidence more thoroughly."
],
"score": [
11,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.britishhomeopathic.org"
]
} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Backfire_effect"
]
} | train_eli5 | If homeopathy does not work, why are there so many people and organisations that claim otherwise?
I'm really interested in how SO MANY people can believe in something that is so obviously bogus. I first thought it was just a small handful of spiritual hippies, but I read a few articles by what appear to be well educated individuals and stumbled across several websites like this: _URL_0_[1] . Some of the 'studies' in the evidence section of that website claim that homeopathic treatment works better than a placebo. Why is there such a contradiction of 'science' with this topic? | [
0.061728186905384064,
-0.03841568902134895,
0.009795017540454865,
0.0656052902340889,
0.04311726242303848,
-0.01808597519993782,
-0.07673192024230957,
0.03002750501036644,
0.03352312371134758,
-0.011802563443779945,
-0.05523187294602394,
0.06510473787784576,
-0.03194720670580864,
-0.032322... | |
8m1be1 | Why do processed food comes with tag saying "xKcal". How would a bottle of 500ml of fruit juice have 43,0 00 calories(43,12 kcal ). | Considering that a human needs 2400 calories on an average day, i am pretty sure this does not have 43k calories/100g.
How would i calculate the original calories if i want to .
_URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dzjz4lf",
"dzjz5mo",
"dzk0l92",
"dzl5vur"
],
"text": [
"Humans need 2400 Kcal per day\nThis Food probably has 43 Kcal per 100ml\n\nHumans are lazy and tend to say \"Calorie\" when they mean \"KiloCalorie\".",
"Because there are [two \"calorie\" units of measurement](_URL_0_). The calorie (small c) is the energy that goes into one gram of water, and the gram is technically the base unit of measurement in the Metric system. But for day-to-day purposes we use kilograms, so because the kilogram sees more use than the gram, the Calorie (with the capital C) = 1 kc (kilo-calories) is actually what gets put on the packaging of most foods.\n\nTechnically, 100 Calories is enough energy to bring a kilo of water to boiling.\n\nQuote from [here](_URL_1_):\nHumans do not generate much power. Think about a person who consumes 2000 Calories in a day. Every Calorie from food (kCal) is equal to 4200 joules of energy. Used over the course of a day (86,400 seconds), this person uses an average of 97.2 joules a second, meaning they have an average power of 97.2 watts. Certainly a person could juggle quite a few hamburgers, but in the end humans only average the power of a bright lightbulb.",
"Amusing how it says “mango pulp & sugar” instead of “sugar, mango pulp” which is a more likely situation. Most of the energy is from the sugar.",
"A kilocalorie is what we refer to as a Calorie. If a nutrition label says 100 calories, it actually means 100 kcals."
],
"score": [
10,
7,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://imgur.com/Qg9j2LE"
]
} | {
"url": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie",
"http://sustainability.blogs.brynmawr.edu/2012/07/31/understanding-energy-part-1/"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why do processed food comes with tag saying "xKcal". How would a bottle of 500ml of fruit juice have 43,0 00 calories(43,12 kcal ).
Considering that a human needs 2400 calories on an average day, i am pretty sure this does not have 43k calories/100g. How would i calculate the original calories if i want to . _URL_0_ | [
0.013664900325238705,
0.08075688779354095,
-0.04666591435670853,
0.07007225602865219,
-0.04491247609257698,
-0.013121440075337887,
0.07539615780115128,
0.0276042427867651,
0.03741565719246864,
-0.012132737785577774,
0.03985283896327019,
-0.04797929525375366,
0.0010960038052871823,
-0.10119... | |
84a5fb | How did they get the resistivity from any material (example copper)? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dvo8rdm",
"dvo32b1"
],
"text": [
"R= rho*L/A\n\nwhere R is resistance, rho is resitivity, L is length of your sample, A is your cross sectional area.\n\nSlightly oversimplified, you can think of it as the resistance is the resistivity * L (because the longer your sample, the more \"crap\" it has to bump past), and divided by A (the wider pipe, the easier for it to \"flow\")\n\nThen you would measure some kind of test sample (say, a cylinder). If you can get R (say, via Ohm's Law, V=I*R).\n\nOriginally, it would've been experimentally observed (the proper name that no one uses is Pouillet's Law). Like Ohm's Law (or Law's in general) , it's an observed fact of the universe.\n\nYou can derive it via Maxwell's Equations/QED but they're nontrivial.\n\nedit:\n\n > how did they know it’s THAT resistivity when it can change depending of the dimensions of that piece of copper and other stuff\n\nIn the earliest days, usually it's often taking the data, and fitting it to something. Then trying to find a simple model that makes sense. Ie, if you started with a cylinder, test with a longer/shorter fatter/thinner one. Eventually you'll notice correlations\n\nYou can often make analogies to things like hydraulics (although that doesn't always work) as well, to give yourself a basic guide. \n\nOr trying to picture what physically happens to an electron moving through a material. You know the electron is going to move in a direction. So, what happens in a real material? It's going to bump into atoms. So the longer you make it (more junk to bump into) should be harder. More area means more room for electrons to \"slip past\" things.\n\nVery crude. And if you don't get lucky and it's not nice and linear, it gets much harder quickly. We like nice linear systems for a reason :)",
"George Ohm is credited with using a mathematical model to determine the resistance of a substance or a conductor.\n\nOhm built his work on the mathematical models that a man named Fourier had created to describe heat transfer.\n\nThe math to discover it wasn't simple, but Ohm was able to show that resistance (R, units of Ohms) is equal to the voltage (V) applied to a material divided by the current (I, measured in amperage(A)) applied to the material. \n\nSo, say for instance you have a source voltage of 100V and it has a current of 10A. Using the above information, we have R=V/I. Then it is just a matter of plugging in the values. \n\nR (in ohms) = 100V/10A = 10 ohms. \n\nNow, all of these calculations are theoretical, meaning they only happen under perfect conditions. Since no piece, of whatever you are measuring the resistance of, is perfect, all your calculations would be just a really close guess as to what the actual resistance is.\n\nThe only way to determine the actual resistance is to use a measuring device to directly measure resistance."
],
"score": [
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How did they get the resistivity from any material (example copper)?
| [
-0.09881111979484558,
0.08989565819501877,
0.06955747306346893,
0.07300051301717758,
0.03856905922293663,
-0.036267902702093124,
0.009308966808021069,
0.03575143963098526,
-0.04749185964465141,
0.027861392125487328,
-0.007876227609813213,
-0.0475582629442215,
0.05329826474189758,
-0.025454... | ||
30g3qt | Why does my voice sound weird when I talk through the fan? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cps4chs"
],
"text": [
"Your voice is made of sound waves and the fan is chopping them up as you talk through it."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why does my voice sound weird when I talk through the fan?
| [
0.030063843354582787,
-0.11020409315824509,
0.0003146011149510741,
-0.029506871476769447,
0.00036734400782734156,
-0.09936807304620743,
-0.0064041223376989365,
-0.05679509416222572,
0.10593684017658234,
-0.04608423262834549,
-0.02025742456316948,
-0.06207316741347313,
-0.09961432218551636,
... | ||
4pf05k | What was and is the purpose of the European Union and what happens when you leave it? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d4kgz6o",
"d4kfj4g"
],
"text": [
"The original idea for the EU came about after WW2, when the countries of continental Europe decided that the best way to avoid the dreadful wars that had devastated the continent from happening again would be to unite in \"ever closer union\" -- first a simple trading bloc, it would gradually become a close confederation. There could be wealth distribution, with stronger economies contributing the help weaker economies, freedom of movement and of trade, close political cooperation and so on.\n\nCritics of the EU say it is overly bureaucratic and sometimes too overbearing, getting involved in member states' internal affairs. Some worry that the open borders encourage \"benefits tourism\", with unemployed people from poorer member states travelling to wealthier states with more generous welfare systems. Most of these concerns are probably vastly exaggerated by, in particular, the British tabloid press; but there are legitimate concerns about, for example, the single currency -- currency union without economic union is something that has never been tried before, and the crisis in the eurozone a few years ago may be a sign that it's not working well.\n\nThe UK has always been somewhat \"euroskeptic\", possibly because the country only has one land border, and that is the border with the Irish Republic with which the UK has very strong ties. My theory is that the political doctrine of \"splendid isolation\" -- non-interference in the petty squabbles of the various countries and microstates that existed before the late 19th century -- is still somehow embedded in the nation's psyche. Being, basically, an island race makes it easier for the country to remain isolated.\n\nNobody knows what will happen if the UK leaves the EU. The current referendum is not legally binding, so the government could theoretically ignore it -- although that would be politically dangerous. Members of Parliament would have to vote on whether to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, beginning the process of withdrawing from the EU. The process will take something like two years.\n\nWhat happens then is anyone's guess. It partly depends on what deal the UK manages to get with the EU and with other countries. Norway and Switzerland are two countries that are doing very well outside of the EU, and \"Brexiteers\" hope that the UK would be able to negotiate favourable terms with the EU.\n\nWhat won't happen is that thousands and thousands of Brits living in other EU states will be deported back to the UK. That would create a massive diplomatic crisis, and in any case it's likely that Brits in EU countries and EU citizens in the UK would be allowed to retain most of the rights they currently enjoy. I'm British and have been living in Germany now for 23 years, and am married to a German: I should have no difficulty in obtaining a permanent residence permit. If absolutely necessary, though, I do qualify to apply for German citizenship regardless of whether the UK withdraws from the EU or not.",
"The purpose of the European Union (EU) is to offer:\n\n- Economic stability and free trade between member nations\n- Safety and protection (other EU nations may be obligated to assist your nation in times of disaster/crisis)\n- Relaxed border restrictions between member nations (including the ability for EU citizens to easily move to and work in other member nations without going through a complex immigration process)\n- A universal governing body and standardized legal framework (e.g. the EU basically comes up with EU-wide laws and regulatory policies which each member nation then has an obligation to implement/enforce in their respective countries)."
],
"score": [
6,
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What was and is the purpose of the European Union and what happens when you leave it?
[deleted] | [
0.025507040321826935,
0.10147128254175186,
-0.04173046723008156,
-0.021937619894742966,
0.08956866711378098,
0.06549439579248428,
0.037322964519262314,
-0.03885654732584953,
-0.01698245108127594,
-0.05875089392066002,
-0.03309829533100128,
-0.013129365630447865,
-0.03794232755899429,
0.005... | |
2a6nr9 | What's the difference between Linear Synchronous Motors (LSM) and Linear Introduction Motors (LIM) on launched roller coasters? | Someone asked this on /r/rollercoasters and I couldn't understand the responses. Thank you | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cis35ln"
],
"text": [
"\"Induction\" not introduction.\n\nThe synchronous motors (LSMs) generally know where the cars being accelerated are. The LIMs generally don't.\n\nLIMs are more grunty at the start, but can't generally get the cars going as fast by the end of the track. LSMs aren't as quick off the line, but can sustain higher speeds in the long run."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What's the difference between Linear Synchronous Motors (LSM) and Linear Introduction Motors (LIM) on launched roller coasters?
Someone asked this on /r/rollercoasters and I couldn't understand the responses. Thank you | [
-0.02754317782819271,
-0.015484875068068504,
0.03928309679031372,
-0.0038176830857992172,
-0.005489104427397251,
0.08005163818597794,
-0.07400178909301758,
0.02847844734787941,
-0.0022856774739921093,
-0.01995248533785343,
0.10349181294441223,
0.09229695796966553,
0.023066595196723938,
-0.... | |
4uax37 | What does DirectX12/11 etc. actually do? And what is Vulkan and what is its significance? | I hang out in a lot of tech subreddits, just out of interest and I'm starting to see a lot of support for Vulkan and it replacing DX | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d5oa1wd",
"d5o8z2q",
"d5oih9u"
],
"text": [
"DirectX (and Vulkan, and OpenGL, etc) are APIs. An API is a set of code that \"talks\" to other software/hardware for ease of use. These APIs in particular talk to GPUs.\n\nSee, those 3D environments you play through in a game are actually a result of a very large and complex set of mathematical instructions. It takes a lot of expertise and a lot of time to do all of this from scratch to not be a buggy, unplayable mess. So, for the benefit of everyone, people have come together to make a set of commonly used instructions that are made easy to use that will always work one way - making graphics easy so you don't have to.\n\n**What's the difference?** \nRemember how I said the APIs do the work so you don't have to? Well, a side effect of that is you're going to run into problems if you need something done and your API can't do that. Other APIs are made in response to that.. so the simple answers are:\n\n* DirectX is the standard for Microsoft Windows and Xbox.\n* OpenGL is multi-platform, so it will work in non-Microsoft areas.\n* Vulkan is new, also multi-platform, and intends on being easy to use and lighter on your hardware.\n\nThey all have varying sets of instruction, levels of performance and usability and it's up to the developer to ultimately pick the right tool for the job.",
"DirectX (more specifically direct3D) provides a methods for programs to draw 3D graphics. Obviously, this is a great concern with most modern games since a good deal of them feature 3D graphics. Though DirectX is only officially available for Windows. If you want to write games that run on any operating system, you use DirectX's competitor, OpenGL. The problem is that previous versions of DirectX (before 12) and OpenGL didn't allow very direct access to graphics hardware, making it difficult to squeeze out all the performance that you can. In response Microsoft introduced more direct hardware access in DirectX 12 and the Khronos group (the consortium that controls OpenGL) released Vulkan which, again, allows more direct access to hardware. But again, DirectX is only supported by windows while Vulkan can be implemented for any operating system. Additionally, DirectX version is tied to Windows releases and I believe that DirectX 12 isn't available for anything other than windows 10, while Vulkan is.",
"Taking this a different direction. Sorry if this dips out of ELI5 but I don't go too technical.\n\nDirectX is a way to talk to your graphics card from the Windows operating system.\n\nOpenGL is a way to talk to your graphics card from any operating system.\n\nVulkan is the successor to OpenGL (also I'm excited).\n\nDirectX is maintained by Microsoft, Nvidia, and AMD. It is first party to the Microsoft ecosystem, has a very tight governance, and is built by people who need it to work for Xbox as well as your PC. Because of this, DirectX has been more agile than OpenGL for a while. Old DirectX was basically a copy of OpenGL, but as Microsoft got smarter and more invested, it added in new features that started to make OpenGL less capable for real time rendering - like games. This is because Microsoft was really focused on two markets: PC games and Xbox games. DirectX 10, 11 and 12 has involved an impressive and gradual architectural change to better enable multi-threaded hardware and more advanced modern features like tesselation.\n\nOpenGL is maintained by the Khronos group, which is governed much more openly by Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Google, Epic, Huawei, Samsung, Qualcomm, ARM, and a very long list of others. It has a very open governance and was originally built and maintained by rendering companies focusing on correctness with real time performance as a secondary concern. In addition to that the open governance makes it harder to have a unified direction, as well as agility: because OpenGL is used across more platforms and architectures, and in more scenarios, it is harder to get changes pushed through. In addition, because it isn't first party it is sometimes less performant.\n\nVulkan is the successor to OpenGL and allows Khronos to make breaking changes in architecture. Ideally this will allow for the best of both worlds: the modern capabilities of DirectX, along with the multi-platform nature of OpenGL. It is a challenger to DirectX's power and capabilities. Since it has the mobile market by virtue of Android, it will hopefully see uptake in the PC and console environments.\n\nCouple notes:\n\n1. DirectX is sort of tied to your version of the OS. XP users are capped out at DirectX 9.0c, which is the last of the older architecture. DirectX 10 died with Vista, but DirectX 11 and 12 should be able to work on 7 - 10. I haven't tried 12 on 7 yet.\n\n2. I purposefully left out some of the bigger discussion points around OpenGL vs. DirectX, because I haven't been in that space for two years."
],
"score": [
7,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What does DirectX12/11 etc. actually do? And what is Vulkan and what is its significance?
I hang out in a lot of tech subreddits, just out of interest and I'm starting to see a lot of support for Vulkan and it replacing DX | [
-0.09046198427677155,
0.05173352360725403,
-0.04563381150364876,
-0.05448469892144203,
-0.033322252333164215,
-0.04226274415850639,
-0.03786546364426613,
0.05250350385904312,
-0.01001416239887476,
-0.0794769898056984,
-0.0787387266755104,
0.07712482661008835,
-0.13015508651733398,
-0.01889... | |
30xarj | Why NetFlix's "Recently Added" column has all the newest releases, while it's "New Releases" contains mostly movies that have been on NetFlix for months-years. | Über annoying in my opinion. Not for nothing, by I also wish they had a way to view traditional genres. It's a fantastic service, but their categorization kinda sucks. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cpwopho"
],
"text": [
"It's based off of your recommended shows/movies so if you have a specific taste, the newest movie in that category might be a year old."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why NetFlix's "Recently Added" column has all the newest releases, while it's "New Releases" contains mostly movies that have been on NetFlix for months-years.
Über annoying in my opinion. Not for nothing, by I also wish they had a way to view traditional genres. It's a fantastic service, but their categorization kinda sucks. | [
0.024377305060625076,
-0.21342113614082336,
-0.018794097006320953,
-0.016268648207187653,
0.05808905512094498,
0.05986665189266205,
-0.032545171678066254,
-0.05107135698199272,
0.03437434881925583,
0.025618011131882668,
-0.001261589233763516,
0.1381305307149887,
-0.06095333769917488,
-0.01... | |
2kqlg4 | Why don't athletes who attack other athletes in the middle of games get arrested on the spot? | Like a hockey player hitting another player in the nuts with the stick, etc. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"clnuamo",
"clnton9",
"clnssk2",
"clnuver"
],
"text": [
"Police are public servants and patrol public areas. There generally aren't police patrolling private stadiums and, where there are, their focus is more on the safety of the public/spectators, not the \"performers\"/athletes.\n\nSo if a police officer were to see an athlete harm another athlete in a way that was **completely, and explicitly illegal**, they could and should arrest that individual.\n\nThe issue is that contact-sports are a consenting arrangement between parties. How absurd would it be for an officer to have arrested Mike Tyson after one of his monster, brutal knock-outs? Then again, why wasn't Mike Tyson arrested after biting off a guy's ear?\n\nThe answer, as pointed out in another comment, is that sports largely police themselves. All participants agree to a certain range of physical contact/harm. This \"consent\" makes much of the contact that occurs not really a \"crime\" and, rather, becomes purely a civil issue. This means that players who believe that another player exceeded the appropriate level of harm they consented to can bring them to court.\n\nThere was a famous case years ago out of the NFL where a player was hit after the play had ended and was paralyzed. The judges had a lot to deal with. One of my favorite comments was something like, \"In a boxing match, boxers do not get to choose which blows they consent to receiving -- rather, they consent to the entirety of engagement.\" \n\nFacts that play into whether something crosses a line are (a) how often does it happen in the sport (are the players aware of the risk), (b) did the act violate the official, enforced rules of the sport, (c) what are the penalties conveyed by the sports organization, etc.\n\n**tl;dr:** \"Arrested\" is something that happens to people who act in a way that justifies temporarily denying them freedom while the court can figure out if a law has been violated... in many sports, everyone is a willing, consenting participant which makes it more of a civil issue than a legal one.\n\n\n**Edit:** Just to add something I mentioned in a different comment below -- another reason that intentional acts of violence are not criminal in a sport even if they are so seemingly outside the scope of being appropriate is that those acts are usually already handled by some sort of foul/penalty within the game. Hockey, for example, penalizes intentional, violent violations of its rules with varying penalty-box repercussions, suspensions, etc. The fact that specific penalties exist for intentional violent acts is an example of how it **is** a part of the game, and it is a part that has been consented to by all parties. Only when it exceeds an extreme, relative level will it become a criminal issue.",
"Courts have a long standing precedent to let leagues & sports organizations police themselves and for good reason. \n\nSports are physical activities, which means people can hurt each other during the game by playing dirty. Sometimes, the only way to keep the other team from continuing to play dirty is to either openly confront or fight them or play dirty in return. \n\nYou see a hockey player get hit in the nuts by a stick... what you didn't see was the entire opposing team, for the last 40 minutes, whacking guys on the back of the calves whenever they skate past just because they can.",
"I believe they can, but only if the player requests to pursue charges.",
"Because generally the assaults are not really all that serious. It's just not worth the time or cost of prosecuting. It's just easier to let the league do the enforcement. In some very rare and serious cases, players have been criminally charged, but usually only in cases where somebody died or was grievously harmed."
],
"score": [
46,
4,
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why don't athletes who attack other athletes in the middle of games get arrested on the spot?
Like a hockey player hitting another player in the nuts with the stick, etc. | [
0.06656694412231445,
0.06760887801647186,
0.011960905976593494,
-0.03923714533448219,
0.0904732421040535,
0.07325159013271332,
0.010784802958369255,
0.023791523650288582,
0.14631059765815735,
0.16092485189437866,
-0.006972423288971186,
0.0646047592163086,
-0.0472855381667614,
0.04014922678... | |
4yoqxg | How does Eye color play into attraction? | I've heard it mentioned many times that the eyes were often the first thing someone was enamored with and its often the thing someone remembers their SO over, men/women with Bright/striking Blue, Green, Hazel Etc. are notable examples. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d6pbkjw",
"d6pauu9"
],
"text": [
"Looking into someone's eyes can reveal a lot of information about how that person thinks of you. For example, if you look into your date's eyes and they dialate, you are *much* more likely to think they have pretty eyes. This is because eye dilation is a sign of arrousal in this context. \nSimilarly, pupil dilation shows interest in other contexts as well.",
"It's a sexual trait. It doesn't indicate compatibility in a mate, it just attracts attention and gets people interested. Kind of like the plumage on a bird, variation in eye color is just a way to open the door for sexual attraction, get people noticing and looking at you."
],
"score": [
15,
6
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How does Eye color play into attraction?
I've heard it mentioned many times that the eyes were often the first thing someone was enamored with and its often the thing someone remembers their SO over, men/women with Bright/striking Blue, Green, Hazel Etc. are notable examples. | [
0.03864477202296257,
-0.04898624122142792,
0.037328530102968216,
0.09672386944293976,
0.005214650183916092,
0.0671454593539238,
0.14812155067920685,
-0.04774011671543121,
0.035040147602558136,
0.03670847788453102,
0.008321435190737247,
-0.006344194058328867,
0.0003877696581184864,
-0.03092... | |
nxhyh | the difference between Tylenol and Advil and when you use them | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c3cpx2c",
"c3csffw"
],
"text": [
"Tylenol's active ingredient is acetaminophen\n\nAdvil's is ibuprofen, a NSAID\n\nThey are similar, but NSAIDs help reduce inflammation. So if you your knee hurts due to inflammation, use ibuprofen",
"tylenol causes more liver damage, advil causes more stomach ulcers"
],
"score": [
13,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | the difference between Tylenol and Advil and when you use them
| [
0.030906900763511658,
-0.05434206500649452,
-0.03451225161552429,
0.025154348462820053,
-0.00525808148086071,
-0.052457742393016815,
0.10247259587049484,
0.04841812327504158,
0.08346746861934662,
-0.009466741234064102,
0.06433133780956268,
0.06239616870880127,
0.04170340672135353,
-0.00098... | ||
26epun | Difference between Electro and Techno music. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"chqj8oc",
"chqv1wu"
],
"text": [
"The most important EDM genres are: Trance, Hard dance, Techno, House Music, Electro, Trap, Chillout, 110, Glitch Hop, Complextro, Liquid Dubstep, Hard or Classic dubstep, Drumstep, DnB (Drum and bass), TnB (Trap and bass), Nu disco and Bounce.\n\nRespectively, I suggest you listen by yourself each, and that you note the differences, this are some recomendations with songs very representative of their genres (genre-artist-song)\n\nTrance - Eminence - Halo\nHard dance - Atmozfears - State of mind\nTechno -for this one any artist or song will do\nHouse music - Hellberg - Air\nElectro - IYFFE - Jurassic / Favright - Green Storm\nTrap - Aero Chord - Surface / Stephen Walking - Claptrap\nChillout - Direct - Parallax\n110 - Pegboard Nerds - Razor Sharp\nGlitch hop - Haywyre - The Schism\nComplextro - Insan3Lik3 - Bliss\nLiquid Dubstep - Stonebank - Eagle eyes\nHard Dubstep - 1up - Thundergun (VIP mix)\nDrumstep - OMG - Magnetize\nDnB - Bustre - Shadow\nTnB - Pegboard Nerds - Coffins\nNu Disco - Televisor - The pressure\nBounce - Timmy Trumpet & amp;amp; SCNDL - Bleed\n\nGo ahead ;)",
"This is asked quite a bit. Check Ishkur's Guide."
],
"score": [
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Difference between Electro and Techno music.
| [
-0.0001247312902705744,
-0.008359410800039768,
0.03053230419754982,
-0.023351917043328285,
-0.02919497899711132,
-0.01665070652961731,
0.05988292023539543,
-0.005726940464228392,
0.046484123915433884,
-0.02929278276860714,
0.021486986428499222,
0.018471114337444305,
0.1288638710975647,
-0.... | ||
1tjpcz | Why are AK47s and other Kalashnikov weapons so renowned? How do you make your weapons simpler and hardier than the other guy? | How do you make your weapons simpler and hardier than the other guy? Why did these weapons become so popular? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ce8n492",
"ce8qe5v",
"ce8nppx",
"ce8uniz",
"ce905qm",
"ce8zag6",
"ce8uijh",
"ce8xfsf",
"ce8sq22",
"ce8myrw",
"ce94d17",
"ce8zzqb",
"ce922x6",
"ce932gx",
"ce8ulx7",
"ce8yk5m",
"ce957qx",
"ce96ym3",
"ce9210p",
"ce97g7s",
"ce8pxra",
"ce8ureg"
],
"text": [
"The simplicity mostly comes in the form of HUGE tolerances (clearances... sorry) between parts inside the receiver. If you open an AK up, there's a ton of empty space inside the receiver, and very few moving parts in the trigger group. That allows you to put all kinds of dirt, gunk, snow, sand, pebbles, dust, etc. inside the thing without gumming up the works.\n\nThey're also incredibly easy to maintain because of these loose tolerances and the relatively few parts. If you can open the receiver, dump out any crud that's accumulated in there, and slather some motor oil over the moving parts, you're good to go. \n\nAs to how they became so ubiquitous, that's partly because of the easy manufacturing process (the receiver is stamped from a single sheet of metal and bent into form), and the fact that the USSR absolutely *loved* to stick its nose into other countries' business; even moreso than the USA did. They had a habit of mass producing AKs and arming little pissant rebel groups all across the globe, and the gun worked quite well for that purpose because it's so easy to maintain, and so resistant to damage and jamming. A barely-trained nobody could be turned from peasant to warrior with the addition of an AK. \n\nSo basically, it comes down to the fact that the AK was easy to make, easy to maintain, and tough as hell because that's what it was designed to be. The USSR war ethic at the time was all about mass production of overwhelming force, and the AK was designed to fit in that niche.",
"No one has mentioned this in here, but all of the extra tolerances that make the ak47 more rugged also make it less accurate. This isn't an issue for most of the time. \n\nEdit. Sorry I really should have mentioned it's not just the large tolerances make it less accurate. Also to do with other design features.",
"They are renowned because they are top notch weapons. The AK47 can take a beating in water, mud, fall from an airplane, and still shoot just fine.\n\nIt was engineered with much open space. It was 40 years ahead of it's time for sure. \n\nMY AK47 is my second most trusted weapon, behind my durable glock 17.",
"The AKs are cheap and easy to manufacture. That is primarily what makes them attractive. If you notice, they are being used by all sorts of governments and organizations that don't exactly have a lot of money. Because of this, the AK series is incredibly unergonomic and the end user is forced to put up with some substantial inconveniences.\n\nOne of the most common myths about AKs is that they are supposedly incredibly reliable. This myth is partly based on truth. They were considered rather impressive back when they were first created. Now even a Russian-made AK is less reliable than any modern rifle. Since it is always compared with the AR platform, it is worth mentioning that modern ARs are substantially more reliable than old AKs. Most modern rifles are more or less equally reliable.\n\nThis is not to say that an AK cannot be good. The problem is, if you make them good, they lose their primary selling point — the price. A Sig Sauer 556R Gen2 is basically an AK that was redesigned for a valuable soldier as opposed to the kind that nobody cares about because they got more. Unsurprisingly the Sig costs on par with a decent AR as oppose to an AK.\n\n\nSo to reiterate: an original AK was irresistable for those with very limited budgets and highly expendable personnel.",
"I acquired a Russian full auto AK while in the military back in the '70s. Good furniture on the stock and handguard and well built, machined receiver and barrel. What most of the world sees now are the cheaper export or locally manufactured versions that are made from stamped steel and plywood and built with very loose tolerances to compensate for environments like Africa or the Middle East where mud, sand and dirt can trash a complicated weapon. Once China started building them along with the SKS they became even cheaper and looser. If you are a collector, try to find a real Russian AK and see the difference.",
"Okay, replies have been on target, but I want to illustrate one of the best features of the Kalashnikov design. Modern assault rifles typically are gas operated rifles. What does that mean? \n\nSmall caliber semi-automatics rely on the tension of the bolt spring to cycle the action. Such as a .22 rimfire where the firing pin strikes the casing, ignites the primer and propels the projectile down the barrel. The recoil of this small caliber round pushes the bolt back, and on the return stroke, it catches the next round in the magazine and seats it in the firing chamber of the firearm.\n\nYou can't do that with medium and high power rounds. When those rounds fire, unless the tension of the bolt spring is calibrated to \"god like\" levels, the bolt will open before the round leaves the end of the barrel and chamber pressure will be lost. The result will be wildly inaccurate fire. \n\nYou have to keep the bolt closed until the projectile leaves, or nearly leaves the barrel.\n\nThat's where gas operation comes in. In modern gas operated rifles, the firing pin strikes the primer, ignites the charge and the projectile travels the length of the barrel. The bolt remains locked in the closed position until the projectile passes the gas tube port near the end of the barrel. (That's the tube you see on top of the AK-47 and 74 barrel).\n\nOnce the projectile passes that point, gas from the firing flows into that tube and forces a piston backwards unlocking the bolt and allowing it to travel backwards and snatch the next round into the firing chamber on the return. \n\nHere's an advantage where the AK is better than early M16 designs in that the exhaust gas hits a piston rod instead of cycling all the way back into the firing chamber. The early M16's had a gas tube that fed all the way back to a fitting on the bolt instead of using a piston driven rod that kept the exhaust gases away from the firing chamber. \n\nThose exhaust gasses are dirty. If you can keep those away from the bolt and the firing chamber, the better the performance. \n\nModern M16 type rifles now employ piston driven gas operating systems, you would do well to seek one of those out if you're purchasing one.\n\nBut Kalashnikov is right up there with John Browning in sheer engineering genius. A great loss.",
"I own two AK variants and two AR-15s.\n\nThe Kalashnikov design makes use of large parts and loose tolerances. There is less friction in the action and less of a chance of foreign debris jamming the action. I was raised to religiously clean and maintain guns, so I've never really put my AKs to the test, but the only time I've ever had a malfunction in either rifle was because the ammo was cheap, old, shitty surplus ammo with shitty primers.\n\nWith that said, if maintained properly, and AR-15 can also be very reliable, despite its tight tolerances and complexity. The only time I've had jams is when I've fired steel case ammo then fired brass case ammo immediately afterward. Basically steel case ammo doesn't fully expand in the chamber when fired, so carbon deposits in the chamber, and then when you fire brass cased ammo, it expands and the carbon kind of acts like a glue that prevents the extractor from removing the spent case from the chamber.\n\nThe reason the AK-47 became popular is simple, because the design is simple, reliable, cheap to make, and many countries, including the former Soviet Union, made a lot of them. Also the ammunition for the weapon (7.62x39mm) is very plentiful. The Soviets during the Cold War would just throw stockpiles of AK-47s and ammunition at any country that wanted it that wasn't an ally of the west. The Russian Federation still does this, to an extent. \n\nThe reason the AK-47 is more popular than the AR-variant rifles is the AR requires more skill to maintain and is more expensive to produce. M4s or M16s are more accurate (because of of tighter tolerances, a round with better ballistics, and superior iron sights) and usually more modular because of integrated accessory rail systems, and in my opinion are better for a highly trained soldier, but the AK-47 is a gun that anyone can use, hence its greater popularity.\n\nEdit: I should point out that modern AK variants are lot more accurate than legacy ones. They've managed to tighten the tolerances a bit and their accuracy is usually constrained by the ammunition you use rather than the design. My Arsenal AK is very accurate, it fires the 5.45x39 round which is designed to mimic the ballistics of the 5.56x45 round ARs fire, and it's only slightly less accurate than either of my ARs.",
"Of all the weapons in the vast soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947. More commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle. A weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple 9 pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam, or overheat. It'll shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy, even a child can use it; and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin. Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists. One thing is for sure, no one was lining up to buy their cars. \n \n\nSource: [Lord of War](_URL_0_) \n\n \n(Factoid: Andrew Nicols also did Truman Show and Gattaca, my other two favorite movies) \n\nEdit: (sorry for formatting..)",
"**PUBLICITY** \nThe same reason that anything else is so reknown. It has great publicity. Everyone can get an AK47.\n\nHowever, the M-16 is not given out indiscriminately. More expensive.\n\n**DRAWBACK** \nFor every single thing designed manufactured, there are tradeoff. How can it be otherwise. The biggest drawback for the AK47 compared to the M16 is accuracy. Because the AK47 has larger gaps it has more tolerance but that same thing makes it inaccurate. The M-16 is tighter with more parts, and therefore is accurate.\n\nI would prefer accuracy over anything else. It's like I used to tell my martial arts students, they can be sloppy and throw all kinds of punches and kicks. You only need to throw one. One accurate punch. Obviously more is required, but accuracy is number one in my book.",
"They're ridicously cheap to produce and combine that with almost idiot proof mechanism that works even with minimal maintenance... That's what makes them so popular... Also the fact that they're ammunition is so widespread and cheap it makes using them cheap doesn't hurt it...",
"Because the USSR handed them out like lollipops throughout the cold war. And if you wanna get technical, the AK47 was retired in the 70's, and was replaced by the much more prominent AK74. Further, most kalishnikovs aren't even AK's, their copycat guns produced and sold off by communist satellite states, like the Yugoslavian M70. Original ak47's are actually extremely rare and most found there way into private collections. The reliability of these weapons comes from the extremely simple design. There basically one solid piece, with very few mechanical components inside, compared to current automatic weapons. As you'd expect, they aren't preferable weapons to fire. The 7.62 round has a hell of a kick, and this is worsened by the weapons inherent design flaw: the curve of it's profile. This means huge vertical recoil, so firing on full auto is a pray and spray. The M16 was the first rifle to address this issue with its linear, or straight, profile, from muzzle to shoulder. This means the recoil is mostly back, into your shoulder, so full auto and burst fire are much more accurate. The NATO standard 5.56 round is also preferable in almost any combat situation. A little less range, but has a higher muzzle velocity that causes the bullet to tumble and splinter when it impacts flesh. One of these smaller rounds is more than enough to cause a casualty, where as the larger, slower 7.62 round can be found and removed from a wounded soldier easier, allowing him to resume combat. Some newer weapons use 6mm Grendel ammunition, which takes this brutal bullet velocity even further, because of its large powder casing and small bullet head. The Russian military has learned from the 50 year reign of the M16, and introduced the AK12 as their standard issue rifle. This weapon, like the M16, has a straight profile and uses a standard NATO 5.56 round. \n\nTL/DR The original AK47 is very rare and difficult to fire accurately. AK variants/clones are popular because they are cheap and reliable, due to design simplicity.",
"During WWI, trench warfare resulted in arms literally being caked in mud and dirt. This made a lot of the new automatic weapons ineffective and they jammed a lot. It was necessary to constantly disassemble, clean out, then reassemble the guns to bring them into working order. This was obviously a problem when a lot of the fighting was happening over short distances. The AK-47 was one of the easiest, cheapest mass produced guns and it almost never jammed, leading to its soaring popularity.",
"because the original kalashikov used a stamped receiver by design, making them quick and cheap to produce. they were designed in a time where the USSR needed to come up with a new weapons system as fast as possible. and if my history is right, this was during the end of WW2, and the war ended before they ever saw service. so then the USSR had a large surplus of weapons with out a war to fight, and being in a large economic down that had started more than likely in WW1 the only logical thing to do was sell these weapons to anyone who would take them. so thats what they did, sold this cheap and dependable weapon to any and all takers. hence is why you see almost every third world army or rebel force arms with the AK platform. this is obviously the short version of the illustrious and lush history of this weapon but if you can put 2+2 together youll see why its weapon of such renown.",
"\"Of all the weapons in the vast soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947. More commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle. A weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple 9 pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam, or overheat. It'll shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy, even a child can use it; and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin. Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists. One thing is for sure, no one was lining up to buy their cars.\"",
"_URL_1_\n\nThis is THE book on the AK in my opinion.",
"as others have said, they're reliable because of the huge clearances built into the design. So they can take a beating and get dirty and be horribly neglected and still get the job done. Think of it like the difference between a garden hose and a waterpik. If you try to pump muddy water through a waterpik it'll clog up on you pretty quickly and all the bits of dirt and grime will fuck it up if you don't clean it out properly. A garden hose on the other hand can handle a lot more dirty water going through it before all the accumulating crud clogs it up. The trade off though is that a garden hose isn't accurate enough to gently rinse stuck bits of spinach out of your teeth.\n\nAs for why is so popular, again, like others have said, the Russians loved handing them out to anyone they thought might possibly help their causes and their simple design is really easy to manufacture ([here's]( _URL_2_!) a guy who literally made one out of a shovel in his garage, though that's a pretty extreme example and he's clearly a very experienced gunsmith) so a lot of countries hopped on the AK-manufacturing bandwagon.",
"> Why are AK47s and other Kalashnikov weapons so renowned?\n\nA very above average, but not great balance of simplicity (less functions = less chance of defective gun), durability (performs well after being fully submerged in water/sand), power, accuracy (only on well built AK's, but even the lower ends can be trained apparently).\nThe way the AK rapidly pumps a bullet in the chamber is so efficient, yet incredibly simple and almost fail-proof for an assault rifle, even by today's standards. IT was also made in 1947 (hence the 47 in AK-47), which makes it even more unique. \n\nOn top of that - timing. Wars happened, guns were needed, and this cheap ass gun proved to be a major force to be reckoned with, over and over again. \n\nI don't know if there's a source, but I heard that is was common for U.S. troops to abandon the M16 for a found AK during Vietnam.",
"ITT: People that never had one and don't really know what they are are talking about.\n\n\nThe AK is not just relieable, easier to maintain and tough as nails; it IS accurate when made right and not beat to shit. My Romanian built WASR AK47 varient shoots 2-3 inch groups with the metal sights at 100 yards. Most engagement are 300 yards or less. At those ranges the slight accuracy advantage for the AR style rifles means very litttle.\n\nTLDR: AK style rifles are more than accurate enough until the bore is shot out.",
"Also, composite weapons are relatively light which has great advantages, but when it comes down to getting face-to-face, having a heavier, steel, and wood constructed AK is superior for hitting someone over the head with.",
"The are cheap to produce, easy to clean and will keep firing under circumstances that would have an M16 jamming up like a 35 year old virgin.",
"Adding to what everyone has already said, the magazine is standard troughout the ak47 model range",
"Are there non Russian weapons that are even better/more efficient than the AK right now?"
],
"score": [
1535,
138,
105,
37,
27,
24,
20,
12,
12,
7,
5,
5,
3,
3,
3,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399295/",
"http://www.amazon.com/The-Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387844283&sr=8-1&keywords=cj+chivers",
"http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/179192-DIY-Shovel-AK-photo-tsunami-warning"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why are AK47s and other Kalashnikov weapons so renowned? How do you make your weapons simpler and hardier than the other guy?
How do you make your weapons simpler and hardier than the other guy? Why did these weapons become so popular? | [
0.012742456048727036,
0.03264584019780159,
0.0024196510203182697,
0.01002718135714531,
-0.04322988912463188,
-0.013190368190407753,
0.010910376906394958,
0.05580912530422211,
-0.016621774062514305,
0.06094201281666756,
-0.06026449799537659,
0.06907971948385239,
0.025861836969852448,
0.0038... | |
693j4m | Where do emergency counselors come from? | It's like they are called in for a crisis as if they were the National Guard or something. Who employs them? Are they often local? Is it just a side job, or are they paid full-time to be ready for a crisis? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dh3ggr8"
],
"text": [
"[This page](_URL_0_) from FEMA's website helps to answer your question. Crisis counselors are funded by FEMA but organized and implemented by the state. \n\n[Here](_URL_1_), for example, is New Jersey's Division of Mental Health Services page. Although most counselors have a counseling background, it isn't required. You apply for the certification, complete your training, and are then called upon as needed. It is not a full-time job."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://www.fema.gov/disaster/4085/updates/crisis-counseling-psychological-first-aid",
"http://www.mhanj.org/nj-disaster-response-crisis-counselor-certification/"
]
} | train_eli5 | Where do emergency counselors come from?
It's like they are called in for a crisis as if they were the National Guard or something. Who employs them? Are they often local? Is it just a side job, or are they paid full-time to be ready for a crisis? | [
-0.022770913317799568,
-0.035295989364385605,
-0.040344107896089554,
0.08573009073734283,
0.060382142663002014,
0.009002842009067535,
0.04788822680711746,
-0.021362248808145523,
0.05202509090304375,
0.005345863755792379,
0.029871612787246704,
-0.0033772578462958336,
-0.00694145867601037,
-... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.