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4htgid | don't drivers' weights mess with the overall stability / weight distribution of those expensive, high performance cars? how is this solved? | counterweighs or something? I mean, in 99% of the cars people sit left or right, doesn't this make the cars lean on one side more? I would guess it makes a big difference in high speeds | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Mazda Mx5, as far as I'm aware (friend had one, was a car nerd too) is designed to be \"perfectly balanced\" on half tank of fuel, and a driver of a specific mass (I can't remember exact number, but it's about average). No passengers either. \n\nI have no idea how this is achieved, but the design does take into account that the driver sits to one side.",
"They do. And people who care enough go to the trouble of dealing with it.\n\nTo most of us it doesn't matter, but think of an F1 car. The driver sits dead center. No lean. \n\nOn the other hand, those cars go at about 3 times the speed most of us will ever drive at, and they care about fractions of a second on a lap time while we lose a few minutes if we get bad luck with red lights. \n\nThe same kind of performance isn't really something we need.",
"It does affect the car, but only by a very small amount. Some cars take it into acount, but it is rare. The car is so much heavier than the driver that whether or not you offset another 80kg by half a meter doesn't make much of a difference.",
"when doing a wheel alignment on a race car, either the driver or a equiv deadweight is put into the driver's seat to load the suspension to the right amount. \n\nit DOES matter. but your average consumer wouldn't care about it. \n\njust like it does matter when your front brake pad wears different rate than your rear. but most people won't notice the difference."
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} | train_eli5 | don't drivers' weights mess with the overall stability / weight distribution of those expensive, high performance cars? how is this solved?
counterweighs or something? I mean, in 99% of the cars people sit left or right, doesn't this make the cars lean on one side more? I would guess it makes a big difference in high speeds | [
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3091nj | Explain to me why people would think Sandy Hook is a hoax. | Was looking at the comment sections for a news article on Facebook and 90% of the posts were about how it didn't happen. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are a few conspiracy theories regarding the Sandy Hook shootings. These are the most prevalent ones:\n\n* The US government staged them in order to pass gun control laws/persecute gun activists. _URL_0_\n\n* Adam Lanza was simply a patsy; the shootings were really conducted by Israeli special forces as revenge for US interference with Israeli affairs. _URL_1_\n\n* The event was faked my the media or the government for some ulterior motive. Theorists source time-stamps on news articles concerning the shooting that did not correspond with the time of the shooting. _URL_2_",
"I live here. I have kids that age. I've tried to confront those who believe it's a hoax, and strangely no one has any questions for me. Just seems questionable with as much as these truthquesters love to investigate everything. You'd think one would at least say \"hey there is a guy on reddit claiming to live in Newtown, we should tear apart his claims and reveal his true identity as a govt agent.\" \n\nIf I didn't know better I would assume that they only want to consider evidence that supports their theories.",
"There's two questions hidden in your question. Do you want the evidence they cite in favor of a conspiracy, or the motivations behind why they want a conspiracy to be true?\n\nFor the former, it's generally evidence of contradictions from the initial reporting when it was very confused. A media outlet will report a rumor as soon as they hear it, then never talk about it again when they discovered they were in error. They also stretch the truth and make a big deal out of things that are perfectly normal. This is what happens for all conspiracy theories, if you want specific examples there's a pretty big video on youtube about it.\n\nFor the latter question, a lot of people buy conspiracy theories because it makes life more interesting and gives you a feeling that you know something other people don't. For the Sandy Hook conspiracies, some of them are also motivated by their extreme pro-gun beliefs, where they'll grab onto anything that \"proves\" the government wants to take away their guns.",
"Since no one is answering the question I will. First thing is no one went to the hospital. Not one kid. All the victims were declared dead at the scene. No one was air lifted. Not a single person was treated by crisis standards. Second no children are scene leaving the building. Watch the helicopter footage. Actually this video sums up the theory. Before you kill me I am simply answering the question. Sandy Hoax - Full Documentary: _URL_3_\n\nAlso you have to admit the video of the old guy practicing his lines is strange. Also the dad laughing at his dead child's press conference. \n\nGo ahead attack me. Once again I am just answering the question and not just saying tin foil hat people are crazy.",
"Any event like the Sandy Hook Shootings will generate a large number of people who don’t want to believe it was real or that it didn’t happen the way it was reported or that it was a conspiracy of powerful and sinister forces.\n\nOne of the reasons for this is that it can be very disheartening to believe that a deranged no-body with access to a gun can create such havoc, grief, and turmoil that profoundly effects so many people. It’s disheartening to believe that a low-life wife-beating punk with a $20 mail order rifle can kill a president and change history, or that 19 zealots with about $100,000 in funding can get into airplanes and radically alter the course of the the most powerful nation on the planet. The random nature of existence bothers our sense of how things should be.\n\nWe are story tellers; it’s hard wired in our brains through evolution as a survival mechanism. We look for patterns and try to make narratives that explain those patterns. And in cases like Sandy Hook we create narratives that we are more comfortable with. Narratives that don’t include randomness and don’t require that inconsequential little jerks do acts of great consequence. These narratives also create a more realistic enemy that we may be able to fight or least one that we can hate.\n\nFurthermore, the prejudices we hold will be vindicated in these narratives. If we believe that guns are good, our stories will not have random people with guns causing the harm, but rather a powerful and evil government or organization that we actually need more guns to defend ourselves against. If we are anti-science we will see how the moon landings were fake and that vaccines are really harmful.\n\nMost of this narrative making happens unconsciously; we are not aware of doing it. Confirmation bias (paying attention to evidence that supports our existing beliefs and ignoring evidence which is counter to our beliefs) is a very strong force; very smart people who consciously try to avoid it fall prey to it.\n\nEDIT: Thank you for the gold. If you are interested in reading about how and why we think the way we do about such things, the book *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman offers some great insights.",
"\"The official FBI report listed 0 deaths. \". \n\nIf the FBI went through the lengths to hide or kill dozens of kids, don't you think they would change an excell #?",
"People can convince themselves of almost anything, and the ones that think they're revealing some hidden truth are going to be loud about it.",
"These conspiracies are going to rub people the wrong way but the idea of not questioning certain motives in today's society is ridiculous.",
"The shooting occurred while there was a national debate about gun control, and served as an impetus for many states to tighten up their laws.\n\nThis is inconvenient for people who oppose gun control, so spinning it into an conspiracy not only removes a point against them, but it turns it into evidence of how terrible the gov't is and how we need to keep our guns more than ever. That makes for a much better narrative to their way of thinking.",
"It's an issue with logic. If I tell you \"If A then B\". But you desperately do not want B to be a truth. You therefore might deny the existence of A just because B not being true is very important to you. \n\nIf Sandy Hook happened that way, then we might need better gun control laws. Some people are so strongly opposed to gun control laws that they are willing to think that Sandy Hook was faked just so that they won't have to face the truth. It's also helpful that the ones pulling the fake are also the ones on the other side of the political debate. \n\nThat's why when you go to Fox they are all \"not real, never happened\" but if you read the same comments on MSNBC they would all be about gun control.",
"I do not believe in the conspiracy theories. With that said, [this video](_URL_4_) got a lot of it started, I think.",
"I stayed on top of this story through mainstream media right as it was happening. What gave the opportunity for \"conspiracy theories\" was the sheer amount of information lacking from reports, as well as a bunch of conflicting information from various sources.",
"Because [part of Gotham](_URL_5_) was labeled Sandy Hook in The Dark Knight Rises. Batman did it!",
"At one time people who said the government knows, records, and tracks everything we do online were conspiracy theorists. Then it came out they were correct. Soooooooo is it so hard to believe if the government can and will do those types of things to control their people then they couldn't possibly do some evil shit like this too? I mean, I'm open to possibilities here.",
"Conspiracy theories are all about the need to feel in control. If we can believe that enough people could cooperate to perpetuate a deception so huge and outrageous, even for nefarious purposes, that implies that we can control to the events that logic tells us we don't. If we don't control those events, even in an \"evil\" way, then life is really random and completely unpredictable.\n\nAlso some people get a real charge out of thinking they know some big secret thing that other people (who they will call \"sheeple\") don't believe.\n\n_URL_6_\n\nEdit: realizing the above is completely general, Sandy Hook is a good focus for conspiracy theories because it's narrative is about two very emotional things, firearm rights and the deaths of children.",
"A coworker's wife is a teacher at Sandy Hook and was there the day of the shooting. Saying she's messed up about what happened is over-simplifying it.",
"Because whenever there is a big national tragedy people try to make sense of it all and try to find a nice little neat and tidy explanation for it. \n\n\"It's the lack of gun control!\" \n\"It's the lack of mental health care!\"\n\"It was his parent's fault!\"\n\nIf you fall into the conspiracy theory camps, you'll believe that it was the illuminati/government's fault.\n\nTo put things in perspective, there are Pearl Harbor Truthers, which believe FDR got word of the Japanese attack and ignored it on purpose to enter into WW2 with the support of the US people.",
"The same reason people believe in any conspiracy theory; it gives a comfortable story.\n\nYou know what's terrifying? The thought that a handful of people could murder dozens of others for no reason, with no warning or provocation. The thought that you could just *end* like that is terrifying.\n\nBut there *has* to be a reason this happened, the government! Nay, a shadow government! Massive forces that had a *reason*, a clear intent, plan and purpose.\n\nWe need structure, as a species, and some people take it upon themselves to impose this structure where there is none.",
"The main reason I personally think there was some fuckery afoot here is because the day it went down I was working a double delivering pizzas. I worked 12am-midnight and was in the car listening to news radio almost that whole time. I must have heard 5 or 6 different series of events come across the radio in the course of the day. First it was Adam Lanza's brother then it was him, then he used a bushmaster to do all his killing, then he only used a couple glocks. Inconsistencies in the way the story was reported by the media throughout the whole news cycle planted the seed for me.\nThen you see that video of the dad who lost a child go from sobbing to laughing when he thought the cameras were off, and you hear they arrested multiple guys in camo gear and see news footage of that.\nI don't know what happened that day, I wasn't there, but the whole narrative about it rubs me the wrong way....that one AND the batman shooting.\nI simply think there is more to them than what the general public has been allowed to know.",
"I've always felt that the reason why people would believe that such atrocities are part of some grand conspiracy is that makes the event oddly easier to comprehend. \n\nIt's much easier and strangely more comforting to believe that some vast, often faceless organization concocted an event to gain influence. At least more so than it is to believe that person with their own goals, aspirations and dreams is simply a monster. \n\nWe refer to things like this as \"unthinkable\" for reason. Because it's difficult to believe that average people have it in them to do such terrible things.",
"It's a weak \"conspiracy theory\" but there were no ambulances leaving the school after the shooting. Generally if there's a mass shooting with a semiautomatic assault rifle, there are multiple non-fatal victims. In Sandy Hook, there were only two. Some would say, just enough living witnesses to confirm that a tragedy in fact took place.\n\nMost other examples of \"evidence\" to prove it a Hoax are feeble at best. Like the claims that the emotional state of the parents after the fact was artificial.",
"I think there is a subset of people who have the attitude, \"I don't understand how this could happen, so it didn't happen.\"\n\nI knew somebody a long time ago who seemed to disbelieve anything that he had not personally witnessed. If it happened out of his point of view, he would not simply accept someone else's account. Lots of questions, suppositions, alternate theories, etc. \n\nHe is probably one of the conspiracy theorists today.",
"My mother doesn't believe in the Sandy Hook shootings. She hasn't gone into any particular depth but I'm 99℅ sure her theory is as follows: Sandy Hook shootings are a conspiracy by the U.S. government to increase controls (not necessarily just gun laws) over citizens. This is one step on the way to readying the people for their subjugation to a one-world government (a \"New World Order\" if you will). This New World Order is going to be the regime that follows the second coming of Christ (the rapture) and the Antichrist is, of course, Obama. Obama's secret alter-ego is further evidenced by schemes such as Obamacare where MICROCHIPS will eventually be imbedded in the body of the people; I.e. the mark of the beast (666).\n\nA lot of this is inspired by the Left Behind books and various Christian 'end times' prophecy websites. Now I love my Mother, but GODDAMN she looks insane when I read this back to myself.",
"Pics or didn't happen.\n\nNo pics of Bin Laden, no pics of dead kids. Both events had massive effects on the public discourse and neither is held to scientific standards of proof. It's \"it happened because authorities said so\".\n\nWhy should I trust an organization built on lies, who has even proposed attacks against its own people to further its agenda? _URL_7_\n\nWhen people I trust say things, I believe them. When people I don't trust say things, I don't believe them until I see proof for myself. Especially when what they say has a large impact on how people think.",
"Simply put, people will be quick to find ways for truly horrible things to be hoaxes. It's easier to some than accepting that we live in a world where awful things happen for no good reason.\n\nBesides, the anti gun lobby HAS been milking the hell out of it, and where someone is gaining, people are quick to look for blame.",
"The same reason most people believe these heinous acts are hoaxes: they can't deal with the fact that another human being, the same as they are, could do such a thing. It's incomprehensible to them, whereas if there's a plan by a shadowy government group it delegitimizes the fact that another human could freely choose to do those things.",
"The loud and often calls for stronger gun control immediately following the shooting made pro-gun-rights nuts think that it was made up as a gun grab.",
"Because it's inconvenient to certain political agendas. So people want to wish it away.",
"Same as the 9/11 people. Give them enough internet and anything can happen.",
"First off, I think there's a justifiable amount of reason to not trust the government or media in this country 100% of the time.\nThat being said, many people like to keep an open mind when they hear about such a tragedy. They just don't want to blindly believe everything they see on tv, especially when there are a considerable amount of inconsistencies.\nNot saying this is the case for all. For some it's a denial thing. If I said I found the lost city of Atlantis you'd want proof, right? Of course you would because it's too crazy to believe. It's also crazy to think someone could shoot a whole bunch of kids... 'there must be some explanation. Maybe it's a lie. Maybe it's the government making it up for reason X.'",
"The just world fallacy. It's horrendously bad and unfair that some nutjob killed a bunch of innocent kids. Most people don't want to live in a world where things like that happen. This has an interesting effect: Some peoples' rejection of such a tragedy as morally acceptable turns into a rejection of the possibility that such a tragedy could happen. They basically subconsciously decide that it's not real.\n\nOf course, people whose minds start to believe that the massacre wasn't real, now have to find an alternative explanation for why people are talking about it. Which is a conspiracy theory.",
"Gullible person here. I watched a video on youtube. Don't remember what it was called, but it it brought up some interesting points. It definitely tilted me in the direction of believing there was something off there. Then I read a thread like this where people say they actually knew the victims and it makes me feel bad for doubting it. People can present all kinds of misleading information. I never know who to believe.",
"This is very similar to the idea that Bush and the government planned 9/11 to invade Iraq. If the u.s government wants to do something they can do it without something as drastic as sandy hook and certainly 9/11. As mentioned the media makes things worse by their ridiculous claims early on and being too proud to admit their ignorance after the smoke clears.",
"people have or find pictures of similar looking kids and parents from different areas and say they were paid off and hidden in a different area.\n\nSomething about the gunshot to the kids head was from behind therefore he was killed.",
"I think the better question is; If there is even a slight existence of evidence for any of these theories, why are they not fully investigated. I know that it would be the other way around in most other cases.",
"Some people look similar to those that were interviewed during the Boston bombings. That's what a conspiracy friend of mine was going about. There was the father who showed up late if my memory of the events are correct.",
"Things you see on TV are not real. Those are actors reading from scripts.",
"Someone call V. This is some Saint Mary's virus shit going on.",
"Because some people are dumb. I am being completely serious.",
"The same reason people say the holocaust didn't happen..."
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} | train_eli5 | Explain to me why people would think Sandy Hook is a hoax.
Was looking at the comment sections for a news article on Facebook and 90% of the posts were about how it didn't happen. | [
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1609xs | What is Glencore and why is it a threat to the control of mankind's resources? | Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | {
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Thanks! | [
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5xil4n | Do you lose apps/data when unlocking a phone through your carrier and switching carriers? | Hello!
I currently have an IPhone 5S (ATT). I'm switching to a Galaxy S5 (Verizon) but still using my ATT service.
This means I will have the previous owner of the Galaxy call their carrier and have it unlocked.
When I put a new ATT SIM card in my new phone, will that cause any apps and data I I have on the Galaxy to be lost? Essentially, it'll take a few days to have it unlocked. In the mean time I'd like to download numerous apps, synch all my accounts, and just general get the phone ready via wifi. Is this a waste of time or will those changes still be there?
Thanks | explainlikeimfive | {
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} | train_eli5 | Do you lose apps/data when unlocking a phone through your carrier and switching carriers?
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2755zk | The circumstances surrounding Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl? | explainlikeimfive | {
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} | train_eli5 | The circumstances surrounding Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl?
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5znnk6 | why does a cold bed feel awful but a cold pillow feel amazing? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"IMO a cold bet feels amazing... sliding into cool sheets is wonderful. I wouldn't want it to stay cool, but neither would I want my pillow to stay cool all night.",
"Probably depends on the time of year and we're you're located, in the summer when it's hot out, I love cool sheets, but in the winter, I love warm sheets. As for the pillow I am sorry to say I have no answer. Good luck with finding a better suited answer than mine! (Not sarcasm, also have a wonderful day!)",
"Cold beds are amazing, nothing better than jumping in the cold sheets, and then rubbing my feet across the sheets quickly.",
"Depends on the time of year. Though, I never got the appeal of cold pillows. I never flip mine."
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6h1fw6 | Why are bidets and other water integrated toilet seats common in Europe and other countries but almost non-existent in the US? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I come from a country in Europe where bidets are normal. The main use is to ~~earth~~ wash your feet and to place the dirty clothes while you shower. Babies use them as washbasin.",
"Adam ruins everything did a piece on it in his flushable wipes video (_URL_0_)\n\nPretty much they became synonymous with hookers and brothels. because of this people didn't want them in their homes. Imagine inviting a guest over and they think you're a hooker because of a piece or porcelain in your bathroom."
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| [
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1ehjht | the physiology of that "butterflies in your stomach" feeling. | I'm studying a bit of human biology at university, so you can explain like I'm six for this one!
Edit: I'm also wondering if it differs between situations, such as when you feel nervous or in danger, when you go down a big water slide, when you kiss someone special, that sort of thing? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From what I've heard before, that feeling comes from our Fight or Flight instinct. Your body senses that you're nervous (that's fear) for something coming up, and as a natural response from the fear, your body begins preparing itself for the potential of fighting/flight. It sends more blood to the more important areas of your body (eg muscles in your arms, abs, and legs) so that if you have to fight/flee, you can in a better way. The butterfly feeling is what happens when blood is rushed away from your stomach area, simply put.",
"I'm no physiologist, but I am a medical student, so I could be wrong...but: The induction of stress will lead to a shunting of blood away from your gastrointestinal tract and other non-essential organs during fight-or-flight to essential organs like the skeletal muscles et al, resulting in decreased GI peristalsis, and decreased secretions in the stomach and intestines.\n\nThe \"butterflies\" might be fluids remaining in the intestines along with the stuff being digested, giving off a slight noxious feeling. The fluids and digestive remnants are probably moving from the momentum of the peristaltic movements and are settling while the rest of your body reacts to the attack.\n\n\n\n\n\n**Now, like your five?**\n\n\nHey, there, little buddy! Is your stomach feeling like butterflies are flying around? Don't worry, little guy! That's just the food you ate. Your brain told your stomach \"don't be afraid, i'll take care of the bad guy...you just sit right here!\" And told the stomach to sit down until he gets back. But the food in the stomach was still sliding down, so all those butterflies in your stomach is really just the food still moving while your stomach is sitting still.\n\nBut don't worry! Your stomach will start moving again and your brain won't be scared or excited for too much longer. And pretty soon, you'll be pooping in no time!"
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} | train_eli5 | the physiology of that "butterflies in your stomach" feeling.
I'm studying a bit of human biology at university, so you can explain like I'm six for this one! Edit: I'm also wondering if it differs between situations, such as when you feel nervous or in danger, when you go down a big water slide, when you kiss someone special, that sort of thing? | [
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22kia4 | How the hell does a 3D printer work? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It works like a plotter, only it is oriented with the \"pen\" facing downward instead of parallel to the ground like on a traditional plotter. The robotics are controlled by computer software, and typical 3d printers use a plasticy resin. The resin is melted and pushed thru the \"pen\" to go down onto the base, dries and turns hard. The pen is on an arm that will move according to the computer's directions, leaving a trail of the resin behind it. Once one layer is printed, it will start on the next layer by \"printing\" directly on top of the prior layer. A 3d printed object is printed layer by layer in this fashion until it is finished.\n\nThere are all sorts of cool things you can make with these things, and you can even print most of the parts that you need to build one of your own!",
"> It's like frosting a cake. Except instead of frosting it's melted plastic. There's a robotic positioning system, RPS, that is able to be very precise with where it's putting the frosting, I mean plastic. The plastic hardens quickly enough that it can be layered on top of itself. So, instead of just drawing on a cake, you can layer it and make actual things. This is why we use plastic instead of frosting. Frosting is too soft. \n\n_URL_0_"
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} | train_eli5 | How the hell does a 3D printer work?
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5pf6ei | why do modern rockets blast off with zero initial velocity (standing straight up)? | Instead of on tracks, a ramp, etc... wouldn't there be a huge energy savings to overcoming the force that resists motion prior to firing the engines? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The biggest difficulty in getting enough speed to get to orbital velocity is how the earth's atmosphere slows you down.\n\nIt is most effective to blast straight up until the atnosphere becomes thinner and the drag caused by the air becomes very low, then level out and accelerate sideways towards an orbital speed.\n\nAlso turning while in atmosphere is very difficult to do, again due to drag wanted to slow down any surfaces that aren't aerodynamic to the direction of travel.",
"Every second spent moving through the atmosphere or crawling on the ground/tracks/ramp adds friction and steals a little bit from the energy of the craft. Going straight up completely eliminates ground friction and gets you out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible, making all motion after that easier.\n\nAdditionally, rockets are basically a big engine with stuff on top. To work on tracks or roll along a ramp or even clamp onto a plane, it all requires additional parts- wheels or skates or clamps- and every bit of weight counts.",
"there are various concepts of ramps and slings and sleds that have been theorized, but none are currently viable. It would be a huge departure from what we know, adding a new phase to the launch rather than just *more* of the same. the track would need to be huge, complexity, investment, ect. \n\nIt will probably get superceded by a space elevator, or so we hope."
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} | train_eli5 | why do modern rockets blast off with zero initial velocity (standing straight up)?
Instead of on tracks, a ramp, etc... wouldn't there be a huge energy savings to overcoming the force that resists motion prior to firing the engines? | [
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2fc23a | how does thought work without language? When I think, I formulate ideas in words. How did this work either prior to language or for people who have no concept of language? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most thought does not use language. When you see a scary spider you don't feel the scariness because of the word \"spider.\" When you are hungry and know you want to eat, that didn't come from language. When you see a beautiful nature scene, it's not beautiful to you because of language. When you decide to put on your socks before your shoes, you didn't need language to take that action.",
"Language is not just spoken. Thought is a nonverbal language and the act of expressing it is called communication. Thus, you can communicate without language. \nBy gestures, or even just a look."
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} | train_eli5 | how does thought work without language? When I think, I formulate ideas in words. How did this work either prior to language or for people who have no concept of language?
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3304wi | Why does the letter H exist in Spanish if its silent? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For historical reasons.\n\nLanguages change and evolve over time, and the way sounds are pronounced change according to some definite rules. One of those is called Grimm's Law, after the person who first discovered it, Jacob Grimm of Brothers Grimm fame (they didn't just write fairytales, they were arguably the first real linguists), and one of the consequences of this is that the \"h\" sound can fall silent.\n\nYou can see Grimm's Law in effect if you go back five or six thousand years, to a language linguists call Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of languages spoken all over Europe and parts of Asia today.\n\nStart with PIE \\*nókʷts (the asterisk shows that there's no proof this word existed, because PIE was never written down, but it's an educated guess). In modern German, it's \"Nacht\" -- the \"kʷ\" has, thanks to Grimm's Law, changed and become a German \"ch\", which here is pronounced with that back-of-the-throat raspy sound that English doesn't have. In modern English it's \"night\" -- the \"gh\" represents a much gentler version of the German \"ch\", which is also thanks to Grimm's Law, but then -- also thanks to Grimm's Law -- it changed again and became silent, so now English has a silent \"gh\" in words like \"night\". But we still write the \"gh\" because we have never bothered to have a proper reform of English spelling.\n\nWell, that's the same reason Spanish has a letter \"h\" which isn't pronounced. It *was* pronounced at one time, but thanks to Grimm's Law it has become silent, but it's still written.\n\nOf course, it *is* useful as a letter to put after \"c\" to change the sound it makes (as in the word \"chica\"), so it's not completely redundant."
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} | train_eli5 | Why does the letter H exist in Spanish if its silent?
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4ntx75 | how does dust settle on vertical surfaces like glass panes? Shouldn't it just fall off? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It may be due to the irregularities in the surface, but it is more likely caused because the dust particle is statically charged, and it attracted to the vertical surface. Glass panes can be charged relatively easily.",
"Things only look flat to us because of our size. Zoom in on your tabletop enough and it would be as filled with valleys and ridges as any mountain range here on earth. Dust is very small and light (and mainly consists of human skin cells if it is the indoor kind of dust ) and will grab these ridges and such as they make contact. I guess it works in a similar fashion as our fingerprints. The ridges on our fingertips give us grip. Same deal with your \"flat\" surfaces. Other things that would contribute would be moisture ( throw flour at a dry window and then at a wet one = big difference ) and static charge ( like how your hair sticks to a baloon after you rub it on your head for a bit ) but it is usually a combination of the three that does it."
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} | train_eli5 | how does dust settle on vertical surfaces like glass panes? Shouldn't it just fall off?
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2b084j | Are there actual modern-day hitmen? How do people find them? How do they not get caught? | I've only seen cops pretending to be hitmen. No I'm not interested in hiring anyone, I'm just watching a bust on someone who hired a fake hitman :) | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Local Man Asked For Hit Advice On Reddit Before Murdering His Wife, Police Say\" - I can see it now...",
"yes there are hitmen.\n\nmost can be found through gangs or other organized crime rings. \n\nnot getting caught is relatively simple. most murders are committed by people who knew the victim. hitmen lack any real connection to their victims, so they aren't part of the normal search pattern of law enforcement. something as simple as shooting someone when they leave for work and then walking away is disturbingly effective.",
"I'm not sure how trusted this is but vice did an article about it _URL_0_"
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"url": [
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} | train_eli5 | Are there actual modern-day hitmen? How do people find them? How do they not get caught?
I've only seen cops pretending to be hitmen. No I'm not interested in hiring anyone, I'm just watching a bust on someone who hired a fake hitman :) | [
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2fmf1m | How do towing companies tow away cars when the car has its parking brake engaged? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"On most cars the parking break only locks the back tires. The towing company lifts the car by the rear end, because the front tires turn freely. Some models of cars only lock the front tires though, and they'll just reverse the procedure. When those aren't viable options the towing company will place a set of tires, connected by a brace, under the tires of the side of the car which is making contact with the ground. [Here is an example](_URL_0_).",
"Parking brakes aren't the only problem when towing vehicles. Often times, the vehicle also needs to be in neutral as well. So, tow companies need access to the shifter and the parking brake release in order to avoid causing massive damage to the vehicle.\n\nOne method: the tow truck will simply hoist one end of the vehicle into the air, and place a special wheeled cart under the other tires. This is the simplest way to handle most any situation.\n\nAnother method: tow drivers will often have special master keys or in-truck key cutting machines to unlock most vehicles they come across. Drivers will also often be trained to break into vehicles without causing damage.\n\nAnother method is to get under the vehicle and simply disconnect the brake cables and transmission shifter cable. This one varies considerably in degree of difficulty.\n\nThen there's the super shady method of not caring and towing with the brakes on.\n\n*Edit: grammar*"
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} | train_eli5 | How do towing companies tow away cars when the car has its parking brake engaged?
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1z76st | Why do people buy the turbo tax software sold in stores when you can just use their website? | Is there something beneficial to having the Turbo Tax CD? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Tax information is pretty personal stuff, I'd pay more not to have them hosted by someone else. I can encrypt and store my tax records offline (on a CD or Tape drive). Also one can create any number of printed returns for no additional cost with the software.",
"Local software works better on computers with slow internet connections. Also some people are just used to using the CD. Intuit doesn't want to alienate any return customers by not providing that method."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do people buy the turbo tax software sold in stores when you can just use their website?
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27d2d5 | So I wanted to understand how do authorities verify when a mountaineer has actually reached the peak of a mountain. | This especially, during the successful ascent to the top of Mt. Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary in the 50s.
Also, are there any differentiating factors, for snow-covered mountains? (which is in case of most tall mountains) | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't and there are no authorities. Historically there were so few people climbing mountains for fun that they all pretty much knew each other and climbing a major mountain ( one worth talking about ) usually involved a large team of climbers and an even larger team of support staff that you really couldn't lie about it. \n\nTL;DR, Honor system."
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} | train_eli5 | So I wanted to understand how do authorities verify when a mountaineer has actually reached the peak of a mountain.
This especially, during the successful ascent to the top of Mt. Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary in the 50s. Also, are there any differentiating factors, for snow-covered mountains? (which is in case of most tall mountains) | [
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19dgh9 | Car related terms such as... | The "liter" amount in an engine, torque, horsepower, etc (I know there are more terms, if you can come up with them and list them that would be wonderful)...What do these all mean and what numbers are considered average car quality (honda civic/toyota camry/etc) and what numbers are considered for sports/luxury car
this way I can differentiate them when it comes time for me to buy one... | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Liter is a unit of volume, like a gallon. The more liters an engine has the bigger it is, which means it has more power, but uses more gas.\n\nTorque is a unit of force. You can think of it as like the strength of car. A high torque vehicle, like a strong person, can carry a lot of weight without straining.\n\nHorsepower is just what it's sounds like. 1 horsepower is the power of one horse. Basically it's torque over time, which means it has more to do with speed so sports car has less torque than a truck, but more horsepower because what it can carry it carries faster.\n\nAnother term is RPMs which is a measure of how fast the engine is spinning (how hard it's working) your transmission handles how directly the engine is connected to the wheels, so if your engine is working to hard (too many RPMs), you want to get it into a higher gear.\n\nAcceleration measures how quickly a car can increase it's speed. \n\nTop speed measures how quickly a car can move once it get's going as fast as it can go.\n\nSo a little Italian sports car can accelerate quickly to it's top speed, and then stay there While a big american muscle car might take longer to speed up, eventually it'll get going faster.\n\nBut honestly dude? This is your first car? there are two numbers I would be watching for MPG and Price. You don't need to be winning any drag races in this thing, you need a car that runs, and keeps running without breaking down too much or costing you a fortune in gas."
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} | train_eli5 | Car related terms such as...
The "liter" amount in an engine, torque, horsepower, etc (I know there are more terms, if you can come up with them and list them that would be wonderful)...What do these all mean and what numbers are considered average car quality (honda civic/toyota camry/etc) and what numbers are considered for sports/luxury car this way I can differentiate them when it comes time for me to buy one... | [
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1sdsr1 | Arab Spring | explainlikeimfive | {
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"On December 18th 2010, a man called Mohamed Bouazizi, who was selling some sort of merchandise at a market in Tunisia, was humiliated and beaten by police because he did not have a permit to sell. In protest, Bouazizi set himself on fire and from there, a sequence of events began. This proved to be a catalyst, as people soon started expressing their discontent with the way they have been living (large unemployment rate, restrictions of freedom of speech, authoritarian government etc.). \n\nThese turned into riots that, long story short, overthrew the government and made the president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in power for the last 23 years, step down on 14 January 2011. However, most social problems that existed in his time are still very actual, as little has improved with the new democratically elected president/government.\n\nFrom Tunisia the protests spread to other countries, such as Egypt and Syria, where the situation had been similar. People thought that if the Tunisian people could do it, so could they. And they did overthrow their governments. Right now, the situation in Egypt has still not resolved, as the military took over the country.\n\nAll in all, people wanted to get rid of the authoritarian regime that was prevalent for decades in the countries that rebelled. They got what they wanted, but in most countries the situation is still bad, even with democratically elected leaders."
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} | train_eli5 | Arab Spring
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8o0j7d | why does the American Military measure distance in meters? But the rest of America uses feet and yards? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The last thing you want in the middle of a firefight where multiple countries might be involved is to have two different measurement systems being used. Example being Brits come under contact and U.S. is in the area to provide assistance and everyone is giving different measurements to pass information on enemy positions. Especially if requesting indirect fire support (artillery).",
"The military operates frequently with international partners, and the last thing you want to do when planning a joint military operation is to screw up a calculation somewhere and people wind up at the wrong landing zone or hit the wrong building"
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} | train_eli5 | why does the American Military measure distance in meters? But the rest of America uses feet and yards?
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4psnz5 | What are cooperatives? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So a lot of the specifics will depend on the legal jurisdiction(s) the company is involved in, as well as how the coop specifically is organized. Generally, coops are a special kind of corporation. As such, they're limited liability entities and usually have legal \"personhood\" (this is just what a corporation is, I won't go into details on what this really means).\n\nWhile corporations are usually owned by \"shareholders\", this group is usually called \"members\" in a coop (membership means ownership, and sometimes members are called owners, or owner-members). The most significant difference is that in standard corporations, you get one vote per share you own, whereas in coops every member gets one and only one vote. In corporations, a single person can own 51% of outstanding shares and essentially control the company. Coops are protected from this, and thus are generally run a lot more cooperatively.\n\nSo who are members? It depends on the type of coop. Here's a broad overview:\n\n**Workers' coop:** the members are workers in the corporation. If the corporation is a manufacturer, then the people running the machines & c are the members. While the membership is made up of workers, some kinds of workers are not members (similar to a union/non-union divide in workers you see in a lot corporations).\n\n**Consumer coop:** Are basically retail or wholesale stores, but you have to buy a coop membership to shop there.\n\n**Credit unions/caisses populaires:** Are basically banks. Everyone with an account is a member.\n\n**Marketing coops:** This is kind of an oddity because this happens largely behind the scenes, and more often than anywhere else in agriculture. The membership of the coop is made up of different people producing the same product, for example wheat. The coop buys the product from all these different producers and then sells them back to different people. This allows a lot of small producers to more effectively compete with the free market (ie. huge industrial farms)\n\n---\n\nIn the course of business, corporations make a surplus value. That is, they start with some money, do something with it, and end up with more. Even after paying for everything they need to do, taking into account infinite growth forever, there is still often a lot of money left over called a \"pofit\".\n\nIn a coop, the profit becomes a patronage return. Coops accept that profit is what is left over after all expenses are looked after; it just kinda comes out of nowhere. This is given out to all members in proportion to how much business they conducted with the coop over the payout period. In a way, coops are run without generating profit. This is essentially impossible to do without the risk of running huge deficits. Coops get around this by first generating profit, and then returning it (roughly) to the person who contributed that profit.\n\n(or at least, they way the coop understands the profit being generated. The same grocery store could be organized as a workers' coop or a consumer coop. In one case, the workers' are recognized as having generated the profit, in the other the consumer is. And this can get messy because absolutely everyone in society is responsible for the surplus that society generates)\n\nRather than paying patronage returns, coops can pay dividends on membership shares. The difference is mostly in legal subtleties.\n\nFor example, (IANAL, do not quote me on this!) in Ontario, money paid in patronage returns is not taxed to the corporation. However, in worker's cooperatives patronage returns are taxed like normal income for the person who got them. Dividends are paid out after corporate taxes have been paid, and are taxed on the individual as a capital gain. These huge differences represent subtleties in what patronage returns are and what dividends are that I am far from qualified to talk about. From this description it seems like you would always want to pay patronage returns and not dividends, but whether you have a choice is largely up to legislation and not you. If you do happen to be incorporating in Ontario, this is legislated under the *Ontario Cooperatives Act* as well as the *Credit Union and Caisses Populaires Act* (if you are financial).\n\n---\n\nMembership often involves buying shares or making a loan (at very low to no interest) to the coop. However, if agreed upon, the coop can pay workers in membership shares or membership loans, and this is very common for new coops who don't have a lot of money.\n\nOn the outside, it looks like you're doing unpaid (or volunteer) work for the coop, however from an accounting perspective you were paid in money that was then reinvested into the company. It's important to keep in mind here that this means that the money does actually have to exist in the company.",
"You want to make cookies for the end of the year school party, you need to gather money and workers. \n\n- You have Paul and Jeanne who give you money in exchange of a part of the benefit and you pay Mary and Peter to cook the cake, that's a regular company \n\n- You have Bill and Monica who unite their money and their effort to do the cake and share the benefits that's a cooperative. \n\nIn real life that's more complex, usually things like the fact that worker/user need to own a part of the company and/or the fact everybody get one voice (even if they own half of the company) are characteristic of cooperative. Were I live I saw 3 types of cooperative company : Several companies need the same service and create an extra company as a cooperative ( it's usually easier/better suited than non profit when you need to charge your services), People in the *alternative* lifestyle who don't want to work for capitalist stocks owner, When companies bankrupt and a part of it is bought back by the worker as a cooperative.",
"Typically co-ops are either worker owned (collectives) or community owned (grocery co-ops, for example). Hybrids like you are talking are less common. If you aren't familiar with co-ops, I'd advise staying away. Decision making, typically through consensus, can be very awkward for noobs and the learning curve is steep. Read up on Mondragon for info on large scale worker co-ops and ask around at the local grocery co-op for info on consumer co-ops. Producer co-ops also exist (Ocean Spray), but they are just regular businesses with voting rights for members. The way you described it, I imagine your friends are aiming toward something more with social and economic conscience. I'm reading an interesting book on the possible effects technology will have on economic organization in the future called *PostCapitalism* by Paul Mason that has some interesting ideas. Most people go into these things with the best intentions and become disillusioned. That said, when they work they work."
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92yvvv | - Why is, what seems like rape so prevalent in the animal kingdom? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because most animals don't have morals. Humanity has gotten to a point of intelligence and society that we don't need to allow ourselves to just procreate willy-nilly. \n\nCats, dogs, and other animals rape as part of procreation because they don't have the morals, the intelligence, the sense of caring for others, that says \"maybe they don't want sex\".",
"Why not? If you're a male animal, and your primary goal is to increase the chances of your genes passing down as much as possible, you'd have sex with anything you can unless there's something preventing you.\n\nThere's no police in the wild, the only thing to really stop you is social factors, if you live in a complex enough social structure for that to matter.",
"The most important thing to note here is that animals are amoral. There is no such thing as murder between animals; simply killing and being killed. Likewise, there is no concept of \"consent\". In most species, sex is not for pleasure but purely for reproduction. \n\nThe reason it is so common to see male animals \"forcing\" themselves on females to mate is because females are the choosy sex. Eggs are far more biologically expensive to produce than sperm, and therefore in higher demand. Much of sexual selection is female choice. Any male that manages to successfully reproduce and pass on its genes is \"fit\" (as in survival of the fittest), and often this involves being physically strong enough to overpower a reluctant female. Other times, it involves enticing a female. There is such a huge range of mating behaviors and systems that it is difficult to generalize, but that's about the gist of it. \n\nOne more factor here is that as far as we know there is no emotional component to most animal reproduction. It's just, \"will you make babies that will live? Alright, let's mate.\" It is purely an instinctive and physical process. Calling it rape implies that the female is traumatized and that the male has committed a wrong when this is simply not true.\n\nEdit: One more thing. In many cases sex is painful for the female, which we tend to anthropomorphize as rape. However, painful intercourse incentives the female to be selective in her mates. Evolution is basically just a competition to see who can reproduce the most successfully. Reproductive success is generally interpreted as the relative number of offspring that also reproduce. If the males adapt to their role of either enticing or subduing a female, and the females to theirs of selecting the most fit mates, things seem to work out.\n\nSource: senior bio undergrad focusing on zoology. I know way too much about animal sex.",
"Animals don't 'rape' each other they don't have the capacity to even process that type of instinct for the most part"
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92ubyo | What are the differences between ego and self respect? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, they are both related to how we view ourselves but I would say the difference is self-respect is healthy, and ego isn't.\n\nEgo leads to thinking someone is superior to others, prevents one from admitting mistakes, or leads to not taking the experiences and feelings of others into account and only considering one's own feelings and experiences.\n\nSelf-respect is more about one's relationship with themselves. It leads to treating one's self well, not accepting poor treatment from other people, and having confidence.\n\nIt's also worth mentioning that ego is a term used in many different contexts in psychology and philosophy and doesn't always mean something bad. In general it's just describing someone's sense of self or individualism. That might be causing you some confusion as well.\n\nFor example, the Egocentric Predicament is a concept in philosophy that states one can only.ever experience the world from.their own point of view. In that sense, we are all egocentric, but that's not necessarily a failing.",
"Lemme take a swing at this. First, I'm an addict in recovery. I don't use drugs because I have self respect; i love myself today. Ego tells me that because I don't use drugs I'm better than those that do use; even though the reality is I'm not any better or worse than anybody, we're all human. There's a line between confidence and ego and I'm constantly having to make adjustments to keep out of ego."
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5dk3wc | Why exactly is it that when siblings (or closely related people) reproduce, there are problems? | I'm not saying that it should be OK. I get the social stigmas and all. But why don't closely related genes like to mix? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's because lots of defective alleles (versions of genes) are recessive (you need two copies for them to cause a problem) and rare. So they almost never cause problems because it's very unlikely that both parents have the same defective allele. Even if you have a defective allele and pass it to your child, your mate will provide a functioning allele that can compensate.\n\nBut now say that your mate is also your sister. There is a 50% chance that she has the same defective allele as you, and now there is a 25% chance that your child will have two defective copies and therefore have the defect.\n\nThat's the basic principle. When your mate is closely related, there is a much higher chance of the children receiving two copies of any defective recessive allele."
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I'm not saying that it should be OK. I get the social stigmas and all. But why don't closely related genes like to mix? | [
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2x2nyy | Why does the UN or the Hague not charge the Saudi royal family with humans rights violations for executing apostates? | Or at least use sanctions against it?
The same question applies to any non-nuclear, non-hermit states (i.e., besides North Korea) that use torture and executions that violate basic human rights. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Saudi arabia is a rather stable country in the middle east with large oil reserves - the UN would like to keep it that way",
"The UN is not a government. It doesn't have soldiers or police.\n\nThe UN is a forum where governments meet to discuss world relations. Anyone could suggest sanctions against Saudi, and in fact plenty of people complain about Saudi at the UN. Saudi Arabia's human rights record was the subject of constant debate until recently when they became a member of the committee on human rights, and will be again when that appointment has passed.\n\nMore broadly, what you mean to ask is 'Why hasn't America done something about Saudi Arabia?' The answer, sadly, is Communism. During the cold war, America's primary concern was maintaining a power bloc. Since then, we haven't significantly reshuffled our alliances.\n\nMaybe we should. I'd like to think we don't need the Saudis anymore. But it's not the UN's job to make that decision for us.",
"Although I would love to see NK dismantled, the brute reality of the situation might be that the costs associated with successfully hunting down its leaders, \"rehabilitating\" its people and avoiding blowback are too high. \n\nRemember how quickly we overthrew Saddam's regime? We still spent years tracking down his family and supporters. \n\nRemember how the North Koreans wept for Kim Jong Il after he died? Sure, some of the mourners may have been acting to avoid punishment, but it's likely that many, if not most, of the population cannot distinguish propaganda from reality. Us deposing Kim Jong Un might be like killing their Christ, and their reaction to US troops, who they've been told are evil, blowing their leader's brains out may be unfavorable. \n\nLet's say you've crushed the NK military, how've you done it? You've probably used a lot of bombs and missiles and tried to limit the number of instances your troops have had to expose themselves to physical combat. Historically, our use of munitions causes a lot of civilian casualties. Historically, that eventually makes enemies of the people we were supposedly trying to help. This ends up meaning that you've simply substituted one, old enemy for another newer enemy. \n\nI think that policymakers have this is mind when deciding how to deal with NK. An invasion of NK could end up pointless and costly. The fact that NK doesn't have anything we really want or need probably factors into why we haven't invaded NK as well: invasion might be a financial black hole and there no obvious chance for recoupment. \n\nI believe we haven't done anything about Saudi Arabia , because, like Gyang193 said, it's relatively stable and provides us needed resources. Additionally, Saudi Arabia is one of the only Middle Eastern countries that doesn't like Russia and can bleed Russia (without Russia seeking retribution) by lowering the price of its oil (Russia top export is oil...second top is vodka).",
"Nobody fucks with anybody who has money, power and influence."
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} | train_eli5 | Why does the UN or the Hague not charge the Saudi royal family with humans rights violations for executing apostates?
Or at least use sanctions against it? The same question applies to any non-nuclear, non-hermit states (i.e., besides North Korea) that use torture and executions that violate basic human rights. | [
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5yeg28 | Why do some people have a myocardial infarction after losing a loved one? What chemical processes are taking place? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In advanced I'm on my mobile so I apologize. I'm also going to bring it to layman s terms so I'm not concerned if it's not **exactly** correct\n\nThis condition is called Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy aka \"Broken Heart Syndrome.\" It does not need to be a sad event it can also be a joyous occasion. In every way it's symtoms mimic a Myocardial Infarction or Acute coronary syndrome. It can even show ST elevation on an ECG indicating a STeMI (which means that heart tissue is being damaged). For emergency medical personnel we treat it as a 'heart attack.' \n\nThe largest hypothesis is the myocardium typically metabolizes fat and during these events the myocardium instead tries to use glucose (sugar). Since this is an emotionally stressful event heart rate increase meaning the heart works harder using more glucose (burns fast like gas) instead of fat (burns slower like charcoal). \n\nThe issue is we see that the heart is not getting the necessary components for metabolism which is \n\nglucose + oxygen → carbon dioxide + water + energy\n\nIn a typical MI a thrombus prevents oxygen reaching the myocardium creating strain and an acidic environment due to the lack of oxygen. \n\nThis is similar since the heart does not have enough sugar to continue doing work. It is similar to a hypoglycemic patient but the low blood sugar is localized to one spot rather than systematically. The heart usually resolves this issue with out medical intervention, but there have been cases that I'm which they were suspicious of death due to Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy. \n\nSource Medscape App.",
"Stress is always stressful. Having a severe emotional event will put a strain on a system. They are in the age group of heart attacks. It is not so much chemistry as the extra strain in a vulnerable population. Without the death the heart attack could have occurred anyway and be less noticed, double events are always noted. It might have occurred a few years later but was precipitated by the strain.",
"Takotsubo is what you are asking for. An MI is a clot in an arterery supplying blood to the heart. Takotsubo mimics an MI but is really just the sides of the heart closing in on itself. Takotsubo =broken heart syndrome and is not true ischemia I believe."
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1ddbsj | That feeling when your on a Roller Coaster and you go over a hill. | I have always wondered what that feeling was.
If needed to be more specific I will do so. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"you're*\n\nThe feeling is you feeling lighter because some of forced caused by your momentum is still going in the upwards direction for a short period, cancelling some of the force caused by your weight."
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I have always wondered what that feeling was. If needed to be more specific I will do so. | [
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6fni7m | the difference between Ethnicity and Race (i.e. hispanic) | Job applications ask me my ethnicity and then go on to ask me my race. I am hispanic, which is always the ONLY option for ethnicity, however, a lot of times then i have to answer my race and there is not a hispanic option there. WHY?! [Example screenshot](_URL_0_) | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because Hispanic isn't a race. There are Asian Hispanics, there are South American Hispanics, there are black Hispanics, and there are Spanish Hispanics. If you/your ancestors spoke Spanish, you put down Hispanic. For race, you put down what your race is. This could be white, black, southeast Asian, or any other type of human under on the planet.",
"That's really weird for a job application tbh. But race and ethnicity is two different concept and they both are loosely define concept.\n\nEthnicity is simply group identity and that identity depend on what is important for that group of people. It can be religious, regional, racial, national, linguistic, etc. Ethnic group by itself is a very vague term that can mean several things.\n\nRace have two meaning. \n\n1) Genetically. Each human have a unique DNA (almost always), but when two group of human didn't interbreed for a long period of time, the difference in DNA start to accumulate. The spectrum of human DNA isn't continuous, there is cluster of DNA with similar characteristic for group of human that interbreed for a long period of time. Where you divide those different cluster can be somewhat subjective. For example you could look at the Y-chromosome haplogroups. It's only looking at 1 single chromosome of the human 24 chromosomes and it's a chromosome only present in male, but it's also on of the chromosome that evolve the fastest so it show more difference in humans. But let say that we agree on using that to map the difference in human, then there is about 20 different haplogroups and some group them into 6 or 7 different race. Where you actually divide two different race can be tricky even if the clusters are obvious. \n\n2) Appearance. Human started to talk about race way before we mapped the human DNA. Those differences in the human genes show in physical differences in human. A south African doesn't look like a European or a Asian person. If it's difficult to know where exactly are the divisions between different race in DNA, it can be even more difficult with appearance. Some gene are dominant or recessive, meaning that someone could have a DNA mostly Caucasian, but if they have the dominant gene for a darker skin colour that will show on their appearance and people will categorise them as black, even if most of their DNA isn't. This wasn't a real problem in the past because there wasn't that much interbreed. People used to make children with their own race by choice or by geographical separation. But in the modern day this is less and less the case.",
"Ethnicity is more of a cultural and social aspect whereas race focuses rather on phenotypical differences of human biology.",
"On other government forms there is usually an option for \"white (non-Hispanic)\", so presumably they expect you to answer \"Hispanic\" for your ethnicity and then something else (white if you're light-skinned/European descended, black if you're Afro-Latino, etc., etc.) for race."
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} | train_eli5 | the difference between Ethnicity and Race (i.e. hispanic)
Job applications ask me my ethnicity and then go on to ask me my race. I am hispanic, which is always the ONLY option for ethnicity, however, a lot of times then i have to answer my race and there is not a hispanic option there. WHY?! [Example screenshot](_URL_0_) | [
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4rymwe | Why do we have the earth positioned as is in illustration, and how did we come up with it? | explainlikeimfive | {
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3dwqid | How do pinhole cameras work? | I have one right here, and I'm convinced there must be elves in there or something.... | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you can imagine the camera in the shape of an hourglass, with the pinhole being the center of the hourglass, it's a lot easier to visualize. You can think of light rays traveling in a straight line, and every light ray that passes through the pinhole gets projected onto a surface, only it's in the opposite position with respect to the pinhole. Since all of the light rays do this, an image appears on the surface, but flipped upside down."
],
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} | train_eli5 | How do pinhole cameras work?
I have one right here, and I'm convinced there must be elves in there or something.... | [
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20qdhe | How did Russia breach international laws? | Everyone keeps saying there was a breach but no one is giving details. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter prohibits states from engaging in any threats or uses of force against other states, of which Russia and Ukraine have signed and are members of. _URL_0_\n\nThe problem with international law is that it is nearly impossible to enforce or pass judgement on. It is purely a basis for argument and peace."
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"url": [
"https://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/"
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} | train_eli5 | How did Russia breach international laws?
Everyone keeps saying there was a breach but no one is giving details. | [
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3dip02 | When a surface is sticking to another surface (like tape) what is actually happening? | I guess I'm just curious as to what's happening on a molecular level that would make a sticky surface, sticky. Also, when a table is sticky because something sugary spilled on it, is it the same process? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So there are a lot of [intermolecular forces](_URL_0_)\n\nadhesives like those found on tape are very good at forming interactions with themselves (so the glue on the tape sticks to itself) and other surfaces. They are technically highly viscous liquids just like sugary things like syrup you might spill on your table.",
"I would go with yes that they're both the same process. It's all about affinity. You ever heard of chrometography? It's the separation of solutes in a solution by some sort of qualitative process. So, if I have a really polar substance, I can put on (basically) a really polar filter and the substance I want will stick to the filter. It's all about like molecules attracting like molecules. The stronger that attraction the harder it is to separate certain things. That's why grease will stick to a plate or pan, it's attracted to soap (which cleans it) but it's also attracted to the plate and the soap might not be strong enough to rip the oil molecules off the plate thus they stick. I hope I'm helping lol"
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"url": [
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} | train_eli5 | When a surface is sticking to another surface (like tape) what is actually happening?
I guess I'm just curious as to what's happening on a molecular level that would make a sticky surface, sticky. Also, when a table is sticky because something sugary spilled on it, is it the same process? | [
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352tcz | Why does selling college handwritten notes qualify as copyright infringement? (Why or why not) | If I as a student sit through lecture, interpret the teacher's lectures, handwrite them, then later edit and add to them via various online sources, want to sell my notes to classmates who might be struggling with the note-taking aspect, would I be violating copyright law? Are my notes now considered my intellectual property?
There are also many third-party sellers online, through which students can make money. Are these illegal as well? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This [University of Maryland](_URL_0_) site does a good job of explaining why.\n\nOn a related note, back in the late 1990s, my university was pressuring professors to convert their courses into web-based versions. Many professors were against this saying, \"If I do that, then the university can get rid of me and just pay any numbnut off the street a pittance to oversee it.\" This fear was not unfounded, especially for those who put a lot of time and effort to create good course materials.\n\nI stopped following that issue after I graduated, but clearly the universities recognized what they'd lose in the long run if they did this."
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} | train_eli5 | Why does selling college handwritten notes qualify as copyright infringement? (Why or why not)
If I as a student sit through lecture, interpret the teacher's lectures, handwrite them, then later edit and add to them via various online sources, want to sell my notes to classmates who might be struggling with the note-taking aspect, would I be violating copyright law? Are my notes now considered my intellectual property? There are also many third-party sellers online, through which students can make money. Are these illegal as well? | [
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4imfcd | Why does whipping cream make it fluffy? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The whipping action forces air into the cream, where it gets trapped. The trapped air is what makes the cream light and fluffy.",
"The protein molecules in cream have formed formed a gel matrix, or foam, by being repeatedly beaten and whipped, which allows it to denature slightly. This denaturation allows tiny pockets of gas or liquid to become trapped in the matrix, which gives it a fluffy, light texture.\n\nSource: Food Science Major"
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} | train_eli5 | Why does whipping cream make it fluffy?
| [
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3ayxqo | Why do planes crash into each other when they have so much open sky and space to fly in? When I look up at the sky, it seems almost entirely clear of planes. | Unlike a car, planes don't have to travel a narrow path. (Or do they?)
I assume that it has something to do with crowded airports, crowded flight paths, standard cruising altitudes, not being able to react quickly enough due to high speeds....But as a 5-year-old, I'm sure there is a real explanation. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Almost all air accidents happen near takeoff/landing where all those planes are in a tight area. There is a very narrow path to use a runway.\n\nThat said, air accidents are EXTREMELY UNCOMMON. You're safer on a plane than you are in your own car, by a huge margin.",
"It's pretty unusual, and when it happens it is often in the vicinity of an airport where the density of planes is greater and there are only so many routes to/from a runway. \n\nDuring take-off and landing the planes can be at different altitudes (thanks stpfan1), which makes seeing one another difficult, so if they don't get good guidance they may have a problem.",
"Planes almost never crash into each other -- and when they do, it's almost always at an airport where things get much, much more crowded.\n\nGo look up the things you've seen about two airplanes colliding. You'll find they were near the airport -- possibly on the runway.",
"Planes do have to travel a narrow path actually. They are called flight paths. Specific parts of air space are reserved for specific flights by air control and planes are directed to said paths. This is all described in a plane's flight plan.\n\nMost collisions between planes happen near runways though where these there are a lot of planes in the air and air traffic control practically has to juggle them all. This especially gets tricky when there are other circumstances (such as bad weather or planes being diverted to another airport) that just add another layer of difficulty to the proceedings.\n\nGenerally when planes collide in mid-air, there is either one plane deviating from its flight plan (either due to pilot error or instrument error) or the crash involves at least one small air plane which do not always need to follow the same flight plan procedures as big commercial planes. Small air planes also don't always need to have the same anti-collision systems that big planes do, which can make it even harder to spot each other. Cause honestly, when you are flying, you are flying so fast that usually by the time you see each other (if you ever see each other) it can already be too late to avoid collision.",
"> planes don't have to travel a narrow path. (Or do they?)\n\nWhen they in the process of taking off or landing, they do. And that is when just about every air to air collision is going to happen.\n\nSome smaller airports don't have a control tower at all, the airplanes just figure it out, much the same way drivers can navigate a 4-way stop on their own.\n\nLarger airports have air traffic controllers to sort it out, but if you misunderstand their instructions, and turn left when you should turn right, you are going to have a problem.\n\nYou also have things like navigational beacons and practice areas for student pilots, when air traffic tends to pile up.",
"Its quite rare that planes collide in the open sky . most collisions are on taxiways or landing strips when a plane is somewhere its not supposed to be. Even then, since commercial jets are travelling at 400 mph their time to react to an oncoming aircraft is very small. That's why air traffic is stacked with north / south on even altitudes, like 30000 feet and east/west on odd altitudes like 35000 feet ( could be reversed its been a while since I flew a plane) You have a far greater chance of being in a car wreck than a plane crash, and even less chance of being in a mid-air collision.",
"Planes almost never crash into each other, for exactly the reason you note. Plane on plane crashes are very rare. There are about 1M commercial flights per year and since 2000 there have been 9 mid-air collisions. Only 2 of those were at cruise, all the rest were in airport patterns, usually with helicopters."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do planes crash into each other when they have so much open sky and space to fly in? When I look up at the sky, it seems almost entirely clear of planes.
Unlike a car, planes don't have to travel a narrow path. (Or do they?) I assume that it has something to do with crowded airports, crowded flight paths, standard cruising altitudes, not being able to react quickly enough due to high speeds....But as a 5-year-old, I'm sure there is a real explanation. | [
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5qnbok | Why do people have different voices? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Vocal chords vary in shape and size which vibrate with air to produce sound. Think of these like a guitar string. Changing the string changes the sound.\n\nHead and facial shapes are different. The cavities in the head affect the way sound reverberates. Imagine taking the same strings from an instrument and attaching them to a different one. The way the string vibrates and the pitch don't change but the tone does.\n\nPeople have different mouth shapes so the physical ways they move their mouth are different when forming shapes to make sounds.\n\nSocially, people sound different. Geographically, like with accents, but also some languages are tonal, which means the pitch affects the meaning. Have you ever noticed that women tend to speak in a higher pitch on the phone than in person but men are less likely to? Social differences.\n\nBecause there are multiple factors affecting speech, it's uncommon for people to sound the same, but identical twins often do because they have similar heads, faces, body sizes, and upbringing.",
"Physical differences in the bits of your body used to make noise with your mouth.\n\nIn particular, longer and thicker vocal cords give you a deeper voice, which is why men have deeper voices than women and children."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do people have different voices?
[removed] | [
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1oelbx | Black holes. Ive watched lots of videos but still cant rap my head around them. Explain like I am dumb 5 year old. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The traditional method of black hole creation is in supernovae. A supernova is when a massive star dies. When a massive, well, massive star goes supernova the forces acting upon its core crushes it until it becomes really small. This means there's a lot of matter in a really small volume. \n\nNow, gravity is caused by mass. The force of gravity you feel depends on your distance from the centre of mass. In a massive (meaning made up of lots of stuff) object that's really small its gravity is concentrated in a really small volume and so you can get really close to the centre of mass before reaching the object. In black holes this means there's a distance at which the gravitational pull is so strong that even light can't escape. They're called black holes because no light is admitted from them. And holes because once you fall in you're not coming back. \n\nIf you could crush the Earth down to about the size of a marble it would turn into a black hole. However, the Moon wouldn't get pulled in because it's still the same distance from the centre of mass as it always was and thus doesn't feel any increase in gravity. You would have to travel past where the Earth's surface used to be to feel an increase.",
"Imagine standing on the surface of Sun. We have to pretend it has a solid surface and you don't burn immediately, unrealistic I know but just bare with me. If you weighed 200 pounds on Earth, you would weigh over 5000 pounds on the Sun! \n\nNow try and jump. It's not going to happen; the force of gravity is just too strong! In other words, you're stuck on the surface of the sun, and nothing you can do will get you out of it\n\nGeneral Relativity says that gravity affects light, too. A black hole is a collection of so much mass that it's force of gravity is too much for even light to jump away from. Because light can't get out of a black hole, well, it's black."
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} | train_eli5 | Black holes. Ive watched lots of videos but still cant rap my head around them. Explain like I am dumb 5 year old.
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1xj45g | Why isn't Russia considered a part of Europe. Geographically, most of their citizens, and even their capital, are on the European side of the country. | It just doesn't make sense to me that Russia isn't considered European at all, really. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Russia is a part of Europe. It's also a part of Asia.\n\nOr are you asking why Russia isn't in the EU? That's a whole separate question.",
"Russia is obviously Europe. FFS it was part of the holy alliance _URL_0_. Anglophone countries seem to know nothing about Europe. The Slavic ethnic group is European. The Russian Language group is European. There are more blonds in Russia than there are in France, Spain, or Italy. _URL_1_\n\nThis notion that Russians are some how not \"ethnically\" European or that Russians are mixed, is ridiculous, and blatantly not true. \n\nHaving said all that. If you mean \"Western\" when you say European, than no, they are not. Western would entail having undergone the cultural phenomena of the ren and the enlightenment. Russia did neither. Russia has never really entered modernity, or at least not in the way the West did. It is truly culturally unique. But, it is most certainly not Asian.",
"I thought that most people do think of Russia as being a European country. Although I can't say I've asked many people whether they think of it as European or not though.\n\nI'd say it's primarily European for the reasons stated in the question. I'd say it's also historically European. Their expansion into Asia really happened around the same time other European powers were starting their empires. Russia just decided to just go straight east to start expanding their empire rather than going overseas like other European powers did."
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} | train_eli5 | Why isn't Russia considered a part of Europe. Geographically, most of their citizens, and even their capital, are on the European side of the country.
It just doesn't make sense to me that Russia isn't considered European at all, really. | [
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19edyc | Why are standardized tests considered to be racially biased? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Heres a real Texas TAKS test question that is a good example of bias on a test. \nSome students wanted to make a model to\nshow how the size of the moon compares with\nthe size of Earth. They used an orange to\nrepresent the moon. Which of the following\nwould best represent Earth?\n\nAnswers: cantaloupe, grape, lime, or cherry\n\nYou can argue a student should know what those fruits are, but the bottom line is the questions do not test only the knowledge of the size of the Earth and Moon, but what these fruits are. This can be hard for an English language learner, or poor students who likely do not eat as much fruit.",
"Well there is the concept of \"Cultural Bias\" in tests. See what happens is the questions make some basic assumptions about who you are and what you expect. \n\nHere is a great example, in Philadelphia they were giving out a standardized test to children across the area. One of the questions went something like \"what is an animal that you dont see in your neighborhood? A)Dog B) Cat C) Giraffe\". Well a bunch of kids got the question wrong, because they lived in the same neighborhood as the zoo (here in Philly the zoo is in the middle of the city, surrounded by houses and businesses and such). The question assumed that all children would not have an African herbivore in their urban neighborhood, but there was a certain group of children who did. And they would have been marked wrong because they were technically giving a correct answer, but an unexpected one. \n\nNow thats a minor case, but sometimes questions can be more White, suburban, questions which might not make sense to an African American or an urbanite.",
"Here's a nice mindfuck: all the attention on how there's racial bias [makes the racial bias worse](_URL_0_).\n\nBasically, if you are given a test and told that your minority doesn't perform particularly well on it, you will indeed perform worse on it, even if there the bias doesn't exist and is completely made up. Obviously we still want to fix any REAL racial bias that may exist, but it might be logically impossible, since even if, say, the SAT is objectively, truely neutral, today's perception that it has a racial bias will induce a racial bias. This holds true even if people are AWARE of this so-called \"stereotype threat\" effect.",
"My mom administers intelligence and logical reasoning tests to younger (K-6) aged kids in the New England area. Years ago, when she was working with more inner city/minority children, the had a question on the test (the WHISK, if i'm not mistaken) that was a pythagorean theorem based question that involved kids racing in sailboats at different rates. Apparently after a few test cycles they had to drop that question, because inner city kids didn't know what a sailboat was and couldn't comprehend the question. \n\nHere, the test makers assumed that their audience was one who knew what sailboats were (inferred to be the children of upper class families in NE). This seemingly minor detail in the set up of the problem put the innercity kids at a disadvantage.",
"NY School administrator here. I agree with much of the other posts, however, I would argue that standardized testing is basically bias on a socio-economic level. Children that have thousands more spent on their education through access to technology, museums, travel, expensive tutoring, and per-pupil expenditure in local districts are taking the same exact test as their less fortunate counterparts. Add in the fact that many children from poorer households have more siblings and less time spent with their parents and you have a savage inequality. Now please excuse me as I must prepare for parent-teacher conferences. I'll be meeting with the parents of the students that have done well on their report cards, while the parents of those students who are failing remain MIA. Standardized testing: designed to maintain the staus quo. \n\nedit. Spelling",
"Not racially specifically, but culturally biased (race plays a part in culture).\nThe main concept is euro-centricisim. The tests are made by affluent North American/European (white) people, wording questions and answers based on this culture. So people from other cultures might not even fundamentally understand or be able to relate to the question. There are many parts of our culture that are just assumed although we don't really notice it when we are a part of that culture. So while it is possible for someone of another culture to pass the test they are at a disadvantage due to lack of inherent cultural understanding.\n\nIt's hard to really understand unless you grow up in a fully euro-centric environment and then all of a sudden spend a lot of time in another culture (asian or african, for general example). All of a sudden you start realizing that a lot of issues and miscommunication arise due to the fact that your cultural views and assumptions about the world are in-congruent. If that just happens socially, what happens when this issue occurs on a test, where the persons entire future is based on the score of the test.",
"Here's an example.\n\nSTRAWBERRY:RED \n\n(A) peach:ripe \n(B) leather:brown \n(C) grass:green \n(D) orange:round \n(E) lemon:yellow\n\nThe answer is E following the pattern \"FRUIT:COLOR\". Seems straightforward unless you know that in Latin America the fruit called \"limon\" is green (lime, not lemon). And sure enough, hispanic kids are more likely to get this question wrong. \n\nWord questions automatically presume the culture and language of the person writing them.",
"Many of these answers so far are accurate, but, if you're talking about the standardized tests issued across wide ranges of public schools, there is another factor that has not been spoken about yet.\n\nJonathan Kozol argues in his text, [*Savage Inequalities*](_URL_1_), that there exists a considerable divide in the United States in the quality of education and amount of resources in schools that affects the outcome of these tests, and it's usually the school districts with more minority students that suffer.\n\nThese schools tend to do poorly on the tests because they have inadequate means of and conditions for preparing for them, including students having to share textbooks and take classes in rooms intended to be storage closets. I remember one section of the text mentioned a school that could spend several thousand (maybe as many as $10-12,000) dollars per student each year, while another within its same county had only a fraction of those funds available.\n\nThough the tests are standardized and *meant to be* fair and objective to as many students at a certain age as possible, some schools have difficulty giving their students the skills and information for succeeding at them in the first place.",
"This is a real-life example of this racial bias. The infamous oarsman-regatta question. \nFrom Wikipedia:\n\nA famous example of this bias in the SAT was the oarsman–regatta analogy question. The object of the question was to find the pair of terms that have the relationship most similar to the relationship between \"runner\" and \"marathon\". The correct answer was \"oarsman\" and \"regatta\". \n\nThe choice of the correct answer presupposed students' familiarity with crew, a sport popular with the wealthy, and so upon their knowledge of its structure and terminology. Fifty-three percent (53%) of white students correctly answered the question, while only 22% of black students also scored correctly. \n\nSeriously, how would an inner city black kid know what a REGATTA is? That's something I personally associate with rich, white people holidaying in New England, while wearing seersucker Capri pants and Sperry top-siders",
"I just took a final for a nursing class. Here is a question that everyone was angry about afterward.\n\nYou are assessing a patient and ask her about \"glass houses.\" She responds \"It's easy to break the windows.\" What would you document?\n\nA) Normal finding\n\nB) Patient has abnormal long-term recall\n\nC) Patient has abnormal short-term recall\n\nD) Patient is alert and oriented\n\n\nOur class of 50-so is not entirely American, or even middle class American. We have 6 Africans, a handful of Filipinos, two South Americans, a Russian, some Indians, south east Asians, etc. These are just the people that are FROM those areas, not to mention those in just different cultures from the US. I'm familiar with the more well known Confucian proverbs, but I STILL missed the question because I picked answer A. The correct answer was B. I thought the woman's response was a joke showing that she understood what she was asked (I was not the only one that understood it this way). And, by the way, WHAT was she asked? The question doesn't say. If the question said \"asked about the meaning of the saying \"People who live in glass houses should not throw stones\" the question would have been better understood by those who know about the proverb.\n\nEven though 80% of the class did not miss the question (the threshold for a question to be automatically thrown out), we went above the professor and complained to the dean. It's a bad, biased question.",
"My professor was literally just talking about this in class this week. She was giving an example of a young, gifted, inner-city student she had take a standardized IQ test. If he got a high enough score he would qualify for the gifted program at his school. The teacher actually had dinner with the family beforehand, explaining to them how the process worked & such. She was treated to dinner and beverages served in all plastic cups since the family couldn't afford to get glassware. Now the test is based on age, so the proctor had the student naming thing that were on cards that he held up. (like a Rorschach test, but with actual pictures instead of inkblots) The proctor pulled out a card that was a tea cup on a saucer, and the student is befuddled since he wasn't familiar with anything but normal plastic cups. Finally he says: \"A Cup on a Plate.\" and the proctor had to mark that wrong. At the end of the test he was 1 question short of making the program.",
"Two kinds of \"bias,\" intentional and unintentional. Intentional bias means that a test validly and reliably measures the concept it was intended to measure. Unintentional bias occurs when a test lacks validity and/or reliability. For example, a math test that includes a lot of word problems might actually be partially measuring a student's ability to read--i.e., not measuring math ability. Similarly, a word problem based on concepts or artifacts unknown to a student may not be a suitible indicator of math knowledge. Biased student responses may correlate with student race--hence the idea of \"racial bias.\"",
"Stereotype threat has been mentioned. It's not the only factor, but it definitely plays a big role. Kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy-- if you're expected to perform poorly, it's more likely that you will perform poorly. \n\nIn one particular study, it was found that black students did as well as white students if they had no information about who else was taking the test. If they were told that their scores were being compared to the scores of white students, they did significantly worse.\n\nSimilarly, white males did much worse on math sections when they knew they would be compared to Asian males, and females did worse on math/science sections when they knew they would be compared to males.\n\nedit: if anyone wants more info, I can definitely find the source, I'll just need to search a little.",
"It's very, *very* difficult to tease apart which questions you can answer correctly because of your education, and which questions you can answer correctly because of some innate trait. You might think that a test where you match symbols up is culturally neutral; but show one of those tests to a genius Eskimo and they'll have real difficulty answering it - they just haven't been taught to manipulate symbols in the same way that Western children have.\n\nA good example is street merchant children in Brazil (I think). Somebody did a study where they tested these kids on mathematics. If you ask them \"what's 0.25 times 37, plus 0.3 times 48?\" and they won't have a clue. If you ask them \"how much would it cost to buy 37 shoelaces (at 25c each) as well as 48 spoons (at 30c each) and they can do it instantly. (If this post gets attention I'll find the source for you guys.) The way the question is phrased and presented can be quite biased, in a way that just won't be apparent to white, middle-class, Western, well-adjusted people.\n\nIQ (one of the standardised tests that is known to be racially biased) is hugely correlated with socio-economic status. If you're poor, you do badly on IQ tests. Black people tend to do slightly worse than white people on IQ tests, and they also tend to be slightly worse economically. But personally, I think IQ is a joke. It's a ridiculous concept. I can't believe that so many people genuinely think that intelligence can be represented by a single number. I hear people boasting about their IQ, and I just think \"you can't be that intelligent, because if you actually thought about it for a second, you'd notice the flaws in the very concept of IQ\". Never mind the fact that IQ tests have been completely misappropriated from their initial purpose, which was to identify children with learning difficulties, ***not*** to rank people based on intelligence. It's a joke.",
"There's a solid bit of research concluding that the subject's own bias *against himself* affects him negatively based on the person's race. I can't find the data now, but the experiment went like this:\n\nFour groups of people took a test. \n\n* Group 1: Whites who were asked their race at the start of the test\n* Group 2: Whites who were asked their race at the end\n* Group 3: Minorities who were asked their race at the start\n* Group 4: Minorities who were asked their race at the end.\n\nInterestingly, between Groups 1 and 2, there was no statistical difference in scores. BUT between groups 3 and 4, there was a statistically significant difference in scores. The conclusion was that the pre-test stimulation of reminding the testtaker of his minority status (and, by extension, the lower expectations of society in his ability to do well on tests) actually affected his outcome. \n\nIt doesn't account for all the difference in standardized test-taking, but it does explain part of it. And either way, it is incredibly interesting.",
"Even as a black man, I couldn't tell ya. I *think* it has something to do with the fact that poor schools have worse education, and races that overwhelmingly live in poor areas aren't simply can't be expected to be as prepared for them as those from nice areas. I can't really comment, as I grew up in suburbia thanks to military parents, and always did exceptionally well on my tests. Some of it deals with motivation to, as I can imagine growing up in a place with nothing you're either going to want to get out, or be just like everyone else. But this is all speculation, sorry.",
"\"Bias\" has a strong stigma. Many people think that \"Bias\" and \"Prejudice\" are one and the same, but they're not. Bias simply means the lens through which we see the world, and that lens plays a critcal role in the things we create(like standardized tests). If affluent people created the tests, then those tests are going to be influenced by the affluent white person's perspective (i.e. bias) \n\n\nWhat you hear a lot about is the inadvertent discrimination that occurs because of these standardized tests, but that's a whole 'nother beast. There's a lot more that goes into the way we treat minority groups, and standardized test bias plays a very small role when compared to the other social forces at work.",
"Because ANY excuse will do when you're only worried about protecting your own tenure. I taught in Oakland. My black, Mexican and Asian kids all were fully capable of doing a kick-ass job on standardized tests. They got some of the best scores in all of California, in fact. Expecting less of kids because they aren't white is the real racism.",
"On the SAT writing section, common questions involve idioms and idiomatic expressions that don't rely on conventional grammar. Rather, these idiomatic expressions simply have to be memorized. How do you expect international students to fare on a test that weeds out test-takers based on localized idiomatic expressions?",
"Because they yield different results for different groups.\n\nPlease hold your downvotes until you let me finish explaining.\n\nIt's difficult to separate racial bias, cultural bias, geographic bias, and socioeconomic bias (the three latter of which all have clear examples given in other people's replies), and when - having failed to control for these factors, one observes that one population gets worse results than another (if, for example, african-americans are, on average, poorer and more live in urban areas as a result of a complex set of historical injustices whose effects have not been reversed, and so they get hit harder by socioeconomic and geographic biases), it's easy to simply assume that the test was deliberately designed in a way that would somehow be harder for them to answer.\n\nThere is no such thing as a question that - all else being equal - someone of one race is better at answering than another - if both students are rich suburban new englanders, who put the same amount of effort into their studies, one is not going to have any more trouble than the other. To suggest there is would, itself, be to validate racism.\n\nThe charge that a test is _racially_ biased, therefore, has nothing to do with the actual nature of the test, and everything to do with the presumed motives of those making the test, which has (intentionally or not) questions that have the other forms of bias mentioned. Furthermore, even if the biased questions are intentionally included, it is an accusation that the person who did so specifically hates african-americans (rather than, for example, hating poor people).\n\nIt is certainly not impossible that these could be the motives of someone designing a test. The \"literacy tests\" required to vote in the south before the practice was banned are a well-documented example. But it is not an attribute of the test itself.\n\n----\n\nAnd, if they didn't yield different results, for whatever reason, regattas and all, would anyone really be saying they're biased and making investigations into how/why?",
"Ask yourself if you can identify the following items, and what sports they are associated with: Scull, Club, Bat, Stick, Pitch\n\nAnswers on the Bottom.\n\nIf you are familiar with various types of sports you may notice that some of these terms could have multiple meanings among various contexts. For example, take the word \"Pitch\". Fairly straightforward, right? Baseball is America's past time so everyone knows that the pitcher \"pitches\" the ball to the batter. But did you know that pitch also is a field in which Rugby, Soccer/Football, and cricket are played on? There is a bias to both the racial minorities and lower class populations who may have never been educated in more sophisticated sports. A scull is an oar used in crew and rowing sports. These are traditionally upper class sports because they are incredibly expensive to maintain or even get into. If you could never afford to be a part of either of these sports you might have no idea what a scull was. Generally, more expensive sports are geared to a more upper class society which is disproportionately \"white\". A \"white\" society contains less minority and lower class/impoverished groups, so by asking the population via standardized test what a \"scull\" is, you are not taking into account that many minority groups could not possibly know the reference to answer the question. Therefore, the question is racially biased in \"white\" people's favor because they are more likely to get the correct answer, having known the context, than a minority group member that might not.\n\nThere is a lot of substance here which only touches one aspect out of many that could explain why standardized tests are racially biased. I could go on for hours using other sorts of examples and justify the same stance though. Feel free to PM me if you want me to explain it like you're 4!\n\nAnswers to above:\nScull- Type of Oar used for Rowing/Crew\nClub- Golf Club\nBat- Cricket Bat, Baseball Bat\nStick- Hockey Stick\nPitch- The act of \"pitching\" a ball in Baseball/Cricket, Field for Rugby, Soccer, Cricket",
"Culturally biased questions are a major factor, but there is a [much more serious and well-documented phenomenon that makes IQ, intelligence, and other standardized testing racially biased, and that is **stereotype threat**](_URL_2_)\n\nBasically, the way it works is if there is a preexisting stereotype that exists about a group of people -- i.e. \"blacks/Latinos are stupid\" -- then the effect of that stereotype and its omnipresence in a society in which that idea is fairly commonplace is for people in it to try to prove that they don't fit the stereotype. The only problem is, the anxiety associated with trying to prove you (and your entire race) are not stupid on an IQ tests usually results in doing worse on the test.\n\nThe way this hypothesis was tested was by giving the same set of test questions to a group of students of different races. When described as a simple homework assignment, the disparity in scores between white and black students was not significant. But when described as an intelligence test, whites dramatically outscored the blacks -- even though it was for the same questions!\n\nThus, just by describing the questions as an aptitude test, or a placement test, or an IQ test, or some other signal to the students that their intelligence is on the line, students from ethnic groups that are collectively labelled stupid -- i.e. blacks and Latinos in the US, Koreans in Japan, etc -- will do far worse on the test.\n\nIMO the long-term answer will require dramatic societal changes that will result in \"the blacks\" not being seen as a sort of \"other\" that can be collectively labelled anything, and I think that will take a lot of work.",
"It's statistics. Most standardized tests are \"standardized\" using the majority population. While the majority population in the US is quickly changing, just a few years ago it was basically white people. If you standardize a test using white people, then the score a person receives on that test is only relevant to what white people know. It is mostly a cultural issue, yes, but calling it cultural doesn't address the math of it.\n\nMathematically, a good test should be both valid and reliable. Does it test what it says it tests? Does it provide consistent results? The only way to know if a test is valid and reliable is to test the test many times in many different types of situations.\n\nSo, for a test to NOT be racist, it must pass the validity and reliability tests for all populations that it will be given to. This has not been the case in the US to this date. The most used tests were never tested for validity and reliability for all populations but have still been used on those populations.",
"I remember one time reading a poem about a quilt and having to analyze it. It struck me as odd that on the poem sheet, the word \"quilt\" had an asterisk (*) next to it, and a small block of text at the bottom of the page which explained that a quilt was a type of blanket made by patching different pieces of fabric together. Then I realized that if I had been a foreign-born student, I might not have actually known what a quilt was. Then I realized how difficult it would have been to analyze the poem if I had lacked that culture-based knowledge.\n\nI always think of that whenever someone mentions standardized tests being culturally biased. It's not often that you have a student who doesn't know what a quilt is, but it can happen, and it would make the student seem very dull if they just wrote a rambling essay about nothing just because they didn't know what a quilt was.",
"One of these things is not like the other:\n\nCello, Violin, Saxophone, Viola\n\nQuestions like these require knowledge of euro-orchestra instruments. It results in white students having easier tests, and minority students having their skills misrepresented.",
"I recently learned about this in class, and im not an expert by any means but the material we studied covered this issue pretty thoroughly. \n Its really complicated but basically (and obviously im paraphrasing because i cant write the whole book on here) standardized tests main flaw is the standardized part. while the tests are indeed set to a standard, the education required to pass the tests is not standard. Depending on what school you go to, (which depends on where you live, or even further, where you can afford to live) you can have anywhere from required sat prep courses all the way down to no substantial information about the sat other than you should take it.This gets back to race when you ask, statistically speaking, who has more access to better schools, historically and today especially the high end private schools? And if people are getting better or worse education depending on where they live yet required to take the same test, you can imagine how that plays out, especially considering the ways in which schools and neighborhoods have been racially manipulated (white flight, blockbustering, segregation etc.)\n\n Also because the tests are used to determine everything from whether or not you graduate high school, to your potential to excel in college ie s.a.t., a.c.t., etc, they have a compounding effect in which the biased testing, can be used as a legitimate means to exclude people based on a \"nuetral\" criteria, a criteria that has been historically and continues to be established by the dominant group. Because these tests are used to determine your eligibility for a number of work and college opportunities, it has basically institutionalized a racially biased system in which because of where you live, u could potentially have less opportunities (jobs and schooling), which has been significantly influenced by race in america. \n\n So to actually explain like you're 5, if mommy and daddy can only afford to live in a poor neighborhood, you have to to the school in the poor neighborhood, which usually means a poor school. All the kids that go to the other school get school buses , brand new books, and advanced classes but your school has no buses so you have to get up earlier and travel farther to get to school, and your books are 30 years old or you have no books, because thats all the school can afford. Then when you get a little older u'll have to take a test that will show how much you learned and that will decide what you get to be or do when you grow up. You may hear from your friends in the other schools how they have to take a class on how to pass the test or how they have had practice tests but you have heard of no such classes in your school, but thats ok because you're all taking the same test and mommy and daddy says you are just as smart as them. when you take the test, you see questions whose topics have never been brought up, or questions you simply have no answer for because you have never heard the question. You have to write a response using \"proper\" grammar on a topic you also may never have encountered. You finish the test and when the results get back you and your school have not met the standard, but your friends at the other school all passed with flying colors. Because of your scores, although you have dreamed of being a scientist your whole life and scientist school would love to take you, sadly you do not meet the requirements necessary to get in, or anywhere for that matter. While your friends have gotten accepted to the college, you're still at the same school you were before wondering how someone with almost all a's can do so bad on this test. Your friends at your school did bad too and some so bad they decided to give up on further schooling, saying, \"how can i be succesful in college when i can't even pass the tests to get in\". Now that you know what the test is like, however, you decide to take it again after finding some books and studying more, and while you know you will have a better shot the second time, in the back of your mind you're still wishing you had could have gone to that other school, where a teacher could help you figure all these complicated questions instead of buying the books and studying by yourself.",
"I am a teacher and reading specialist. I have taught sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, and I'm currently a reading specialist in a very poor, urban school district. The standardized test I have administered are definitely racially biased. I know it seems simple, but I teach first and second graders who don't know the farm animal sounds. Just reading the word *mooooooooo* or hearing it online doesn't solidify the experience for some kids. I know students are not tested until the 3rd grade, but many kids do not have a lot of background experiences needed to excel at standardized testing.\n\nFor a specific example: \nOne year, my sixth graders were asked some very specific questions about a loon. Luckily, this was when I taught in a rural district, and my students knew about loons b/c of a fifth grade teacher the previous year who loved birds. But students all over the state had to take that same test with questions about loons. \n\nI do not have a problem with standardized tests when used properly (to look at the macro - districts, curricula, etc) but I do disagree with the way we value standardized tests in the United States. Students should be assessed in many ways, and they are on a daily basis. But since NCLB was implemented, the curricula has shifted to focus on basis \"test-taking\" skills and vocabulary throughout the school year. I have seen \"data walls\" in k-5 elementary schools valuing arbitrary percentage gains instead of a love of literacy, questioning, learning, growing, exploring, etc. (I know there are also many, many great schools out there who are teaching their kids to be out in the world, but what I have experienced is that children living in poverty get the most basic, rote instruction. The kids who need it the most get the least in this country. Then they are penalized for not measuring up to an unrealistic standard.)",
"An example I've heard is based on analogy questions. If the question is asking \"Which object belongs with the cup\", and the picture is of a nice tea cup, and the possible answers are a car, a saucer, or a couch, students that don't know what a saucer looks like are more likely to pick the car (because they eat a lot of fast food and still associate the cup with any sort of drink) or the couch (because they eat dinner on the couch in from of the TV or something).",
"I also want to know why the old SATs were considered gender biased as well."
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} | train_eli5 | Why are standardized tests considered to be racially biased?
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24jpc6 | What is your "gut feeling" and why is it usually right? | I've always been curious about this | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Confirmation bias tricks you into believing your gut instinct is usually right. You often forget the times your first choice was wrong, but remember the times your gut was right all along because it is seemingly more noteworthy.",
"Unfortunately, I can't answer your exact question, but the book [Blink](_URL_0_) by Malcolm Gladwell covers the power of \"gut feelings\". It's quite a good book, and well worth a read if you're interested!",
"To explain the \"gut feeling\" part it comes down to us having what is effectively a very primitive 'second brain' in out stomachs : [SciAm link](_URL_3_). \n \nHowever when it comes to the \"usually right\" part of the question that's actually surprisingly wrong. What we humans think as \"common sense\" turns out to be very wrong much of the time. I'm not talking about things like \"that red, glowing thing is probably hot and will burn me\", but much of our analysis of the social world is incorrect. Look into the research of Kahneman and Tversky. ([Kahneman](_URL_3_) , [Tversky](_URL_3_) ). They researched heavily into how humans perceive data and it's results and found that the vast majority of the time we are either misguided in our conclusions or outright wrong.",
"For me, that gut feeling is my intuition, and has always been right. I tend to \"feel\" things long before I understand why I feel such about something. \n\nI am definitely on the introverted side, so I tend to listen more than I talk. \n\nA long while ago, I dated this woman. During the course of our relationship, her behavior sometimes made me feel this huge weight inside of my gut. An incredible feeling of dread. On the surface, it was something like her telling me she needed to go to bed. But for some reason, my gut reacted. I would then ask her - is everything OK? She would say absolutely fine! Not to worry, how she appreciates me. Still, my stomach was in knots after we hung up, and I was up the rest of the night. I told her I can't help but feel things are off with her... if she needed to talk, I was here for her. She reassured me EVERYTIME, and told me I worry too much. \n\nI did my best to ignore that pit in my stomach feeling. Kept telling myself, my mind was over thinking and my gut was wrong for no reason. That I need to trust and have faith in her. \n\nAfter a few months of this, I had this fellow give me a call out of the blue one night. No idea how he got my number or who he was, but said \"I know your girlfriend, and she is a whore. Remember when you would ask her if everything was OK when she would tell you she needed to go to bed at night? She was hanging up with you because I texted her and she'd call me for phone sex.\"\n\nThe guy was mad at her because she wouldn't commit to him, so let the cat out of the bag to me. I was devastated, heartbroken, and place any other appropriate adjective here. \n\nI learned a great deal of myself with her. The biggest lesson was to always listen to my gut and trust it. That if I feel off about something or someone, to really explore why, and never ignore it. And you know what? My gut has never been wrong. It might take a while to figure out the \"why\" part, but the feeling \"off\" part... has always been very valid for me.\n\nSo for me, my answer to this question is.... That gut feeling is my intuition, and yes, for me, it has ALWAYS been right.\n\nI'll also say that I took the MBTI, and found I was an INFJ. I found reading up on the topic gave me some more understanding of how I perceived and interpreted the world. And with being that particular combination, I put a lot of merit into my intuition, or gut feeling.",
"Not any kind of expert, but in another post I read it's because of tiny cues that the brain subconsciously picks up that sets off red flags in a situation. It's like that feeling that someone is watching you is probably because your eyes saw the person, the part of the brain that's constantly looking for danger registered the person, but your conscience mind didn't see him/her. I didn't really get it myself and I may have said that wrong but I tried",
"Read \"The Gift of Fear\" .... It's a book basically written about those \"gut feelings\". Interesting stuff.\n\nBook Link: _URL_4_"
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jixu4 | Can someone ELI5 why this water simulation works very well in a web browser, but is hardly used in video games? | Heres the link to the water simulation:
_URL_0_
It doesn't appear to use too much CPU, and looks great. Why is it that something like this works in a web browser, but is hardly ever integrated into video games?
Heres a link to where I found out about the water simulation:
_URL_1_ | explainlikeimfive | {
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"(I think this is the problem)\n\nAlthough this water simulation works awesome you have to be careful when using it on a larger project. The first thing to notice is the number of polygons or shapes used in this project.\n\nThis whole project is simply a cube and ball. This makes the program use so little cpu because there are less polygon to render (In this project there are probably less then 500 polygons) Marcus from Gears of War was around 15,000 Polygons and with enemies there could be lot more. This would increase the processing power needed and make the game run slow."
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} | train_eli5 | Can someone ELI5 why this water simulation works very well in a web browser, but is hardly used in video games?
Heres the link to the water simulation: _URL_0_ It doesn't appear to use too much CPU, and looks great. Why is it that something like this works in a web browser, but is hardly ever integrated into video games? Heres a link to where I found out about the water simulation: _URL_1_ | [
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obx56 | What is the deal with Dubai? | I feel like I've only heard of Dubai in the last five or ten years. What's the low-down on the city/country's rise to noticeability? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Oil money. Then they leveraged that oil money for credit to build up Dubai, initiating a huge slew of construction projects (islands, manmade reefs, tallest building, giant indoor skiing mountain). Some of these building projects are so ostentatious and excessive that people took notice. They have been building a Las Vegas in the Middle East (although they'd compare themselves to Singapore -- they want to be the major trading port of the ME). However, with the recession that hit in 2007, they lost a ton of money and have been unable to sell a lot of what they built. They've had to take a huge ($60bil iirc) loan from their neighboring Emirate cities.",
"Dubai won the oil lottery. Then they were like \"fuck it, lets buy all the things.\" Now they're running out of money.",
"This may not be relevant to your question, but I visited Dubai about 5 years ago and I thought it was a really strange place. There was construction everywhere. And I really mean EVERYWHERE! There were several trucks carrying sand to and from the construction sites for the man made islands. My friends went on about the crazy rich sheiks who dunno what to do with their money, the crazy laws and gender inequality. The place seemed really conservative and modern at once. A tour guide told me that the crime rate was really low. I dunno if that's true though. If it is, I'm not sure if that's cos they have shit tons of money or if it's cos they have such crazy laws that you're screwed for all eternity if you get caught doing something illegal. There's a really good article about the dark story behind Dubai. It's shocking! I can find it if you really want it. PM or respond to me if you do."
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} | train_eli5 | What is the deal with Dubai?
I feel like I've only heard of Dubai in the last five or ten years. What's the low-down on the city/country's rise to noticeability? | [
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mbjb8 | why units of time are universal across modern cultures and languages | I know that years and days are easily understood units because of astronomy, but what is the primary reason timekeeping is universally expressed in hours, minutes, and seconds? Is trade the main reason, or was there some other impetus for coordinating time and date references? What kind of fragmented systems were used in the past? How much does the adoption of the Gregorian calender play into this development? Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Probably because once the first working system was developed it was adopted and spread all over.....\n\nMost cultures will probably have time units that are derived from periodic events, like the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the movement of the planets. (I realize this is speculation, and I wish i had something to point to to prove this hunch, but I dont, sry)\n\nHowever counting these particular cycles are not uniform or standardized across any particular culture, for example the whole 2012 bullshit craze deals with an ancient calendar that uses different time units than ours. Also things like the Ke are different than seconds. \n\nThe main reason why we dont see really small time units is probably because of the difficulty of counting really small units of time with out modern technology, they could construct water clocks that are accurate to the minute, but not to the second, so they probably wont have a word for second, as they cant really express the error involved in counting a minute...(again more speculation, sorry i dont have any facts to support this)"
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} | train_eli5 | why units of time are universal across modern cultures and languages
I know that years and days are easily understood units because of astronomy, but what is the primary reason timekeeping is universally expressed in hours, minutes, and seconds? Is trade the main reason, or was there some other impetus for coordinating time and date references? What kind of fragmented systems were used in the past? How much does the adoption of the Gregorian calender play into this development? Thanks! | [
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8m8wob | How were photographs edited prior to advances in editing software? i.e. those old photographs of Stalin where people were phased out | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For that kind of thing, they literally used an actual airbrush -- which is why photo editing software has \"airbrush\" tools, and why we use the word \"airbrushing\" to mean both retouching of photos and the practice of excluding people or events from the history books.\n\nA skilled artist using a small airbrush would paint over the object that needed to be removed or manipulated. Usually it was small things like unsightly objects or skin blemishes (in fashion photography): the removal of entire human beings from photographs was rare and extreme, but as you say there are some famous examples of this during and after the Stalin era.",
"There are multiple techniques you can use for manual/\"analog\" retouching, pre-exposure (scratching, painting the negative), during exposure (exposing different parts of the photo for different lengths of time), and on the print (airbrushing, painting), to name a few.\n\nAs for the disappeared persons in Soviet photos: they were airbrushed away."
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} | train_eli5 | How were photographs edited prior to advances in editing software? i.e. those old photographs of Stalin where people were phased out
[removed] | [
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1mdayz | Why are realistic CGI movies so expensive to produce? | Why do movies like avatar, where it's heavily CGI'ed, cost so much to produce? It's much more expensive than movies that use physical props. Where do the chunk of the budget go into? Animators? Actors? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As with most things expensive; it's difficult, it takes time and it requires a lot of resources.\n\nFor one scene of CGI it might be months of work behind it, with everything from motion capture actors (so you need to do everything you would need to actually film the scene but with even more things needed than normal), scrubbing of the motion capture data, creating all the 3D models, painting or creating textures and mattes, staging it over and over again until it's to everybody's liking, hours of rendering and then painstakingly handcrafted finishing polish to create the last touches.",
"Virtual props can be very expensive. Animating weird alien creatures is probably one of the most expensive thing since you can't use real animals as a template. It needs a lot of man hours to look just remotely believable. Thats why most movies save money by using creatures with some kind of easy locomotion eg magical wingless flight.",
"It's lots and lots of man hours to animate CGI like that."
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} | train_eli5 | Why are realistic CGI movies so expensive to produce?
Why do movies like avatar, where it's heavily CGI'ed, cost so much to produce? It's much more expensive than movies that use physical props. Where do the chunk of the budget go into? Animators? Actors? | [
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j6slx | Why Germany decided to go Nuclear-free | I remember reading about it post-Japan tsunami/earthquake. Is that really why? Seemed kind of ridiculous considering it's in a rather seismically inactive part of the world, but there's probably more reasoning behind it than that. So yeah, ELI5. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, although Germany is not as seismically active as say Japan, there is seismic activity there which can be a cause for concern.\n\nOverall, I would say Germany made the decision because there is a strong environmental movement in Germany. Germany has already started building wind farms and is big on solar technology both because they are a technological and industrial powerhouse. Germany already had a law on the books to phase out nuclear energy until the lifespans of the nuclear reactors were lengthened by the current government. The lengthening of reactor lifespans was highly controversial here with a huge segment of the population being unhappy about it. When Fukushima happened, the government made an about-face on their plans. Since the reactor life extension was already unpopular the government figured it could try to save face.\n\nAs to why the anti-nuclear movement in Germany is so large, there's a simple answer. Chernobyl. When Chernobyl exploded the radioactive cloud went right over Germany and Europe triggering the movement."
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} | train_eli5 | Why Germany decided to go Nuclear-free
I remember reading about it post-Japan tsunami/earthquake. Is that really why? Seemed kind of ridiculous considering it's in a rather seismically inactive part of the world, but there's probably more reasoning behind it than that. So yeah, ELI5. | [
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3cz89b | Do I come in contact with any radiation from the microwave if I put my hand in it to take something out as soon as the timer sounds (as opposed to waiting a few more seconds)? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Short Answer: No. \n\nLong Answer: **\"Microwaves generated in microwave ovens cease to exist once the electrical power is turned off. They do not remain in the food when the power is turned off. They do not make the food or the oven radioactive.\"**\n\nThe [microwave oven](_URL_1_) acts like a [Faraday Cage](_URL_0_), meaning that any microwave radiation does not leak out of the cage unless the microwave is defective (e.g. door won't close). However, modern microwaves won't even run if the door isn't properly shut unless you tamper with it. Essentially, the microwave is perfectly safe until you purposely tamper with it in order to make it unsafe. \"Direct microwave exposure is not generally possible, as microwaves emitted by the source in a microwave oven are confined in the oven by the material out of which the oven is constructed. Furthermore, ovens are equipped with redundant safety interlocks, which remove power from the magnetron if the door is opened. This safety mechanism is required by United States federal regulations. Tests have shown confinement of the microwaves in commercially available ovens to be so nearly universal as to make routine testing unnecessary.\"\n\nMoreover, microwave radiation is **non-ionizing** which means that it **does not** penetrate cells and it **does not** harm DNA. In other words it does not cause genetic DNA mutations and does not cause cancer. This is unlike **ionizing** radiation which **does** penetrate cells and **does** mutate DNA causing cancer. Common forms of ionizing radiation are gamma, x-ray, and UVA/UVB. \"The radiation produced by a microwave oven is non-ionizing. It therefore does not have the cancer risks associated with ionizing radiation such as X-rays and high-energy particles. Long-term rodent studies to assess cancer risk have so far failed to identify any carcinogenicity from 2.45 GHz microwave radiation even with chronic exposure levels (i.e. large fraction of life span) far larger than humans are likely to encounter from any leaking ovens. However, with the oven door open, the radiation may cause damage by heating. Every microwave oven sold has a protective interlock so that it cannot be run when the door is open or improperly latched.\"\n\nThis means you are at a *much* higher risk when walking outside being exposed to the UVA/UVB radiation emitted from the sun than you will ever be from a microwave in your house. So put on your sunscreen. \n\nEdit: clarity",
"I am curious of this too. My Microwave is broken and occasionally turns on with the door open. Is the radiation emitted like a lightbulb where it shoots in all directions or is it a straight flow of waves?"
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"url": []
} | {
"url": [
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} | train_eli5 | Do I come in contact with any radiation from the microwave if I put my hand in it to take something out as soon as the timer sounds (as opposed to waiting a few more seconds)?
| [
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34spvw | Why is there muscle strength loss after surgery? | I'm 2 weeks removed from arthroscopic rotator cuff surgery to repair some partially torn ligaments. I get that I no longer have all of the flexibility in the tendons and need to re-stretch stuff, but where did all my shoulder muscles strength go? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fun fact muscles are always in decline. Muscle cells are always dying off, body is always consuming mcules for energy. But the body replaces that if you use them, if not, body doesn't have a need to replace \"damaged\" muscles. Hence the loss of strength. As soon as you start using them, the strenght returns.",
"The body slowly eats away muscle tissue for energy and muscle cells die and are removed. \nBecause you aren't using the muscles there is nothing to trigger the growth of new muscle tissue so it \"wastes away \""
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} | train_eli5 | Why is there muscle strength loss after surgery?
I'm 2 weeks removed from arthroscopic rotator cuff surgery to repair some partially torn ligaments. I get that I no longer have all of the flexibility in the tendons and need to re-stretch stuff, but where did all my shoulder muscles strength go? | [
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4junxa | Why we sleep at night instead of during the daytime? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"While many mammals turned nocturnal during the age of dinosaurs, modern primates have turned diurnal for probably a lot of reasons. \n- Most importantly we don't have very dominant diurnal predators anymore. \n- Early primates learned to live out the night in the trees which offered some protection from nocturnal predators. (incidentally, this is the theory of why we sometimes spasm or jerk ourselves out of sleep, it's a holdover instinct from our tree dwelling days to keep us from falling out of trees while unprepared for sleep) \n- We don't have to compete with nocturnal predators. \n- Our food is easier to see during the daytime (as are our enemies and potential mates) \n- Primate eyes are specialized to work better in daylight as opposed to some mammals who have made compromises, i.e. the cat's tapetum lucidum which allows their eyes to collect far more light than our eyes (their eyes sort of reflect light back through the retina twice, which is why their eyes appear to glow at night) but hinders image resolution a bit. Mammals lost most of their color vision during the age of dinosaurs but we gained a lot back pretty quickly. Still tho we are far behind the visual acuity of birds, who made it through the KT extinction with a massive head start on daytime vision, although to be fair we don't need the same acuity they need. Primates are one of the few mammal groups that can see red because it helps us identify ripe and nutritious food. At night anyone's color vision is shit \n- We have relatively efficient thermoregulation methods and can weather heat relatively well. \n\nSo for these and probably many other reasons (other will probably list more) may as well sleep when it's dark.",
"There may be others out there who can explain this better than me, but I believe this is the general gist...\n\nHumans are weak in areas that allow many other species to excel during the night (night time vision, heightened sense of smell and hearing). Being awake and moving during the day allows us to more effectively forage for food, detect predators and recognize our surroundings.\n\nAt nighttime, when our senses are less helpful, we find a safe place to rest.",
"Try going out in the middle of the night in the forest, what can you actually do?\n\nNot much, except for waiting for the daylight (so while waiting, why not take the opportunity to restore your power by sleeping?). We have developed to use our eyes as the most important senses, few animals if any have better eyes than us (some birds have a higher resolving power at the center than us, but on the other hand they can't more their eyeballs, so not even they have strictly better sight than us), while many animals have other senses more developed than ours.\n\nVision obviously requires light, so we would be handicapping ourselves a lot by deciding to be active during the night and sleep at daytime.\n\nToday we can obviously use artificial light to operate at night time, but relying on that is still a handicap compared to being active at daytime.",
"We don't all sleep at night.I worked 42 years on rotating shifts,and no you don't get used to it,your body won't let you."
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} | train_eli5 | Why we sleep at night instead of during the daytime?
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1sfgte | Why do we lose our voices when we yell or scream a lot? | What happens to your vocal cords that causes this? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Just an anatomy clarification, your whole voice box isn't actually a muscle. It's a fold of tissue. There are the false vocal cords, and then the true ones. What happens is air passes through these folds and the true ones vibrate to make sound. Now when you scream you actually make the surrounding tissue swell up and become inflamed which hinders the vibration of the vocal folds.\nSource: 10 credits undergrad of anatomy and psychology."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do we lose our voices when we yell or scream a lot?
What happens to your vocal cords that causes this? | [
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1ddyar | Why is polygamy illegal and considered bad form? | I'm rather confused by this... | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Polygamy is bad news for a few reasons. It isn't illegal all over the world. And there are parts of the US where it is underground. In the US, those areas have an alarming number of teenage boys who are cast out of their homes and communities. The older males see them as competition for the younger women. There are orphanages/homes in Utah, Arizona,etc... dedicated to these lost boys. You'll also get teenage girls who run from home when they know they may be forced into an arranged polygamist marriage. \n\nIn the Middle East, many countries allow polygamy. And,like in those areas of the US, they have an over-abundance of young,unmarried men. And statistics tell you that a lot of unmarried, unemployed young men leads to spikes in crime. These young men will often acquire a very skewed image of women as well from their growing frustrations.\n\n Older men have the money for multiple wives. And the rich guys aren't going for cougars. They go for the younger women. Polygamy, in one sense, is a way for richer,older men to produce more offspring. And, often in these cultures, women have little say in joining into such relationships. Their families often force it on them because they see the rich guy as potentially helping their own family. And if a woman wants out? Good luck. When a woman in some of these polygamist cultures becomes too old, unattractive, can't have kids,etc... She is forced to become a glorified nanny/housekeeper to the younger women and children.",
"Stripping away any moral or religious aspects marriage is a wonderful thing two people do to get a host of legal benefits. Things like tax breaks, joint bank accounts, hospital visitation etc. If you had more than one spouse these legal benefits could get really confusing really fast, so legal polygamy remains illegal.\n\nThat said you are free to, live with as many women / men as you want, have kids with them etc. Thats not illegal, but you only get one leal marriage.",
"In theory, there is nothing around with it.\n\nIn practice, it is typically only seen in male dominated societies to provide the powerful males with a steady stream of young wives, while driving the unmarried males to do anything to acquire a wife.",
"You are allowed to date, have sex with, fall in love, have children with, etc, any number of people. \n\nMarriage as a legal institution is just limited to two people."
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} | train_eli5 | Why is polygamy illegal and considered bad form?
I'm rather confused by this... | [
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62y82t | When the BBC show Sharks says that Tiger Sharks return to the same place on the same day every year, how would a shark know how long a year is? Do they perceive time like we do? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"How do you know a year has passed without looking at a calendar? I imagine they sense the temperature/climate changes like anything else."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
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} | {
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} | train_eli5 | When the BBC show Sharks says that Tiger Sharks return to the same place on the same day every year, how would a shark know how long a year is? Do they perceive time like we do?
| [
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1pt3w6 | What is the difference between copyright and all rights reserved? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Copyright is a legal concept. When something says \"copyright\" or has the (C) designation on it, the creator is claiming the work to be origingal and that they hold exclusive rights to its use.\n\nA claim of copyright is usually followed by a statement of what the copyright holder will or will not allow others to do with that copyrighted material and that they are prepared to defend it in court.\n\n The phrase \"All rights reserved\", is the most common of these statements because it is brief and unambiguous. It essentially means \"We the copyright holder do not permit any unauthorized use (distribution, performance, creation of derivative works) of this material\". It also implies that you can expect a call from a lawyer or two if you violate their copyright."
],
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} | {
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} | train_eli5 | What is the difference between copyright and all rights reserved?
| [
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usm41 | Why is an indirect election system in the US President elections a good idea? | I might be using the terminology wrong, so I'll elaborate: if I understand correctly regular people in every state vote for the electors and they vote for their candidate (I know they technically don't have to, but let's drop this point for simplicity). So votes in every state get lumped together and candidates mostly focus on swing states.
1. Why is this system good? That is as opposed to a proportional system that wouldn't allow situations like the one in 2000 happen. What are the advantages?
2. A slightly different question: why did the guys who installed this system chose it?
3. If it's not good why is it there?
4. What would it take to change it?
5. Is this kind of change a realistic thing to expect? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The electoral system was put in place as a sort of check against a truly unqualified candidate being elected. The founding fathers feared that the government and country could be undermined by such a president, and so allowed electors to switch their vote if necessary.\n\nIt made sense when the laws were first being written, as there were no parties to speak of at the birth of the nation (remember, George Washington ran under no party). There was no primary process written into the Constitution, and so no preliminary vetting of the candidates.\n\nThe most realistic and likely path to changing it is a \"electors pledged to the popular vote\" movement. Each state gets to set its own rules as far as how electors are regulated. That is why Maine and Kansas have each district's electoral vote go to the district's winner, as opposed to most states in which the statewide winner gets all of the state's electoral votes. Under the proposed change, the state's electoral votes would go to the popular, nationwide vote winner. If enough states representing more than half of all electoral votes adopted this system, it would mean that the popular vote winner would be (nearly) guaranteed to win the presidency, regardless of which states they won.",
"Our current system was chosen so high population states don't gang up on low population states. So someone doesn't get elected on a \"Send all the criminals to Wyoming\" platform. Cause that's not really fair to Wyomingites (TIL!). So they give smaller states a disproportional, but still small, advantage to make up for their lack of population.\n\nIs it good? Depends on who you talk to. Obviously people from Wyoming, Alaska, Rhode Island, and North Dakota are going to favor the system. But someone in California or New York's vote is going to count for President only a faction of someone from Wyoming and would likely be rightfully upset.\n\nYou would need a Constitutional amendment to change the rule. There is, however, the [National Popular Vote Interstate Compact](_URL_0_). It won't change the rules, but if they can get enough states to comprise 271 Electoral Votes to join it, all those states have pledged their delegates to the National Popular Vote winner, so it would change the system in effect, though not in writing.\n\nImportant to note, though, this will likely never happen or if it did, likely wouldn't be stable. A state would likely overturn their membership in the compact the second their guy lost because of it.",
"The main thing to understand is that citizens don't vote for president. **States** vote for president. \n\nEach state is allowed to come up with it's own system to decide how to cast that state's vote for president. It just so happens that all of the states have chosen to use public elections to decide how to direct the state's vote."
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
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} | train_eli5 | Why is an indirect election system in the US President elections a good idea?
I might be using the terminology wrong, so I'll elaborate: if I understand correctly regular people in every state vote for the electors and they vote for their candidate (I know they technically don't have to, but let's drop this point for simplicity). So votes in every state get lumped together and candidates mostly focus on swing states. 1. Why is this system good? That is as opposed to a proportional system that wouldn't allow situations like the one in 2000 happen. What are the advantages? 2. A slightly different question: why did the guys who installed this system chose it? 3. If it's not good why is it there? 4. What would it take to change it? 5. Is this kind of change a realistic thing to expect? | [
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7xaieg | What is the most likely way the universe will end? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"We don't know for sure, but the prevailing theory is [heat death](_URL_0_).\n\nBasically, every single particle of matter will eventually decay into thermal energy. Since thermal energy is only useful when there are differences in temperature, eventually the temperature will even out across the universe and it will not facilitate any interactions.",
"I’ve understood that heat death of the universe is the most likely of the outcomes. Time, space, and the universe are constantly expanding outward, and the indication of the Big Bang is it’s eventually a long term explosion that will expand so far the universe will be “too cold” to function as it will be too big for the amount of energy left"
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
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} | train_eli5 | What is the most likely way the universe will end?
[removed] | [
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1k01f3 | What is a brainfreeze and how does it happen? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It occurs when the roof of your mouth gets cold. It cools a nerve in that area which constricts blood vessels."
],
"score": [
3
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What is a brainfreeze and how does it happen?
| [
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8fo8c7 | How do cows and buffalos build muscles while eating mostly grass? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Grass actually does have a surprising amount of protein in it. But humans can't digest grass, it takes far longer to digest than it stays in our systems for. Enter ruminants, animals, like cows, that are able to digest grass due to their unique multi-stomach structure that allows them to get the nutritional content out of it.",
"They have a sophisticated digestive system that can crack the dense cellulose armor that plant cells are protected with to access all the nutrients.\n\nThey can also synthesize a more complete set of amino acids.\n\nHumans evolved a more generalist diet and don't have that ability."
],
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4,
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How do cows and buffalos build muscles while eating mostly grass?
[removed] | [
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39f2i0 | Before someone invented scissors (no, it wasn't Leonardo DaVinci), how did people cut their hair and fingernails? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"With long nails, you can pare off slivers of nail with the edge of the knife (try to cut away from the finger.) When your nails are shorter, you can shave the nail by holding the blade perpendicular to the edge of the nail and dragging it along the length of the nail. This leaves fairly sharp edges that you can buff smooth by rubbing them against rough cloth, like denim.\n\nNails don't necessarily need to be trimmed though - if you've ever just let them grow until you have 4-5mm of white, they start to wear down much faster.\n\nHair can be cut by grasping a clump of it, and sawing through it with a knife; or you could just shave it off.",
"I normally wouldn't do this, I would just summarize the info for you, but I think you may find some of this very interesting. The [wiki page](_URL_0_) about the history of hairstyling has some interesting info, like: \n \n > In Bronze Age razors were known and in use by some men, but not on a daily basis since the procedure was rather unpleasant and required resharpening of the tool which reduced its endurance.",
"Depends on where in the world. Some native people in the amazon have used piranha jaws to cut hair. Knife against a wood board to cut hair. \n\nFor nails, the folks at /r/askhistorians already answered this question.\n\n_URL_1_",
"Teeth are pretty good at trimming nails down in a pinch, granted, they'll probably be janky and require some smoothing, but you could probably use a stone or other abrasive substance for that.",
"Just a guess, but I would think razors for cutting hair. Seems like normal wear and tear would keep nails short, but biting them has probably worked handily for thousands of years."
],
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairstyle#Prehistory_and_history",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uhvu0/how_did_people_cut_their_nails_before_the_nail/"
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} | train_eli5 | Before someone invented scissors (no, it wasn't Leonardo DaVinci), how did people cut their hair and fingernails?
| [
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1jbdrq | Would it be possible to create liquid wood in a vacuum? | I understand that it is an organic material but so is skin and that can melt cant it? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cbcz37t",
"cbcz1gy"
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"text": [
"Not everything can melt. Many materials being to break down from heat before it ever reaches liquid phase; this process is called [pyrolysis](_URL_0_). Wood is one such example.",
"Short answer no.\n\nTo create a liquid you need high temperatures and/or low pressures. For wood and many other substances and room temp the pressure literly cant go low enouh to turn it into a liquid or gas.\n\nSo what about high temperatures, for wood and many plastics and other complicated organic material, before the temperature goes high enough that it should melt it will start to burn, or other chemical reaction will take place within the material."
],
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} | {
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} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis"
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} | train_eli5 | Would it be possible to create liquid wood in a vacuum?
I understand that it is an organic material but so is skin and that can melt cant it? | [
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2goro8 | how does counting cards in blackjack work? What steps do casinos take to render card counting hard to do? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"At its simplest, card counting is just keeping track of how many 10's and face cards (all worth 10) are left in the deck, vs. how many lower cards. This lets you gauge the odds on each particular bet a little better, and if done perfectly, can give you a slight edge over the casino.\n\nCasinos have a lot of ways to make it tough to do. First of all, dealers and especially pit bosses are trained to recognize if someone is placing suspect bets and winning more often than they should. \n\nActually, the last time I was in Vegas, at Treasure Island, a player at my table wanted to double down on a 13, with a $80 bet at a $10 minimum table. The pit boss had to be called to approve the bet, and they sure kept an eye on him for a while afterwards, even though he busted. I think he was just messing around and having some high-stakes fun, but casinos don't play games (ha!).\n\nAdd to that the fact that most tables use 4 or more decks to make it harder to keep an accurate count, frequent reshuffles, and the ever-present cameras to catch people making cues to their confederates... it's tough to do well enough to reliably win with.",
"A blackjack player has an advantage when there are more 10's and A's in a deck. Why? Because if they bet $10, and win a regular hand, they win $10 (they get $20 back). But, if they win by a \"Blackjack\", which is an A and a 10 on their first two cards, they win $15, collecting $25. So the purpose of card counting is to find opportunities to temporarily increase their bet when the odds are in their favor.\n\nSo the odds improve when there are high numbers of A's and 10's in the deck. So while you are playing, if you notice high numbers of non-10's and A's being dealt, then you know that your odds are getting better. If you are seeing lots of 10's and A's, your advantage is dropping.\n\nIn your local casino gift shop, you might find a 'basic strategy' card, usually the size of a credit card, that has a computer generated list of whether it is best to hit, stand, double down or split a hand. You might be surprised that you can use these cards at the table - 'perfect' play is not enough to overcome the natural house advantage.\n\nBut through counting, you might also find ways to *modify* the basic strategy. For example, you have a two card 7, and the house is showing a 5. Normally, you would hit this hand. But, if you know that a lot of 10's are coming, you might be more likely to double down. The house is more likely to have 15, your single card on the double down is most likely going to take you to 17, and then the house will draw a card, which will likely be a 10, so the house busts. So using counting in this manner also helps cut the house edge.\n\nThe simplest weapon that casinos use to fight this is by using a large deck. If you count that there are two 'extra 10's' in the deck, your advantage is bigger than the regular house advantage if there is about one deck of cards remaining. But today's casinos not only use an eight deck 'shoe', but they also shuffle the deck before there are that few cards remaining. So even if you do have an advantage, it's slight, and not enough to overcome the house advantage very often.\n\nAnother key weapon is supervision - blackjack dealers are trained to watch bet patterns, and they might even be 'counting along' with you. If you try to increase your bet, they might call a supervisor (a 'pit boss') to watch your play. If your play is deemed to be suspicious, US casinos have the right to bar you from playing, and arrest you if you return. Oh, by the way, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to hear that security cameras ('eyes in the sky') are watching every play you make, and scanning/analysing each hand you play, and automatically detecting possible counting patterns, and communicating with the pit boss.\n\nThe casinos can also tweak the rules of their games, modifying the handicap of the player. Some casinos only allow doubling down when a player has a 10 or 11 (you lose the choice when your hand is 9 or lower). Some casinos have the house hit on a 'soft 17' or an Ace-6, instead of simply standing on all 17's.",
"The rules of black jack require the dealer to follow a rule (house hits on anything below a hard or soft 17, for example). Because of this rule, decks with more low cards (cards that will not bust any hand that the house must hit on) are favorable to the house and unfavorable to the player, while 10s are favorable to the player and unfavorable to the house. \n\nBy counting the number of each and adjusting the potential of the remaining cards to be drawn as favorable or unfavorable, a savvy player can vary bets (betting minimal amounts when the deck/count is unfavorable and betting large amounts when the deck is favorable). \n\nSo most pit bosses are looking for players whose bets vary widely (and the strategy becomes ways to vary bets without doing so obviously or having a non-strategic reason to vary bets).\n\nIn addition to baring players, casinos use multi deck shoes and early shuffles to prevent the advantages from shifting too significantly."
],
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"url": []
} | train_eli5 | how does counting cards in blackjack work? What steps do casinos take to render card counting hard to do?
| [
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1uppyo | How do massive cold fronts, like the one being experienced in America right now, occur? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cekgi97",
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],
"text": [
"The cold front that is being experienced by the United States and Canada right now is known as a polar vortex. Polar vortexes are strong winds found in the upper level of the atmosphere that normally stay over the north pole. On occasion the vortex can be distorted, causing cold air to spill to the south. \n\n[Source](_URL_0_)",
"[NPR had a pretty good explanation](_URL_1_) -- basically, you've got high pressure air to the west, high pressure to the east, and in between the cold arctic air. The arctic air is getting squeezed by the two systems on each side, and when you squeeze something it has to squirt out somewhere. The arctic air is getting squirted out all over the US this time."
],
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} | {
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"url": []
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"url": [
"http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/06/us/polar-vortex-explained/",
"http://www.npr.org/2014/01/06/260265148/powerful-polar-vortex-makes-rare-appearance-in-u-s"
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} | train_eli5 | How do massive cold fronts, like the one being experienced in America right now, occur?
| [
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23mt4v | How is it possible for someone to survive riding in the wheel well of a jet at 36,000 feet for several hours? | With the cold temps and lack of oxygen I just don't get what happens to allow the person to survive it. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Like most of the stories going, he entered a staye of hibernation. This is possible. Ive heard stories of people being trapped underwater in subfreezing temps but what happens is the body keeps only the vitals alive. Ive heard of this with infants who fall into pools occasionally they survive with no damage. I wouldnt test this though.",
"I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but I had a theory while talking with my dad.\n\nI wondered if higher pressure from beneath the wings, or ram air pressure from high speed flight entering gaps in the landing gear doors, created a semi pressurized cavity out of the wheel well. Even if it only lowered the pressure altitude inside to 25,000 feet, it could have aided in keeping enough oxygen in his blood to support life.\n\nIt would be easy enough to test. Send one up with a recording altimeter tucked in the wheel well."
],
"score": [
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2
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How is it possible for someone to survive riding in the wheel well of a jet at 36,000 feet for several hours?
With the cold temps and lack of oxygen I just don't get what happens to allow the person to survive it. | [
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21fahf | What's a neckbeard? The person, not the beard. (I know what a beard on the neck looks like.) | How do I recognize a true neckbeard in the wild? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The general implication is that the person acts superior or overly-critical towards others, yet their poor personal hygiene shows that they don't apply the same standards for themselves. \n\nThey may act like their STEM degree qualifies them as an authority on every subject under the sun, yet just by looking at them you can tell they are oblivious to certain topics."
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What's a neckbeard? The person, not the beard. (I know what a beard on the neck looks like.)
How do I recognize a true neckbeard in the wild? | [
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7ol67v | What causes the itchy irritation on your butt from feces? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dsaa6ar"
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"text": [
"You see, when poop gets a bit old, it becomes crusty. So if you don’t clean your ass after you shat, the poop that remains on your butt remains there and becomes crusty, kind of like blood. \n\nThe reason it’s itchy would be because of friction. When. You walk the crust moves as well, tickling your butt as you move. \n\nSource: avid pooper for 20 years"
],
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} | {
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} | train_eli5 | What causes the itchy irritation on your butt from feces?
[removed] | [
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3o8im9 | Why is practically everything made in China? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"China has lower average wages, no unions, and much lower environmental standards so it's significantly cheaper to manufacture goods there."
],
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} | {
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why is practically everything made in China?
| [
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2muiwp | Why aren't Discover/American Express accepted every where cards are? Don't they all work in the same way? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Every time a credit card is used, the business has to pay the credit card company for the convenience of the service. For the merchants, it's a complex matter; they ideally don't want to accept credit cards at all, but many customers wouldn't shop there because the customer's card isn't accepted.\n\nEach merchant has to decide which credit cards to accept, based on how much each company charges and how many customers they would potentially lose by *not* accepting a certain type of card.",
"They charge the business more to accept payments in them. But they also give more benefits to the users so lots of people cary them"
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} | train_eli5 | Why aren't Discover/American Express accepted every where cards are? Don't they all work in the same way?
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4qxdtx | Why is the word "no" so similar across languages around the world, but "yes" so different? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, two answers for you.\n\n1. A solid third of the world has the same root language, what we call Proto-Indo-European or PIE. The people spread out into Europe, much of the Middle East and the Indus River Valley and China. Though these became linguistically distinct regions over time they began many thousands of years ago with the same-ish tongue so it would make sense if there remains a few passing similarities still between them.\n\n2. That not withstanding, your premise is demonstrably false. Yes there are some languages with a similar \"no\", mostly those who share a Latin or Germanic origin. But they are easily the minority. \n\n[Have a look at the diverse ways people say \"no\" across the world.](_URL_0_)",
"Assuming we are mostly talking about the Romance languages, \"no\" seems to have derived from Latin's \"non\" which means \"not\", which comes from PIE's \"ne\". Latin popularized this particular negator when other languages were born from it such as Spanish, French, etc. \n\nLatin did not have a word for \"yes\". They would use things like \"ita vero\" which essentially translates to \"thus, truly\" or \"thus, it is the truth\". Latin's daughter languages didn't inherit a word for \"yes\" so I'm assuming they either borrowed one from a neighboring language or created one.",
"It's not really. I'm in a situation where I code switch between Japanese and English a lot and the difference between \"yeah\" and \"iya\" can get confusing.",
"in thailand they say *mai* to negate everything. \n\n- mai chai = > no yes\n- mai dai = > no can\n- mai au = > no want\n\neasy language ;)",
"I guess it would be the same only for Indo European languages due to their common origins.\n\nI speak a Dravidian (South Indian) language (Tamil) where the word for No is \"Illai\" and Yes is \"Aam\".",
"The words for mother and father often share similar sounds- mother having an O/M sound, and father having a hard P/B sound",
"I wish saying no was that simple in Canadian. We'ce basically got three ways, and theyre all long.\n\n\"Yeah sure (but you mean no, and were too polite to decline\"\n\n\"No thank you, sorry, sorry\" (likely the most used)\n\n\"Fack off ya fackin hoser\" (when displaying anger. Likely followed by a \"sorry\" just to be safe)",
"In Japanese \"no\" phonetically is \"eeyeh\" and \"yes\" is \"hai\". Seems straight forward enough until you see the casual versions: Un and Uun for yes and no.",
"That moment when \"ne\" in Greek means \"yes\". While \"ne\"(short of nein) in German means \"no\"."
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1udm54 | Can I identify a body's sex by examining its bare skeleton? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The key areas to look on skeletons to determine sex is (1) the pelvis and (2) the skull. The pelvis is by far the best area of the body to determine sex. If the pelvis leaves you with questions, the skull can help further determine sex. (Note: prior to puberty, male and female pelvises have more male characteristics and will require more support from other areas of the body. In many cases, it will be nearly impossible to determine sex with 100% certainty on a prepubescent skeleton. At best only degrees of certainty can be determined.) A female's pelvis is wider to support a baby and flatter. Females also have a wider sciatic notch and their pelvic inlet is round while the male pelvic inlet is heart shaped. The female sacrum is also wide and short while the male sacrum is long and narrow. The subpubic angle of males is V-shaped while the female has a less steep U-shaped angel. If the pelvis still leaves you with questions, the skull is an excellent place to reaffirm or deny your hypothesis. Male skulls tend to be bigger and more rugged while females have smaller, smoother skulls. Next look at the brow ridge. The male brow ridge is rounded and pronounced while the female is less pronounced or even none existent. The male jaw is typically larger and angular with a wider chin. The female jaw has less pronounced angles and a more pointed chin. The mastoid process of the male is more pronounced while female is less so. Many men also possess a nuchal crest at the base of the occipital bone of the skull while females do not. \nOther areas to further determine sex (but with a much smaller degree of certainty) are the length of long bones, joint size, and intercoastal ribs. Again, one would not typically use these to positively identify sex and these should only be used as the supporting evidence, not definitive evidence.",
"Yes.\n\nOne notable difference is that the female pelvis is a lot wider than the male by proportion since it has to support pregnancy.",
"About 80 gajillion years ago, I took a human osteology class and this was something we learned to do. IIRC, it wasn't that hard once we learned it, though I doubt I could do it without a refresher these days. \n\nAs Kavaeric said, the pelvis is the key, but it should be noted that you can't determine sex in children. Girls' pelvises don't start to widen until puberty, so depending on age, it may be impossible. But if you have an adult skeleton, I believe a trained person can be about 90% accurate based on the pelvis. \n\nI seem to recall that there are other things you can look at as well if you don't have an intact pelvis, but I don't recall what they are (though I do remember that they aren't as accurate)."
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3mqqbg | What are the limits of contracts? What can I sneak into a contract or a terms of service? | Dear all,
I am wondering what the principled limits of contracts are. For examples, let's take Facebook. Whenever anyone registers on Facebook, they have to press "accept" to a set of terms.
What are the limits to these terms? For example, could Facebook sneak in clauses like the following? What determines whether a clause is enforceable?
1. "By registering, you agree that Facebook has the right to come to your home every other month and take up to five belongings from you, no matter their value."
2. "By registering, you agree that employees of Facebook may kill you at any time."
3. "By registering, every piece of data you post to Facebook becomes the property of Facebook, such that Facebook has full rights over these assets (e.g., text, photos, information, etc.) and can do anything with them as Facebook pleases, include selling them, pasting them on billboards for all to see, etc."
Intuitively, I would think that no court would uphold these clauses. But in principle, ought they, if courts are supposed to uphold agreements?
Thank you! (Also, it can be ELI75!) | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I assume there's no question here about whether the person meant to click or sign themselves up for Facebook. Rather, someone read the terms of service and said \"okay\" and clicked.\"\n\nYou can't contract to do anything illegal. That's never enforceable in court. Other than that, it's pretty context specific. Courts look for what's call \"unconscionability.\" Basically, that just means something is so incredibly unfair that it would unconscionable to enforce it. What makes something that unfair isn't exactly clear. Factors such as the bargaining power between the parties to the contract, the sophistication of the parties, and the reasonableness of the terms of the contract. Therefore, the fact that Facebook is a very sophisticated entity and holds pretty much all the bargaining power in determining whether you can use their site or not will likely matter.\n\nHere's some language about unconscionability from an opinion from the Supreme Court of Texas:\n\n > A contract is unenforceable if, \"given the parties' general commercial background and the commercial needs of the particular trade or case, the clause involved is so one-sided that it is unconscionable under the circumstances existing when the parties made the contract.\" Unconscionability is to be determined in light of a variety of factors, which aim to prevent oppression and unfair surprise; in general, a contract will be found unconscionable if it is grossly one-sided. Although not subject to precise doctrinal definition, unconscionability -- as delineated by the above principles -- has been recognized and applied by this Court for well over a century.\n\n*In re Poly-America, L.P.*, 262 S. W. 3d 337, 348 (Tex. 2008) (internal citations omitted).\n\nAs for your examples, the first one, while not illegal (you have the right to give your stuff away), clearly creates an unequal exchange since it can be any item at any value. The second is illegal so it would be unenforceable for that reason. The third one would be unenforceable in the sense that you upload a lot of stuff to Facebook that you don't have the rights to, so that wouldn't suddenly give Facebook the rights, but it might otherwise be enforceable. You upload something to Facebook, you agree to allow them to use it. That would probably depend on prior precedent, how clear the term in the contract was, etc. If this were a written contract you signed and mailed in I would guess that it would be enforced, but contracts of adhesion (take it or leave it contracts, such as ones where you have to accept the terms of service) are usually scrutinized more.",
"This depends a *lot* on the jurisdiction (in the US, it varies between states), on the specific clauses, and on the nature of the contract. If you were doing actual negotiation, the terms were specifically brought to your attention, and you agreed, that's more likely to be upheld then if it's a checkbox saying \"agree to predefined terms\"; companies with big legal departments are more likely to be held to the contract than individuals negotiating with them.\n\nIn general, a court will *never* enforce a contract against the law or against public policy. Your clause (2) is both; it is a crime to commit murder, and consent is no defense to that crime. If a contract is illegal or against public policy, it doesn't matter how it was negotiated, it's still not allowed. \n\nCourts in the US will also generally not uphold \"unconscionable\" contracts (that's the actual term), which are basically contracts that are so ridiculously unfair that there's no possible way one side actually agreed to it knowing what it contained. This is where the way the contract was made mattered; if you have two companies whose legal departments spend a week hashing out a term, that term is probably not unconscionable because they clearly *did* understand it. However, in Facebook's case, no consumer would expect the terms of use to give them the right to take your physical property every month, so (1) would likely be unenforceable. Term (1) might be allowed in *some* cases (like if there is a significant payment tied to it), but certainly not in a website terms of use that isn't negotiated.\n\nTerm (3) is trickier: copyright assignment is a perfectly legitimate thing in general, and it *might* well be in a ToS. Some places have laws that wouldn't allow Facebook to do whatever they want with your data, on privacy grounds. This would overrule any contract, *if* that country's the one whose law applies (like if you live there, and sue Facebook there). Likewise, countries may or may not allow copyright assignment if you don't clearly know that's what you're doing. It depends.",
"Disclaimer: I am Not A Lawyer, I am Not Your Lawyer, and This Is Not Legal Advice.\n\nIn common-law jurisdictions (the United States, Great Britain, etcetera) there is a standard enshrined in case law called the *Reasonable Person Standard*.\n\nThis standard holds that clauses of contracts are not enforceable if a *reasonable person* would not expect them to be a part of the contract — which means that no-one can articulate a reason for that clause to be a part of the contract.\n\nThere is no way that requiring you to hold harmless a Facebook employee for killing you could have a reason to exist in a contract for use of their service. There is no reason that can be articulated for requiring you to the specific performance of the act of being Bill Gates' towelboy. There *is* an articulable reason in copyright law as to why you would be required to grant Facebook a non-exclusive, universal, non-terminating *license* to reproduce and sub-license for certain purposes the content you transmit over their service, while you retain the copyrights; there is no articulable reason for them to require you to surrender your copyrights, but it is also legally impossible for them to legally store, transmit, and reproduce your status updates and photos without that license.\n\nDoes that answer your question?",
"Contract law isn't quite as nailed down as some other parts of law.\n\nContracts cannot contain something illegal, no \"By signing this I own your first born child.\" type stuff.\n\nA contract between two parties who are both knowledgeable about the contract terms and subject can be pretty wide open.\n\nHowever there is something called a \"reasonableness test\", i.e. would a reasonable person who knew about this clause be OK with it. This is used for things where one side has more power/knowledge like with a EULA or insurance or something."
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} | train_eli5 | What are the limits of contracts? What can I sneak into a contract or a terms of service?
Dear all, I am wondering what the principled limits of contracts are. For examples, let's take Facebook. Whenever anyone registers on Facebook, they have to press "accept" to a set of terms. What are the limits to these terms? For example, could Facebook sneak in clauses like the following? What determines whether a clause is enforceable? 1. "By registering, you agree that Facebook has the right to come to your home every other month and take up to five belongings from you, no matter their value." 2. "By registering, you agree that employees of Facebook may kill you at any time." 3. "By registering, every piece of data you post to Facebook becomes the property of Facebook, such that Facebook has full rights over these assets (e.g., text, photos, information, etc.) and can do anything with them as Facebook pleases, include selling them, pasting them on billboards for all to see, etc." Intuitively, I would think that no court would uphold these clauses. But in principle, ought they, if courts are supposed to uphold agreements? Thank you! (Also, it can be ELI75!) | [
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jgeuc | Fuels? What does it take to create gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc and how do they differ? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basically they all start from the oil we pump out of the ground.All of these things are inside that oil. We then heat the oil in a large tube that has many different levels. As the oil heats up all the different parts become a gas at different temperatures and they settle in the level where the temperature is cool enough for them to become a liquid again.Heres a picture _URL_0_\nthey differ by the the amount of heat(energy) produced when they are burnt"
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} | train_eli5 | Fuels? What does it take to create gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc and how do they differ?
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rk4fb | The top used Internet Browsers and how they're different. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As you may know, internet pages are written with HTML and various other languages. A nice analogy is to consider a web page as a museum. Let me explain.\n\nThe HTML is the architecture of the building itself. It's the building blocks of the page that tell you what things are and what they do. Using HTML, you give the browser data about what the page actually contains.\n\nCSS is the paintings, or galleries, or whatever makes the museum appealing. CSS makes web pages look good. Without CSS, most if not all modern websites would look absolutely horrible. Just like a museum would just be a big empty building without its exhibits.\n\nJavaScript is the museum curators. They let the guests experience the museum, and customize their experience. Similarly, all the interactive elements of websites (show/hide buttons, upvotes, etc) are JavaScript. \n\nPHP is the workers of the museum. They keep everything going behind the scenes. PHP runs on the server and updates things like databases, just as a worker would change the museum (put in new exhibits, build expansions, etc).\n\nNow, how does this relate to browsers? Well, a web page is just a file full of code. It's the browser's job to display this to you, the end user. In the early days of the internet, there wasn't much to display. Especially before CSS, most pages looked the same no matter how they were displayed and fairly bland. However, now, there is new technology; CSS3 has nice gradients, for example, and HTML5 has video and audio elements (you have probably seen Youtube's new HTML5 player at some point). The browsers have to update in order to work with these new forms of old technology, and they don't all do it the same. Most browsers don't even support all of it, and there's a website (I can't remember it now) which will tell you what browsers support what facets of HTML5 and CSS3.\n\nTL;DR: They all display pages differently and support different web technology.",
"Please don't shoot me, but I'd say Wikipedia's [article](_URL_0_) is fairly informative for this topic.",
"Today, they aren't all that different. But back in the day...\n\nBasically the world would agree to something. Like \" < strike > A WORD < /strike > \" should display as ~~A WORD~~.\n\nAnd then Microsoft was like 'Fuck this party, < strike > should make a section ignore all padding rules, blink like a disco ball, and shit on a bible.'. Thus was born IE6. \n\nThen, Satan got jealous, because IE6 was way more evil than he was. So he went back in time and invented Hitler to restore his dominance over all things evil. \n\nThen came along Firefox, who was like that dude nailed to 2x4's, and was all 'Welcome to awesomeness'. And people rejoiced. They could view websites as the authors intended, instead of how Microsoft thought they should (which, it turns out, was shitty and without JPEG transparency). \n\nAnd then about 70% of the world quit using Internet Explorer. \n\n**The END**.",
"After Netscape died, IE had almost no competition and Microsoft took the opportunity to do... pretty much nothing with it for years as it got more and more outdated. IE is probably fine now but it's playing catchup and nobody trusts it. It also used to do a lot of things in nonstandard (or outright buggy) ways so web developers hate it.\n\nIn the later days of Netscape they started an open source project called Mozilla which was the foundation of the last couple of Netscape versions. Firefox is a stripped down and improved branch of that project which was a big deal because IE was both dominant and stagnant in the early 2000s. Firefox has a lot of support for plugins and customization.\n\nChrome has fancy Google magic, is part of evil Google world domination plot. It's more minimalistic than Firefox and has been pretty aggressive about technological improvement.\n\nSafari is only a major browser on one platform obviously and isn't really exceptional for much right now except that it fits in with Apple design and interface conventions. Interestingly, Chrome is based on Apple's (open source) WebKit, just as Safari is."
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} | train_eli5 | The top used Internet Browsers and how they're different.
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3njn98 | Why does marijuana make you paranoid? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It has to do with the way THC interacts with your amygdala. Which is the part of your brain responsible for fear feelings."
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3tn288 | What is it that prevents Xbox games from being played on a PlayStation but yet allows people to play music CDs on either? | I have little knowledge on how cds work and was just curious. I imagine it's the CDs wanting a command or something that isn't found in that software like run .Xbox which doesn't exist on PlayStation. Thanks for any answers! | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Xbox and PlayStation are very different animals, just like a dog and a cat are very different animals. They have some similarities - 4 legs, 2 eyes, good pets - but internally they are different beasts. Their internal plumbing is different, even when you pull them apart and you notice strong similarities, you also notice they're not exactly alike. In Xbox vs PlayStation this is called the \"hardware\".\n\nCats and dogs also speak a different language. Your cat won't bark and your dog won't meow, and I suspect a cat doesn't really understand most of what a dog is saying when it barks. Xbox games are written in Xbox language and PlayStation games are written in PlayStation language. PlayStation simply doesn't understand the language of the Xbox, and vice versa. In Xbox vs PlayStation this is called the \"software\".\n \nHowever you can train a pet to understand human words and perform tricks. Dogs are obviously much better than cats at being trained, but something simple like playing an Audio CD is an easy trick so both the Xbox and PlayStation have learned that one. That's a language they both understand.\n\nYou can teach Xbox and PlayStation to understand other languages with \"emulators\". This allows them to understand the words of other animals like SNES and Commodore. However this needs a lot of brain power, and just like dogs and cats aren't very smart, neither are Xboxs and PlayStation, so they can only learn older (simpler) languages.",
"Games are a series of instructions for the device to follow. A Playstation can read the instructions from an Xbox disc just fine, but it doesn't understand them. A music CD just contains data. A program already on the console (written so that the console understands it) contains the instructions on how to interpret that data.",
"It has to do with the OS and less to do with the hardware. When you put in a game, all the console is doing is reading what is stored on the disk from the optical drive (just like when you put a CD into a CD player). But the companies have explicitly designed the consoles Operating System to be proprietary, so when an Xbox disk is inserted the OS only has permission talk to the Xbox coded disk , and vice versa with Sony. Truthfully, their graphics processors and systems aren't all that different when you look at the cold hard specs. But the OS is the biggest distinguishing factor that makes them incompatible from being read properly. This means Developers for games will have to code the disks differently at the end of the day so that the game can talk to the system properly. The only reason you can also insert a DVD or CD, is because Microsoft also built the OS to be able to read from those inputs as well."
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} | train_eli5 | What is it that prevents Xbox games from being played on a PlayStation but yet allows people to play music CDs on either?
I have little knowledge on how cds work and was just curious. I imagine it's the CDs wanting a command or something that isn't found in that software like run .Xbox which doesn't exist on PlayStation. Thanks for any answers! | [
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5euxfd | Why do creators keep their upcoming projects/products secret until release? | Youtubers, filmmakers, businesspeople etc.
I guess the explanation lies with types of promotion, but I would love a response from an expert. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One of the aspects that you may not have considered is that a huge number of projects that people work on *never get released*. They turn out not to be as interesting as the creator hoped, or there's no enough of a budget, or there are creative differences with other people involved, etc. And it's not good practice to announce something that you're working on if it might never actually happen, so a lot of creators will wait until it's almost finished and the release is a sure thing.",
"I would also mention that from a marketing perspective, keeping things secret let's you control the story when you do release it. You don't gain much by announcing something just for the sake of announcing it. If it will be newsworthy when you admit what you're up to, you want to somehow leverage that news to get something out of it before it becomes old news. E.g. If I'm an artist working in a new album, I want to maybe release one song while announcing that the album is coming out so that the news of the new album might drive interest in the song too.",
"The other answers so far seem good. There are lots of other reasons too. For example, if your project is revolutionary in some way, just mentioning the project could give competitors the information they need to build the thing before you can launch, which is highly relevant for business opportunities that have a first mover advantage."
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Youtubers, filmmakers, businesspeople etc. I guess the explanation lies with types of promotion, but I would love a response from an expert. | [
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1t6xl2 | The bitcoin crash going on right now. | Seeing a lot of threads pop up about the Bitcoin crash, and all I know is that it lost half it's value. I'm browsing through the subreddit and one of the post is a suicide hotline.. Can someone please explain to me why it's so bad? Thanks.
edit:Wow, the front page.. never expected it to get this popular. Still overwhelmed by the amount of replies I got. Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Bitcoin is only worth as much as people *think* it's worth. The Chinese shut down Bitcoin trade in their country, which makes the Bitcoin inherently less valuable (why would you use a currency that can't be traded everywhere?)\n\nThe crash happened because Bitcoin is a volatile currency. There isn't a lot of it out there, and people who have bought Bitcoin tend to follow the news very closely. When the bad news came out, lots of people started selling their Bitcoins, and the price consequently went down rapidly.\n\nIt's worth noting that the value of a Bitcoin is down to where it was last month - while this seems like a dramatic drop, it's par for the course. This is a good example of why Bitcoin is a risky investment.",
"Bitcoin blew up in value over the past year, and a big part of that growth was from China. China has strict limits on how much money it allows to leave the country; Bitcoin offered citizens a back door to get large sums of money out while remaining relatively anonymous. \n\nChina (the people, not the country) started buying large amounts of Bitcoin, pumping up the value, and creating a speculative bubble in the market. \n\nThis created a bubble and in regards to currency, a \"deflationary spiral.\" A deflationary spiral is a theory that people become more reluctant to spend money that is rising in value. For economies that depend heavily on people consuming products and services, it can hurt the economy if people want to hold rather than spend, because spending is what pays employees salaries.\n\nThe problem for Bitcoin is that this is a very new currency, and as a percentage of the world economy, it accounts for a minuscule amount of the transactions that take place. How much is a Bitcoin worth at Walmart, or on _URL_1_? Nothing, until they start accepting it as a form of payment.\n\nBitcoin was created to protect against the inherent risk in holding fiat currencies, the risk that the people who control that currency aren't trustworthy. The U.S. Dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government. Before 1971, it was backed by a representative amount of gold. Despite not having gold-backing, people still believe the currency has value because it can be exchanged for goods or other currencies without significant losses on a weekly or even yearly basis. However, if you look at historical examples, like the Weimar Republic, or Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe, currencies can lose immense amounts of value in very short periods of time.\n\nHell, people used to get paid multiple times a day in some eras, because their currency would drop in value that quickly.\n\nBitcoin is a revolutionary payment system. It uses the collective computing power connected to the Bitcoin network to process \"blocks\" of information that verify transactions. This is to ensure Suzy (not Suze) can't send the same money to two different people, like Habib and Joseph. It also allows people to transfer money to each other with minimal transaction costs.\n\nHowever, if there is nowhere to spend Bitcoins, it's difficult to make the case that it's a currency. The fact that it uses algorithms, or has a limited supply doesn't give it as much value as peoples' belief in it as a currency.\n\nAlso, there is a big risk in holding Bitcoins, because if you get robbed (like Sheep Marketplace), there is almost no way to get your money back. Once a transaction has taken place, the only way to reverse that transaction is by getting the initial receiver to initiate or accept to a reverse of the payment.\n\nThat's a huge risk, because if your password isn't secure, or you're subject to a phishing attack, you could lose all your Bitcoins and be left with nothing but your tears of unfathomable sadness. \n\nMy personal opinion is that this risk, along with the skirting of strict capital controls, is a major reason China was the first to restrict their financial companies from dealing in Bitcoin. Other countries felt the need to issue their own opinions, and that seed of doubt grew.\n\n(Pure speculation)Apple recently stopped authorizing Bitcoin apps, because I assume they're concerned that someone will see them as being liable for their losses.\n\nAs with any speculative bubble, it only lasts until people start to doubt the value of what they're buying, whether that's Tulips or _URL_0_ stock. \n\nWhomever bought Bitcoin at $1,200 likely believed it was going to rise in value. The person who bought Bitcoin at $900 a day later may have felt the same thing. As the price continued to drop, they may have changed their minds and sold to cut their losses.\n\nAs with any market, you need a buyer and a seller for a transaction to occur, and there continue to be more sellers than buyers at the most recent market prices. \n\nBitcoin will likely continue to fall until it finds enough people to support its value. After that, who knows. Being original is a huge benefit, but large price fluctuations in a downward manner will inhibit more merchants from jumping on the train. \n\nIf merchants start losing significant sales because they don't accept Bitcoin, they'll start adopting it in droves, but right now most people are holding onto it to make money, like U.S. Dollars, rather than spending it at local retailers.\n\nAnybody who wonders why the Chinese selling Bitcoin would affect other markets should look up \"arbitrage.\" \n\nTl;dr It's a bubble. China told it's financial companies \"no more Bitcoin for you,\" warned its citizens about the risk, and people started selling. People who bought because it was going up, sold because it was going down. \n\nEdit: grammar and shit",
"[This image](_URL_2_) of an economic bubble pretty much resembles [the value of a Bitcoin over the last year](_URL_3_). We may be heading to the 'Despair' stage",
"Bitcoin value is heavily dependent on its utility. It has no underlying commodity that gives it any real value.\n\nIf Bitcoin has no utility (e.g. cannot be easily bought or sold) its basically useless. A lot of its value right now comes from hype over its utility and the nature of its supply/demand (limited supply, lots of demand thanks to hype). \n\nChina decided 'fuck bitcoin' and effectively killed its utility there. This caused a massive amount of instability - not only does it set precedent for Bitcoin being banned from other countries, thereby reducing its utility, it also removed a lot of the demand/hype, which further reduced its value.\n\nSome people bought into bitcoin when it was worth $1,000, even though many users (like /u/FruityCockJuice or the entirety of /r/investing) warned of the dangers of what is essentially a highly volatile currency. Now its worth half that, so if you bought $1,000 of bitcoin, now its worth 1/2 of that. I imagine a lot of the merchants who recently decided to accept bitcoins are fuming. That OC Lambo dealer is probably feeling a little green in the gills knowing the 200K worth of bitcoins they had a week ago is now worth 100K. *edit* /u/Fraum notes that the dealer converted to dollars at the time. Had they not, and tried to hold onto the bitcoins hoping for a rise in value, they would be fucked. Which is another reason why Bitcoins is not a stable currency - you don't want to have a currency that can lose 50% of its value in a day.\n\nEdit: /u/FruityCockJuice 's post was deleted, but I've reproduced it here for the sake of record:\n\n > I called this two days ago. But I got downvoted for it.\nBitcoin is not a tangible currency. It is too unstable to bother with. If you do, it is a big mistake.\nIt's a problem because it circumvents conventional means of trade. It is equal to buying and selling with dark matter.",
"Bitcoin is an unregulated pump-and-dump scheme that has taken in a lot of people who like the idea of an anonymous digital currency.\n\nThe most recent crash came due to Chinese authorities announcing that they were barring Chinese banks from making bitcoin transactions. The same day, the Bank of France issued its own warning about the potential risks.\n\nI'm sure some folks will disagree, but by definition bitcoin is a P & D scheme. It was designed so that the mining system gives better rewards to early users than latecomers for the same effort. The early adopters have more bitcoins than anyone else ever will. \n\nIn fact, 47 individuals own 28.9% of the approximately 12 million Bitcoins in existence so far, and another 880 own 21.5%. This means that 927 people (out of a few million) control half of the entire market cap of bitcoin.",
"_URL_4_\n\nBasically the yellow line is the average value but you can open during the morning at the average value and at noon be selling at double the price and by the end of the day it's back down to the average.\n\nSo what the green and red in the graph is showing is the donchian channel which shows the instability in the price. The wider the channel the more unstable and risky the investment becomes.\n\nSo if you look at March 2013 there's lots of red with people selling as the price goes up but for whatever reason people are buying but soon as the green shows up you basically are seeing the beginning of the crash and basically it's then people not buying as strongly and the channel widened which made it unstable. \n\nSo really when you look at the most recent spike the channel is very wide and that just means a crash was certain.",
"i have a question. \n\nfrom my understanding, correct me if i'm wrong, the incentive for people to mine lies in getting bitcoins, in exchange they provide the service of validating every transaction in the bitcoin market, allowing the system to exist.\n\nAs time makes it less and less profitable to keep on farming and therefor sustaining the system, what keeps the system from failing? can it survive with a relatively low userbase? can it work independently from its users?",
"Its funny how some people seem surprised when the value has gone from 200 usd to 1100 usd in less than one month. Not very hard to believe then that many of those who trade to make dollars from it will sell as soon as the peak starts to dip a bit too much. I would say that anything above 300usd is still a good profit from those 200 usd since nov 1.",
"So is now a good time to buy? I know it's volatile, but surely there are more people who will buy when things get ironed out. I've never bought stock or invested in anything, so I probably won't, but if I were to buy, now is the time, right?",
"I unloaded some of my Bitcoin when it was at it's peak. Good thing. I kept a lot of it because even now at half value, it's worth a thousand times more than I got it for. Like the stock market, it'll go up and it'll go down.",
"and can someone elaborate on why the Chinese would want to shut down bitcoin trading?",
"Bitcoin is a bet, at long odds with a big payoff. If it becomes the next gold, it'll be hugely valuable. If it doesn't, it won't.\n\nSo, the value today of bitcoins depends on what people think the chance is that it's the future of money. Remember, we're talking about very small chances.\n\nLet's put some numbers in for an example. Let's say that, if bitcoin wins, it's worth $1,000,000. Then if it has a 1-in-1000 chance, it's worth $1000. If that chance drops to 1-in-10,000, it's worth $100 again. If it leaps up to 1-in-100, the price will go to $10,000. And if some big news means the smart money starts to think bitcoin has a 50% chance of being a million dollar win, the price will shoot up towards $500,000.\n\nWhen prices are based on this sort of thinking, even a sensible estimate of the genuine underlying value can move very fast.\n\nOf course, in real life, it's worse than that. People are terrible at estimating very low probabilities - a thousand to one and a million to one look more or less the same to a person. So most of the money in bitcoin is not based on a sensible estimate of its underlying value. People base their personal valuation on things like what it sold for yesterday, what they paid for it, and whether or not they're feeling optimistic just now about the future of magic internet money. This can often mean that, if the price starts to shift, the very fact that the price is shifting can cause the price to shift more, and the market becomes even more unstable."
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} | train_eli5 | The bitcoin crash going on right now.
Seeing a lot of threads pop up about the Bitcoin crash, and all I know is that it lost half it's value. I'm browsing through the subreddit and one of the post is a suicide hotline.. Can someone please explain to me why it's so bad? Thanks. edit:Wow, the front page.. never expected it to get this popular. Still overwhelmed by the amount of replies I got. Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. | [
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66vy2r | Why are Xeon processors better suited for server applications than mainstream CPUs? | Just curious what makes them better... | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Xeon processors allow you to use ECC (Error-correcting code) memory. This is crucial in servers because it allows the memory to self correct data corruption in most instances.\n\nIt also provides more virtualization functionality which is common in servers today. \n\nOn top of these two major differences they also allow for multiple CPUs in the same workstation and generally come in higher core counts which is beneficial to a server doing many tasks.",
"Along with support for ECC memory, Xeon processors are \"certified\" by Intel to produce mathematically consistent and correct results. Your home budget spreadsheet will be ok if the 32nd decimal place of a one time calculation is incorrect. But, it your a High-Frequency Trader making millions on stock transactions, then any minute calculation error will be very expensive over time. Some Xeons that fail certification become i7 processors.",
"For one, you can run several of them together on the same motherboard. We have a server at my workplace that has 64 CPUs. Also, higher core counts (up to 16), larger cache, and support for error-correcting memory.",
"In addition to the other answers here they also typically have more level 1 cache memory than desktop processors. L1 cache helps speed up context switching.",
"\"Server\" changes over time in enterprise environments. It used to mean a very high power dedicated machine. But today it might just as well mean a very high powered VMware environment running virtual servers. \n\nThe Xeon has a few things going for it that make it suitable for enterprise server or vm environments. \n\nIt has a lot of cores which allows for extensive multitasking or multithreaded application support. VM environments can also assign dedicated CPU cores to a particular virtual machine. \n\nIt has a large amount of on board L1, L2, and L3 cache to speed up memory access which helps servers with high input and output IOPS requirements. And it supports ECC memory which is a kind of RAM with built in parity checking that prevents errors and crashes caused by radiation and electromagnetic noise altering memory values. Basically it's RAM that will keep accurate values in all conditions. Normal desktop computers use non ECC memory and if a random neutron goes zipping through a memory chip and changes a 0 to a 1 it can cause corruption or a system crash. It's rare, but when you need 99.99% up time vs 99% uptime it's worth it. \n\nLastly, the number of PCIx lanes and northbridge functions allow Xeons to support very high input output operations a second (IOPS) with high speed access to multiple high performance RAID arrays, network adapters running anywhere from 1GBPS to 10GBPS, as well as multiple processor setups where a motherboard accepts 2 or more Xeon processors together. \n\nXeon chips also support a slightly different instruction set than say an I7 desktop processor. This allows it to more efficiently execute common commands you might find in an enterprise Linux environment or VMware ESXI environment. \n\nOne of the products I work on at my job has 16 to 32 cores and it's mission critical function is very high network, disk, and memory IOPS. The Xeon chips help it to achieve this with high bandwidth dedicated PCI express lanes, fast memory access and caching, and multiple cores allow threading of child processes to individual cores. Like 2 cores keep the database clean, 4 run DB queries, 2 handle GUI rendering, etc.",
"In finance applications software are compiled knowing the exact processor they will run on. You have the luxury to make program that is efficient or run only on one processor/os. Even less than 1% gain in speed could be what make a trading app of one bank win over another.\nXeon have many strong points for them. You could choose more frequency or more cache because of large choices of models. They have instructions set like AVX-512 that are available only on Xeon or years before. \nFor every day computing where software are made to work on low end to i7, xeons don't shine, but on specific application you could have 10% (better cache or freq) to 500% or more ( avx parallel computing, more core...)."
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} | train_eli5 | Why are Xeon processors better suited for server applications than mainstream CPUs?
Just curious what makes them better... | [
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2gx185 | Why is it okay for Girls to Wear Guys' Clothes, but When Guys Wear Girls' Clothes, Its Weird? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's just a social thing. There's not really logic behind it - there was a time when women wearing men's clothes was just as odd as a man wearing woman's is today.",
"there are practical reasons for women to wear pants which helped to move society toward accepting it.",
"Girls wearing men's clothes is seen as taking a step up, so it's tolerated or even encouraged. Boys wearing women's clothes is seen as taking a step down, so it's punished. Sexism at work.",
"In pre-European contact, Thai men wore skirts/saris while women wore pants. \"King Chulalongkorn (or Rama V) ascended the throne as king of Siam in 1868. King Chulalongkorn; himself educated by westerners, was intent on reforming the monarchy along western lines...\" He made the Thai people eat with forks and spoons (not chopsticks)m and made the men dress like women, and women dress like men, as they did in England. It's a matter of culture.",
"Blah blah society blah blah gender roles blah.\n\nBut mostly, women's clothes are way too uncomfortable and inconvenient for most men to wear.\n\nNot speaking from experience, of course.....\n\nSeriously though, Women's Fashion Designers, stop making your products pseudo-torture devices and *maybe* you'd find yourself a new market......",
"Because in our culture masculinity is paramount, and dressing in women's clothing is seen as forfeiting that.",
"It's 2014 dude, it's not weird for anyone to wear anything (or nothing)",
"Depends on what sub-culture you fit in with, here in Portland OR wearing girls pants is in!",
"Because female clothes are usually fitted, tight and guys clothes are loose and baggy.",
"I actually used to be (still am) really skinny, so much so I would wear xtra large womens jackets because I thought they looked good, and they did."
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} | train_eli5 | Why is it okay for Girls to Wear Guys' Clothes, but When Guys Wear Girls' Clothes, Its Weird?
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3gxbxi | What causes the noises that come from the walls and ceiling in my house? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Heat makes things expand, and cooling down makes them contract.\n\nSo it is parts of your house rubbing against other parts and settling.. \n\nYou are most likely to hear it at night when you are usually lying quietly in bed. Perhaps also since things fall back into position, giving a thump.\n\nOr you have pests or someone is squatting in your attic.",
"Im not very good with explanations, but it basically has to do with the house expanding and contracting when the temperature fluctuates. So the materials of the house seem to \"pop\" and \"twist\" making the noises you hear. When the temperature gets colder things shrink, during the heat of the day in direct sunlight they expand some",
"not entirely sure, but possibly a combination of dirt moving below the foundation, andwood expanding and contracting. or it could be a family member walking around, or a ghost",
"Ghosts!\n\nHaha but in all seriousness this looks like a pretty good source of info for ya _URL_0_\n\nP.S. sorry if this isn't good reddiquette I noob"
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} | train_eli5 | What causes the noises that come from the walls and ceiling in my house?
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1elwvo | Why do companies release update products at least every year? even when they don't change much from last year'd models. | It seems like its a market requirement that products have to be constantly updated, instead of only doing that when the new model makes a big enough difference.
For example: cars. I think updating car models every year and discounting last year's model hurts manufacturers, because car technology doesn't change and improve as fast as say samrtphones. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because people generally think newer things are better. So even if they *aren't*, you've got to release new things, or your competitors can get your market share by selling a new model.",
"Depends on the product in question. Sometimes, as others have pointed out, it's a question of just wanting to appear new. Sometimes there is a purpose. TurboTax releases a new version each year because they've updated for the changes made to the tax code. Sports games release a new version each year to reflect the changes in the teams' lineups. Now, you could argue that in both cases they could just make the changes as a patch to last year's version, but when you've got a set-up that makes you money you don't mess with it.",
"Money and image:\n\n - People want to have the latest things so they can show off to their friends.\n - Companies make a new one every year knowing that people will want to buy it (because it's the latest thing)."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do companies release update products at least every year? even when they don't change much from last year'd models.
It seems like its a market requirement that products have to be constantly updated, instead of only doing that when the new model makes a big enough difference. For example: cars. I think updating car models every year and discounting last year's model hurts manufacturers, because car technology doesn't change and improve as fast as say samrtphones. | [
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4an3oe | Monkeys reacting to Magic tricks, are they really understanding what is happening? Or does it only look that way? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If they see ball \"go inside\" a palm and then disappear I bet they understand it well. But have them pick a card, memorize it, put it back into the deck and shuffle thoroughly and then find the same card inside their wallet and I bet they didn't understand what had happened.",
"Is there any place where I can find a collection of these videos? I find them hilarious."
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} | train_eli5 | Monkeys reacting to Magic tricks, are they really understanding what is happening? Or does it only look that way?
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68r1lk | What would happen in the minutes, hours, and days following a nuclear attack? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That depends on so many factors. It would take over 20 minutes before the first warnings to the first bomb lands. In addition it would require some checking and double checking to make sure this was a real attack. There would be no time to evacuate but citizens would be asked to take cover as best they could. There is very advanced missile defense systems which would be able to take out most of the nuclear missiles. The president would be given different options. Even if there is a first nuclear attack sending nuclear missiles back might not be the best option. Or at least limit the response to not be overly aggressive. Because of the vast distances of our planet and the difference readiness states of the missile systems a complete nuclear war would stretch out for hours.\n\nWhere the bombs have hit there will have been massive devastation. However the surrounding areas would not be that bad to begin with. Shock waves will get weaker the longer away from the center they are and will also be directed upwards into the atmosphere by buildings and hills. The radioactivity levels will not be deadly either. Modern bombs are designed to get as much energy as possible into making an explosion so any accidental isotopes is a failure in the bombs design. That is not to say there will be no radiation but it will not be as bad as some people might imagine. Going to the site of the Chernobyl reactor would be more dangerous then in the newly formed crater from a nuclear bomb.\n\nIf significant amount of warheads will have been detonated the added particles to the atmosphere would cause some problems. This can vary from radioactive downpoor to completely changed climate.",
"[Get a copy of Threads](_URL_0_) (which is also on youtube, although possibly not legally so I won't link it)\n\nThere have been countless studies into the effects post strike around the world. The most comprehensive British study was used to create the movie Threads, which is kinda the gold standard ELI5 for this (but takes 1:50 to watch so I won't repeat it here)\n\nIt's pretty fucking depressing. The ELI2 is that nuclear attacks are A Bad Thing and to be avoided",
"Depends if it's a single explosion in a shipping container in some coastal city or a full-scale bombardment between developed nations. \n\nThe full scale attack is simply... well... a whole different scale. A single sneaky terrorist action or a lucky tin-pot dictator could really devastate a big city with a fission bomb... but not destroy it. A full scale attack with the big-H mofos would end the world as we know it. (But not as much as it could between 1960 and 1990, we've simply gotten rid of a lot of nukes). Take a look at [The nuke map](_URL_1_) to get a sense of scale about how big various nuclear explosions are. \n\nOne fission bomb in LA:\n\nMinutes: The explosion is over. 10,000's dead, 100,000's injured. Lots of fire and smoke. Broken windows all the way across the city, but the fireball doesn't reach downtown. People probably think it's an earthquake in Santa Monica, but there are enough cellphones running at any given time around L.A. that it's on the news with video. Everyone knows what a mushroom cloud means.\n\nHours: The resulting fires are probably a problem. Likewise radiation. Fallout, radioactive dust and ash, rains down and makes trouble for a good portion of LA. There's likely panic and L.A. traffic actually manages to get worse. Look at the newsfeeds right after the 9/11 attacks if you want to get a sense for how the media reacts to tragedy. Things will be politically \"tense\". \n\nDays: The fires are probably out. The panic is likely STILL a problem. FEMA is likely tripping over itself to try and organize relief. By now the humanitarian issues like water, food, and medical aid are a problem, but the rest of the nation will step up and help out. We get to see a lot of people die of radiation sickness. We've probably invaded or bombed somewhere by now. \n\nFull scale nuclear attack:\n\nA lot like the single bomb, but most people in most cities are dead or doomed. Fallout is a big problem for nearly everyone, even out in the wilderness. There is no aid or organized relief effort because that got bombed too. There's little to no infrastructure remaining. Life... doesn't end. There simply aren't enough bombs to blanket the WHOLE world. The resulting nuclear winter, from the soot blacking out the sun, would spell bad times for everyone though, but that's months to years afterwards. \n\nIt's a world-ending event. Not to be taken lightly."
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/",
"https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/"
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} | train_eli5 | What would happen in the minutes, hours, and days following a nuclear attack?
[removed] | [
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4gjelk | What is the reason for tasting pennies when you become winded? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It could be that the exertion results in some minor amount of blood leakage (which is not likely to be harmful), say through tissues dried in your upper respiratory tract by the extra hard inhaling you're doing. \n\nBlood can result in a metallic taste because it contains iron. This can be similar to the taste you would perceive from a penny, even though the metals differ.",
"Are you asking about physically putting pennies in your mouth, or just the taste in your mouth resembling the taste of a penny?"
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} | train_eli5 | What is the reason for tasting pennies when you become winded?
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3gxe4y | if it was 1926...loan question | So if it was BEFORE computers, when they only had paper files of everything, and took out a loan for a house or etc... And the bank burnt to the ground one night... Would there be any record of my loan? Would I get away with a free house? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When Pretty Boy Floyd use to rob banks one of the things he took was peoples mortgages so the banks would have no record of them.",
"You have a legally binding agreement with the bank by virtue of making an agreement. All the paperwork is just evidence of that agreement.\n\nBetween witness accounts and gov't records, it wouldn't be difficult to show you had a mortgage with the bank. A court would likely enforce this, but with the most plausibly favorable terms.",
"Well-run banks would keep a duplicate of the most important records. But if all two or three copies were stolen -- or if no copies were made -- the information was indeed completely lost.",
"At some point, mortgages and deeds were recorded in the county courthouses. What's in the computer now isn't what governs the property loans...it's the information stored in public records.",
"How would you get a free house if there was no paperwork to show who owned the house in question?"
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} | train_eli5 | if it was 1926...loan question
So if it was BEFORE computers, when they only had paper files of everything, and took out a loan for a house or etc... And the bank burnt to the ground one night... Would there be any record of my loan? Would I get away with a free house? | [
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1yo1rm | Adverse possesion or, squatters rights. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Depending on the jurisdiction, if you occupy land in an obvious and overt fashion for an extended period of time (like, forty years) without being challenged by the owner, you BECOME the owner."
],
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} | train_eli5 | Adverse possesion or, squatters rights.
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13vwbo | Reformatting a Hard Drive? | How does it erase the information so much quicker then just deleting it?
What is actually going on when you reformat it? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So, your hard drive stores data as a series of 1's and 0's. So, what does it mean to delete something? Well, you could just set all of the bits to 0. That would effectively delete it. But, as you noted, that would take a long time for the entire hard drive because you'd have to touch every single bit on the disk and set it to 0.\n\nIt turns out there's an easier way. At the beginning of the disk is a special file called the file allocation table. This is a list of all of the files on the disk and where they are located. So, you might have \"resume.doc\" and it starts at bit 8,547,980 and takes up 100,000 bits. That data is stored in the FAT. When Windows wants to find resume.doc it looks up where it is stored in the FAT and then goes to that location on the hard drive.\n\nIf you wipe out the FAT then the location of all of your files goes missing. The table is now empty and every bit is considered available for use. The files are still technically there, but your computer doesn't know where to find them. If you're not too concerned about security this is a very fast way to delete all files on your hard drive."
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} | train_eli5 | Reformatting a Hard Drive?
How does it erase the information so much quicker then just deleting it? What is actually going on when you reformat it? | [
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8l305c | How are weather balloons deployed so that they do not pose a risk to commercial air traffic? | Given the fact that weather balloons are frequently deployed to obtain critical measurements for making more accurate weather forecasts, how do pertinent governmental agencies ensure that they do not pose a risk to commercial air traffic where there is a likelihood that a collision/impact with these balloons may take place? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a suggestion that the local air traffic controllers be notified of the intended launch of a high altitude balloon so its presence is known, but the more relevant regulations regard the content of the payload. There are limits on the total weight and density of the payload, as well as the separation force of the payload from the balloon. The intent of those regulations is that on the exceedingly low chance that such a balloon would be struck by an aircraft it wouldn't cause any significant damage.\n\nRemember that the sky is very large and there aren't really that many aircraft in flight. Hitting a weather balloon by accident is just an incredibly remote chance; far more likely is hitting a bird of which there are quite a few. If the payload is roughly the size and weight of a crow then a commercial jet engine would deal with it in much the same way it would the crow, namely going \"Nom nom nom!\" and not really caring.",
"The balloons go much higher than aircraft. Still, there is a risk when the balloon is on its way up or down, even though it's a very small risk. Generally, a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) is issued for the launch. Most weather balloons are launched on a regular schedule, though some high-risk days may necessitate additional launches.",
"A typical airliner might cruise at an altitude of ~30,000 ft. Weather balloons will rise to an altitude of ~50,000 ft up to ~120,000 ft. Whenever a launch takes place the FAA (assuming we're talking about the US) would be notified and airspace can be restricted to avoid collision.\n\nThey're really quite far apart.",
"In the US - local ATC has to be notified, often there will be a aviators notice given. They want the balloon to 60,000 feet as soon as it can get there - the FAA wants you to tell them how fast it'll get to 60,000\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\"(a) Prelaunch notice: Except as provided in paragraph (b) of this section, no person may operate an unmanned free balloon unless, within 6 to 24 hours before beginning the operation, he gives the following information to the FAA ATC facility that is nearest to the place of intended operation:\n\n(1) The balloon identification.\n\n(2) The estimated date and time of launching, amended as necessary to remain within plus or minus 30 minutes.\n\n(3) The location of the launching site.\n\n(4) The cruising altitude.\n\n(5) The forecast trajectory and estimated time to cruising altitude or 60,000 feet standard pressure altitude, whichever is lower.\n\n(6) The length and diameter of the balloon, length of the suspension device, weight of the payload, and length of the trailing antenna.\n\n(7) The duration of flight.\n\n(8) The forecast time and location of impact with the surface of the earth.\n\n(b) For solar or cosmic disturbance investigations involving a critical time element, the information in paragraph (a) of this section shall be given within 30 minutes to 24 hours before beginning the operation.\n\n(c) Cancellation notice: If the operation is canceled, the person who intended to conduct the operation shall immediately notify the nearest FAA ATC facility.\n\n(d) Launch notice: Each person operating an unmanned free balloon shall notify the nearest FAA or military ATC facility of the launch time immediately after the balloon is launched.\""
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} | train_eli5 | How are weather balloons deployed so that they do not pose a risk to commercial air traffic?
Given the fact that weather balloons are frequently deployed to obtain critical measurements for making more accurate weather forecasts, how do pertinent governmental agencies ensure that they do not pose a risk to commercial air traffic where there is a likelihood that a collision/impact with these balloons may take place? | [
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6osc3p | what are spectral lines and how do we use them to determine what light has passed? | I'm reading the new Neil Degrasse Tyson book and I'm really quite interested in the subject now. I've learned quite a lot. But I don't understand what happens when you look closer at prism light | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you direct light through a prism, you can spread it out and look at all the different frequencies it's composed of.\n\nIf you look very closely, you'll notice that certain frequencies are [\"missing\"](_URL_0_) (or at least severely reduced in intensity).\n\nThat means that somewhere between when this light was emitted, and when you looked at it, that particular frequency was absorbed by something.\n\nEvery material has a unique absorption spectrum, so you can tell what kind of materials the light has passed through."
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"url": [
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} | train_eli5 | what are spectral lines and how do we use them to determine what light has passed?
I'm reading the new Neil Degrasse Tyson book and I'm really quite interested in the subject now. I've learned quite a lot. But I don't understand what happens when you look closer at prism light | [
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5ruqd0 | How do fish survive long periods of time out of the water without suffocating? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fish die on land not because they cannot get oxygen out of air, but because their gills are designed to work in water. This means that they dry out relatively quickly and when that happens their gills start to tear and bleed and stop working. At this point they stop being able to breath and suffocate. \n\nThere are also many fish species that have protective mucus that prolongs how long they cans stay out of water, and some that even have primitive lungs that can last a very long time."
],
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} | {
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} | train_eli5 | How do fish survive long periods of time out of the water without suffocating?
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rp4sw | Why is glass clear? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"First let's look at a simplified view on what makes something to appear to have colour. Visible light hits some object, one of two things can happen (disregarding scattering, etc.): the light gets absorbed or it passes without being hassled.\n\nWhy would light of certain wavelengths (i.e., colours) be absorbed? Electrons in the atoms have certain energy levels, and absorption of light will excite these electrons onto higher energy levels. This could only happen if the energy of light happen to match the energy transition of the material (and light energy is inversely related to wavelength). If no such match is present, the light will pass through this material.\n\nIf you want to go one level deeper, you'd ask - what determines these energy levels? It lies in the very nature of the chemical bonds that hold the atoms together, and that is highly dependent on the chemistry behind the materials (e.g., bond orders, elements, isomers, etc.).\n\nSo the short answer is that glass doesn't have the right energy transitions to absorb visible light. It does, however, have the right energy transition (in bulk material it's called a _band gap_) to absorb certain wavelengths of UV light."
],
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} | train_eli5 | Why is glass clear?
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3qxqjc | Why do we clench our teeth or yell etc when we are lifting something heavy or pushing our bodies to the limit? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Clenching your teeth helps stabilise your head, neck and upper back by tightening them all up"
],
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} | train_eli5 | Why do we clench our teeth or yell etc when we are lifting something heavy or pushing our bodies to the limit?
| [
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4qwbl0 | Should i put wet hand-washed dishes straight to the cupboard without drying them? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"your question should probably be flaired as biology.\n\nIf you stack wet plates, the moisture will never get a chance to dry out. In the ideal world, your clean plates have no bacteria, food residue or stuff in the water. \n\nBut in the real world, your plates will still have small bits of food residue, maybe some soap residue, and stuff in the water you used to rinse the dishes. So that plus the water from the wet dishes provides an ideal habitat for bacteria, mold and fungus to grow. By allowing the dishes to dry first, bacteria and mold can't grow as easily.",
"One dish, possibly, but if it's two or more, then they won't dry properly. Each dish will have an area that will have no contact with the air at all, sealed off by the dish on top. On a drying rack, air can circulate and excess water can drain off,"
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} | train_eli5 | Should i put wet hand-washed dishes straight to the cupboard without drying them?
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7ek44w | Why do police officers not always wear kevlar as an occupational precaution? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Seems like there would be no downside\n\nSpoken like someone who's never worn kevlar.\n\nVests suck. They are uncomfortable, stiff, and sweaty. While most departments require them for patrol officers, officers who can get away with not wearing them sometimes don't. Simply because they judge the inconvenience of the vest to be not worth it. In many positions the likelihood of ever being shot at is as near to zero as it can be.",
"To piggyback on what /u/rhomboidus said, the biggest reason is that they're uncomfortable and restricting. \n\nThe overwhelming majority of police officers will never have a live round fired at them. Even for those that have been fired at, there are very few who have been saved by a vest. \n\nIn 2017, [41 officers have died nationwide from gunfire](_URL_1_). That's fewer than the total number of officers who died from vehicle-related causes. Without trivializing any of the deaths, it's fair to say that gunfire related deaths aren't a widespread issue. As a whole, [being a police officer is a safer occupation than working construction](_URL_0_). \n\nWhen those numbers are put into perspective, it's easy to see why police officers would choose not to wear a vest. Sure a vest might make them marginally safer, but the limits it places on an officer's ability to move and carry out other duties comfortably aren't necessarily worth it relative to the risk of getting shot. \n\nAnother thing to consider is that bullet proof vests aren't completely effective. Depending on the rating, they will stop most pistol rounds, but they're generally not effective against most rifle rounds. Further, they only protect the (important) chest and abdomen area, leaving the wearer still vulnerable to getting shot in other areas. Even if a vest stops a bullet, the wearer can still be subject to serious injury. \n\nWhile I do not have the concrete statistics to back it up, it stands to reason that proper training (and adherence to that training) does much more to keep an officer safe than a vest ever could. If an officer ever reaches a point where they're depending on their vest to save them, they have much more to worry about than whether or not they're wearing something that can stop a bullet.",
"My dad has been in law enforcement for 26 years and has worn his vest every day. He even wears it when we go shooting because \"it feels wrong without it\".",
"Because cops are almost never shot or stabbed at and they only provide marginal protection at a great cost in personal comfort.\n\nYou'd *think* it's a dangerous job, wouldn't you? But you'd be wrong."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
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} | train_eli5 | Why do police officers not always wear kevlar as an occupational precaution?
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688wrp | why are all planets except pluto in the same plane | And why pluto moves in opposite direction to other planets | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Do you ever question what you have been given as facts on the Internet?"
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} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | why are all planets except pluto in the same plane
And why pluto moves in opposite direction to other planets | [
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2jklzp | How is ambient music in video games being looped seamlessly? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"it's designed to do so. the end fades into the beginning, either directly, or with a small bit of silence"
],
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"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How is ambient music in video games being looped seamlessly?
| [
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6ekn3t | Why isn't internet content offered "pay as you go"? Why is everything either ad-supported or subscription-based? | When I say internet content, I am referring to websites, music, movies, news, games and everything else.
When Reddit links me to a website with a paywall, I don't read the article. It might be the LA Times or something that I will look at a couple of times per year. Yet, if there was a charge of a couple of cents to read the article, I would do it, especially if it took little to no effort.
I justify subscribing to Netflix as it has enough content that there is always something to watch. However, there are times of the year when we watch a few shows per month. It seems that it would make sense to pay for how much you watch. Same goes for Spotify.
My understanding is that the technology is there to bill this way. For example, I have a long-distance phone plan. I pay by the minute. I have a pay as you go mobile phone. Same deal.
It seems that news sites would benefit the most from this. Dozens of them ask me to sign up for $10 month which is unrealistic. They could have millions of people paying a couple of cents per article.
With all this in mind, I recognize that there is a good reason behind why this seemingly simple solution is not implemented. I would like to know what it is. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine how click-baity everything would be, and how irritated you would be to click on a headline and be charged a few cents just to get a story which is nothing like what the headline promised? Or, the body of the story is nothing but the headline repeated in smaller type with punctuation and without having the first letter of each word capitalized.\n\n > I justify subscribing to Netflix as it has enough content that there is always something to watch. However, there are times of the year when we watch a few shows per month. It seems that it would make sense to pay for how much you watch.\n\nHow would this make more sense for **Netflix**? They seem to be doing pretty well with their existing model. Also, many of the customer probably wouldn't like it. Now every time you turn on the TV it becomes an economic decision. If you turn on TV to turn off your brain, this would not be appealing.\n\n > My understanding is that the technology is there to bill this way. For example, I have a long-distance phone plan. I pay by the minute. I have a pay as you go mobile phone. Same deal.\n\nBut you have just one of those plans. (And I'm sure they don't take one cent out of your bank account every minute while you talk, but rather batch them up monthly or something.) So it more like your Netflix example. But with the newspapers, there are hundreds of them. Are you going to sign up with each one of them separately? Or do you have some middleman that you sign up with to automatically enroll in everyone? And what is his cut? And how would you know that some click-baity site isn't just telling the middleman you visited their site, even if you didn't. If a few cents per click is enough to pay for their expenses, then it is also enough to commit fraud over.",
"This is called \"Micropayments\", and it has been suggested as a method to finance websites for at *least* a decade. \n\nHowever, methods of implementing it were not really widely available. If you had to set up your micropayment account with every website you visited, that'd pretty much leave you in the same situation as you have now. Or maybe you set up one or two (or three, or four), but when you get linked to yet another site you'd probably go \"Screw this, I'll wait for it to show up somewhere else\" or just ignore it. \n\nThere were attempts to set up micropayment websites, but those did not take off. You'd need to license it, and everyone would have to agree on what kind of cut they get, etc. \n\n\n**That said**, you know how many sites have a PayPal \"Donate\" button? That's pretty much exactly what you're talking about, except it's voluntary.",
"The best way to look at is, think about how you're willing to spend your money. Think about the number of online services you use, how many of those do you pay for? Now, out of those paid services, how many are for entertainment? If you had to pay to use any online service, would your online life be this active?\n\nPersonally, I don't have money to be throwing at websites to use their service. I doubt many people would want to either. However, many people want to use free services. However it cost money for companies to make these services. Platforms like Facebook wouldn't have many (if any) users if you had to pay to use it. However, by having ads more than a billion people see those ads, and the company makes money. Way more money than if 100-1000 people paid 10 dollars a month.",
"The main limit at the moment is a transaction fee.\n\nIf you have to pay 30 cents to process a transaction, you cannot charge people a fraction of a cent per page view easily. People would need to sign up, register their details, batch together payments and pay a bill every few months or years.\n\nBitcoin did briefly enable these sorts of micropayments, but now the transaction fees for Bitcoin are too large.\n\nIf the technology to do micropayments emerges, then we will probably get it on websites as an option.",
"Consumers already pay to access the LA Times - they just pay the ISP, and the ISPs somehow engineered their way out of having to pay for it. Here's my question: why do telecom companies *not* have to pay the LA Times for the content they stream to your tablet or phone yet they *do* have to pay HBO for the content they stream to your TV?",
"Primarily, it's because nobody pays for much of anything online & no attempts at universal micropayment systems have taken off. Unless you've got a well-established brand (eg - New York Times), nobody's willing to give you any money when they can get something else for free."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why isn't internet content offered "pay as you go"? Why is everything either ad-supported or subscription-based?
When I say internet content, I am referring to websites, music, movies, news, games and everything else. When Reddit links me to a website with a paywall, I don't read the article. It might be the LA Times or something that I will look at a couple of times per year. Yet, if there was a charge of a couple of cents to read the article, I would do it, especially if it took little to no effort. I justify subscribing to Netflix as it has enough content that there is always something to watch. However, there are times of the year when we watch a few shows per month. It seems that it would make sense to pay for how much you watch. Same goes for Spotify. My understanding is that the technology is there to bill this way. For example, I have a long-distance phone plan. I pay by the minute. I have a pay as you go mobile phone. Same deal. It seems that news sites would benefit the most from this. Dozens of them ask me to sign up for $10 month which is unrealistic. They could have millions of people paying a couple of cents per article. With all this in mind, I recognize that there is a good reason behind why this seemingly simple solution is not implemented. I would like to know what it is. | [
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65c0o5 | why are some very cheap items on Amazon are priced as thousands of pounds? | Is this a scam or an error?
Edit:
_URL_0_
Example. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dg925pj"
],
"text": [
"There is no way of knowing for sure, especially with specific instances, but the culprit is probably an errant or misconfigured bot. [For example](_URL_0_) competing bots once drove the price of some book up to 23.6 million dollars."
],
"score": [
4
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://www.amazon.co.uk/Southpole-Bandana-Jogger-15191-3332-Black/dp/B00WHYV1ZK/ref=pd_sbs_421_1?_encoding=UTF8&refRID=FESGFVDC616WTNFYZ6Z7"
]
} | {
"url": [
"https://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2012/02/28/amazons-23-6-million-book-a-hilarious-bidding-war/"
]
} | train_eli5 | why are some very cheap items on Amazon are priced as thousands of pounds?
Is this a scam or an error? Edit: _URL_0_ Example. | [
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5t4cu6 | How do MRI's work? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The machine uses a very powerful spinning magnet that aligns the nuclei of water (H20) atoms inside your body (Since most of it is water), it creates a magnetic field that causes the atoms to resonate, a phenomenon called nuclear magnetic resonance. The nuclei produce their own rotating magnetic fields which aligns the proton \"spins\" and the scanner detects it and uses it to create an image.",
"Hydrogen nuclei (protons - I will use the words proton and nuclei interchangeably) distribute themselves between two quantum spin energy states when placed in a static magnetic field, and only in a magnetic field. Hydrogen is a type of nucleus that is said to be magnetically susceptible (has nothing to do with a positive charge, which all nuclei have, but rather the existence of quantum spin states), and it is ubiquitous in body tissues, so a good choice. The lower of the two energy states is said to be aligned with the field, and the higher energy state opposed. More nuclei are in the ground state (aligned), because it's lower energy. The energy difference between the two states lies in the range of radio frequencies. Only a pulse with a frequency precisely matching that energy difference will cause spin state excitation, which means that a nucleus in the lower energy state is promoted to the higher energy state. A radiofrequency (RF) pulse, which comes from a transceiver consisting of a coil placed around the area being scanned, will excite a population of protons to the upper state, and this tips the bulk magnetization vector (average alignment of the magnetic spins of all the protons) out of the direction of the magnetic field. This creates a signal that is detectable by the RF coil, due to the spins of the nuclei within the magnetic field. One is detecting the average of all the spins, and the frequency emitted from the protons is the same as what was required to excite the protons to the higher energy spin state.\n\nOne tries to achieve a duration of RF pulse that tips the spin vectors by 90 degrees, with respect to the magnetic field direction (and by extension, with the ground state orientation of the proton spin vectors); this gives the strongest signal. The rate of decay of the signal, from excited state to ground state, which is the basis for the imaging, is determined by a number of factors, but suffice it to say that hydrogen nuclei on molecules in various kinds of tissues have different decay (aka relaxation) rates. The RF pulse sequences chosen are designed to exploit those differences. You can imagine that if you have two kinds of tissues next to each other, and you want to be able to distinguish them from each other on the image, you might sample the RF pulses from their spins at a point in time after the excitation pulse that the protons in one tissue have relaxed completely, and the others have not, so that the latter shows a brighter signal. It's more complicated than that, but you get the general idea.\n\nOne problem is that the detector does not know where the RF pulses are coming from, in terms of 3D localization from the area being scanned. Magnetic field gradients are used to create spatial resolution. There is a high-powered supercooled permanent magnet, usually 1.5 Tesla in strength, and then electromagnets that are tuned to produce a field gradient through the area being scanned. Stronger fields create a greater energy difference between the two proton spin states and therefore require a higher frequency RF pulse for spin state transition, and they also emit a higher frequency after excitation. So the RF pulse is broadband, exciting all protons, and the computer is able to parse out the various frequencies emitted. Since you know the magnetic field gradient, you know where the pulses are coming from and can therefore construct an image. There are also gradients created by altering the phase of the RF pulses being emitted. You need gradients in all three coordinate axes to know where an RF signal is coming from, to give a proper 3D reconstruction.\n\nThe images are formatted as 2D slices in various planes, and what the computer determines for image construction is the strength of the RF signal from each small volume element in the area being scanned; these are called voxels, the volume equivalent of a pixel. A higher strength RF signal, by convention, gives a brighter signal. You can do multiple different types of RF pulse sequences to make various kinds of tissues bright. One kind will make water bright, another fat.\n\nThe reason you are in the scanner for so long is that the RF signal being detected is very weak and scarcely discernible from noise, so the area being scanned is pulsed repeatedly and the signals obtained after each pulse are summed, so that background noise falls away, leaving a good signal to use to create an image. The thumping noise in the scanner, I'm told, is from the electromagnets creating the field gradient with each pulse.\n\nBeware of explanations that say the scanner is detecting the bulk magnetization vector of the protons, as is the case in some texts, including radiology texts. I've seen some BS graphs depicting this. The detector is picking up RF pulses, not magnetization. I don't know if you can even measure such a tiny bulk magnetization vector from the protons inside a static 1.5T field. I suspect not. But that's a moot point anyway, as there is no magnetization detector on an MRI scanner.\n\nSorry so long, but it's super complicated. A Nobel prize was awarded for this technology. I think it's cool.\n\nSource: I'm a sports medicine physician also with a PhD in Chemistry.\n\nTL;DR: quantum spin state excitation and decay in hydrogen nuclei.",
"This is what I do for a living so let's see if I can give it a go.\n\nBasically the body part we are looking at is placed in or on a coil (commonly referred to as a camera). That body is then moved to the centre of the magnet (known as isocentre).\n\nAll the hydrogen in your body is aligned with the direction of the magnet's (scanner's) magnetic poles. Keep in mind you have 2 parts Hydrogen in every molecule of water in your body (something we have a lot of). A radio frequency wave (RF) is applied to the area of interest (yes the same frequencies your car stereo picks up) and the coil measures the speed at which either the hydrogen recovers to being back to being in-line with the magnetic poles or the speed in which the hydrogen decays from it's position immediately after the RF pulse. \n\nNow that's a very basic version of how it works. The differences in measuring give different weightings of images (i.e. different tissue appearances. Infection may not show on one image type but will on another).\n\nSomeone astute might point out that there is not water in your lungs (or shouldn't be at least). Which is true! Lungs are basically the only area MRI can not image. \nThat said, the hospital I work at recently started a new study seeing if we actually can at least measure lung capacity via MRI.",
"An MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Image, induces a magnetic field around a specimen and the hydrogen atoms in the specimen's composition are affected by this magnetic field...the absorb at various radio frequencies. The system maps the location of the hydrogen's which are predominately located in the fat and water. Thus great for analyzing many parts of the body WITHOUT using X-Rays."
],
"score": [
8,
3,
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2
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How do MRI's work?
| [
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6pr9iv | What happens in our body, that causes the dark colour under the eyes after not enough sleep? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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],
"text": [
"Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: Why when you are lacking sleep do you get black marks under your eyes, then when you catch up they disappear? ](_URL_0_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do we get 'bags' under our eyes when we're tired? ](_URL_1_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do people get bags under their eyes when tired? ](_URL_2_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do I have dark rings under my eyes? ](_URL_4_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do we get bags under our eyes when we're tired? ](_URL_3_)"
],
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2
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32sy63/eli5_why_when_you_are_lacking_sleep_do_you_get/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ltb44/eli5_why_do_we_get_bags_under_our_eyes_when_were/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bezcc/eli5_why_do_people_get_bags_under_their_eyes_when/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qufcc/eli5_why_do_we_get_bags_under_our_eyes_when_were/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p5h43/eli5_why_do_i_have_dark_rings_under_my_eyes/"
]
} | train_eli5 | What happens in our body, that causes the dark colour under the eyes after not enough sleep?
[removed] | [
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2gg5wg | Why are oats "Steel Cut" Why not aluminum or titanium cut? Or hand cut? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ckisekf"
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"text": [
"\"Steel-cut\" is more about result than the process. \n\nWhen you cut oats with steel blades rather than crushing them (i.e. \"rolled oats\", or when crushed really flat, \"instant oats\"), you're separating them into specific sharp-edged chunks rather than smashing them into flour. \n\nThe result is a different texture that takes longer to cook, and when cooked has a different consistency. It's more chewy and less porridgey, and so goes great in muffins and other baked goods. \n\nAs to why \"steel\" rather than other metals or processes, steel is the most economical and efficient blade to do it with. And it SOUNDS cool too. :)"
],
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16
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why are oats "Steel Cut" Why not aluminum or titanium cut? Or hand cut?
| [
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30htuq | Why does Facebook keep thinking I know strangers from countries I have never been to and have 0 friends in common? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cpsjjau"
],
"text": [
"This happens to me too so I would like to know. \n\nI've definitely had people from other countries (not sure if fake or not) and fake people from the US friend me and we had \"mutual friends.\" I think what happened is a fake profile friends one person and then just friends everyone in that person's network because you're more likely to accept a friend request if you have a mutual friend.\n\nThis is speculation, but when I get suggested friends from odd looking profiles and we have 0 friends in common, I assume that person attempted to friend one or more of my friends. Since they added my friends, Facebook thinks they might know me too. However, since it's a fake profile my friends don't accept the request so Facebook reports 0 friends in common. In other words, Facebook thinks we know each other based on the stranger's friend requests, not actual friend acceptances.\n\nThe reason they want to friend you is so they have access to your information and can store/sell it. And probably other reasons I don't know about that require friend permissions with your account."
],
"score": [
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why does Facebook keep thinking I know strangers from countries I have never been to and have 0 friends in common?
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