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830suk | Why has no country yet extradited Polanski to the US if he is so easy to find and a convicted fugitive? | **I'm NOT trying to argue wheter he's really guilty or not. I'm just wondering about the practice of extradition.** Is extradition such a weak diplomatic obligation between the US an its friends? After such a long time it may seem irrelevant, but why didn't it happen in the first few years?
This seems so wrong and rude to me. He's convicted, is he not? Is this some kind of serious rule that France has (no extradition of citizens)? If this was another crime, like if he killed 19 people, would they extradit him for that or still stick to the rule? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Polanski is a French citizen. France (like many nations) won't extradite its own citizens to face foreign charges. That policy is very common and dates back to Greek and Roman laws (upon which most European legal systems are based). He's cautious in his foreign travel not to travel to nations that would extradite him to the US (nations that perform extradition form a treaty which can be read by attorneys who can advise people as to what they say and mean). \n\nWould you want the US to send you to a third world country over bogus charges? Let's say you made a video that was shown in Thailand insulting their King which is a [serious offense](_URL_0_). French people don't want to take that risk either. Sometimes that means that bad results happen, and that's life.",
"For many years there wasn't a concerted attempt to extradite Polanski, and the reasons for that were as follows: If you look at the evidence, he raped that girl--he drugged her without her knowledge and then had sex with her without her consent. But it's a lot easier to prove statutory rape than rape, because statutory rape just requires proof that sex occurred and that one of the two people was underage, while rape requires one to demonstrate the sex was not consensual. The penalties for statutory rape are typically less than for rape. So Polanski struck a plea bargain in which he pled guilty to statutory rape, not rape. This led a lot of people to believe that he was guilty only of statutory rape, not of forcibly drugging and raping a child. Nowadays you can look up anything on the internet, but back then it was a whole effort to look up newspapers in the archives, so you couldn't fact check things easily. There came to be a general belief that what happened was that he engaged in consensual sex with someone who was a little underage, like 17 or something (she was 13), and no one really had any huge motive to look that up and correct it. What was far better known was that he was an acclaimed artist, and that he had suffered greatly--first in the Holocaust, and then when his 8 months pregnant wife was murdered by Charles Manson followers. Combine all this with the already widespread negative attitude towards rape victims--she's a slut, she was asking for it, she is just looking for money and notoriety, she wasn't a virgin, she consented, she's lying, etc., all of which have been used against her at times--and you just end up with people saying the whole thing is a wash and wanting to forget about.\n\nEvery time this was brought up, it upset the victim, whose name and worst day of her life got brought up again. So she struck a deal with Polanski--he gave her some money, and she said she would not pursue extradition. She wanted to put it all behind her and move on. \n\nHowever: in 2009 the Zurich police decided to arrest Polanski on his outstanding warrant. When that happened, there was widespread outrage about him being arrested. It's far more appealing to believe it was unfair and he's just this brilliant auteur who was being unfairly punished. Lots of big Hollywood names signed petitions in support of him. He ended up being released--it seems like on the US side and on the Swiss side were people who wanted him arrested, but there were also those who didn't and Polanski got a judge who sided with him. \n\nFYI: there have subsequently been additional women who have accused him of having raped them when they were 13 or so as well. Gradually gradually gradually, sexual assault is being taken more seriously so the tide is turning against Polanski, plus perhaps more people know the truth about the circumstances rather than believing the much less damning story that Polanski's friends have been repeating for decades. But at this point he's 84 years old and he's not going to risk his freedom again so probably nothing more will happen. Hollywood is finally turning on him as well, though not the French.\n\nFYI: here's another example of a case in which France refused to extradite: Ira Einhorn, a charismatic, radical activist killed his girlfriend in Philadelphia in 1977. He fled to France while on bail and lived there for decades. France refused extradition because it won't extradite in death penalty cases, as, like the rest of Europe, they think the death penalty is barbaric. Also, Einhorn was convicted in absentia--they made the rare decision to try him in absentia because all the witnesses were getting old. France wouldn't extradite in a case where someone is convicted in absentia because such trials aren't generally considered to be fair. Plus he had a lot of friends and supporters in France who he'd convinced of his innocence. But prosecutors in Philly really wanted this guy and so they met France's various conditions and he did end up being extradited and convicted cuz he was obviously guilty. So France isn't necessarily going to reject extradition, but it did take a lot of arranging, plus some pretty convincing evidence of his guilt.",
"Most countries are reluctant to allow their citizens to be extradited unless they are clearly guilty of an egregious crime. Some subject to extradition can challenge it in court, and if the court doesn't buy the grounds for extradition, it can be blocked.\n\nUnfortunately, this is extra true for famous people with connections. And the sad reality is in the 1970s, having sex with an intoxicated minor at a party was seen as being \"naughty\" rather than \"a sexual predator\". Kind of like how sexual harassment and domestic violence were funny in the 1950s.",
"Since you are wondering about the practice of extradition in general: \n\n\nMost countries will not extradite someone to the US if they believe he might receive the death penalty.\n\nThere is also a case that just happened, a court in England refused to extradite someone who has mental issues. They ruled that US prisons are horrible at treating such people.\n\nThere are cases where the country believes that the sentences in the US are way too long for the crime , so they won't extradite.",
"Someone has to actually ask. It's not automatic.\n\nBluntly, no one thinks Polanski is worth the trouble."
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} | train_eli5 | Why has no country yet extradited Polanski to the US if he is so easy to find and a convicted fugitive?
**I'm NOT trying to argue wheter he's really guilty or not. I'm just wondering about the practice of extradition.** Is extradition such a weak diplomatic obligation between the US an its friends? After such a long time it may seem irrelevant, but why didn't it happen in the first few years? This seems so wrong and rude to me. He's convicted, is he not? Is this some kind of serious rule that France has (no extradition of citizens)? If this was another crime, like if he killed 19 people, would they extradit him for that or still stick to the rule? | [
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2ypol0 | Does the team behind Forza pay to use the cars or do the car companies pay them to feature their cars in the game? | I'm curious because Forza could advertise that they have all these licensed cars. But the car companies are having their brand advertised. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A little from column A, a little from column B. It really depends on the car company involved.\n\nSome car companies will \"pay\" for placement in the game by not charging a license fee.",
"Forza pays to license the cars, otherwise it would be stealing the likenesses of real life vehicles, and that's forbidden by copyright laws."
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} | train_eli5 | Does the team behind Forza pay to use the cars or do the car companies pay them to feature their cars in the game?
I'm curious because Forza could advertise that they have all these licensed cars. But the car companies are having their brand advertised. | [
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87kw48 | Why is, no matter the colour of the shampoo, the foam always white? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because the bubbles that make up the foam are so thin that the pigments that make up he color are too thinly spread to matter much. Instead the light is fractured everywhere by every bubble making it effectively reflecting white light.",
"[So meta...](_URL_0_)\n\nAnyway it's because the colour gets spread so thin and infused with microbubbles that the colour pigment makes no difference to the light hitting it so it appears white.\n\nDarker colours will reduce this effect. An entirely black shampoo would have very dark suds.",
"The dye chemical tends to not want to hang around in the very thin soapy matrix that forms the bubble wall.\n\nThen, if you do have a dye that will work, it still takes a fairly high concentration of it to be visible. That's a problem because when the bubble pops it leaves a dark dye stain behind.\n\nTo solve this you need a dye that will quickly degrade chemically into harmless, colorless products.\n\nFortunately, dyes have been invented specifically for this purpose and are used in the [Zubbles](_URL_1_) product. You might enjoy reading about the development of the dyes if you'd like a somewhat deeper look at the challenges that colored bubbles present.",
"I use violet pigmented shampoo (used to balance brassy tones from blonde) and the foam is hella purple! Violet splatter can be found all over the shower walls after. It’s just REALLY violet.",
"Think about a balloon. When not blown up, balloons are solid with color and very vibrant, but as you blow it up, it loses that color and starts to become very pale, almost white. And if you could infinitely blow up the balloon without it breaking, it would eventually lose all its color and become clear because there is not enough pigment (color) for the light to reflect off. This would happen because of how thin the material gets.\n\nIn this case, the blown up balloon is like the bubbles. The shampoo, which contains pigments, gets spread so thin that there is not enough for the light to bounce off and form colors. Thus, the bubbles appear transparent.",
"Same reason clouds are white instead of blue, except instead of tiny droplets, you have spheroids of thin laminate material. The light is incident in them to and from all angles no matter from which direction the observer stands. The result is usually Mie scattering, a form of refraction.\n\nThe thickness of the soap bubbles is both thick and variable enough to cover the entire visible spectrum, and probably more. If all three (or four) of your photopigments are inactivated, you perceive this as white light.",
"The foaming agent in shampoo is not itself colored; in fact most of the \"soaps\"/\"detergents\" in shampoo are explicitly a off-white or pale yellow color.\n\nAdditionally, very little color is actually used in the shampoo. That shit is expensive, you know.\n\nSo the detergents foam up. The foam is too thin and has too little color present to significantly depict much of the coloring agent. Thus the detergent's natural off-white color is what remains.",
"Follow up, would colored shampoo stain carpet, clothing, etc?",
"Because sunlight or room lighting is usually white. But this can be changed though. Try shine a light of a certain colour to white foam. It should reflect that colour too.\n\nIn foam, there are many tiny bubbles and this help scatter light quite a lot, making it seem uniform in colour. This also makes a lot of surfaces between air - liquid - air - liquid and this allows a lot of chances for the light to reflect",
"The bubble is so thin that light does not transmit through it like you would expect. This is called the thin film effect, and its why gas and oil leave a sheen on water. _URL_2_"
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} | train_eli5 | Why is, no matter the colour of the shampoo, the foam always white?
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3uex5l | What is the connection between oysters and Thanksgiving? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is the first I've heard of this; however...\n\nOysters, clams, and lobsters are a readily accessible food item in New England where the first two-hundred odd years of American culture more or less developed, and the food remains a staple (icon?) of the entire diet of the region, sort of in the way cows are associated with Texas and salmon with the Northwest.\n\nIs there any chance you or your immediate ancestors are from New England? I'm mostly midwest so I know all about cranberries for Thanksgiving, but nothing about Oysters!",
"The abundance of oysters—and therefore oyster stuffing—wasn't unique to the Americas. According to this website focused on historic New England cooking, evidence of oyster stuffing can be found in British cookbooks dating to the 17th and 18th centuries. It makes sense that immigrants to North America would continue the tradition upon discovering heaps of oysters in their new homeland.\n\n_URL_0_"
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} | train_eli5 | What is the connection between oysters and Thanksgiving?
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40ptzc | Listening to the State of the Union, I notice what sounds like intentional coughing, constantly, after President Barack Obama's statements. Is this on purpose and, if so, what purpose does it serve? | I've searched online, through Google and Reddit's (terrible) search engine but was unable to find anything on it. Am I crazy or is this really a thing? Are they doing it as a sign of disrespect? Why aren't they removed? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You are crazy, how many people are in there? You don't think a room full of old, mostly men isn't going to have some \"dad sounds\" going on in the back?\n\nPeople fall asleep in those things, even if it's there party's president.",
"Maybe if you have to cough you wait until the President is done speaking?"
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} | train_eli5 | Listening to the State of the Union, I notice what sounds like intentional coughing, constantly, after President Barack Obama's statements. Is this on purpose and, if so, what purpose does it serve?
I've searched online, through Google and Reddit's (terrible) search engine but was unable to find anything on it. Am I crazy or is this really a thing? Are they doing it as a sign of disrespect? Why aren't they removed? | [
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708h98 | Are some Japanese songs written specifically for anime in mind, having 90 second cuts? | If you've ever seen any episode of an anime you'd see that the opening is always 1 min 30s long. Songs are taken from many Japanese bands and almost always end up being 1:30, maybe 1 or 2 seconds longer or shorter.
Is it that the anime studio will search out songs that will fit their opening, then take a viable 90 second cut from the song that fits? Or do many bands write it so that a verse + chorus is 90 seconds? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Both; depends on the anime. \n\n[death parades OP is just a real song by the band BRADIO](_URL_0_)\n\nits not hard to cut a song to a shorter version; remove a verse or two etc. \n\nbut then theres also [shows like jojo, who have custom songs written](_URL_2_)\n\n[btw all of jojos openings are amazing](_URL_1_)",
"most songs are cut down to be 90 but a few are originally 90 seconds like the [beserk 2016 op](_URL_3_)."
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} | train_eli5 | Are some Japanese songs written specifically for anime in mind, having 90 second cuts?
If you've ever seen any episode of an anime you'd see that the opening is always 1 min 30s long. Songs are taken from many Japanese bands and almost always end up being 1:30, maybe 1 or 2 seconds longer or shorter. Is it that the anime studio will search out songs that will fit their opening, then take a viable 90 second cut from the song that fits? Or do many bands write it so that a verse + chorus is 90 seconds? | [
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18m70l | What exactly is a black box? | I've heard about them before when it comes to the fields of computing, electronics, etc - but I don't what the heck they do / when it is appropriate to use them. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a general term people use when they deal with a functioning component without necessarily knowing or needing to know how the component works. You know *what* the component does, but not necessarily *how*. For example, when you run [black box testing](_URL_0_) on a software package, you are examining the output you get when you run particular inputs into it. You don't know how it works, but you know what it outputs (or is supposed to output) based on what you put in.",
"Like you're five: A black box is a magical contraption where if you feed it certain items, it will spit out certain other items. We don't care *how* it works (because it's magic), we just care what it spits out what it's supposed to be spitting out, depending on what we feed it.\n\nFor example I might have a black box that converts things into money. So I can put in a banana and it spits out $2, and I can put in a gold bar and it spits out $10,000. I don't care how it gets rid of the banana and how it conjures up the money, I only care that it's functioning correctly.\n\nOne \"black box\" contraption might be a calculator. It really doesn't matter to the user how the internals work, it just matters that it does all the math like it's supposed to -- I give it a bunch of numbers, and if it's working correctly it gives me back a number that makes sense."
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} | train_eli5 | What exactly is a black box?
I've heard about them before when it comes to the fields of computing, electronics, etc - but I don't what the heck they do / when it is appropriate to use them. | [
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21akkk | Would a black hole be able to swallow another one? If so, what would happen? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"[Space Cannibal: Ginormous Black Hole Caught Eating Another](_URL_0_) *A monstrous black hole at the heart of one galaxy is being devoured by a still larger black hole in another, scientists say. The discovery is the first of its kind.*\n\n[Can Black Holes Swallow Other Black Holes?](_URL_2_) *Yes. If such an event occurred, and we were looking in the place to be able to see it, we would likely see a burst of high-energy radiation, which we can see as intense x-ray emission from such an event. An example of such a merger of black holes that might happen in the future has been observed in the galaxy merger system NGC3393 by the Chandra x-ray observatory. I hope that this answers your question.*\n\nEdit: [ELI5: Black Holes.](_URL_1_)",
"The holes would merge into a larger black hole. This is suspected to throw out a lot of energy in the process, but we have never been able to observe this (extremely rare) event."
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} | train_eli5 | Would a black hole be able to swallow another one? If so, what would happen?
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23siw4 | What is the point of a telemarketing business that hangs up or is just dead air when you answer? | I would really like to know this.
I get weekly calls from different telemarketing companies on my work phone (even though it is on a do not call list) and when I reverse search the number I see that numerous other people have the same issue. They call you, then they either don't answer or hang up.
How is this productive, and what is the purpose of this?
How do they make a profit paying people to do this shit? It is incredibly annoying and pointless.
| explainlikeimfive | {
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"Much of the time it is because of a technology known as \"predictive dialing\". A computer dials hundreds of numbers, knowing that a certain number will be busy, most will not be answered, some will be answered by answering machines, etc. The program continually monitors how many calls are likely to get picked up by a human, and delivers those calls to the staff of telemarketers.\n\n\"Hello, Mr. Smith - I am calling you from Microsoft to tell you that you have a problem on your Windows computer...\"\n\nSometimes the algorithm doesn't work: you pick up but there aren't any free telemarketers at the time. So the program hangs up on you (although they do record that there is a live person answering this particular number so they can call you back more frequently). You experience this as a hang up call, which it technically is. But no humans wasted time dialing you, so it costs almost nothing.",
"It's just a test call to see if the line is valid."
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} | train_eli5 | What is the point of a telemarketing business that hangs up or is just dead air when you answer?
I would really like to know this. I get weekly calls from different telemarketing companies on my work phone (even though it is on a do not call list) and when I reverse search the number I see that numerous other people have the same issue. They call you, then they either don't answer or hang up. How is this productive, and what is the purpose of this? How do they make a profit paying people to do this shit? It is incredibly annoying and pointless. | [
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3pgb0q | How do freeways or Highways get their number assigned? Is there any rhyme or reason to it? | I know the whole odd numbers are North/South & even are East/West. But how does the 5, or the 15, 405 etc... get the number? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For the US interstate highway system: \n\n_URL_0_\n\n > the numbering scheme for the primary routes, east-west highways are assigned even numbers and north-south highways are assigned odd numbers. Odd route numbers increase from west to east, and even-numbered routes increase from south to north\n\nThree digit numbers are used for secondary freeways, like loops going around cities, with their number being based on the primary road's number (eg - I-405 is a bypass around I-5). These numbers are only unique to the state, not the whole system (eg - there's an I-405 in both Portland and Seattle).\n\nOther highway systems will have similar numbering systems in place."
],
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3
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Numbering_system"
]
} | train_eli5 | How do freeways or Highways get their number assigned? Is there any rhyme or reason to it?
I know the whole odd numbers are North/South & even are East/West. But how does the 5, or the 15, 405 etc... get the number? | [
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84jo2h | How does our body process foods with large amounts of artificial additives? | In terms of storing, breaking down and excretion..thanks! | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"This is really going to depend on the specific additive.\n\nThe word artificial in your question is probably the least useful one. Your body doesn't really care how a substance came to be, it will do what it can to either turn it into something else, absorb and piss it out, shit it out, or some combination of all of those things. They don't usually have a meaningful impact on the food itself.",
"\"Artificial additives\" is a term that encompasses a ridiculously huge number of things. Anything that is created in a lab and then put into the food can be labelled a such.\n\nThe same chemical or substance might be a *natural ingredient* in Food A, a natural *additive* in Food B, or created in a test tube and added to Food C as an *artificial* additive.\n\nSo, it's hard to really discuss them in general. As with any other substance or chemical in the universe, some can be absorbed in the digestive tract and some can't. Some are broken down before digestion, some after, and some not at all. This is true for literally anything. If a specific ingredient or substance were mentioned, then more details could be perhaps provided about how exactly the body deals with it."
],
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19,
9
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How does our body process foods with large amounts of artificial additives?
In terms of storing, breaking down and excretion..thanks! | [
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3it96f | Do fish not feel pain like mammals do? Why is it so acceptable for us to do things like shove our fingers in their gills or drag them around by hooks in their mouths? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Nobody knows. There brains are simpler than a mammal's. But they still react to pain and such. On the other hand, it's not difficult to make a computer program that reacts to \"pain\", and few people would consider that sentient.\n\nIt probably mostly comes down to tradition and the fact that they're not as cute. If people didn't routinely shove hooks into fish's mouths and, if they're feeling nice, send them back into the water instead of taking them out of their suffering, then someone doing it would probably be seen as cruel. And if we normally caught deer that way, then nobody would bat an eye at someone doing that.",
"It is impossible to know how painful anything happening to something not yourself is. Fish (and insects) are fairly alien to humans compared to mammals and even birds, to the ways they express pain are different enough that we can fool ourselves into thinking they don't feel pain. For all we know a bonsai tree lives in constant agony from all the pruning."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Do fish not feel pain like mammals do? Why is it so acceptable for us to do things like shove our fingers in their gills or drag them around by hooks in their mouths?
| [
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8lwkwd | Why is the contraceptive pill only 99% effective? What makes it fail? | I got curious and decided to google it but couldn't find the answer and now it's bugging me. So say I am a healthy woman with no stomach problems or taking any other medication that can affect the effectiveness of the pill. I also take it as indicated and never miss a day. There is still a 1% chance of getting pregnant, right? Well, why?
| explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"The 99% effective is not to account for failure nessisariy, it is to prevent a law suite. If the claim was 100% effective and for some unknown reason someone became pregnant, the company who manufactures and markets that contraceptive could be held liable. \n\nThere would be little statistical proof of even 99%, but it does leave enough room for error just in case.",
"To add to what others have said, I know of one physical situation where the pill has been found to not be 100 & #37; effective, and that is the case when women have premature ovarian failure \\(POF\\). That's a condition in which women under 40 have ovaries that are failing \\(for a variety of reasons\\). Women with this condition may usually not have a period due to the failing ovaries, but every once in awhile, the ovaries will flare to life and produce a healthy follicle and they'll have a regular cycle. But because it's usually not working, the pituitary gland produces very large amounts of follicle stimulating hormone \\(FSH\\) to stimulate the ovaries. One of the things birth control pills do is lower FSH, to prevent the ovary from being stimulated enough to produce mature egg follicles. But because a woman with POF already has extremely high FSH, it may happen that the pill is inadequate to lower FSH significantly. And then, every once in awhile, even though the ovaries are failing, they may respond to the FSH stimulation and produce an egg, despite the birth control pills.",
"First, the \"99%\" figure is with perfect use, which doesn't really exist when it comes to humans outside of a lab setting with free will. I've never seen a non-iud claim actual 99% effectiveness (98% maybe), and I'm pretty sure the other person who responded has either never taken birth control or never read the drug facts because this is pretty clearly explained. The super high perfect use figure is basically advertisement and if you want to know how safe you actually are you should completely ignore it.\n\nMost oral contraceptives (yes, there are different kinds) have something between 91-95% actual effectiveness depending on which trial of which pill is being cited, which is shorthand for saying that out of 100 couples using that contraceptive, 5-9 will get pregnant per year of normal use. Still much better than condoms.\n\nThere's also no single answer as to why they fail. The biggest reason is human error of various kinds. Taking the pill too late or missing it altogether. Using medications that would inhibit its function. Getting sick before the hormones can be absorbed, diarrhea and vomiting can both cause problems with the pill. So, take the pill, go out drinking and get sick? Entirely possible that the pill will fail.\n\ntl;dr: if you're relying on oral bc because you think the 99% is a CYA disclaimer for something that works 100% of the time, really don't do that. It's the exact opposite."
],
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"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why is the contraceptive pill only 99% effective? What makes it fail?
I got curious and decided to google it but couldn't find the answer and now it's bugging me. So say I am a healthy woman with no stomach problems or taking any other medication that can affect the effectiveness of the pill. I also take it as indicated and never miss a day. There is still a 1% chance of getting pregnant, right? Well, why? | [
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865gwg | Does "Student Athlete" status vary from sport to sport in the NCAA | Ryan Donato is a prospect for the Boston Bruins, who [missed a team practice because he had a class at Harvard that morning](_URL_0_).
I thought the sentiment in the NCAA was that student athletes have to be amateurs, and if he's playing in the premier professional league I don't see how he can retain his amateur status.
Is this a unique specific example? Or is it ubiquitous to hockey? I've heard stories of basketball players in college being reprimanded for accepting a per-diem for food. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dw2hykt"
],
"text": [
"Ryan Donato is no longer eligible to play NCAA hockey. He has joined the Bruins. He's still a junior at Harvard (and still attending classes apparently) but he isn't allowed to play hockey for the Crimson anymore.\n\nThis was something that he chose, to turn pro early and forfeit his remaining NCAA eligibility."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://www.reddit.com/r/hockey/comments/85vv7h/ryan_donato_missed_bruins_practice_today_because/"
]
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Does "Student Athlete" status vary from sport to sport in the NCAA
Ryan Donato is a prospect for the Boston Bruins, who [missed a team practice because he had a class at Harvard that morning](_URL_0_). I thought the sentiment in the NCAA was that student athletes have to be amateurs, and if he's playing in the premier professional league I don't see how he can retain his amateur status. Is this a unique specific example? Or is it ubiquitous to hockey? I've heard stories of basketball players in college being reprimanded for accepting a per-diem for food. | [
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6ubv13 | What is a Virtual Meeting Room (VMR) and what is its use | We have Virtual Meeting Rooms for our videoconference systems at work and I can't seem to quite grasp what it does and why we have to use it. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dlrhk8x"
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"text": [
"It's an attempt to bridge the gap between the folks who work in the office and the folks who work remotely.\n\nI work on a team that is roughly half in the company's main office, and half in remote locations; of the remote half, half of them work at one of two satellite offices, and the rest work from home.\n\nOnce a year, we all get together at the main office for a week for big meetings, and you can sense the clique-y vibe. We all like each other and go to dinners and happy hours after work with each other, and enjoy each others' company, but during the work day that week, you can see the habits pretty starkly; the people from satellite office 1 will all talk to each other and go out to lunch together, and the remotes will kind of commiserate together...\n\nHaving a cohesive team is important in many fields, mine included, and seeing peoples' faces during meetings, rather than just hearing their voices, helps with the monkey part of our brains in forming relationships, even just close business-team relationships, with those people."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What is a Virtual Meeting Room (VMR) and what is its use
We have Virtual Meeting Rooms for our videoconference systems at work and I can't seem to quite grasp what it does and why we have to use it. | [
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19r7n5 | how a car engine works. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Suck, squeeze, bang and blow. Sounds dirty, but basically it describes the 4 strokes of a 4 stroke engine. To simplify it, the cylinder sucks petrol(mixed with air), compresses it (squeeze), ignites it (bang), then forces out the burnt exhaust gases (blow)"
],
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} | {
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"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | how a car engine works.
| [
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1lr0le | Why is wheat bread considered more healthy than white, especially to those dieting. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"white bread is made from white flour, which is flour *without* pretty much everything that naturally makes flour a good thing for us. nutrients, vitamins and especially fibres. they get shifted out of it to make white bread. brown bread flour has had no such treatment.",
"Wheat flour contains at least some of the germ, bran, and endosperm of the wheat berry. White flour is basically just the endosperm. Endosperm is mostly just starch, so flour with bran and germ has more nutrients. \n\nWheat bran also contains fiber. Fiber takes much more time to digest than just starch. So eating a slice of wheat bread will keep you full for longer than a slice of white bread. If you are dieting, you're less likely to reach for a snack later if your wheat bread ham sandwich is still making its way through your system. Also, the sugars in wheat bread are absorbed into your body at a slower pace, avoiding the dreaded \"sugar spike.\"",
"Forgive me if I'm misinformed, but including the answers that some are giving regarding the nutrients found in wheat bread, isn't white bread also much more processed, leaving far less work for your body to do?\n\nIn other words, since wheat bread is less processed, your body burns more energy to process it, and that also makes eating it better for you than white bread, where your body does hardly any work to process it, and you just put on more calories in the long run."
],
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"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why is wheat bread considered more healthy than white, especially to those dieting.
| [
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17djje | What is "unlocking" your smartphone? What is it now illegal and punishable by up to a $1 million fine? | Apparently this became law this weekend in the US. I hear a lot about "switching carriers" but don't know what this means in the context of this law. If anyone could explain why this law came about and what it means to unlock your smartphone, I'd really appreciate it. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Phones provided by service providers are usually locked by their firmware into only working on that provider's network. Unlocking disables that so the phone can be used on any network.",
"The reason that carriers were upset about people being able to unlock their phones was because of the prepaid market. You can pick up a prepaid phone for $20 at your local grocery store. The phone is so cheap because it's assumed you have to buy service on the carrier's network and only their network. They are literally losing money on the phone and making it up on the service.\n\nHowever, some companies were buying up these cheap phones in bulk, unlocking them and shipping them off to other countries. That's the practice that carriers don't like."
],
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What is "unlocking" your smartphone? What is it now illegal and punishable by up to a $1 million fine?
Apparently this became law this weekend in the US. I hear a lot about "switching carriers" but don't know what this means in the context of this law. If anyone could explain why this law came about and what it means to unlock your smartphone, I'd really appreciate it. | [
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5bek5d | what happens if a plane flies in the opposite direction of the rotation of the earth. | Will it reach his destination faster? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Unfortunately the atmosphere largely travels with the rotation of the earth (why we don't have crazy wind nonstop) and so the effect on planes is minimal compared to things like local weather.",
"So, what happens when a plane flies west? At least in the Northern Hemisphere in the Continental United States, the prevailing winds generally move from west to east. So, even though you are moving against the rotation of the earth, you have a headwind and it takes you longer to fly from point A to point B than it would to fly eastbound from point B to point A.",
"There was a show where a British pilot took a super fast jet and flew towards the sunset. I can't remember everything but he was flying faster than the rotational speed of the earth effectively \"reversing\" the sunset."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | what happens if a plane flies in the opposite direction of the rotation of the earth.
Will it reach his destination faster? | [
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3kjrh2 | How are fantasy sports companies like DraftKings and FanDuel legally allowed to operate? | After the shut down of sports book websites like Bodog, how are these fantasy sports league sites allowed to operate? They are essentially sports gambling operations. Have they been granted exemption? Exploiting a loophole? Generating revenue as fast as possible until they ultimately get shut down, too? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"These fantasy sports sites are considered games of skill, because a better player will in the long run turn a better profit than a poor player. They are granted an exemption from sports gambling because the score for the fantasy sports site is not directly tied to the outcome of the actual game, AND they are over more than one specific game or player. They also have to have a predetermined prize pool that is not in anyway linked to the amount of players playing in that contest.\n\nThere is some question about the validity of daily fantasy when it comes to PGA or NASCAR as it is only one event. \n\nThis is also the reason why you need to draft players from more than one team in these leagues.",
"Federal law has [specific exemptions for fantasy leagues](_URL_0_), because the intent of the law is to prohibit wagering on the outcome of actual sporting events."
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} | {
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} | {
"url": [
"https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5362"
]
} | train_eli5 | How are fantasy sports companies like DraftKings and FanDuel legally allowed to operate?
After the shut down of sports book websites like Bodog, how are these fantasy sports league sites allowed to operate? They are essentially sports gambling operations. Have they been granted exemption? Exploiting a loophole? Generating revenue as fast as possible until they ultimately get shut down, too? | [
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67c1sx | What is the earned income tax credit? | I know close to nothing about taxes/tax law, but as a political science major I recently heard someone talk about the issue of the "earned income tax credit". I tried to google what it was, but I had a tough time following with my minimal background knowledge. If possible I'd like to know:
What is the earned income tax credit (in general, and - if necessary - with a special emphasis on its context in U.S. politics)?
What is a widely-held "conservative" view on the earned income tax credit in the United States?
What is a widely-held "liberal" view on the earned income tax credit in the United States?
Thanks for your time and help. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dgpbkxp"
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"text": [
"The earned income tax credit is a tax credit for low/medium-low income people.\n\n\"Earned income\" is basically the tax policy way of saying \"income from a job\" as opposed to investment income or gifts. \n\nThe EITC gives low income people money back on their taxes, potentially more than they actually paid in taxes. \n\nLiberals like it because it's basically a welfare program. Some conservatives don't like it, because it's welfare. But others are more supportive because it does require people to work to get it."
],
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"url": []
} | {
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} | train_eli5 | What is the earned income tax credit?
I know close to nothing about taxes/tax law, but as a political science major I recently heard someone talk about the issue of the "earned income tax credit". I tried to google what it was, but I had a tough time following with my minimal background knowledge. If possible I'd like to know: What is the earned income tax credit (in general, and - if necessary - with a special emphasis on its context in U.S. politics)? What is a widely-held "conservative" view on the earned income tax credit in the United States? What is a widely-held "liberal" view on the earned income tax credit in the United States? Thanks for your time and help. | [
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5bk6k7 | Why do cell phone/internet providers only focus on "New Customers"? | I can't talk for any other country, but in Canada, cell phone and internet providers often give really good discounts to "new customers only".
Now it does make sense that it would bring in new customers, but it also tells existing customers they could just switch to another provider to exercise their "new customer deal".
That has been happening with my family, and other families that I know. Internet Company A would tell me "for 3 months we can give you a 20% discount on your bill"; then after 3 months we would just switch to Company B since they're always welcoming new customers to give discounts, and company A only says "that was only for 3 months, so we can't help you anymore. You can change providers or whatever you want but your deal is done".
It's the same problem for cell phone providers. They give so much more benefits to new customers, while giving nothing to existing customers. The time has come for me to switch to a new phone, and nothing seems beneficial if I decide to stay with my provider. My provider gives me a very tiny discount compared to almost 50% subsidization for new customers. I am pretty sure I will switch providers, which is definitely not a good thing for my current provider.
Is there any good reason for this? Am I missing something? or are providers just being douchebags? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"d9p4zqu"
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"text": [
"Because changing cell phone providers is a hassle that many won't put up with, and the cell phone market is saturated. So the only real way to grow is to take customers from other carriers."
],
"score": [
7
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} | {
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do cell phone/internet providers only focus on "New Customers"?
I can't talk for any other country, but in Canada, cell phone and internet providers often give really good discounts to "new customers only". Now it does make sense that it would bring in new customers, but it also tells existing customers they could just switch to another provider to exercise their "new customer deal". That has been happening with my family, and other families that I know. Internet Company A would tell me "for 3 months we can give you a 20% discount on your bill"; then after 3 months we would just switch to Company B since they're always welcoming new customers to give discounts, and company A only says "that was only for 3 months, so we can't help you anymore. You can change providers or whatever you want but your deal is done". It's the same problem for cell phone providers. They give so much more benefits to new customers, while giving nothing to existing customers. The time has come for me to switch to a new phone, and nothing seems beneficial if I decide to stay with my provider. My provider gives me a very tiny discount compared to almost 50% subsidization for new customers. I am pretty sure I will switch providers, which is definitely not a good thing for my current provider. Is there any good reason for this? Am I missing something? or are providers just being douchebags? | [
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1fjuyy | How do QR Codes still read when part of them are obstructed? | I understand a good deal how QR codes work, so no need for the basic explanation. The real question is how do they still work when a chunk of them is missing? I know it's something to do with the pixels on the left side. Anyone care to elaborate? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Long story short, QR codes have about a 30% margin of error. The purpose is to account for sloppy positioning of the code reader, camera resolution/fuzziness and possibly code degradation, etc. As long as specific elements of the code (EG, those 3 squares near the corners) are visible, the reader can still decode the info.\n\nHow this is possible is a similar concept to data redundancy on hard drives (getting slight above ELI5, here). It divides all the information across a code that can actually contain more data than it needs. Effectively, a QR code takes 100% of its data and spreads over 150% of its needed space and all of its data is doubled up. That way, it can afford to lose up to 30% of the code and still work because the data that was lost is also held in another section.\n\nIf you've ever seen a NAS drive set up, it's very similar. You can take 5 1-TB drives and create 4 TBs of storage space. The 4 TB of data is divided over the 5 drives with every piece of data held in two different places. If one drive fails, you can replace the drive easily without any loss of data.\n\nTL-DR, a QR code holds more data than it needs in order to create its own redundancy by doubling up the information it contains allowing for a 30 margin of error",
"_URL_1_\n\n\"The answer is with a high level of error correction, about 30% of these bytes can be complete gibberish, and your phone will still be able to read the QR code. with 172 areas, that means about 51 of them can be altered in any way, shape or form.\"\n\nIf you want to know more about how the error correction codes work you can check this out _URL_0_",
"The information is stored more than once, and the copies of the pieces of information are spread on the QR code so that if a single area gets damaged the code will still be readable.\n\nWhen creating a QR code you can choose how much extra space you want to use for the copies: more copies mean a bigger QR code that in turn is more robust.\n\nThe \"pixels on the left\" (I think you mean the three larger square markers) are there to tell your mobile phone where the QR code starts and how big it is."
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"http://hackaday.com/2011/08/11/how-to-put-your-logo-in-a-qr-code/"
]
} | train_eli5 | How do QR Codes still read when part of them are obstructed?
I understand a good deal how QR codes work, so no need for the basic explanation. The real question is how do they still work when a chunk of them is missing? I know it's something to do with the pixels on the left side. Anyone care to elaborate? | [
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1pkarf | Why does almost every app you download on the android app store have permissions where they can delete folders, access your contacts and turn your phone on and off among other things? | I't just seems ridiculous that you would download an app and also give control of your phone to them... Or maybe i'm missing something? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As a former android developer I can give you a bit of insight into how permissions work, and why sometimes applications require permissions that seemingly do not make much sense.\n\nAn Android application is somewhat different from a desktop application. You can't write an android application from scratch you are forced to use a set of different tools and libraries provided by Google in the Android OS. Each library has a wide array of different features that an app developer might use. For example when an app uses GPS Android provides a library to access GPS data from the phone. However in order to use it you need to state in your permissions that this app uses GPS. In GPS this is pretty strait forward however not ever library is like this.\n\nIf for example an app wanted to turn off the screen when it detects that the phone is up against your ear it would need access to the library that controls the power to the screen so it would need permission for that. But if this same library also controls the power to the entire phone there is not a separate permission you either get permission for all the functions a library has or none of them even if you are not using most of them.",
"Pretty much any app needs to have folder access. That's how it stores its data.\n\nContacts? Depends on the app. Lots of apps have something to do with communication, so it needs contact access.\n\nAnything that talks over the internet at all needs full internet access, because there isn't a way to limit it.",
"Most of them are needed. Writing to file is for saving data, control of phone is so that they pause when you get a call, and or so you can call from an app (ie click a number and it takes you to the dialer). Turning phone on and off is an unnecessary permission for most, although I believe it includes preventing phone from sleeping, which many apps do."
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"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why does almost every app you download on the android app store have permissions where they can delete folders, access your contacts and turn your phone on and off among other things?
I't just seems ridiculous that you would download an app and also give control of your phone to them... Or maybe i'm missing something? | [
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6ntlv6 | Why isn't the 3.5mm audio jack updated for better sound and power transmission capability like USB ports. | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Adding another ring, for microphones, produced a lot of compatibility issues when Apple tried it. There isn't an established need for \"analog + power\" or \"better analog\", and after gold plating it's not clear what the better analog concept even means (digital ≠ better analog)."
],
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} | train_eli5 | Why isn't the 3.5mm audio jack updated for better sound and power transmission capability like USB ports.
[removed] | [
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2fvl8t | Why the word "second" is used for the number two. | After four the ordinals match up to the number. First, second, and third are weird and second is the weirdest. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"'Second' is Latin, from *secundus* \"following, second in a list\", in turn from sequi \"follow\" (from which we also get 'sequel'). First and third come from German. How we managed to mix etymologies between ordinals is flatly beyond me."
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} | train_eli5 | Why the word "second" is used for the number two.
After four the ordinals match up to the number. First, second, and third are weird and second is the weirdest. | [
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4n9elx | How do large venues and sporting organizations, which ban lots of people for unruly behavior, actually enforce these bans? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For the most part they aren't actively enforced. But what the ban means, in a legal sense, is a trespass warning. So, if they come back and cause any trouble, they immediately go to jail for trespassing.",
"I don't know how the venues enforce it, but in Europe some 'known hooligans' are banned from following their team to away games or go to international events like the World Cup or the upcoming Euro 2016. \n\nThese people have to show up at local police stations the day of the game to make sure they're not going abroad."
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} | train_eli5 | How do large venues and sporting organizations, which ban lots of people for unruly behavior, actually enforce these bans?
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j984d | Fine then, why is 0! = 1? | I always assumed it was an axiom invented for the sake of mathematical convenience, but there must be a more rigorous justification. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a matter of probabilities. If there are 5 different books to arrange on a shelf, you have 5x4x3x2x1 different ways (5 choices for the first book, 4 for the second, etc) to arrange them = 5! = 120. With 3 books you have 3! ways = 6 possibilities. If you only have one book, then you've got 1! = 1 way to arrange the book. If you have 0 books, then there is not 0 possible options, but only 1 possibility, __.\n\nIn other words, if you haven't got any books, the 1 possible arrangement is to not do anything/arrange nothing, which is still a possibility.",
"Factorial n, or n!, means 1 * 2 * 3 * 4...* (n-1) * n.\n\nLet's work backwards.\n\n4! = 1 * 2 * 3 * 4\n\nBut let's say we want 3! instead.\n\n3! = 1 * 2 * 3\n\nHow do we get from 4! to 3!? Well you just take 4 out of the multiplying. To get rid of multiplying, we divide. So:\n\n3! = 4! / 4 = (1 * 2 * 3 * 4) / 4 = 1 * 2 * 3\n\nThis means:\n\n2! = 3! / 3 = (1 * 2 * 3) / 3 = 1 * 2\n\n1! = 2! / 2 = (1 * 2) / 2 = 1\n\n0! = 1! / 1 = (1) / 1 = 1",
"You are sort of correct, in the fact that we have defined 0!=1. It is a special case of factorials, separate from the way we calculate other factorials. The reason for this has to do with combinatorics, and the fact that there is only one way to permute zero objects. I am not sure I could explain this like you were five however. \n\nEdit: I couldn't give 'orangegluon' more than one upvote, so I am amending my post to say...look at his post! That is a very good explanation that I was having trouble coming up with."
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} | train_eli5 | Fine then, why is 0! = 1?
I always assumed it was an axiom invented for the sake of mathematical convenience, but there must be a more rigorous justification. | [
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2t821n | Why do countries want to host events such as the Fifa world cup or the Olympics when it costs them billions of their own money? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My guess is that the people in charge of getting it to come to their countries still make a lot of money in bribes and backroom deals. So, even though it is overall a large financial drain on the country, it makes the people in charge a lot of cash. Similar to war profiteering.",
"They don't really any more. The 2022 bid is going on, and they [can't find enough](_URL_0_) interested cities to fill the ballot.",
"Income from tourism (only lessens the cost), prestige, and of course, a competition of dick size"
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"url": [
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} | train_eli5 | Why do countries want to host events such as the Fifa world cup or the Olympics when it costs them billions of their own money?
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25kxab | How can USA get kicked out from the international space station if they funded 81% of it ? | I just don't understand.
_URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We didn't get kicked out. Russia isn't letting us use their rockets anymore. There's a big difference.",
"The Russians aren't kicking anyone out of the ISS. One minister (who is powerful in their space program, but still is just one guy talking and not Putin) says that after 2020 the Russians are going to end their cooperation with NASA, the ESA and JAXA on ISS operations.\n\nThe Russians built their modules on the ISS to be removable. They have their own power generation systems, their own air scrubbers, and their own engines. Technically, the Russians could close up the hatches, spin the bolts, and disconnect their stuff from the ISS, fly it off to some other orbit, and operate it by themselves.\n\nPractically speaking NASA is not going to let the ISS become inoperative due to the Russians doing that - assuming they actually did do it. NASA, the ESA and JAXA will kitbash something together to replace the missing Russian components and get it installed before a catastrophe happens.\n\nRight now the only two countries that launch crewed space vehicles are Russia and China. NASA has signed agreements with Russia for seats on its ships for the next several years. Russia has not indicated it intends to unilaterally void those agreements, and frankly, they need the money, so they're unlikely to do so. But even in a worst case scenario, NASA is not going to be without options.\n\nSpaceX pre-announced that on May 28 they are going to disclose the work they've been doing to upgrade the Dragon system to support crewed missions. My suspicion is that they're going to tell NASA they could fly immediately if NASA would accept a higher degree of risk than the current Commercial Crew specification allows (because SpaceX's emergency abort system has not been tested). NASA already knows what SpaceX is going to announce, and Russia probably does too. So this may be an empty threat.\n\nIt's a lot of political theater. Not a lot of actual policies.",
"Well, we currently don't have a space shuttle program.\n\nWikipedia:\n_URL_0_\n\nISS crew and cargo resupply\nThe ISS is planned to be funded until at least 2020.[37] There has been discussion to extend it to 2028 and possibly beyond that.[38] Until another US manned spacecraft is ready, crews will travel to and from the International Space Station exclusively aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.[39]\n\nSo we are dependent on rides to the ISS from the Russians.\n\nAdditionally, because the Russians are the only ones who can really access the space station, it would be a trivial matter to keep out any unwanted visitors (assuming someone is on board)",
"The only nation with vehicles that can go to and from the space station is Russia. We retired the space shuttle program, so we depend on Russia for transport. We haven't been getting along with Russia so well lately."
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"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_retirement"
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} | train_eli5 | How can USA get kicked out from the international space station if they funded 81% of it ?
I just don't understand. _URL_0_ | [
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4wmjpy | They say that 95% of the ocean remains unexplored. Why is that we can explore billions of miles into outta space but not a couple of miles down in the ocean? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sea Pressure.\n\nIn outer space, it's essentially a vacuum. So the difference in pressure between the inside of the space shuttle and the outside is about 15 psid.\n\nThe deeper underwater you go, the stronger the sea pressure. Imagine a column of water. The water at the very bottom of that column is being squished by ALL the water on top of it. For every 100 ft of water, there's about 44 psi of pressure being applied.\n\nSo when you go down thousands of feet underwater, you have a LOT of water on top of you, trying to squish you. The underwater vessels can only be built to withstand a certain amount of pressure before they're crushed by the immense force of the water on top of them.",
"We can \"see\" deep into space by observing the light and energy it produces and understanding how it works. These things have trouble traveling any sort of distance in water, so our field of vision in the ocean is much smaller. Added to this, pressure increases rapidly as you go deeper in the ocean, making an unsurvivable environment for much current observation/measuring technology.",
"I work in the subsea field, the phrase I use to compare is \"it's harder to get to space, but its harder to stay in the deep\"\n Ocean pressure is such a more hostile environment to our current technical skill set as a species than space.",
"All the miles we've explore in space is only .00000000000000000001% of it.\n\n5% of the ocean is a universe of knowledge and actual physical contact sometimes total immersion with the data in comparison.",
"Because it's easier to keep the air inside a spaceship than it is to keep the crushing ocean out of a submarine.",
"'Explored' is the key word here. How close do you have to get to something for it to be 'explored'? We could say that we've explored the solar system with telescopes, but I think we really mean 'visit'.\n\nBy that definition, we've explored such an infinitesimally small amount of of the space between earth and the moon that it's laughable to say we've explored it at all. Same goes for the surface of the moon - you've explored more of Cleveland on a layover in the airport than we've explored the moon.\n\nThere's still a lot to discover in the oceans because of high information density and low visibility. Checking the depths in one place gives us little information even a kilometer away. But rest assured, we've spent a lot more time searching the bottom of the ocean than we have walking on the surface of the moon.",
"Space is easier to explore. Deep sea pressure is much much harder to overcome than the vacuum of space is."
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} | train_eli5 | They say that 95% of the ocean remains unexplored. Why is that we can explore billions of miles into outta space but not a couple of miles down in the ocean?
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3cs1sm | Why is it that sometimes when water touches me unexpectedly, it feels painful? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's simply that you aren't expecting it, and the temperature difference is usually very different to your skin. As soon as you feel this difference, your body jumps and reacts."
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} | train_eli5 | Why is it that sometimes when water touches me unexpectedly, it feels painful?
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1zdc74 | Space coordinates? | How do coordinates in space work? If planets are orbiting in a solar system, solar system moving in a galaxy, galaxy moving, etc. Everything is moving, how can space coordinates work?
Are they real or just something in SciFi? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are several astronomical coordinate systems: Horizontal (AltAzimuth), Equatorial, Ecliptic, and Galactic are four commonly used, and each has it's own purpose. The choice of which coordinate system you use depends on what you're looking at, what kind of instrument you're using, and who you're talking to when you try to describe an object's position.\n\nIf you're standing in your backyard, using your eyeball as an observing instrument, and you want to tell somebody standing next to you what you're looking at, the Horizontal (AltAzimuth) system works well: look 12 degrees (clockwise) in Azimuth from due North, then go up 27 degrees in Altitude from the Horizon. Pretty simple, but it doesn't mean much to somebody who is not at your location. Consider how a person in Australia might describe where something is in the night sky, compared with a person in Norway.\n\nThe Equatorial Coordinate System is typically used by scientists to describe the positions of most celestial objects in reference texts, astronomical databases, and in Google Sky. One of the benefits of this coordinate system is that it doesn't matter where on Earth you are, the reference points are out in the night sky instead of the local horizon.\n\nAs a very coarse description, you should know that Right Ascension (R.A) in the sky corresponds to Longitude here on Earth. The difference is that R.A. is measured in hours, minutes, and seconds, based on the idea that the Earth rotates one complete revolution every 24 hours. A circle is 360 degrees, so one hour of R.A. represents exactly 15 degrees of arc (360/24=15). Just like Longitude on Earth is measured from an arbitrary meridian line passing through Greenwich, England, R.A on the sky is measured (clockwise) from a point called the vernal equinox. I'm not going to try to explain what the vernal equinox is here. All R.A. numbers are positive, from 0hr 0min 0sec through 24hrs 0min 0 sec. You can't have a negative R.A.\n\nDeclination (Dec) in the sky is a little easier to understand, it corresponds to Latitude here on Earth. The Celestial Equator (the line on the night sky that you'd see if you could extend the Earth's Equator out into space) is the zero point, and declination is measured positively up to the North Celestial Pole at +90 degrees, and negatively down to the South Celestial Pole at -90 degrees.\n\nThe Ecliptic Coordinate System can be used to locate objects in the Solar System, and likewise, the Galactic Coordinate System can be used to describe objects in our galaxy. There are reasons why it may be more convenient to use one of these rather than the Equatorial Coordinate System, but remember that any given object in the night sky can be described by more than one coordinate system. \n\nTL:DR; We measure everything from were it is as compared to earth.",
"There are several ways to do it, but the key to any coordinate system is a reference point (reference points are what you are gonna compare your position to).\n\nYou can build any coordinate system as long as you have a reference point. Within that coordinate system, the reference point does not move. It doesn't matter if what that point is tied to is moving (like the center of the earth), as long as it doesn't move within the coordinate system.\n\nImagine a satellite that would trail behind the Earth as it rotates the sun. If we compare it's position to the center of the Earth, it is not moving. If we compare it's position to the center of the Sun, it is moving as fast as the Earth.\n\nIn space, you typically set your reference point to where you are going to be travelling, but technically you can use any reference point (but the math gets tricky if you have weird things as reference points).\n\nSatellites that orbit the Earth use the center of the Earth as their reference point.\n\nSatellites that travel to other planets use the center of the Sun as their reference point.\n\nWe haven't dabbled much beyond that, but we can use anything we want as our reference point.\n\nThere is more to it, but I am trying to keep it as simple as possible.",
"Coordinates in space work rather easily. It's just a build up of various reference frames.\n\nFor instance, plotting the moon's trajectory around the sun is rather hard. It's a fairly complex motion. However, instead of having the sun as my frame of reference, why don't I shift my frame of reference to the Earth? If my frame of reference is the Earth... well the problem becomes much easier! The moon revolves around the earth! \n\nThe Earth's motion around the sun is also very simple. So instead of plotting how the moon revolves around the sun directly... we plot how the Earth revolves around the sun, and then on top of that we plot how the moon revolves around the Earth.\n\nThat's the beauty of reference frames, a simple shift of reference frame makes a very complex problem a very easy one.",
"When orienting a spacecraft, we use two types of coordinates: inertial (fixed) and noninertial (moving/on the craft). For this purpose, we consider the galaxy as inertial since the stars don't move much relative to each other. The system of space-fixed coordinates is determined by star tracking instruments on the craft. We then define any noninertial coordinates based off these inertial ones. Hope that made sense!\n\nSource: I'm an aerospace engineer!"
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"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Space coordinates?
How do coordinates in space work? If planets are orbiting in a solar system, solar system moving in a galaxy, galaxy moving, etc. Everything is moving, how can space coordinates work? Are they real or just something in SciFi? | [
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3kzd59 | How does 3 phase power work? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are three \"hot\" (energized) AC power lines, and the voltage on them moves up and down at different times. When the first one is 2/3 of the way through a cycle, the second is 1/3 of the way through a cycle, and the third just starting a cycle. This is depicted in [this graph.](_URL_0_)"
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-phase_electric_power#/media/File:3_phase_AC_waveform.svg"
]
} | train_eli5 | How does 3 phase power work?
| [
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7w2gyi | How do you use unique rectangles to solve sudoku? | I've tried reading multiple explanations, seen step by steps of examples, but none of them explain it in enough detail for me to understand how it works, so that I can use it on my own.
I know the purpose of the process is to eliminate number candidates, but I don't understand what the technique does to help you do that. Every "why" explanation I read for examples feels like they're missing to make it make sense.
Also, if there's too many candidates in a lot of the cells, like in an expert level puzzle, if you know any techniques to quickly identify a unique rectangle, that'd be a big help. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"A standard sudoku puzzle has *only one* solution. Unique rectangles let you eliminate possibilities because those would lead to a situation with two solutions, which you know to be impossible. \n\nSo in a sudoku puzzle, if you pick any four spots that forms a rectangle, those four spots will always have more than two different numbers in them. If a rectangle was made with (going around) 2,5,2,5, it could just as well be 5,2,5,2. That’s two solutions, and that against the “rules” that a puzzle has only one solution. So, if you were to encounter a point in solving a puzzle that it appears this situation can happen, like a rectangle has two numbers in common in all four spots, you *know* that it can’t end that way. Say the bottom corners are already reduced to the same two numbers, but the top corners also include another number. One of those top spots must be one of those other numbers. If that number is possible elsewhere in line with the rectangle, you can eliminate those other possibilities because you know it must be one of the rectangle corner spots. \n\nI think you’ll understand how to use it once you firmly understand this aspect. Using them in practice requires identifying potential “deadly patterns”, like a rectangle with only two numbers, and then figuring out which possibilities that you can eliminate because of it."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How do you use unique rectangles to solve sudoku?
I've tried reading multiple explanations, seen step by steps of examples, but none of them explain it in enough detail for me to understand how it works, so that I can use it on my own. I know the purpose of the process is to eliminate number candidates, but I don't understand what the technique does to help you do that. Every "why" explanation I read for examples feels like they're missing to make it make sense. Also, if there's too many candidates in a lot of the cells, like in an expert level puzzle, if you know any techniques to quickly identify a unique rectangle, that'd be a big help. | [
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2wk07h | Would it be possible for another country to BUY a country in debt? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The only ways to gain control of a country is through conquest or treaty.\n\nIn a treaty, you can theoretically place a condition by which the annexing nation pays the remaining debt of the nation being annexed.\n\nThis would effectively be \"buying\" a nation, though it is not something that could be done without the debtor nation's consent.",
"Not in the way you could buy a house, or one company could buy another.\n\nIt has happened though. Scotland poured a lot of it's wealth into an attempt to colonise Panama. When this scheme failed (due to disease, the locals, the Spanish, and to some extent the English) Scotland was broke.\n\nAt the same time Scotland had been arguing with England about thier shared monarchy, particularly who should be allowed to succeed. The English parliament wanted to ban all Catholics from sitting on the throne.\n\nThe English saw the Scots predicament as an opportunity and agreed to re-emburse the nobles for thier losses if they voted to merge Scotland with England - creating the United Kingdom.",
"You can buy the debt from the person that holds it, but you cannot purchase control of the country.",
"If you were to buy a country, who would you be paying?"
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} | train_eli5 | Would it be possible for another country to BUY a country in debt?
| [
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1p75t4 | the observance of Halloween in European countries. | To what extent do European countries celebrate Halloween? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"In Denmark, we barely celebrate it at all, some stores will do like halloween area and have some halloween stuff like pumpkins and a few people will make pumpkin heads (whatever they're called), but that's about it.",
"In Britain it's just seen by kids as an excuse to get sweets off people, by teenagers/students as an excuse to get wrecked in fancy dress, and by adults as an annoying and unnecessary festival caused by American influence on our culture.",
"In Scotland it's big. Kids dress up and go guising and for adults there'll be night clubs with dress up themes."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | the observance of Halloween in European countries.
To what extent do European countries celebrate Halloween? | [
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3xxob1 | Where in the toilet should I aim to have the quietest pee? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"I go for the side of the bowl (the *inside*) on the right side. This way the stream is a \"glancing blow\" of sorts and minimizes noise. \n\nNever thought I'd answer a question like this..."
],
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} | train_eli5 | Where in the toilet should I aim to have the quietest pee?
| [
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30zd70 | Why do Electric Dryer Cords not just plug in like every other power cord? | Got a new dryer today and had to spend a couple hours figuring out how to hook up the power cord. Every other appliance I have either comes with the power cord already attached, or simply plugs into the back of the appliance. But not electric dryers.
First you must remove a little panel that, on my dryer, was attached with bolts rather than screws leading to a half an hour spent trying to find the right socket wrench that fit the tiny bolt. Next I had to read the manual to figure out which wire went where. Then I had to attach a brace for the cord. Then there was the ground wire that was, unlike all the other wires, attached with a little bolt,
No problem, I thought, I grabbed my socket wrench with the little socket only to find that the two bolts were each slightly different in size! wtf!
Anyway, it seemed like a real pain in the ass compared to the normal procedure of just plugging the cord in. What's the point of this Rube Goldberg mess? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cpx7ccv"
],
"text": [
"It has to do with building codes. Let me explain\n\nDryers and homes can have two different main types of plugs for dryers. A 4-prong and a 3-prong. Old dryers and homes have 3 prong plugs/outlets, new ones have 4-prong plugs/outlets. Obviously, if you mix and match old/new home or dryer it won't work.\n\nNow the codes also say, you can't just \"convert\" a 3-prong outlet to new 4-prong outlet in your home, or vice-versa. But legally, you can just change the cord of the dryer to which ever outlet your home contains to get it to work. So manufactures of dryers make it so you can change the cord and that they will work with either 3 or 4 prongs."
],
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5
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why do Electric Dryer Cords not just plug in like every other power cord?
Got a new dryer today and had to spend a couple hours figuring out how to hook up the power cord. Every other appliance I have either comes with the power cord already attached, or simply plugs into the back of the appliance. But not electric dryers. First you must remove a little panel that, on my dryer, was attached with bolts rather than screws leading to a half an hour spent trying to find the right socket wrench that fit the tiny bolt. Next I had to read the manual to figure out which wire went where. Then I had to attach a brace for the cord. Then there was the ground wire that was, unlike all the other wires, attached with a little bolt, No problem, I thought, I grabbed my socket wrench with the little socket only to find that the two bolts were each slightly different in size! wtf! Anyway, it seemed like a real pain in the ass compared to the normal procedure of just plugging the cord in. What's the point of this Rube Goldberg mess? | [
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2mo3xk | what are laser beams & how are they different from light beams? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A laser beam is a beam of light that has some specific properties. A laser beam is monochromatic, meaning it emits a specific wavelength of light (in practice it's probably not 100% monochromatic, but it's close enough for many purposes). Normally lights emit a fairly wide range of wavelengths. Even a normal beam of red light will emit a range of wavelengths, just mostly wavelengths that fall within the range we see as red.\n\nThe photons they emit are also in phase. That means that if you think of them as waves, they peak and trough in synch with each other.",
"Laser is an acronym. Light amplification stimulated by emissions of radiation. Lasers are concentrated beams of light. But light any beam of light they still expand after so much length."
],
"score": [
6,
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | what are laser beams & how are they different from light beams?
| [
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3btg07 | if our bodies are around 97 degrees Fahrenheit, then why don't we feel comfortable in 97 degree weather? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cspc4ob",
"cspc7jo"
],
"text": [
"Because we're exothermic. We make more heat than we need and have to get rid of the excess. We need a temperature differential to get rid of heat at a comfortable rate.",
"The surface of your skin is lower than that of the inside of your body. Because your insides generate heat they need to radiate it away or face overheating, much like a computer for example.\n\nWe do it mainly by sweating, heat radiation (I think it might be convection actually but that's an argument for another time), and through breathing\n\nWhen your skin is the same temperature that your body should be at then it isn't moving heat away from your insides so you will overheat.\n\nIf the temperature of the air is the same as that of your skin then you will not convect heat away, relying on sweat to cool down. However hot weather is often very humid, which makes sweating much less effective. This is why in hot humid climates like South East Asia overheating is far more common than in areas like the Middle East"
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | if our bodies are around 97 degrees Fahrenheit, then why don't we feel comfortable in 97 degree weather?
| [
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2qtl94 | why do progressive Estates put their focus and resources on free healthcare and free education and not on free food, free clothing and free shelter? | According to the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (_URL_0_), Physiological needs are top priority and not Safety needs or Esteem needs. Why do the Estate focus on the latter rather than on the former? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cn9d7aw"
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"text": [
"I'm a little confused by your use of the word Estate, but I assume you mean state. The reason is that most progressive states have already taken care of their citizens' need for food, clothing, and shelter. People in those countries are either able to buy their own food, clothing, and shelter easily or there are government programs that provide food, clothing and/or shelter. \n\nI would also say that the states aren't providing \"free\" healthcare and education, but rather they are socializing it. People still have to pay taxes to support those systems, but in return no individual person has to pay a lot of money out of pocket when they use those services.\n\nYou could also look at it more cynically and say that governments aren't concerned with their citizens' needs, but rather strengthening the state economically and militarily. Schools and healthcare for productive citizens do a better job of that than providing aid to less productive, poorer citizens. Realistically, though, I think governments try to help with all of the things you listed, but they can't do it all because they have limited resources."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs"
]
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | why do progressive Estates put their focus and resources on free healthcare and free education and not on free food, free clothing and free shelter?
According to the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (_URL_0_), Physiological needs are top priority and not Safety needs or Esteem needs. Why do the Estate focus on the latter rather than on the former? | [
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7dztj6 | How do constellations stay the same in such a violent place like our galaxy? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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],
"text": [
"They don't. But you'll never live long enough to see them change. \n\nThe stars are moving relative to each other, but it's happening so slowly it's very hard to notice. In the 17th Century, Edmund Halley noticed that the then current position of some stars did not match the ancient Greek recorded position of these stars- a span of about 1600 years. _URL_0_\n\nalso, Polaris was not always \"the north star\", at one time the star Thuban was the pole star. At other times there is no star exactly at the pole at all.",
"The stars are moving. They are such great distance from us that the movement takes thousands of years to be apparent.\n\nThere are some nearby stars that move a little quicker. Barnard's Star is one of our nearest neighbors, about 6 light years away. Over the course of a lifetime it will move about half a moon diameter in distance.",
"Simply consider this. Constellations are made up of stars, the lifespan of which is on average about 10 billion years. We've been viewing them for less than 400 years, so basically no change would be seen."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/constellations.html"
]
} | train_eli5 | How do constellations stay the same in such a violent place like our galaxy?
[deleted] | [
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janrs | Reddit, please explain like I'm five what string theory is. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Everything in the universe is made of things way, way, smaller than atoms and even electrons called strings. They look like little rubber bands stretching everywhere. \n\n[This shows everything from what you can see, like a diamond, to what you can't see, like a string. Number 6 is a string.](_URL_0_)",
"Imagine you have a microscope so powerful that you can actually see what everything is made out of. You'll zoom down to molecules, then atoms, then protons and neutrons, quarks, electrons and after zooming in even further (much further), you'll see strings. Almost literally, strings, they have all sorts of shapes and they're vibrating in all sorts of ways. Or at least that's what the string theory tells us, but trouble is, for all it's relative popularity and complexity, we've never actually found one one shred of evidence supporting the whole thing and there's a good chance we never will.\n\nIt's more like a String Hypothesis, to be honest, lots of physicists are very sceptical about the whole thing. There are all sorts of conclusions and answers string theory provides about the world we live in, fancy words like branes, dimensions, fuzzballs, Calabi–Yau manifolds and lots of other complicated stuff that I don't even pretend to understand. You'll have to start at least two dozen ELI5 threads in order have some very, very, very basic idea of what's going on.",
"Mathematicians noticed that if you imagined super tiny loops that vibrate at various frequencies (analogous to the way, say, that a guitar string naturally vibrates depending on its length), you could *sort of* model the behavior of particles such as photons and electrons in a way that possibly could really make sense.\n\nAfter years and years of trying, this idea has been expanded on and gotten quite complicated, but still to this day the models don't quite match up with reality in a way that can be experimentally proven.",
"string theory is an idea that the very smallest things in the universe, the things that make everything else, are actually little strings. \n\nlook at this page.\n_URL_1_"
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} | train_eli5 | Reddit, please explain like I'm five what string theory is.
| [
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1qqaoa | How does Fusion work? What are it's possibilities as a means for energy in the future? | I've done some reading on here, it all sounds very interesting. But why haven't we delved deeper into something that seems to have so much potential?
Also, what do the environmental impacts look like from using this as a means for energy? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's an experimental plant called [ITER](_URL_0_), still under construction.\n\nThe trouble with fusion is that you're basically putting the sun in a bottle, but we're still figuring out how to make the bottle.",
"For fusion to work, you have to squish things so much that the atoms collapse together. This requires a lot of energy. Like, you need a high-yield nuke to even squish the atoms together. Then, you're hoping that by squishing the atoms together you get even more energy out than you put in.\n\nSo let's say you do that. You successfully bomb something so hard it squishes and fuses together. Two things happen:\n\n1. You get some energy out, but not enough to recover your losses. Now you just have a big crater.\n\n2. You get more energy out of it than you put in. Great! Now you have an even bigger crater, because we don't know how to safely collect all of that energy yet.\n\nFun Fact: The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, was a fusion bomb. It was a regular nuclear bomb that could generate enough energy to fuse hydrogen and release more energy."
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} | {
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} | train_eli5 | How does Fusion work? What are it's possibilities as a means for energy in the future?
I've done some reading on here, it all sounds very interesting. But why haven't we delved deeper into something that seems to have so much potential? Also, what do the environmental impacts look like from using this as a means for energy? | [
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53lwm9 | Why are some food allergies much more common than others? | Why are some foods, like peanuts and shellfish, particularly prone to causing adverse reactions? For example, I know dozens of people who are allergic to the aforementioned food products, but I know only one person each allergic to corn or green peppers.
I've read about the theory that lack of exposure to the potential allergens in childhood is what leads to reactions later. That is, because we're not exposed to as much stuff as kids, our immune systems do not learn how to properly respond to benign things like certain foods. But peanuts are a very common food ingredient, from what I can tell (shellfish less so, admittedly), so I'd expect it to be a fairly rare allergy instead of the most common one around. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The best answer we have is, \"we don't really know\". This is still a hot topic of research.\n\nAllergic reactions are basically your immune system overreacting to things it deems dangerous. Most of the time when you talk about allergies, those \"dangerous\" things aren't actually dangerous.\n\nOne of the current leading hypothesis on why certain allergies are more common is genetics. Our ancestors may have developed allergies to those things, and whatever genes that were responsible for causing those allergies got passed along. So, the unlucky people with those genes would have a much higher chance of developing those allergies."
],
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} | {
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} | train_eli5 | Why are some food allergies much more common than others?
Why are some foods, like peanuts and shellfish, particularly prone to causing adverse reactions? For example, I know dozens of people who are allergic to the aforementioned food products, but I know only one person each allergic to corn or green peppers. I've read about the theory that lack of exposure to the potential allergens in childhood is what leads to reactions later. That is, because we're not exposed to as much stuff as kids, our immune systems do not learn how to properly respond to benign things like certain foods. But peanuts are a very common food ingredient, from what I can tell (shellfish less so, admittedly), so I'd expect it to be a fairly rare allergy instead of the most common one around. | [
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oo6nb | Why only somethings work on touch screens, and others don't, fingers but not fabric? | This might have been answered in a ELI5 about touchscreens but I didn't really see an explanation about what works and what doesn't. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most touchscreens work using something called capacitive sensing. Basically, the touchscreen uses a conductor to detect when something is nearby. The human body is also a conductor, and therefore it can interfere with the electrical field of the touchscreen. The screen uses this to detect how a human is interacting with it. Fabric does not conduct electricity, so it doesn't interfere with the electric field.",
"Some touch screens work by pressure, others actually react via electrical conductivity in your fingers.\n\nThere's more to it, but that explains why you can't set them off just with pressure."
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} | train_eli5 | Why only somethings work on touch screens, and others don't, fingers but not fabric?
This might have been answered in a ELI5 about touchscreens but I didn't really see an explanation about what works and what doesn't. | [
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4wp1qe | If I try to hit a small insect, e.g. a fruit fly, with my hand at high speed, will I hit it or will the air which my Hand pushes in front of it will save the insect? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The air in front of it will actually be hitting it itself if you swing hard enough. Of course this is way faster than your hand can really go on its own. So it depends on what you mean by 'high speed'.\n\nThat's why the space shuttle coming down from space catches fire. Not from friction, but by pushing the air so hard in front of it that it hits more air hard enough that it glows and gets super hot.\n\nIf you had some kind of superhuman punch the force from the punch could hit the fly with air molecules hard enough to kill it well before your fist made contact.\n\nHave your punch go fast enough and you could turn the air into superheated plasma that would vaporize the fly. But at that point your hand has become a fist shaped weapon of mass destruction. As you'd be vaporizing everything in a vaguely cone shape for a large distance.\n\nOf course, with a slow enough human hand speed, the air currents are likely pushing the fly away, because you're not moving the air fast enough to make it damage the fly. And your hand isn't moving fast enough to damage the fly. And because the fly is so small it will absorb way less kinetic energy from your hand than say, somebody's face.\n\nAt THIS speed, the air is doing you a disfavor, and that's why the air holes in a fly swatter help it snap down fast enough. But even a fly swatter hitting a fly will often not harm it. It's the impact against the fly swatter and the wall the fly is on that crushes it."
],
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | If I try to hit a small insect, e.g. a fruit fly, with my hand at high speed, will I hit it or will the air which my Hand pushes in front of it will save the insect?
| [
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1r9w7a | When I visited London, I saw properties for "sale" with 999 year "leases". How does this system work? | Who actually owns these properties? What actually happens in 999 years? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Properties in Britain tend to be either Leasehold or Freehold (or others that are less common).\nWhen you buy a property 'Freehold', you are buying the house and the land underneath it\n\nWhen you buy 'Leasehold' you are buying the house but only renting the land. This means you have to either pay 'ground rent' or have a long term lease on the land\n\nA 999year lease is as good as buying it outright but just means the developers want to keep the land in their portfolio. Probably more useful where land values are expected to rise and they would be able to sell the land at a later date for a great profit. I think it also restricts your own ability to do extensions and development",
"There are a few different sorts of legal ownership of land: freehold, leasehold, cross-lease (amongst others).\n\nI believe that the London 999-year lease is **leasehold**, although in my country anyway, all of the ownership types include a lease term.\n\n(Rest of this post applies to New Zealand only, but our system is based on the British one, so some of it may also apply there).\n\n**Freehold** (aka. fee simple) is defined as a 99-year lease from the Crown here, but it gets renewed to 99 years on sale (and I presume the owner has the right to renew it at any time). It's done like this so that the country the land is in still has the right to charge you property tax, and apply the laws of the country, etc. For most intents and purposes, you own the land absolutely.\n\n**Cross-lease** is also popular here, it's where there is a single underlying freehold title, but two members agree to both share the freehold title, and also lease half of the property from the other person for 999 years (which is the closest the law allows to saying \"in perpetuity\".\n\nCross-leases are typically used when the land is too small to divide into two separate freehold titles (city councils have rules about that); or occasionally when an unscrupulous developer is too lazy to subdivide properly.\n\n**Leasehold** is where one person owns the land freehold and then they lease the buildings out. This is the worst type of ownership if you're the one buying the lease; because the leaseholder can change the terms of usage of the land, and also put up the rent. There was a case recently where some leasehold titles included a lease of $7000/yr for the land, and then they were renewed (this happens every 21 years) for a rent of $84,000. So most people who owned houses on this leasehold land were immediately ruined , because they couldn't afford this rent and the re-sale value of the house was destroyed."
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} | train_eli5 | When I visited London, I saw properties for "sale" with 999 year "leases". How does this system work?
Who actually owns these properties? What actually happens in 999 years? | [
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26ky5g | Could same sex marriage in the United States be legalized nationally, forcing states without SSM currently to perform these marriages? Or would each state have to legalize individually? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not really a matter of the federal government legalizing same sex marriage per se, since marriage has traditionally been a state issue. But the federal government does need to unilaterally recognize same sex marriage across the board (IRS, Social Security, etc) and when they do the remaining non-SSM states will have few options since now it will involve money. States taxes in states that don't recognize same sex marriage would be a nightmare if a gay couple could file a federal return jointly.\n\nStates have traditionally accepted the fundamental documents and records from other states. If you are married in one state, you are married in all states. Same with divorce. The SSM issue is really throwing a wrench into things for the hold-outs.",
"I do not think Congress could pass a law legalizing same sex marriage short of a Constitutional Amendment because marriage has always been a state power. However, it would be possible for the Supreme Court to decide laws outlawing same sex marriage are unconstitutional which would have a similar effect."
],
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} | {
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"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Could same sex marriage in the United States be legalized nationally, forcing states without SSM currently to perform these marriages? Or would each state have to legalize individually?
| [
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3k0wwx | How do people know that archaeological sites like Stonehenge and the newly announced find 2 miles from Stonehenge are ceremonial places of worship and not something else like, i dunno, a market or townhouses? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We don't really know what it was used for, but it would have taken a great deal of effort to build so we can assume it had great significance. It's aligned with the sunrise and sunset at the solstices, so it's a fair guess that some kind of ceremony took place then. If you just wanted to know when the solstices were then you could have built something much more simple. Also, there's evidence that some of the people buried nearby were from distant parts of Europe, so it seems to be something that you'd travel to visit. We might compare it to a medieval cathedral for those and similar reasons, but saying that it was a place of worship like a cathedral is mostly speculation.",
"There's a joke among people who study these things that if you don't know what it is, you claim it had \"religious significance.\" There's even a book written about not knowing what you're looking at called [Motel of the Mysteries](_URL_0_).\n\nThe truth is, if there are no reliable written accounts or pictures left showing us what went down, we have to make assumptions based on what we actually have our hands on. So a market or a house is going to look a particular way. Even if we had no idea what the Coliseum of Rome was, we could tell it was a gathering place for lots of people with something important going on in the middle. We might not know why people were there or what was happening on stage, but we understand what it is based on the structure. \n\nSo archaeologists and other specialists who study what little is known about this particular culture know what the houses look like (and I'm guessing that the houses here were made of wood, but you can identify post holes for structures even after the wood has rotted away) and this isn't it. They know that this is a massive structure requiring a lot of people working together for some unknown reason, that it's unusual, and any number of other things I don't even know to consider because I've never studied the place, and they narrow down possibilities. \n\nSo they know it's not residential or commercial. They know it has significant celestial alignment. They know how many people and how much time it took to get the materials to where they needed to be and make them into what they wanted. They might even know that there were other people in the area that did stuff that was similar and they know what's that for (not necessarily for Stonehenge, but other archaeological sites). So they put all the pieces together and say, \"This is what we have. Until anyone can prove differently with more authority.\"\n\nTL;DR: Let's see if it makes sense as anything else first before we claim \"religious significance.\"",
"The truth is that it could have multiple purposes.\n\nThe pre-Christianity religious world had less boundaries between what was considered the religious matters and secular matters. Kings were often priests, gods, or proxies for gods. Temples would provide prostitutes. Mathematics, writing, and astronomy were all considered a form of magic. \n\nSo Stonehenge could very well have had multiple purposes. When not being used for religious purposes, it could have been used storytelling, audiences with leaders, markets etc.. And we know it was useful for astronomy.\n\nBut I think one thing that proves it had more a primarily religious purpose was the lack of apparent intended uses. The open structure was not very defensible. The lack of enclosure means it was got very good for storage of materials or living quarters. And the expensive and relatively exotic materials point to it not being just a memorial (a significant portion was quarried from Wales when there are much nearer sources of stone). Using it as public gathering spot (market, forum, theater) is excessively expensive and ritualized.\n\nBasically, what points to something having a more religious and less secular usage, is often the lack of secular usage for the site.\n\nAbout the only other non-religious use I could see for it is beautification. That would be awfully usual if it was. All early beautification projects of this scale and time that I am aware of were usually for kings and for their personal usage. But there is no palace to go along with it. Over the course of history, usually kings build an impressive palace first, and then start working on gardens and plazas for themselves. If there was nearby palace of near equal scale, it might rewrite the purpose of Stonehenge.\n\nIf it turned out to be just beautification for stake of the people's enjoyment, that would be a big change in how we view those ancient people.",
"If it were a living place, we'd find more evidence of human life.\n\nPiles of animal bones that show signs of being butchered are a favorite. Metal/clay shards that could be from tools or plates. Hell, in some sites (newer than Stonehenge) they find evidence that the homes were regularly swept of dirt.",
"To put it in modernday terms of the effort required, imagine starbucks making a 12 story solid gold mansion with humanskin rugs and long lost mayan artworks, for their self checkout area.",
"The layout and composition of Stonehenge pretty much rules out the possibility that it was residential, although archaeological evidence of residential structures has been found nearby. \n\nThe important thing to remember about Stonehenge is that it was built in several phases over a long period of time. The particular composition of the stones and the unearthing of bodies that were sick and/or injured suggests that it was once a place of healing. The smaller blue stones were quarried 200 miles away, and were believed to possess healing powers. What is known as the \"great trilithon\" of Stonehenge is lined up with the summer and winter solstice. Many ancient cosmological theories posited that the arrangement of the heavens and the processes governing life on earth were causally related. None of the theories about the original purpose or use of Stonehenge have been verified beyond all doubt, but the evidence we have so far strongly suggests that its construction has to do with the cosmology and worldview of neolithic Britons.",
"Just going to throw this in, but the stonehenge is actually not a stonehenge at all, it doesn't fit with the definition of what one should be."
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108831.Motel_of_the_Mysteries"
]
} | train_eli5 | How do people know that archaeological sites like Stonehenge and the newly announced find 2 miles from Stonehenge are ceremonial places of worship and not something else like, i dunno, a market or townhouses?
| [
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28wla0 | How do Young Earth Creationists rationalize radiocarbon dating? | Not trying to stir the pot, just genuinely curious about how they do it. Since it is based on relatively simple math, and relatively simple science, on what basis do they reject it? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I grew up in a moderately fundamentalist community, so I'll speak from personal experience. \n\nFrom the point of view of a fundamentalist, you are approaching the problem backwards. When you and I look at a problem such as \"how old is this item,\" we look for a method or data point to work from. When a fundamentalist looks at the same problem, they start with their interpretation of the bible. The earth is X,000 years old. Therefore, the item must be less than X,000 years old. Any information that supports this is correct. Any info that contradicts this must be either divine interference, a mistake, or a lie told by someone attempting to disprove God's existence.\n\nA perfect example of this. I went to a private school growing up. In our \"science\" textbook, was a section on radiocarbon dating. Our book included a graph showing us how reliable RC dating was. According to the text, after 5000 years, RC dating is unreliable.\n\nI will qualify all of this by saying that I know very few young earthers. Most practicing Christians that I know only believe that its been roughly 6-10 thousand years since Adam and Eve. They feel that any amount of time from Genesis 1:1 to the end of the garden of Eden could have been any amount of time.",
"[Here is Ken Ham's explanation] (_URL_0_) for why radiocarbon dating is not a proof that young-earth creationism is wrong.\n\nNotice that the fact that it is nonsense is camouflaged in scientific-sounding language. Many young earth creationists will actively avoid reading science books that aren't written by young earth creationists, and so they will trust that this is real science (after all, it sounds very science-y), and not double-check its logic against other science.",
"They believe one of two things, depending on the denomination of their churches:\n\n1. God manipulated it to test our faith. Or...\n2. Satan manipulated it to fool us."
],
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://answersingenesis.org/geology/carbon-14/doesnt-carbon-14-dating-disprove-the-bible/"
]
} | train_eli5 | How do Young Earth Creationists rationalize radiocarbon dating?
Not trying to stir the pot, just genuinely curious about how they do it. Since it is based on relatively simple math, and relatively simple science, on what basis do they reject it? | [
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4mvsgr | What's the difference between Miss USA and Miss America? | additionally, why are there two pageants? does England have Miss Great Britain and Miss England? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's just two separate competitions, run by competing organizations. It's Coke vs. Pepsi, or IBM vs. Mac, or Jif vs. Skippy -- just two separate companies, each trying to do it best. There is nothing whatsoever official about it. If you wanted to, you could set up a \"Ms. Americas\" competition and try to get people to buy advertising and sponsor it and to enter.",
"Miss USA is part of the Miss Universe Organization and selects the American entrant to Miss Universe. They also operate Miss Teen USA. \n\nMiss America is another pageant unrelated to Miss Universe. It's scholarship based. \n\nYes, the UK has a Miss United Kingdom, Miss Universe UK, Miss Great Britain, Miss England, and probably everything else. These are mostly unrelated (with the exception of miss universe). Any pageant can exist if an organization holds it. Certainly not every country has any of these pageants."
],
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} | {
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"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What's the difference between Miss USA and Miss America?
additionally, why are there two pageants? does England have Miss Great Britain and Miss England? | [
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6jq0s4 | Why are some people "heavy" sleepers, and some "light" sleepers? | My wife wakes up every time I shift in bed, while I will probably sleep through the Apocalypse if my alarm doesn't go off. Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djg7rqn"
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"Everyone's brain is a little bit different. Sometimes it's the physical structures, sometimes it's the chemicals the brain makes, and how it uses or responds to them. \n\nThere are at least 2 chemicals that play a big role in being awake versus sleeping, and how we go from one state to another: GABA and histamine. Some people may make more of one chemical and less of another. Someone else might have more or less physical structures that interact with the chemicals. \n\nThat's pretty simplified though. Try searching the neuroscience of sleep. Start with Wikipedia and work up to the link below. Hope this helps. 🙂\n\n[cognitive neuroscience of sleep](_URL_0_)"
],
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
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]
} | train_eli5 | Why are some people "heavy" sleepers, and some "light" sleepers?
My wife wakes up every time I shift in bed, while I will probably sleep through the Apocalypse if my alarm doesn't go off. Why is that? | [
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2nbhd5 | What is happening biologically and psychologically when someone witnesses something so horrific they throw up? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Stress reaction. \n\nStomach acid, bowel contents, bladder contents -- they all do really, really bad things to you if they end up outside of their designated organs. Waaaay back in the day, if you saw someone getting mauled by a lion, there was a good chance you're next. So your body then proceeds to evacuate those solids and fluids, so if you survive the mauling, you won't slowly die of sepsis."
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} | train_eli5 | What is happening biologically and psychologically when someone witnesses something so horrific they throw up?
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5qubq4 | Why does it seem to take so long to warm up after being cold for so long. | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I hope I'm understanding your question right. Your body's reaction to being cold is to go into a survival mode, moving blood away from the extremities and toward the organs in your core. Your body is willing to sacrifice limbs to stay alive, which is why hands, feet, nose and ears are often the fist things to get frostbite. Say you've been outside in the cold all day and then go inside, your body doesn't know it can now stop constricting blood vessels in your limbs, therefore your hands and feet can take a long, and often painful, time to rewarm. Getting your heart rate up will force your body to increase blood flow and warm you up much faster. Other than that the best way to rewarm extremities is not warm water like many people think (this can cause skin damage and even burns since people often can't feel how hot the water actually is), but instead to have direct skin-to-skin contact. Cold fingers can go in your groin or armpits, and toes can go on a (close and very understanding) friend's abdomen. \n\nI can't find it now (maybe someone can help me here) but there was a study done in Norway I think were they attempted to retrain this reaction in people's bodies. They had subjects stand outside in winter in their underwear with their hands in bowls of hot water. They were able to temporarily have their bodies flood blood to their extremities when cold, however the effect wore off without the constant conditioning.\n\nI remember after a week of backpacking in the winter here in New England, getting in a warm car to head home. For most of the ride back, my hands became swollen, reddish, and itchy. It was literally my body not knowing how to handle being back in a warm environment for a few hours."
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} | train_eli5 | Why does it seem to take so long to warm up after being cold for so long.
[deleted] | [
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us0cm | How lightbulbs work | I know this is supposed to be common knowledge, but I've really never quite understood. Some help? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When something gets very hot it gives off a lot of EM radiation. Some of that is visible light (~8% for a standard filament lamp)\n\nIn a lightbulb the Tungsten filament gets to temperatures near 2000K (~2300 Celcius) hence light."
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} | train_eli5 | How lightbulbs work
I know this is supposed to be common knowledge, but I've really never quite understood. Some help? | [
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6jikwu | Do dancers count to 8 for every song? Or in songs that use 3/4 or 6/8 time do they count differently? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Do dancers count to 8 in every song?\nYes. Understand they arent counting music, they are counting movements.\n\nSometimes we do \"1, e and a 2, 3 and 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8.\" This is for highly syncopated stuff. Accents and such. Each word represents a movement. Always, always we count to 8 no matter the song.",
"Absolutely not, no. Dancers, musicians, anybody counts in a way that is helpful.\n\nSo in common time (4/4), you'll most often count to four or eight or whatever. In Waltz timing (3/4) you'll definitely count to three mostly. In 6/8 the most common way to count would probably be 'one two three, two two three'.\n\nHowever, sometimes that doesn't make a great deal of sense. There's a step we learned in Argentine Tango that was thirteen beats long (which is odd, but you can pause and pose whenever you like...) so I'd count to thirteen there.\n\nSo I think it's whatever works."
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} | train_eli5 | Do dancers count to 8 for every song? Or in songs that use 3/4 or 6/8 time do they count differently?
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1gfxso | Can somebody please give me a tl;dr on this whole NSA scandal? | First off, I understand *scandal* isn't the best word for it, but it's two in the morning and that's the word I decided to use. Now let me explain.
Ok, so I have a mild understanding about the issue at hand. Basically, we can all be "watched" by the government at any point in time, more or less, and because of that we can all get manipulated (including the government). I also understand that most(?) of the stuff they do is illegal. Everything else I read, however, I can't decide what to think of it.
It seems to me that the things that I've read have been a little biased (sorry /r/restorethefourth, I hope you understand!). Because of this perceived bias, I've devised that part of the speculation towards the NSA that I've read is conspiracy, and the other part legitimate. However, I can't decided which is which or if there is any kind of conspiracy at all! So please, if I could get the least opinionated/most factual, up-front answer, that's what I'm looking for!
Note: To clear things up, the (potential) conspiracy in question is not the NSA, but rather the calling of bullshit towards the NSA. Also, by no means am I trying to pin any of you guys as conspiracy theorists, please take no offense! | explainlikeimfive | {
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"the NSA since 9/11 has been given a purpose to track terrrorists and some of the methods they have done were considered immoral and would of been considered unconstitutional but, It's Not at all illegal.\n\n Phone log database - They are constitutionally allowed if you consider the supreme court's interpretation in to collect data of call sender/receiver and log info without a warrant, wiretapping requires a warrant but call logs aren't.\n_URL_4_\n\n > the Supreme Court of the United States held that the installation and use of the pen register was not a \"search\" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and hence no warrant was required.\n\n_URL_3_\n > A pen register is an electronic device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line. The term has come to include any device or program that performs similar functions to an original pen register, including programs monitoring Internet communications.\n\n One of their other programs called PRISM collects data from foreign servers routing into american servers, say if a pakistani user submits data to a pakistani website that needs to use an American server first then it would be copied because it went through an american server, however if it was a pakistani user submitting data and didn't reroute into a american server by any chance then it won't get copied.\n\nAnd the other part within regards to American data is that since intelligence agencies aren't allowed to do this tactic, so they have to ask US companies for data (apple,microsoft,google,facebook...etc) Despite misconceptions they are Not hacking into computers but copying data from what people uploaded online and into the products of the following companies. If you take a pic of yourself but you don't upload it to facebook then it won't be copied, but if you do then maybe. It isnt however PRISM copying everything, it collects pieces here and there to get a bigger picture/web of the situation.\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHeres a map of data collected, PRISM collects far more data on india then US data.\n\nAny americans who read EULA's(hint: close to none) should of known that corporations can do what it wants with the data you given them. The NSA collected data from third party corporations whose data came from users who willingly user supplied content and data towards their products, The PRISM program wasn't hacking into private computers. But merely collecting what the private corporations already had.\nSo its a moral issue of whether a user willingly supplying content into a product of a third party corporation who was NOT forced to in the first place is considered a violation of privacy when the user for example did not read the EULA's terms.\nHere's facebook data policy\n > _URL_2_\nHow we use the information we receive We use the information we receive about you in connection with the services and features we provide to you and other users like your friends, our partners, the advertisers that purchase ads on the site, and the developers that build the games, applications, and websites you use. For example, in addition to helping people see and find things that you do and share, we may use the information we receive about you.\n > ....\n > We store data for as long as it is necessary to provide products and services to you and others, including those described above. Typically, information associated with your account will be kept until your account is deleted. For certain categories of data, we may also tell you about specific data retention practices.\n\n\nSo what does the NSA do with the data?? they use it to build a database which they then will use algorithms to search for patterns of terrorist activity. Since they can't search through every data, for example its more likely they search through arabic or somali or farsi words for terrorism, some previously used al-qaeda keywords were wedding which was a codeword for a bombing until they dropped it when they realized they were being busted and moved on to other keywords.\n\nThe NSA is legally barred from searching a US citizen's data without a warrant, but the data of foreign nationals do not require so because unless they are in the US, so if abdullah salam is suspected of plotting a attack on americans abroad and at the US, the NSA does not require a warrant, but if he is in the US then they have to get a warrant.\n\nAnd where do these warrants come from?? they come from the FISC court who are a 11 member panel appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who then approve a warrant to investigate only foreign nationals, and with the warrant then the NSA are allowed to look further into the data of the foreign national by using PRISM.\n\nWhat some consider unconstitutional is the NSA copying data with the folks on reddit consider a illegal search, but the supreme court would have to decide on it, since the internet is not protected under the fourth amendment and its going to be tough to convince them that copying data is a search and seizure.\n\nAnd the NSA has legal authority to do these programs, specifically under the Patriot Act, Protect America act of 2007 and the FISA amendments of 2007 under section 702.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n > SEC. 702. PROCEDURES FOR TARGETING CERTAIN PERSONS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES OTHER THAN UNITED STATES PERSONS.\n\n > ‘(a) Authorization- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, upon the issuance of an order in accordance with subsection (i)(3) or a determination under subsection (c)(2), the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence may authorize jointly, for a period of up to 1 year from the effective date of the authorization, the targeting of persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information.\n‘(b) Limitations- An acquisition authorized under subsection (a)--\n‘(1) may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States;\n‘(2) may not intentionally target a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States if the purpose of such acquisition is to target a particular, known person reasonably believed to be in the United States;\n‘(3) may not intentionally target a United States person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States;\n‘(4) may not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States; and\n‘(5) shall be conducted in a manner consistent with the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.\n‘(c) Conduct of Acquisition-\n‘(1) IN GENERAL- An acquisition authorized under subsection (a) shall be conducted only in accordance with--\n‘(A) the targeting and minimization procedures adopted in accordance with subsections (d) and (e); and\n‘(B) upon submission of a certification in accordance with subsection (g), such certification.\n‘(2) DETERMINATION- A determination under this paragraph and for purposes of subsection (a) is a determination by the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence that exigent circumstances exist because, without immediate implementation of an authorization under subsection (a), intelligence important to the national security of the United States may be lost or not timely acquired and time does not permit the issuance of an order pursuant to subsection (i)(3) prior to the implementation of such authorization.\n\nSo how the procedures goes is that\n\n1. PRISM finds pattern of terrorist activity and only allowed to use it to find terrorists under the laws of congress and under the supreme courts supervision.\n2. If PRISM finds a pattern among a foreign national, report back to both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence who both then ask for a warrant from the fisc.\n3. FISC (foreign intelligence surveillance court) approves\n4. PRISM then legally and constitutionally allowed to search data of that foreign person and only for that person.\n\nIf a US citizen is linked to a foreign plotter then it also requires a warrant before the person's data can be searched by PRISM. But PRISM cannot directly target US citizens with their algorithms, however if they are linked to a foreign national, then with a warrant they can be. But it also cannot if you read the 702 section, directly target foreign nationals within the US or US citizens abroad.\n\n Its confusing but basically they are searching for data for links to terrorists but they cannot search data of US citizens abroad and domestic or foreign nationals within the US unless they find a link with a foreign national abroad and then with a warrant. And even though foreign nationals abroad are not protected by the fourth amendment, the section 702 requires one anyway\n\n > (5) shall be conducted in a manner consistent with the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States."
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"http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register",
"http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland"
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} | train_eli5 | Can somebody please give me a tl;dr on this whole NSA scandal?
First off, I understand *scandal* isn't the best word for it, but it's two in the morning and that's the word I decided to use. Now let me explain. Ok, so I have a mild understanding about the issue at hand. Basically, we can all be "watched" by the government at any point in time, more or less, and because of that we can all get manipulated (including the government). I also understand that most(?) of the stuff they do is illegal. Everything else I read, however, I can't decide what to think of it. It seems to me that the things that I've read have been a little biased (sorry /r/restorethefourth, I hope you understand!). Because of this perceived bias, I've devised that part of the speculation towards the NSA that I've read is conspiracy, and the other part legitimate. However, I can't decided which is which or if there is any kind of conspiracy at all! So please, if I could get the least opinionated/most factual, up-front answer, that's what I'm looking for! Note: To clear things up, the (potential) conspiracy in question is not the NSA, but rather the calling of bullshit towards the NSA. Also, by no means am I trying to pin any of you guys as conspiracy theorists, please take no offense! | [
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2s0u0y | Why do we still make pennies in the USA if they are barely used and cost more to make then they are worth? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because the Zinc Industry in America has a powerful lobby and would not allow it (Pennies are mostly made from zinc now).",
"Yes, it does cost more than a penny to make a penny -- but a penny has a very, very long useful life. And, if you'll excuse the phrase, the mint isn't in the business of making money -- they're in the business of making money.",
"[This video](_URL_0_), where John Green asks Obama this very question, is very interesting. I think Obama's first two answers are pretty much right:\n\n1. I don't know.\n\n2. People don't like change, even if it's positive.\n\nThe first one, is simply that most people haven't even thought about it as an issue. Activists only have a certain amount of time to promote issues, so those who would push for this kind of thing would rather focus their energies on bigger things. I think I heard $48 million per year the government spends on pennies. The federal government spent $3,454,000 million in 2013. $48 million is nothing.\n\nThe second issue is that, even if you got somebody to introduce a bill, it could be a tough sell. People will be scared about how the world will work when there are no longer pennies, since the system we have now \"works\". On the other hand, since it's not a big ticket issue, there isn't much to gain politically from supporting it.",
"Sales tax is calculated on the total of your transaction, not the sum of the individual items. There are also multiple taxes (state, county, city) and in some places it can vary with quantity (take out food vs groceries).",
"One reason is that most Americans hate change. (Pardon the pun)",
"We killed the penny up here in Canada and everyone seems to still be alive.",
"While it does cost more to make than its worth, the average life of a coin is something like 25 years, so each individual penny will be spent and respent a multitude of times. That's how the government looks at it."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do we still make pennies in the USA if they are barely used and cost more to make then they are worth?
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3s7n3p | How can satellites be free-falling towards earth all the time and never touch ground? | I saw on this video _URL_0_ that zero gravity on satellites is actually micro gravity.
I get it's the same principle as those airplanes that free-fall a huge distance and give you a few seconds of weightlessness.
But how does earths velocity keep satellites from actually touching ground? Why doesn't the same principle work on those airplanes?
I just can't get my hear around earths speed preventing an orbiting object from crashing on the ground.
| explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not Earth's velocity, it is the satellite's. The best way I have found to describe it is that the satellite is going so fast in the perpendicular direction of Earth's gravity such that it missed the Earth, and continues missing.",
"Gravity doesn't make things fall straight down. Instead, it bends their path toward the earth.\n\nThink about an object like a baseball. When you throw it, it starts out going straight, then bends toward the earth. If you make an object a lot faster than a baseball -- like a bullet fired from a gun -- it is moving so fast that it goes miles before the downward curvature of its path pulls it down to earth.\n\nIf you have something a lot faster than a bullet -- like a space rocket -- it moves so fast that while its path still curves downward, the curvature of the path isn't sufficient for it to hit the earth, and instead it describes a circle around the earth [2].\n\n[1] Different objects have different air resistance, determined by shape, materials, and the speed it is travelling.\n\n[2] Or an ellipse, depending.",
"its because the earth is falling away from it as it is falling towards the earth. _URL_0_\n\nthe cannonball being shot around the earth is a good example. if the velocity of the ball is high enough, the ball will keep going past the earth before its brought down, thus it never really gets brought down.",
"Which way is the satellite going, (pretty much) in a circle around Earth right?\n\nNot quite technically, the satellite is traveling in a straight line parallel with the Earth; but the Earth keeps it 'anchored', pulling it down with the same force it travels parallel with [Example](_URL_1_)",
"It's falling toward Earth, but not falling DIRECTLY toward Earth...rather it's falling at an angle and a speed such that it keeps falling and keeps missing. Remember, those things are at some serious speeds."
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} | train_eli5 | How can satellites be free-falling towards earth all the time and never touch ground?
I saw on this video _URL_0_ that zero gravity on satellites is actually micro gravity. I get it's the same principle as those airplanes that free-fall a huge distance and give you a few seconds of weightlessness. But how does earths velocity keep satellites from actually touching ground? Why doesn't the same principle work on those airplanes? I just can't get my hear around earths speed preventing an orbiting object from crashing on the ground. | [
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3naeag | how come there isn't life that silicon based like carbon | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Silicon and Carbon, despite being in the same column on the Periodic Table, have fairly different properties. In particular, silicon does not form long chain molecules as easily or as frequently as does carbon, and those long chains are essential to organic chemistry.",
"Maybe all carbon based life simply ate silicon based life. Maybe Earth's environment isn't that good for alternative to even happen.\n\nThe truth is, we have only vague understanding on how carbon life happened. Any discovery of something different would be revolutionary.\n\nThat's why recent NASA announcement is so exciting - we might get a sample of life completely independent from Earth. Mars is after all more accessible than underground oceans on Europa or lakes of Titan."
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} | train_eli5 | how come there isn't life that silicon based like carbon
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4v3srp | What are lobbies in politics - how did they develop, what are they, why do people hate them? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Let's say you are a wombat rancher. You prefer that laws get passed that benefit your business...like low taxes on wombat related goods, and regulations that make it difficult for foreign wombat ranchers to sell in your country.\n\nYou might write your representatives in congress, but you are just one person. Instead, you might get all of your wombat rancher friends to contribute money, and hire someone to convey your desires to congress. That's a lobbyist. They are a natural extension of freedom of speech and freedom to assemble.\n\nPeople don't like lobbyists, because they can give people with money and connections a greater voice in congress. They arrange for congressmen to get campaign contributions and special gifts, and many feel this borders on bribery.",
"Lobby groups are not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of every single person trying to see their congressional representatives one at a time, they can form a group (lobby) for their cause, and then send a person on their behalf.\n\nIt makes it easier for causes that aren't geographically specific to try and affect change for their chosen cause."
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} | train_eli5 | What are lobbies in politics - how did they develop, what are they, why do people hate them?
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4uv6um | If internet banking systems use encrypted SSL connections and they say encrypted connections are safe why people say it is not secure to use internet bank systems on public wi-fi? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"WOW, there's a lot of really bad answers here with completely false info, especially /u/TRENZAL0RE 's answer.\n\n1) A lot of people out there are idiots and don't understand terminology or advice given to them. Some people equate WiFi with any non cellular access. To these people saying don't use a public computer is exactly the same as don't use public WiFi. The real message is DON'T USE PUBLIC COMPUTERS to access your bank account. These computers can be compromised with key loggers, etc...\n\nhere's how an actual attack on wifi might go down:\n\n2) a) The issue with using public WiFi hotspots is not necessarily with the provider but also with the users connected to the hotspots. When you connect to a wifi access point you are then assigned an IP address and routing/DNS info from the DHCP server which is usually a service running on the router. However, ANYONE can run a DHCP service on their computer (or even their rooted phone) and use that to assign a chosen DNS server. So either the provider, or if a user is running a DHCP service that user (assuming your device gets its IP designation from their competing DHCP service, a 50/50 chance) will have control of what DNS service you are using. The DNS is used to resolve the domain to an IP. So an attacker will run a custom DNS that will resolve a chosen domain to whatever computer they wish (i.e. their own). So this is the first part of an attack, routing your access to a target machine of their choice. It's not even 100% necessary for a user to use a custom DHCP server, if the router is badly secured they could simply replace the DNS settings on the router with one of their choice.\n\n2) b) When you type an address into your browser address bar, for some stupid reason, it will prioritises insecure http over secure https when attempting to connect to the server. So if you type in _URL_4_ it is actually going to try and visit http://_URL_4_ which is not secure. and typical bank will redirect that to the secure page _URL_1_, but since an attacker has control of the DNS its now the server so it can redirect a site to whatever the fuck it wishes, like _URL_2_ or _URL_0_. Since the attacker owns the domains _URL_7_ and _URL_3_ it can easily get reliable certificates for both of those domains with ease and the user will see that lovely green secure symbol in the address bay to say that a valid cert has been provided and sees a page written by the attacker that looks like their bank page because the attacker just ripped the html from the actual page.\n\na lot of people on this post are talking about MITM attacks or cookie hijacking on the https connection (what i described above is kind of a MITM attack, but not of the sort others are describing). These attacks are all BS for secure connections. You would have to be able to spoof the cert which is almost impossible (there have been a number of cases where people have gotten legitimate certs for high profile domains, such as _URL_6_ subdomains using social engineering). And cookies are part of the HTTP/HTTPS protocol not SSL/TLS so they are not sent insecurely when you are on a secure connection.\n\nI'm slightly drunk, but if anyone wants to go through an attack scenario I will happily debunk/approve it as a possible attack vector.",
"They can't reasonably break SSL. They can do things like redirect _URL_8_ to a fake site that LOOKS like your bank (and then collect your login). They can also insert viruses into unencrypted pages (like _URL_9_ or your bank's homepage) that infect your computer.",
"A lot of these answers are either blatantly wrong or don't directly address the question. If you see the green padlock in your address bar, you are 99.99% safe from eavesdropping, barring the occasional vulnerability that impacts SSL's overall security. In my opinion, there are two big reasons you might not want to browse on public Wi-Fi:\n\n\n1. Your destination domain (e.g. *_URL_11_*) will be disclosed to anyone who is listening in.\n\n2. An attacker might take advantage of you typing *_URL_11_* into the address bar instead of *https://_URL_11_*. We security folks have since fixed this vulnerability by allowing a website operator to tell the browser a site must always be loaded over https://, but this mechanism requires the site operator opt-in. That said, your major banks / web apps all do this.\n\nAt the end of the day, a lot of it comes down to the things the site operator has implemented in order to keep you safe. Logging into a Wells Fargo bank account over public Wi-Fi is perfectly safe. When entering your social security number on _URL_10_, though, think twice, because the site operator might not have protected against #2 if they don't have professional assistance with web security.\n\n-\n^References: ^I'm ^a ^web ^application ^security ^engineer ^with ^a ^major ^cloud ^company",
"Taken from here _URL_13_\n\n\"A session which is entirely over HTTPS is fairly safe, as all requests from the browser, and pages transmitted by the server are encrypted.\n\nHowever, when accessed via HTTPS, many sites will only carry out the authentication step over HTTPS, and then drop back to HTTP for the rest of the session. So, your password itself is safe, but the session ID used by the server to identify you for that session is transmitted in the clear by your browser. This reduces the load on the webserver (because encryption/decryption is CPU-intensive) but makes the site much less secure. Gmail is safe because it uses HTTPS for the whole session, but Facebook and many other sites do not.\n\nThis is how tools such as Firesheep are able to hijack users' accounts when an attacker is sharing an unencrypted wireless network.\n\nYou can protect yourself from this attack by either using a VPN to encrypt all session data, or by only using networks which have strong, per-user encryption such as WPA-PSK (WEP uses the same key for every user, and so does not offer protection from this attack).\"",
"As long as you see the lock icon on your browser without any warning messages and verify the URL , then your connection is authenticated and encrypted. You can bank with full safety. No one can decrypt your communication or perform man-in-the-middle attacks.",
"If you're really careful, there is no reason not to use https websites, such as banking or email, on public Wi-Fi. SSL/TLS protects your session end to end, and even someone who captures the traffic can't do anything useful with it. \n\nHowever, most users are not careful, so there are still some bad things that can happen:\n\n* Banks will usually redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS (so if you type _URL_16_, which your browser turns into _URL_15_, you're redirected to _URL_14_). This redirect, though, is not secure, so a compromised hotspot might send you to _URL_17_ instead.\n* Search engines are usually not secure by default. So if you're Googling the name of your bank and clicking on the first result, someone might be able to send you somewhere else.\n\nOne way to get around these issues is to use a previously installed app from your bank on your mobile device. I would have no issue doing this, or typing the full https url of my bank, on a public Wi-Fi connection.",
"Here is an attack I actually had to deal with. Malware was on the user's PC. It DNS hijacked to a fake bank website, probably after lifting the bank's url so the attacker could setup the fake one. What kills me is that multifactor authentication was used with a code on the RSA key expiring every 30 seconds. Two transactions were executed. We managed to get the bank to stop the transactions. However, it was blind luck that someone noticed the bank transaction notification emails. The attacker sent over 8000 spam emails to hide them. Which, ironically, is what led the user to panic after many unsuccessful attempts to login to his bank's website. Bank was called, accounts were locked, transactions cancelled. PC cleaned six ways from Sunday.\n\nI don't think the FBI was involved because I wasn't asked for a forensic hard drive image.",
"**tl;dr**: It is completely safe if you can click the padlock and see \"Secure connection\"(Firefox) or \"Your connection to this site is private\"(Chrome)\n\nTo understand this better, let's go through steps from attackers standpoint:\n\nStep 0: Getting into network\n \n* Public network: Just connect to network and go to step 1.\n\n* WEP encryption: In WEP network, encryption keys change constantly, but there is not enough codes, so they will repeat after some time. By listening to the traffic and exploiting this flaw, it is possible to crack the key in a matter of minutes.\n\n* Some routers have WPS Pin code made to make network setup easier. The problem is that there are only 11000 variations which could all be tried in a matter of seconds\n\n* WPA2: In this case, you'll be better off just asking for a password. If you can't though, there is still a method. First off, you put some noise into the network, distracting connections and hopefully causing clients to disconnect. After client disconnects, software is likely to try to reconnect back with an encrypted message like \"Hey, [Router], im [Client], i want to connect\". We intercept this message and since we know who the client is and which router he connects to, we can go home and try every single encryption key untill we get a match. In best case scenarios, this might take between few hours or a week. In worst cases, few years might not be enough.\n\n\n\nStep 1. Okay, now we're on the network. Now we need to intercept and listen to the traffic. What we do is we send client a message like, \"Hey, im a router, i've changed my address and now it's this one\", and then we send another one to a router like \"Hey, im [that client], please send data here now\". Now we can listen and modify all the client's data on the fly. Despite how dumb it sounds, this is what's possible when you get inside the network and **this is the main reason public networks are considered unsafe**.\n\n\n\nStep 2. SSL. Now this one is a tough nut. We could've tried the WPA2 method described above, but since keys are much longer, this would take literally forever, so we have two options:\n\n* Just create a fake certificate. Browsers won't be fooled with this and will display a message like [this](_URL_18_). But most users are used to clicking through error messages without even reading them and will likely just click \"continue anyway\". This is actually the reason modern browsers make this option so obscure.\n\n* SSLstrip. Basically what we do is we strip all the **s**'s from http**s**:// links in the traffic. We keep track of which links we removed it from so we can re-add it on our side to impersonate user. It would look like this: \n\n User < ---http--- > Hacker < ---https--- > Website. \n\n For user, it would look like there was no secure version in the first place, and browser would not draw a padlock icon. The only thing we could do is to swap website's icon with a padlock icon. This is the reason why browsers don't display favicons in address bar anymore",
"There are several problems with it.\nMost have been discussed already. \n\nA rogue access point can be set up to mimic the free wifi, right down to the legal access end use policy mumbojumbo screen. Now who ever is in control of that device can poison the DNS to redirect you from HTTPS to an unsecured mirror image of the site, typically hosted on their machine, and if you are like 95% of John Q. Public, you arent going to check for the lock, the https, the green Verisign, etc objects. And since no certificate has been passed, no cert problems. The webpage looks like your banks, smells like your banks, feels like your banks, so it must be your banks. So you happily enter your credentials and hit ENTER. Oops! -Page cannot be displayed- error; or how to do it correctly, the page redirects you back to the correct https page after passing bad creds so you think 'i must have oopsed'. And you go on your merry way completely unaware that you were redirected to the wrong site initially. \n\nIt would flow like this:\n_URL_19_ request\nRogue AP the user is attached to requests the IP address for that site from its DNS provider, the attacker's computer, or its DNS cache which the attacker has poisoned.\nThe computer or DNS cache on the AP provides the IP address of 10.0.0.10:80 where they have a locally hosted page that is exactly like the BOA site, except over HTTP. \n\nYou enter your credentials, hit GO and the go button actually redirects you to the CORRECT website, passing your username (in some cases) or bad credentials so the correct page returns the 'logon error user name/password' screen. Youve been had and no cert cracking needed. \n\nYou CAN ALSO do this to intercept SSL traffic. It functions in a similar manor as above, but the user session is decrypted at the attackers end using their private key, not the users. Of course that only works if the attacker has a private key for the requested site. Facebook, gmail, etc are all extremely popular so this would be plausible. The end user will NOT see the SSL lock or any of the security features because they are actually on an unencrypted page because the attackers computer is feeding then the traffic they are un encrypting. \n\nBasically: you log in to me on my fake site and I log in FOR you through my computer using my key. The secure site accepts my SSL key as good. \n\nWe set this exact scenario up for Facebook in my Ethical Hacking course. The page was an exact copy except over http. Yes we tried it and yes it works. \nHow many of us check for SSL when going to a page we visit often? Close to zero. \n\nThis is why places like Apple and Google send you alerts when you log in from an unknown or new device. In the case above, if you tried to log into iTunes or Google, you would get an alert that they do not recognize the device you are logging in from because youve never logged in using MY key and MY computer before.",
"Because it is easier than saying \"Be very cautious when sending or receiving sensitive information over public WiFi\"\n\nTake this as a for instance:\n\nI am a Network/systems/security engineer, my home network is far more complex than your typical home network... I have one wireless network in my home that passes all internet traffic through a proxy, so that I can decode it and reverse-engineer android apps, etc.\n\nOne thing this proxy does is SSL termination. When you are on said network and attempt to go to a HTTPS site, the proxy acts as a man-in-the-middle. It pretends it is the web server for your device and pretends it is your device for the web server. in-between, I have access to any encrypted data that is sent or received.\n\nSomething similar could be set up in a public place by an unsavory person.\n\nThat being said, in my instance the browser gives you a warning that the SSL certificate is wrong and the connection is unsafe, but how many people do you think would just click past that while swearing at their computer about not letting them do what they want? Additionally, it could be possible that A) I install a certificate that sets off fewer alarms or b) your PC is configured not to show you those alarms\n\nTL;DR: Bad guys prey on unaware or stupid people, but that is no reason to take unnecessary risks",
"You'd have to ask those people. I work with computers for a living and I have no problem using online banking sites on public wifi.\n\nIs it perfectly secure? No. The only perfectly secure cryptosystem is the one time pad. A motivated person could execute a man in the middle attack if they were able to trick a CA into issuing them a certificate for the bank's web site. That's hard to do, but there are a lot of CAs out there and I'm sure at least one has less than perfect security procedures.",
"Not op, but as a side question, why does a vpn suddenly make all of this stuff secure?"
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} | train_eli5 | If internet banking systems use encrypted SSL connections and they say encrypted connections are safe why people say it is not secure to use internet bank systems on public wi-fi?
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w3j6c | Why are MRI machines so loud and differ in the noise made? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hard to ELI5, but here goes....\n\nMRI works by causing the protons in your body to emit a radio signal. This signal is different depending on where in your body it originated. To embed this spatial information in the radio signal, the MRI needs to create a magnetic field that varies with position. To achieve this there are things called gradient coils surrounding the opening in the MRI, electric current is passed through these coils and the nature of the current causes the coils to vibrate. It's these vibrating coils that cause the noise, and the noise will vary depending on the information that needs to be encoded at any specific time."
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62dm6m | I have often heard the term "pain is subjective". What exactly does this mean, in laymens terms? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Different people feel pain to different degrees. Someone could pinch me and because I'm hypersensitive it would hurt like a cut, but too someone else it wouldn't be too bad."
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} | train_eli5 | I have often heard the term "pain is subjective". What exactly does this mean, in laymens terms?
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6gb2ec | What does Fourrier Transform do? | What does it do? Why is it needed? What are the complex128 numbers FFT (Python or Matlab) return exactly mean?
If you can explain this like I'm five, go write a blog about it. I mean, haven't found a layman link anywhere. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A Fourier transform lets you take a signal that shows you how something changes as a function of time, and instead express it as a function of how much energy is represented by each frequency.\n\nThe input is a waveform.\n\nImagine that you've got some digital audio. If you don't understand how digital audio records *samples* of a waveform, read [this tutorial](_URL_0_) first.\n\nImagine you've got a sample of some audio, about 1/10 of a second long, or about 4000 samples of audio.\n\nWhat you want to know is how much energy is contained at each frequency - is it mostly bass, or treble? What's the fundamental frequency, what note is playing? Stuff like that.\n\nThe Fourier transform takes the 4000 numbers representing the audio sample, and returns 4000 pairs of numbers.\n\nThose are usually described as complex numbers, but that's confusing. It's equivalent to say that they're coefficients that you can apply to the cosine and sine functions.\n\nEssentially what the Fourier transform does is say let's take both a sine wave - f(x) = sin(x) - and a cosine wave - f(x) = cos(x) - then have one of these for each frequency from 1 to 4000:\n\n f(x) = a * sin(1 * x)\n + b * cos(1 * x)\n + c * sin(2 * x)\n + d * sin(2 * x)\n ...\n + z * cos(4000 * x)\n\nWhat the Fourier transform does is give you those numbers a...z (actually 8,000 of them) such that the resulting waveform is EXACTLY THE SAME as the input waveform.\n\nThe cool thing is that the Fourier transform is guaranteed to work, and it's invertible.\n\nIf you just want the energy at each frequency and not separate coefficients for sin and cos, just add their squares, like a^2 + b^2. You can plot that and it will look like a spectrum or a graphic equalizer.\n\nAnother cool thing you can do is modify the values in frequency space, then do an inverse FFT back to a waveform. That allows you to manipulate sounds and change how strong each frequency is.",
"You know the sounds your phone makes when you dial a single digit? Each of those tones is composed of exactly two frequencies. Here's a chart showing what those wave forms look like. These images show what you what we think about when we use the term \"sound wave.\"\n\n_URL_2_\n\nAbove each graph it shows which button on the phone creates that sound, and it gives the two frequencies that are combined to make that sound.\n\nThis next chart shows one of those signals as a Fourier transform. You might have to zoom in to read the fuzzy text Notice there is a spike around, I don't know, 700 Hz and maybe 1400 Hz. (Ignore the negative side of the frequency axis.) If we look back at the earlier chart and the frequencies given above each number, you can make a good guess as to which button was pressed on a phone to make that second image. \n\n_URL_2_\n\nThe first charts show how amplitude of a signal changes with *time*. The second graph shows which *frequencies* are strongest in a particular one of those signals. The first graphs are *time domain* graphs. The second graph is a *frequency domain* graph of one signal from the first graphs. That frequency domain graph is a Fourier transform of one of those earlier signals. \n\n(I'm pretty sure that Fourier chart is a \"6\" on a phone.)",
"The Fourier Transform is used to see patterns in signals.\n\n1.) How does it do that? It transforms Signals from the time* domain to the frequency domain (*Not necessarily just the time domain but lets keep it simple here). \n\n2.) Time domain and frequency domain:\nSuppose you have a signal (lets keep to just a simple cosine function):\n\nf(t) = A * cos(2 * pi * fc * t )\n\nSo when we talk about time-domain we usually talk about this f(t). If we apply the fourier transform we get an entirely different signal with a signal height of A, but on the \"x-Axis\" it is a single Peak, centered around fc (I can't explain it any simpler).\n\n3.) On complex values:\nThe fourier transform aproximates a signal as a sum* of sine and cosine terms** (* Actually only the discrete fourier transform, **Think of it as a \"taylor aproximation\" of your signal). \nThe real part of the complex solution denotes the cosine coefficient, while the imaginary denotes the sine coefficient. \n\n4.) Why is it needed: Often information is not in the time-domain but frequency domain. The easiest example is acoustics. Surely you have heard that humans hear from about 20Hz to 20.000Hz. \nBut it can also be applied in image compression or electronics.",
"Conceptually, a FT converts a signal from the time domain into the frequency domain. It is needed, or at least useful, because some mathematics is much easier to do in the frequency domain. For example, if you want to know the power rate of a radio signal, you can integrate the power in the time domain across a known time period and divide by the length of the time period. For a longish time period the wave will go through many cycles, requiring many terms in your numerical integration. After the FT, the signal will be represented in terms of power at specific frequencies. This is much simpler to integrate, and it eliminates the scaling according to the time period you use.\n\nComplex number valued FTs are more general, and can represent most any signal. The Matlab function with 128 probably means that there is a 64-bit floating point real part and a 64-bit floating point imaginary part."
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} | train_eli5 | What does Fourrier Transform do?
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517869 | Why did Tomorrowland's "failure" at the box office make Disney stop production on Tron 3? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Based on the article, if you want a tl:dr version-\n\nTomorrowland's flop killed Disney's confidence in upcoming big budget movies like Tron 3, especially since Legacy did so-so in the box office."
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} | train_eli5 | Why did Tomorrowland's "failure" at the box office make Disney stop production on Tron 3?
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1zxmyn | Outside of personal life, has Rob Ford been a good mayor (policies, economy, etc.)? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ELI5 isn't for questions on opinions. People who agree with his policy will say he was good, people who disagree will say he was bad."
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} | train_eli5 | Outside of personal life, has Rob Ford been a good mayor (policies, economy, etc.)?
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3j9wku | Why is the thought of incest repulsive? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Humans are predisposed to passing on their genes and producing strong offspring. Children born of incest, particularly over multiple generations of incest, are prone to genetic faults due to the lack of genetic diversity among their parents/ancestors.\n\nCousins having web-footed babies, for example.\n\nIt's possible that we have some kind of subconscious knowledge of this fact, which eventually fed the persisting social concept of incest being a bad idea. In any case, humans have *always* been averse to the concept, a trend that persists to this day.",
"It may be instinctual. In the wild, very few animals will mate with close relatives. And children who grow up together from a very young age (even if they aren't siblings) have been shown to be uncomfortable at the thought of having sex with each other as adults. It's highly possible that we're primed, instinctively, to find the thought of incest disgusting. And it's probably good that we do because incest is bad from an evolutionary perspective, it allows recessive genes that code for disease and disabilities to be expressed."
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"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why is the thought of incest repulsive?
[deleted] | [
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11i4xe | Why is bad posture so much more comfortable than good posture? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It isn't. \"Good posture\" is the practice of using your muscles to hold up your body, rather than leaning against them (think of building a tower, as compared with just dropping a pile of blocks on the floor). The reason people don't like to do this is because it takes muscular control (mostly in your abdomen and to a lesser extent in your back because everywhere else there is skeleton to hold you up) - you're probably thinking \"Well, I don't want to do a work out just to stand still\" - but what you don't realize is that your body is *designed* to do this. It's not exhausting, it's just a matter of building up the muscular endurance over time (stand with good posture for a few days, and you'll be most of the way there). \n\nIt's comfortable *initially* because of this 'tiredness' and strain from using muscles you haven't been using. \n\nBad posture is bad because instead of 'holding yourself up' you are allowing the force of gravity to exert strain on all your muscles, ligament and tendons, joints and worse of all to compress your internal organs and blood vessels. When you don't hold yourself up your weight 'collapses' in on your body, pushing everything together. This impedes the function of just about everything - internal organs like heart and lungs, digestive system, blood flow (ever heard of people getting blood clots for sitting too long? Slightly different cause but the same idea behind it). \n\nSIT UP STRAIGHT.",
"[BBC has an article that says sitting up may not be that great for your back.](_URL_0_)"
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} | train_eli5 | Why is bad posture so much more comfortable than good posture?
| [
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4npkbc | How does a computer boot? | What is that which brings the hardware to life? How does the code communicate with hardware to do things? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"On a very basic level, the hardware is designed in such a way that it recognizes electric pulses as either ones or zeroes. Once you grapple with that, it all goes from there. And I've definitely been in your place, trust me. Going through CompTIA courses and like \"Okay but ***how***?\"\n\nSeriously the main and underlying thing is that: every piece of a computer (and I'm talking really about the motherboard, I guess) is designed to read those electrical signals as something. Once you have something plugged into the wall, it's easy to \"make\" electrical pulses, and that's exactly what a computer does. Each layer gets more technical. Until you have this webpage (simple) or Overwatch (hard).",
"Inside the computer's CPU is something called the \"program counter\", which keeps track of what the computer is doing. It points to the bit of memory that contains the next instruction the computer needs to execute.\n\nWhen the computer is first turned on, the program counter points to a bit of memory in a special chip called \"BIOS\".\n\nBIOS contains instructions to do a number of different things, such as let the operating system talk to the hardware, and let the user configure some of the hardware... but the main thing we're interested in if we're talking about booting, is that the BIOS contains a user-configurable list of where to look for the boot device. You might set this to check the CD drive first of all, for example. And if the CD drive doesn't contain a bootable CD (which it usually won't), then it might check the hard disk next. The hard disk will normally have a bootable operating system on it, such as Windows.\n\nSo now, the BIOS loads the first part of Windows from the hard disk and runs it. And that is responsible for loading everything else that needs to be loaded.",
"A computer consists of CPU and memory. Memory is the simpler chip to understand -- memory consists of a large array of *memory cells*, each of which can contain a 0 or a 1 (a single bit). The cells are divided into groups of 8, each group can contain 8 bits (one byte). Each 8-bit group is numbered with an *address* which is simply a number (coded in binary) that identifies the cell.\n\nSo for example, the CPU can tell memory \"write 00101101 into cell number 1493\". Then at a later point in time, the computer can tell memory \"read the contents of cell number 1493\" and memory will respond with \"00101101\". The address 1493 is itself coded as a sequence of bits, so the CPU would actually say \"read/write the contents of cell number 0000010111010101\".\n\nA typical CPU/memory interface consists of a number of *lines* which are several copper wires that physically connect the CPU to the memory:\n\n- Address lines. The CPU puts the coded address of the cell it wants to work with (such as 0000010111010101) on these 16 lines.\n- Data lines. The data (00101101) goes on these 8 lines. In the case of writing data into memory, the CPU sets the data lines. In the case of reading data from memory, the memory sets the data lines.\n- R/W bit. A single line which the CPU sets to 0 when it wants to read from memory, 1 when it wants to write to memory.\n- Clock. Pulses on this line dictate the timing of exactly when the memory / CPU should read/write the address/data lines. How quickly the clock pulses occur determines how quickly memory can be read/written. Making it faster increases system performance, but also increases the physical speed requirements of the CPU / memory chips.\n\nThe CPU works by reading memory at the program counter, executing the instruction based on what it does, and incrementing the program counter to get it to the next instruction. For example, 37 might be the code for \"load the number 0 into register A\", the 3-byte sequence 87 21 63 might be the code for \"load the number 6321 into register B\", 88 34 14 might be the code for \"load the number 3414 into register C\" and 22 might be the code for \"add register A to register C, then store the result in register A.\" (A *register* is a small number of memory cell circuits inside the CPU which serve as a \"scratch pad\" or \"short term memory\" for the CPU to store values internally.) If we wanted to do these things in a program, it would be 37 87 21 63 88 34 14 22 which would go into consecutive memory cells.\n\nLet's put 37 87 21 63 88 34 14 22 into memory cells at addresses 2100, 2101, 2102, 2103, etc. then set the PC to 2100, and let the CPU run. The CPU reads a 37 from address 2100, increments PC to 2101 and executes the instruction to set register A to 0. PC is now 2101, so the CPU reads an 87 from address 2101, increments PC to 2102, sees that 87 is code for a three-byte instruction, fetches the first additional byte 21 from PC (which is 2102), increments PC to 2103, fetches a second additional byte 63 from PC, increments PC to 2104. The CPU now has the three bytes needed for the second instruction and loads 6321 into register B. The CPU keeps on doing this fetch-decode-execute loop forever (or until powered down). \n\nNow that you know how CPU and memory work, the boot process is simple: Physically hard wired in the CPU is a number called a *reset vector* (like all numbers in a computer, it's coded in binary). Upon system power-up or reset, the CPU copies the reset vector into the program counter. It's up to the system designer to include a memory chip which will respond to the reset vector address and contain a useful program. On the PC, this memory chip is called *BIOS*. The initial chip is referred to as a ROM (read only memory), because in the early days it was literally hard wired with the program. In modern times ROM's are flash chips (the technology in USB disks, smart phones and modern SSD hard drives), so the ROM isn't truly \"read only\" (it can be written to), but it's still called ROM to distinguish it from \"ordinary\" memory or RAM (which is much faster, but loses data when powered down).\n\nNow your second question: How code communicates with hardware. As well as being connected to memory, the CPU has extra pins which can be connected to other devices. There are CPU instructions to read and write the electrical state of these pins. There are a number of standardized communication methods for sending data over these extra pins (serial, SPI, I2C, ISA, PCI). Also you can have devices which aren't memory cells connected to the memory bus and respond to memory addresses (\"memory-mapped I/O\").\n\nSo really the heart of the computer is the CPU + memory which makes it possible to execute a program consisting of stored instructions. For everything else you just need a physical connection to the CPU and a way to access that connection from the software level of stored instructions. The vast array of devices in a typical computer -- screens and keyboards to communicate with humans, networking to communicate with other computers, hard drives to store gobs of data permanently, speakers, video camera, microphone -- they're all just literally separate devices that are electronically designed to be computer controlled and mechanically designed to fit snugly in the same case (or on the same circuit board) as the CPU / memory.",
"Go to the bottom for eli5.\n\nThere's a REALLY REALLY important concept in computer science called an abstraction barrier. An abstraction barrier is basically information that YOU (i.e. the user) cannot touch, change, see, or even interpret without some higher level software. The barrier forces basic restrictions on what can and cannot be done with that data. You layer many many layers of abstraction barriers and you have built a complex interaction of rules, programs, and data that carriers out all the computation that the end user asks for, safely and correctly. \n\nNow the majority of abstraction barriers are data abstraction barriers. These barriers establish what YOU can't see, but the MACHINE can see. A good high-level example of this is the Finder on Macs. How would you find files on your computer if you didn't have the Finder? You couldn't (well there's other ways but for this example just ignore them). You need that higher-level software (the Finder) to interpret data on the other side of the abstraction barrier (the file system).\n\nIf you peeled off all of the layers of abstraction barriers like an onion, eventually you'd be looking at hardware. You could look at the voltage of individual semiconductors and interpret that as a 0 or a 1. This is information that YOU can see, but the MACHINE can't see. You have to engineer rules in the physical hardware on how the machine is to interpret that 0 or 1. This is the very first abstraction barrier and it is also a very special one. It is the barrier between physical and virtual. Now there are obviously many many rules even for a basic instruction architecture so you can imagine how complex the electrical engineering is just to set up this first abstraction barrier. \n\nNow assuming we are set up with solid hardware, the question becomes how does the initial flow of electricity on boot establish the abstraction barrier between physical and virtual? Well that is the basic input/output chip or the BIOS. The BIOS is a special chip that has *hardwired* information on boot *software* to be executed. The BIOS on boot will load a very special piece of software and begin its execution. This special software is called the operating system or OS. Now if you thought all the hardware stuff was complex, the operating system might be even more complex, because once the OS is running, *all other* program execution is mediated by the OS. The OS is designed to be run on specific hardware (usually, although some like Linux are much more adaptable) so that the OS knows certain things about the machine. For example, the OS has to know the memory location of the very first instruction on boot. It *doesn't* have to know how to execute this instruction, because all of that data is on the physical side of the abstraction barrier. The OS just loads the instruction, tells the CPU to execute it, and then waits for it to interrupt the OS to say execution is complete. You can see how useful the physical/virtual abstraction barrier is, because designing an OS is much less complex if you let the CPU handle all aspects of the physical computation.\n\neli5: There's a special piece of hardware called the BIOS chip that initializes a special piece of software called the operating system on boot. After that, the operating system handles all other program execution.\n\nedit: if you wanna know more about how the CPU works ask me! I just finished building a basic MIPS architecture CPU in Logisim. It complicated tho and definitely above eli5. Basically there's something called a datapath on the physical side of the abstraction barrier that executes assembly instructions step by step. The datapath receives user-defined program data from memory and then executes line after line in memory until it is told to stop. This is the point where it would signal the OS that execution is complete."
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What is that which brings the hardware to life? How does the code communicate with hardware to do things? | [
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1ahc5s | TCP/IP | explainlikeimfive | {
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"TCP/IP is the group of standards that different computers use to all be able to talk to each other on the Internet.\n\nIt consists mainly of 3 things:\n\nIP: this is a way in which every computer of the Internet can be given a unique address, called an \"IP address\", so that it's possible for one computer to specify exactly which other computer a message is intended for.\n\nTCP: this is a \"guaranteed\" way in which two computers can talk to each other, and it's the way most communication on the Internet is sent. A computer specifies the IP address of another computer, and the detailed message to be sent to the other computer. The communication is \"guaranteed\" - that doesn't guarantee the message will be received (because what if the destination computer is switched off, for example), but it means that the source computer can ask if the message has been delivered, and we can guarantee that the source computer won't be told its message has been delivered if it hasn't.\n\nUDP: this is a non-guaranteed way in which two or more computers can communicate. The source computer specifies the IP addresses of one or more computers, and the details of the message. The message gets sent, and hopefully arrives at its destination, although there's no way of guaranteeing that or even of finding out if it was delivered. It's not used much, but it can be useful, for example for sending out messages about the time, when it doesn't matter if the destination computers miss some of the messages."
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} | train_eli5 | TCP/IP
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z4fuo | The Samsung/Apple patent war and it's implications | Sorry if this is a repost -- I searched around but couldn't find anything.
I don't get it. Why are all these companies suing the shit out of each other? What could this mean for the future of technology? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Companies have been suing each other as a form of stifling competition since the beginning of... well, since a long time ago.\n\nApple is in the news recently because they are doing it a lot.\n\nThey are exploiting a patent system that allows this kind of environment. \n\n > What could this mean for the future of technology?\n\nThis is it. You are witnessing it right now. The only change would have to be a big one and (this is going to make me sound preachy) it would probably have to come from you as a consumer. \n\nAn ELI5 is too coarse and rough to explain the underlying problem. I suggest reading a few essays:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"
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"url": [
"http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html",
"http://www.theverge.com/2011/08/11/broken-patent-system/"
]
} | train_eli5 | The Samsung/Apple patent war and it's implications
Sorry if this is a repost -- I searched around but couldn't find anything. I don't get it. Why are all these companies suing the shit out of each other? What could this mean for the future of technology? | [
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21ud7d | Why are there so many languages around the world? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most human languages seem to be related to each other at some level, and all ~~evolved from a small, local, protolanguage.~~ languages that still exist seem to have evolved from a very small group of protolanguages. (Thanks /u/HannasAnarion, and /u/dmazzoni for the correction).\n\nAs people move away from each other, their dialect drifts slightly. As groups move further from each other and become isolated, their dialects stop being mutually intelligible.\n\nA good example is Romance languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc.). Everyone who speaks those languages used to speak Latin, during the time of the Roman empire. However, as the Empire collapsed, people stopped moving as freely, and each area became isolated. Latin then developed into these individual languages.\n\nEDIT: For the curious, [here is a chart of one of the biggest language groups - Indo-European](_URL_0_), which covers everything from English to Farsi, and shows how they split from each other."
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} | train_eli5 | Why are there so many languages around the world?
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46vkzo | Why are planets spherical and not odd shaped? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Objects are attracted to something's center of gravity. The force of this gravity increases with the size of that something. In asteroids the force of that gravity is too small for it to overcome the forces that hold a rock together, so the rock stays the same shape. For planets this force is on average greater than the force holding a similarly sized rocked together, so the rock breaks up until it's pieces are small enough to not get pulled apart.",
"The nearer a mass on some planet is to the centre of the planet, the less energy this piece of mass has. This is why things fall down when dropped. This means that the energy is lowest once all the mass is closest to the centre. This is the case if the planet is spherical. So by natural processes any planet will normally get rounder and rounder over time if no energy is added to it."
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} | train_eli5 | Why are planets spherical and not odd shaped?
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69telp | Why do some things that smell good don't taste good? | If both senses are connected why does that happen? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Actually they're not so much connected as they are the same sense.\n\nOur noses sense both smell and taste (not our tongues) and they respond differently to exactly the same chemicals depending on direction those chemicals are moving.\n\nIf they are coming in the front of your nose (i.e. when you smell) they produce a different response from the same chemicals going out through your nose (i.e. taste, from your mouth out through your nose).\n\nWhich is why coffee always smells much better than it tastes.\n\nA very few things smell/taste the same, two stand out examples are chocolate and lavender."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do some things that smell good don't taste good?
If both senses are connected why does that happen? | [
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41f3yy | The Naturalist Movement in American Literature | I'm writing a paper on the Naturalist movement but I barely understand what it is. If somebody could help it would be greatly appreciated! | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Don't know if you studied the Romantic period before it, but the Naturalist movement is a reaction to that (all literary movements are a reaction to the previous one.) Romantics focused on the beauty of nature and the infinite potential of the individual. Reading Whitman and Emerson will give you the best examples. The writing is highly idealistic and optimistic, and the world is working with the character instead of against it.\n\nNaturalism is the opposite. It tends to be more cynical, down to earth, and lacking in hope. Characters are often not in control of their own destiny, live in ugly places like industrial cities, and live more average or subpar lives. New scientific ideas from Freud (unconscious mind) and Darwin (evolution/Social Darwinism) helped to shape this genre, as well as the fact that people who lived in cities working 12 hours a day would be more likely to resonate with this genre more than the civil war Romantics.\n\nHope that helps!"
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} | train_eli5 | The Naturalist Movement in American Literature
I'm writing a paper on the Naturalist movement but I barely understand what it is. If somebody could help it would be greatly appreciated! | [
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2j2p7m | What justification do Jewish people use for not following much of their own ancient law? | I know Christians, when asked about the laws laid out for the Israelites, say Jesus "replaced" these laws. What do modern Jews have to say about disregarding some of the more unpopular laws found in scripture? I.E. is there a reason they point to for not following parts of their ancient law?
EDIT: examples: restrictions on shellfish, eating fat, charging interest, tattoos, etc. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"*some jewish people. Orthodox jews follow (or do their best to follow) everything in the torah with the exception of things that can only be done when the great temple exists. \n\nI think conservative and reform jews believe that the torah is a living document that needs to be changed here and there to remain relevant in modern society, to address how times have changed over thousands of years.",
"As Dzmagoon said, there are varying degrees of how closely Jews follow the Mosaic law. The more orthodox, the more they follow the law to the letter. A lot of less conservative Jews believe that there is some more spiritual interpretation of the law, or that the law was written for a different society and shouldn't be followed literally today. \n\n\nTo clear up what Christians mean by Jesus \"replacing\" the law, though - \n\nChristians believe that the Mosaic law was given to the Jewish people for the purpose of creating a nation from which Jesus could come. When that happened, the purpose of the law was fulfilled. Christians also believe that the law was never a means of \"earning\" your piety with God but it has always only been faith that brings salvation.",
"First, it is unclear the degree to which ancient Jews followed these laws. For example, \"don't boil a calf in its mother's milk\" to some modern Jews means \"don't eat anything where there is a possibility that molecule of meat and diary are both in it\". Similarly, \"don't light a lamp on the Sabbath\" has become \"don't walk by a motion detector that turns a light on\". It is very difficult to say if a bronze age rabbi would interpret the law in this way.\n\nAs for other Jews, a lot of those laws had cultural or hygienic reason behind them that no longer apply today. Pork was more likely to have parasite than beef, and perhaps the follows of Ba'al used tattoos to signify their devotion.",
"It's not like your average person that identifies as a Christian follows everything in the new testament either. Only orthodox folks follow their religion with everything they do."
],
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | What justification do Jewish people use for not following much of their own ancient law?
I know Christians, when asked about the laws laid out for the Israelites, say Jesus "replaced" these laws. What do modern Jews have to say about disregarding some of the more unpopular laws found in scripture? I.E. is there a reason they point to for not following parts of their ancient law? EDIT: examples: restrictions on shellfish, eating fat, charging interest, tattoos, etc. | [
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2c8qrg | How come we can take long 40°C+ showers and feel great, but hot summer days over 30° feel like crap? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Showers last 15 minutes, try an 8 hour 40-deg shower and it will feel bad too.",
"That's 104°F for US people.\n\nIt's a core temperature thing.. The shower never heats your core up more than a couple of degrees.\n\nInterestingly my wife heats up in her sleep to about the same temperature... It's gotten her pushed off the bed a couple times since I prefer to be cold.",
"Water conducts heat better than air. That's also the reason why water at room temperature feels colder than the surrounding air.",
"- you are free to leave any time\n- you can adjust the amount of skin exposed to the cooler air thus regulating your core body temperature\n- part of the suffering of a hot day is the stickiness. Doesn't happen under water.",
"I think 40ºC+ is a bit hot, but a shower lasts what 10 minutes? and you can regulate the temperature if you need to. \n\nNow, to feel comfortable we need very specific conditions, there needs to be a balance between temperature, humidity, wind, and probably other factors. When you are exposed to 30ºC and the air is dry, you will sweat a lot, but you are able to dissipate energy, since the sweat evaporates. If you are exposed to 25ºC but the air is close to being saturated, it will be a hellish thing. No matter how much you sweat, it's very hard to cool down, because the sweat cannot evaporate, so you keep the energy and you won't cool don't. So it's not only a matter of temperature.\n\nI hope this illustrates, how complex this subject might get. Also you are subjected to these temperatures/humidity for days, sometimes weeks and it takes a while for your body to fully adapt.",
"Probably the same reason you can also stay in a sauna at 75°C for 15 minutes....\nIt takes a while for your body temperature to increase to a level where it's uncomfortable.",
"While you're in the shower, you are both warming up and cooling down at the same time. If you stay in the shower long enough such that the bathroom's temperature goes beyond something comfortable like 30, you will feel uncomfortably warm again.",
"The shower only feels good when the air temperature is substantially less than the water hitting your skin. When it is cold out, the hot water transfers heat to your skin and the water on your skin transfers the skin's heat to the air. This makes you feel hotter at first, then cooler due to the transferring of heat. When it is hot out, the outside temperature does not cause the hot water on your skin to cool as it does with cold weather. Instead of feeling the cooling effects, now you just feel hot. That's why you don't feel the same when the weather is hot outside, there is no heat transfer from your skin to the air.",
"In general your comfort is more closely related to the relative humidity than the temperature. And even then , it's more of the humidity that you \"feel\". When you're outside and it's 80% RH you feel gross. In the shower it's much closer to 100% , but the shower is instantly washing the sweat away so it feels great."
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How come we can take long 40°C+ showers and feel great, but hot summer days over 30° feel like crap?
| [
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2rfbm4 | Why is whole life insurance considered to be better than term life insurance? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Generally term life insurance is for a fixed period. Like 15 years or whatever. And the premiums are set based on your risk category at that time. However it's going to expire when the term runs out, and no matter what you will have to shop for more insurance after the term. It's definitely got its uses, like if you have a 20 year mortgage you can get a term life policy for 20 years so if something happens the house still gets paid off.\n\nWhole life insurance is valid from the day you purchase it until the day you die as long as you pay the premiums. The premiums tend to be higher (because you won't be shopping for another policy as you age), but it also builds value that you can often borrow against (reducing your payout if you die before it rebuilds). \n\nRefer to [this page](_URL_0_) for more info.",
"I didn't think it was, necessarily.\n\nThe benefit of term life insurance is that you only need to pay for a term when you're financially vulnerable. If you die at age 30, there's a good chance you have a mortgage, kids, whatever else. When you're 60, the kids are probably grown up, mortgage paid off, and you probably have a solid retirement fund. Having life insurance at 30 is more important to some people than having it at 60 for some people, hence the reason for term.",
"My understanding is the opposite - term life is better. Whole life has a built in investment component (you can \"cash out\" a policy) but the actual performance measured against other passive investments is pretty poor."
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"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.us.hsbc.com/1/2/home/personal-banking/insurance/life-insurance/guide/term-whole-life"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why is whole life insurance considered to be better than term life insurance?
| [
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8frrpg | Rain-sensing variable-periodicity windshield wipers - how? | Was driving a 2012 Mercedes C350 today. Had wiper setting a the first tick intermittent (lowest).
They don’t run at all when there’s no rain but speed up greatly the heavier it got without changing the wiper setting on the switchgear stalk.
Doesn’t seem like it’d be measuring flow or humidity.
How is rainfall rate detected or measured for this purpose? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is a sensor in the windshield. It detects the amount of liquid and adjusts automatically.\nI work for Mercedes and this question gets asked a lot haha.",
"An invisible infrared light is traveling inside the windshield glass. It goes from the top down to the bottom, where a sensor measures how much of the light reaches the bottom. \n\nWhen the windshield is dry, the light bounces back and forth inside the glass, and most of the light reaches the sensor. When the surface is wet the light doesn’t bounce back and forth - some light escapes when it hits an area where the outside is wet. So the sensor at the bottom can tell less light reaches it, and thus your windshield must be wet. \n\nFun fact: light bouncing back and forth along the inside of glass is exactly how fiber optic cables work. They’re not electricity, it’s light being pulled inside. Same concept.",
"When the rain hits the windshield, a little camera in the glass goes \"oh no, glass is wet!\" and tells the wipers to get their shit together and push the water away. The more often the camera goes \"ah! wet!\", the faster the wipers go."
],
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Rain-sensing variable-periodicity windshield wipers - how?
Was driving a 2012 Mercedes C350 today. Had wiper setting a the first tick intermittent (lowest). They don’t run at all when there’s no rain but speed up greatly the heavier it got without changing the wiper setting on the switchgear stalk. Doesn’t seem like it’d be measuring flow or humidity. How is rainfall rate detected or measured for this purpose? | [
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21bhhl | Why a nearly empty pen that stops working and then when we tested it still writes in a corner of the paper, but rarely rewrites where we left off? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Friction. The almost empty pen has less ink to press on to the ball, giving it less and less of ink to move in.\n \nWhen you draw a line on the paper you not only leave ink on it, but you also press a tiny imprint into it, this makes the surface less rugged than it was, so when you have a ball with less ink that dries more quicker you get greater friction between the ball and the pen and less between the ball and the paper, so basically it slides on the imprint when it wont work. \n\nWhen you go up to the corner you are not trying to write something so you are not tracing the same line as carefully giving it a greater chance to start rolling again via the extra friction of \"fresh\" paper.",
"In chemistry, my professor told us that the reason that for this is because there is a micro-coating of minerals which coat the piece of paper you are writting on. This causes the friction which moves the ball in your PBP. If you press hard (like when your pen is going out), you'll rub all the minerals off in the process. Even if you then find a brand new PBP and try to pick up in the same spot, your pen will not work. HTH.\nedit: words"
],
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why a nearly empty pen that stops working and then when we tested it still writes in a corner of the paper, but rarely rewrites where we left off?
| [
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2q75vc | Why is it that sometimes I'll wake up congested and sneezy even when I'm not sick, and it'll go away as the day goes on? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"It's most likely tied to the Circadian rhythms in the body, basically fluctuations in biological functions throughout the day. If you're affected by allergies, your body's lower concentration of cortisol in the morning would cause increased symptoms of the allergies. Cortisol helps regulate histamines, which are a known factor in symptoms of allergies. \n\nEdit: Just wanted to mention taking allergy medication before bed can help offset the body's lull cortisol production and help alleviate the symptoms you'd feel in the morning\n\n_URL_0_"
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.nationaljewish.org/about/mediacenter/pressreleases/y2007/time-medications/"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why is it that sometimes I'll wake up congested and sneezy even when I'm not sick, and it'll go away as the day goes on?
| [
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4c2tuh | What happens to batteries in electric vehicles after they can no longer hold a charge? Are they really better for the environment than burning oil? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Many are retasked to store power for homes or even at places like wind power generating facilities. They'll still have about 80% of their total capacity at the time that they're no longer really useful in a car.\n\nOtherwise they can be recycled. Most lithium batteries are almost entirely recyclable. Worst case scenario, they're environmentally safe and can be put in landfills without causing damage the way lead acid batteries do.\n\n_URL_0_",
"The majority of the energy used by a car comes from actually driving the car, compared to manufacturing the car. Electric cars do require mining lithium for batteries, but as others have said you can recycle the lithium so you need to mine it just once compared to requiring a constant supply of fossil fuels.\n\nThe conclusion generally is that unless your electricity comes from a really polluting source (like the lowest grades of coal in an old power plant), electric cars are much better for the environment.",
"If they are lithium batteries, they can be recycled, and even if they can't lithium isn't a particularly dangerous substance, compared to things like lead and cadmium."
],
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"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.edmunds.com/fuel-economy/what-happens-to-ev-and-hybrid-batteries.html"
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} | train_eli5 | What happens to batteries in electric vehicles after they can no longer hold a charge? Are they really better for the environment than burning oil?
| [
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3z62w3 | Are airlines constantly buying airplanes? | Companies like Boeing sell their airplanes to airlines, but how often would these airlines have a demand? I would assume airlines aren't constantly buying airplanes; once an airline has a decent amount of planes, it wouldn't buy any for a while. Is my assumption wrong? How do airplane manufacturers always have a demand? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From what I understand, Boeing, Airbus, and other aircraft manufacturers fill orders made by airlines. It's not like buying a car where Boeing has a lot full of new planes and a showroom floor. You see headlines like \"Emirates oders 20 new 787s from Boeing.\" \n\nBoeing has a production plant and has a steady supply of orders. I'm not sure about the terms of this contract, if they are rolled out and filled gradually, over the course of a year, or all in one swoop. I'm guessing the former, as boeing wouldn't have the infrastructure to build 20 (or however many are ordered) aircraft simultaeneously.\n\nAilrines have an idea of the age of their fleet, the demand for routes they offer, and future expansion. Emirates may order 10 new 787s to increase service to China, and the next year they may put another order for 5 new 737s to gradually replace their aging fleet. Or they may stand pat for a year and just work with what they got.",
"Yes, they buy airplanes fairly regularly. Take British Airways (_URL_2_) for example, they have 260 aircraft with an average age of 12 years old. \n\nTo keep that age fairly constant planes are regularly bought and sold. After they leave BA they might go to a 2nd tier airline, then get converted into freight aircraft.\n\nA Boeing 747 is rated for 35000 cycles, so after it's taken off/landed that many times, it's done and needs to be scrapped.\n\nIf you look here, you can see everybody that bought a 737 in 2015: _URL_1_\n\nPlanes get sold a lot /r/aviation like following their history. Ex: _URL_0_",
"First, global air travel is growing, so more planes are needed.\n\nSecond, planes wear out and need to be replaced."
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} | {
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} | {
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} | train_eli5 | Are airlines constantly buying airplanes?
Companies like Boeing sell their airplanes to airlines, but how often would these airlines have a demand? I would assume airlines aren't constantly buying airplanes; once an airline has a decent amount of planes, it wouldn't buy any for a while. Is my assumption wrong? How do airplane manufacturers always have a demand? | [
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51kdrn | How does a computer tell us how much battery percentage is left? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They use a method called \"Coulomb counting\". \nImagine you bought a wallet to store your money. You know it's empty. Now you put $100. You know, the wallet holds $100. Then you stopped by a gas station and spent $20. Now, even without looking, you know that there are currently $80 in your wallet. \nCoulomb counting works similarly with batteries - the charge controller monitors how much energy was put into battery and how much was used (and reports this to the computer).\n\nThis method is subject to some inaccuracy due to losses and gradual deterioration of battery's properties, but is good enough and is much better than measuring voltage (laptop batteries have a very flat discharge curve). Some systems employ \"learning\" algorithms to adjust the value based on how the battery was charging/discharging previously.",
"As a battery drains, it starts supplying a lower voltage. So a full 9V battery might actually supply around 9.8V, and an empty one might supply around 8.2V. By measuring the voltage supplied by the battery, the computer can tell how much battery is left."
],
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} | train_eli5 | How does a computer tell us how much battery percentage is left?
| [
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4l4gxk | Is there any motive behind politicians speaking about their families? | Watching American political debates, especially in the Republican debates, almost every candidate mentioned their spouse and/or children during the opening statement. Is there any motive behind that? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is. When politicians talk about their families we build a weak relationship to them. It feels More personal for us (the viewers/listeners).\n\nSome people don't see politicians as normal human beings, but they really are. When they talk about their families we get reminded that they are people as well, which is good if you want votes. Nobody would vote for a robot.\n\nFurthermore. Showing their personal side and showing love and caring for others helps improve their etos. Etos is a rhetorical term for being trustworthy. When showing another part of their minds they increase their trustworthiness.",
"Ever notice how the dads at your workplace kind of \"get\" each other and share a mutual respect despite not having much else in common? It's like that."
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} | train_eli5 | Is there any motive behind politicians speaking about their families?
Watching American political debates, especially in the Republican debates, almost every candidate mentioned their spouse and/or children during the opening statement. Is there any motive behind that? | [
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223hnm | What is that "feeling" you get in the pit of your stomach? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> \"Our gut, AKA the gastrointestinal system, is comprised of the esophagus, stomach, small intestine and colon. It is lined by mucous membranes and wired by a complex of neurons more numerous than the spinal cord. These neurons are called the enteric nervous system, and some scientists think the gut has a mind of it’s own. Just like the brain, this neural network sends and receives chemicals called neurotransmitters, and reacts to emotions and experiences. The brain and the gut influence each other, but the gut can also respond independently to situations. Gut feelings may indicate a previous lesson learned, hidden from our conscious mind, but available in the memory bank of our gut then transmitted to the intuitive brain.\"\n\n _URL_0_"
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} | train_eli5 | What is that "feeling" you get in the pit of your stomach?
| [
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2fce8b | Why are humans required to eat a diet seemingly so much more complex than animals? | Is the human diet so complex solely because we have the capabilities to make it so complex (through agriculture, complex divisions of labour, shipping infrastructure) or is there something different between us and most animals who seem perfectly happy to live off a small range of food sources? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In essence our diet isn't that complex and for thousands of years we got by on a much smaller range of foods. \nThe diversity in many different food sources is mostly a luxury in that regard. \n\n > there something different between us and most animals who seem perfectly happy to live off a small range of food sources?\n\nThe ability to choose (in richer countries that is) mostly.",
"Being omnivorous and highly adaptable we can eat almost anything, since we have a complex society and economy there has been large incentive to make \"anything\" available whenever and wherever it is desired.\n\nSure I could live off whatever is native to the Northeastern US but then I'd never know the joy of guacamole. For another example, consider how oranges were considered gifts/treats back in the day, now they are commonplace foodstuffs. I think diets are complex because we are complex socially not biologically.",
"Also, 'improvement' in modern human diets are based on a couple of assumptions: humans should live as long as possible and humans should die a 'natural' death (preferrably not from things such as cancer, mental illness, diabetes, etc). Nutrition science and epidemiology in general tries to tease out all the variables that reduce disease and lead to longer life spans, and specific diet recommendations are a part of that.",
"They're not. Humans are omnivores. We have the ability to eat almost anything and live. Even if we were eating our ideal diet, there are plenty of native people who eat almost nothing: one or two kinds of plant and one kind of animal. . You can survive on that. Hell, if you could find a good source of wild ruminants, you could live on JUST that one animal. the fact that we eat so many things is because we like new tastes and because we currently eat a diet that is devoid of a lot of the nutrients we need (if, for example, you had only a deer to eat, you'd eat all of it. When you buy beef, you probably only eat the big muscles and not the organs and the like, which means you're missing a lot of the nutrients, which you get elsewhere).",
"True wild animals have a diverse diet. It changes several times throughout the year to whatever is available. Deer for example, eat mostly grass through the summer, then transition to mast crops (nuts) in the fall, then will eat whatever is available in the winter, then back to grass and sprouts in the spring. \n\nSquirrels eat nuts, but they eat a wide variety of nuts as they become ripe. \n\nWe just have a lot more availability of food and therefore eat a lot more different foods. We really could subsist from a few simple items that would contain the basic nutrients we need."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why are humans required to eat a diet seemingly so much more complex than animals?
Is the human diet so complex solely because we have the capabilities to make it so complex (through agriculture, complex divisions of labour, shipping infrastructure) or is there something different between us and most animals who seem perfectly happy to live off a small range of food sources? | [
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258b5u | Why do my cock and balls seem to be acquiring an increasingly healthy tan as I get older, despite their very limited exposure to daylight? | I tried the search bar and found no answer.
It is generally held that a mans manhood gets darker as he ages.
Why? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cheoo8e",
"cher8kk",
"chescuk",
"cheqzqn",
"chf3pyu"
],
"text": [
"No seriously. \nSomeone smart please answer this. \nWhy is my genital skin darker than most all of my other skin. \nAnd darkening as I get older",
"The expression of Androgen receptors is greater in melanocytes located in the areolas and genital area. Thus, Androgen stimulation promotes the synthesis of melanin and pigmentation in these areas. This is a relevant paper: _URL_0_\nThere are other hormonal stimuli that promote melanogenesis and their excessive activity causes excessive genital pigmentation (e.g Addison's disease causes excessive synthesis of POMC/MSH).\nELI5 translation: The chemicals that turn you into adult also make you darker. The skin at your genitals reacts more from those chemicals. We evolved this way likely to protect the areas more from harmful sunlight radiation.",
"Your old saggy balls are farther away from your face, and the redshift just makes them look darker.",
"Something to do with the elasticity of the skin. A good visual representation would be to take a rubber band, and stretch it. Notice how it changes to a little lighter of a color and then darker as it returns to its normal shape?",
"Skin tone, hair tone, and eye color are caused by how much melanin is present, darker skin has more melanin, your genitals have more melanin to protect the genetic information (sperm) from the sun's radiation that would cause genetic damage to them."
],
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} | {
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.nature.com/jid/journal/v109/n4/abs/5610049a.html"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why do my cock and balls seem to be acquiring an increasingly healthy tan as I get older, despite their very limited exposure to daylight?
I tried the search bar and found no answer. It is generally held that a mans manhood gets darker as he ages. Why? | [
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16osae | Could someone please explain some of the most common Reddit abbreviations? | Like OP, for example. TIL I found out by myself. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c7y0w9g",
"c7xxi68",
"c7xyh4x",
"c7xyjrw",
"c7xxz5b"
],
"text": [
"IQTMPOA\n\nI've quietly taken my pants off again.",
"OP - original poster (the person who made the thread)\n\nOC - original content (not copied from tumblr, 4chan, 9gag, any news source, etc)\n\nDAE - does anyone else\n\nTL;DR - too long; didn't read\n\nMFW/MRW - my face/reaction when\n\ni know i am missing some\n\nedit: ITAP/IDAP - i took/drew a picture\n\nAMA - ask me anything\n\nGGG - good guy greg (meme - opposite of scumbag steve)\n\nDFW - dat (that) feeling when",
"IANAL - **I** **A**m **N**ot **A** **L**awyer, used as a disclaimer when advice of a legal nature is posted by someone who is not a practitioner of the law.\n\nYSK: **Y**ou **S**hould **K**now\n\nLPT: **L**ife **P**ro **T**ip\n\nFTFY: **F**ixed **T**hat **F**or **Y**ou\n\nThese next ones may not be unique to Reddit, but they do appear frequently:\n\nGF/BF: Girlfriend/Boyfriend\n\nSO: Significant Other\n\nAFAIK: As far as i know\n\nIIRC: If I recall correctly\n\nLMGTFY: Let me Google that for you\n\nI'm sure there are more...",
"IANAL = I am not a lawyer.\n\nWTF = what the fuck?\n\nSRS = Shit Reddit Says - a subcommunity and [subreddit](_URL_2_) that finds things on Reddit they don't like then goes and massively downvotes it.\n\n_____Porn = In redditspeak, usually not pornography, just something really, really interesting or cool. Some examples: cityporn, foodporn, and (confusingly) animal porn, all of which just feature really nice photos of those topics, with no pornography at all. [LIST](_URL_1_)\n\nSFW = Safe for work. Notice that something that might look questionable is actually not, and is safe to view. The above example link is SFW is spite of it having \"porn\" in the name.\n\nGodwin = from [Godwins Law](_URL_0_), relating to how eventually in any online arguement someone will compare someone else to Hitler. International internet protocol is to declare the thread over and whoever posted the Hitler reference the loser, though this is not always followed, especially in highly political subreddits.\n\nCake day = on your yearly anniversary of your account joining reddit, a little cake appears beside your name. It is traditional to announce it's your cake day and post a picture of a cat, or a picture of something else while saying you don't have a cat picture. This gets you karma, further diluting any and all meaning of the term.",
"If you come accross something you dont know, try [Urban Dictionary](_URL_3_) first. That way you can find out and not risk sounding like a n00b. I find its helpful for alsorts, though often NSFW."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/earthporn+villageporn+cityporn+spaceporn+waterporn+abandonedporn+animalporn+humanporn+botanicalporn+adrenalineporn+destructionporn+movieposterporn+albumartporn+machineporn+newsporn+geekporn+bookporn+mapporn+adporn+designporn+roomporn+militaryporn+historyporn+quotesporn+skyporn+fireporn+infrastructureporn+macroporn+instrumentporn+climbingporn+architectureporn+artporn+cemeteryporn+carporn+fractalporn+exposureporn+gunporn+culinaryporn+dessertporn+agricultureporn+boatporn+geologyporn+futureporn+winterporn+foodporn",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/",
"http://www.urbandictionary.com/"
]
} | train_eli5 | Could someone please explain some of the most common Reddit abbreviations?
Like OP, for example. TIL I found out by myself. | [
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1y7jjp | Why are high speed cameras so expensive? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cfi1j6h"
],
"text": [
"1) Specialized pieces of equipment tend to cost more no matter what you're buying - smaller volumes = higher costs. Plus, they can sell them for more because companies are willing to pay more if the return on investment is good (see below).\n\n2) You need some decent processing firepower to move that much image data through your processors. \n\nI've got an Olympus iSpeed TR at work. I think we paid $25K for it - 2000 fps at full sensor resolution, 10,000 fps with reduced image size. For my use (troubleshooting high-speed packaging equipment, I rarely need more than 500 fps, to be fair, but the Oly was recommended by a colleague. If I can eliminate an issue that stops one of my 24/7 packaging lines for 5 minutes a day with that camera, I pay for the camera in under a year."
],
"score": [
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why are high speed cameras so expensive?
| [
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5yyn6z | Why does paper make so much noise when crumpled? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"detxzwp",
"deu0ipj"
],
"text": [
"Other materials that are shaped like a semi-rigid sheet will make similar amounts of noise when crumpled: aluminum foil, thin sheets of plastic, etc.\n\nEach bend that you make in the sheet causes vibrations in it, and the vibrations are amplified similarly to how the (paper) cone of a speaker in your stereo makes loud sounds: the large surface moves more air as it vibrates.\n\nStart crumpling the paper from a corner and you'll see it vibrate and push air around as you do the crumpling.",
"There was quite a bit of research on this topic a while back: _URL_0_ I can't summarize it for you but if you're interested you might be able to get something from the links provided there.\n\nHere's one paper: _URL_1_\n\nHere's the abstract:\n\nFrom magnetic systems to the crust of the earth, many physical systems that exhibit a multiplicity of metastable states emit pulses with a broad power law distribution in energy. Digital audio recordings reveal that paper being crumpled, which can be easily held in hand, is such a system. Crumpling paper both using the traditional hand method and a cylindrical geometry uncovered a power law distribution of pulse energies spanning over two decades: p(E)=\nE\nα\n, α=1.3-1.6, with clearly nonexponential distribution over three decades. Crumpling initially flat sheets into a compact ball (strong crumpling), we found little or no evidence that the energy distribution varied systematically over time or the size of the sheet. When we applied repetitive small deformations (weak crumpling) to sheets which had been previously folded along a regular grid, we found no systematic dependence on the grid spacing. Our results suggest that the pulse energy depends only weakly on the size of paper regions responsible for sound production."
],
"score": [
385,
50
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.honeylocust.com/crumpling/",
"http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.54.278"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why does paper make so much noise when crumpled?
[removed] | [
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303i22 | Why are more and more laptops coming with out a dvd drive? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cpory1m",
"cporz8s",
"cpotbnw",
"cpovick"
],
"text": [
"Pretty much the same reason more and more started coming without a floppy drive 15 years ago. Between huge flash drives and fast online storage, it's a dying medium.",
"An optical drive (first a CD drive, then a DVD drive) used to be the best way to get software onto a laptop. It replaced the floppy disk, the previous most common way. A laptop without an optical drive would have been useless because you couldn't have installed new software.\n\nTwo things changed:\n\n* The Internet is so ubiquitous now that 99% of software is downloaded rather than installed from a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM\n* USB drives are large enough and cheap enough that they provide a great alternative for the few cases where a DVD-ROM would have been used before. Note that a DVD-ROM can only store around 5GB, whereas USB drives can store more than 100GB now.\n\nSince most people don't need them, it makes more sense to save the cost and weight and just leave it out of the laptop.\n\nFinally, you can still get an optical drive as a separate accessory if you need one. They're cheap.",
"Because DVDs aren't being used much anymore, they're a dying 20-year-old technology.\n\n- For movies, you've got Blu-rays now, which are six times the resolution, encoded in a much better video format, and much more resistant to scratching.\n\n- For moving personal files around, you can buy a $4 flash drive that's twice the space of a DVD and reusable, and which saves files much faster than a DVD does. For $45, you can get a USB flash drive equivalent to 30 DVDs, and for $100, a hard drive equivalent to 681 DVDs.\n\n- For sharing documents between groups, we've got Dropbox, Google Drive, _URL_0_, etc, which in most countries are much more convenient.\n\n- Software rarely ships on discs anymore. Most games are on Steam, and even if you go into the store and buy the box, half the time it's just a disc that spins up a Steam installer. Photoshop, MS Office, it's all available to download online and *preferable* to download online because the Adobe/MS websites will have the most recent version while the one on a disc might be outdated.\n\nSo if they're not necessary, why not just keep them around just in case?\n\n- DVD drives take up a *ton* of space inside a laptop, which matters when you're trying to reduce the size and weight.\n\n- DVD drives suck up a ton of battery power because they're a physically-moving object.\n\n90% of people will benefit from not having a DVD drive. Those people that do can buy a USB DVD drive.",
"Optical drives take up a lot of space inside a notebook computer's case. In the slimmer computers that consumers demand these days, that is space that cannot be spared.\n\nCombine that with the fact that fewer people were actually using the DVD drives that computers came with, and they are rapidly going the way of the 3¼\" floppy drive.\n\nSource: I fix the things. Many times I happen to find a failed DVD drive while repairing the computer for some other reason - the owner wasn't aware of it."
],
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8,
5,
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"Ge.tt"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why are more and more laptops coming with out a dvd drive?
| [
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3nd77l | If we were to replace our neurons one by one with exact copies, would we still be "us"? | After reading the comments of [this TIL](_URL_0_), I got to thinking about neuron replacement, and whether that would preserve the original consciousness. My view on it is that if neurons are replaced, one by one, with an exact copy of itself, it's similar to replacing a tire on a car; the tire behaves the same, and the car can still control and access it. I talked with my friend about it, and his opinion is that it's more like the idea some people have of teleportation, where the original body is destroyed and a physically identical copy is produced at a different location. Could somebody explain to me why and how neurons hold the information they do, and whether or not this is possible? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cvn0jvb"
],
"text": [
"In a more philosophical sense the dilemma you're describing is known as the [ship of Theseus](_URL_0_).\n\nIf you're asking if neuron replacement is possible the answer is \"hell no\" in the foreseeable future. Humans have some 20 billion neurons, each of which connects to thousands of others. Trying to replicate that sort of complexity is utterly impossible without decades worth of breakthroughs in nanotechnology.\n\nYour brain stores its memories in the connections between the neurons, so if you somehow were to replace all neurons in you with exact replicas nothing would change. Your brain doesn't have a metaphysical part (\"soul\") to it. Like cogs in a machine the neurons would continue to fire just as normal. Sure, it'd be an entirely different brain composed of entirely different atoms but the end result would be identical to the original one."
],
"score": [
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://www.reddit.com/comments/3ncc6i"
]
} | {
"url": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus"
]
} | train_eli5 | If we were to replace our neurons one by one with exact copies, would we still be "us"?
After reading the comments of [this TIL](_URL_0_), I got to thinking about neuron replacement, and whether that would preserve the original consciousness. My view on it is that if neurons are replaced, one by one, with an exact copy of itself, it's similar to replacing a tire on a car; the tire behaves the same, and the car can still control and access it. I talked with my friend about it, and his opinion is that it's more like the idea some people have of teleportation, where the original body is destroyed and a physically identical copy is produced at a different location. Could somebody explain to me why and how neurons hold the information they do, and whether or not this is possible? | [
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71epyy | why is it that our minds can blindly know where all the keys are on a key board, making us able to type fast, yet if you were to ask someone to draw out and label a keyboard, they would likely have a hard time doing it? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dna6na0"
],
"text": [
"So learning to type depends a lot on muscle memory. That is- when you repeat a motion many times your nervous system adjusts and gets used to that pattern so you can do it again quickly. So more so than learning the position of each letter on the keyboard, you're really learning the movements you have to make with your hands to type a certain character. Drawing and labelling a picture of a keyboard requires a better visual concept of the keyboard, which isn't as well developed in many typists."
],
"score": [
4
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | why is it that our minds can blindly know where all the keys are on a key board, making us able to type fast, yet if you were to ask someone to draw out and label a keyboard, they would likely have a hard time doing it?
[deleted] | [
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2ha7ve | What is it about alcohol that causes some people's faces to turn red and feel warm? | My brother has no in between with alcohol. He goes from sober to drunk with the snap of a finger. The only sign it is about to happen is when his cheeks and sometimes forehead turn red. Sometimes it will happen to me but I can stop because I feel my face getting warm. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ckqtboy"
],
"text": [
"This is a common reaction for people of Asian ancestry. It has to do with lacking an enzyme, alcohol dehydrogenase. It means the person does not metabolize alcohol easily. They get drunk easier.\n\n_URL_0_"
],
"score": [
11
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6117742"
]
} | train_eli5 | What is it about alcohol that causes some people's faces to turn red and feel warm?
My brother has no in between with alcohol. He goes from sober to drunk with the snap of a finger. The only sign it is about to happen is when his cheeks and sometimes forehead turn red. Sometimes it will happen to me but I can stop because I feel my face getting warm. | [
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1yi1py | Cooking term: breaking sauce | I'm watching The Taste and the one cook says "I broke my sauce"
What does that mean
exactly? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cfkp283",
"cfkthno"
],
"text": [
"When making a sauce like hollandaise, the butter and egg yolks can separate, or the egg yolks can scramble and become solid.",
"Any sort of emulsion, or forced mixture between components that don't normally blend like oil/fat and water, is held together usually with a binder like egg yolk. If the oil is introduced too quickly to the base, then the mixture will separate into layers and fail to form a sauce. More detail is available if needed, hope this helps!"
],
"score": [
3,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Cooking term: breaking sauce
I'm watching The Taste and the one cook says "I broke my sauce" What does that mean exactly? | [
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24iuj6 | Why are pyramid schemes illegal? | I know what they are, and I understand that people on the bottom get fucked, but I guess I don't get why that makes it illegal. It's not like they're lying to people. Please note I'm not arguing against this, just trying to understand. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ch7k7wz",
"ch7nwkx"
],
"text": [
"> It's not like they're lying to people.\n\nThat is exactly why they are illegal*. \nThe fact that most 'investors' will never get any return is not disclosed. Except for -perhaps- State Lotteries, there aren't many situations where people will willingly risk money knowing they can't get it back. \n\n*\"Illegal\" refers to specific laws, which change when you cross borders. Every City/Township/Parish/County/State/Countrycan write laws. This allows States to write laws allowing them to take money for a lottery. \n\n[FBI](_URL_0_) \n\n [Federal Trade Commission](_URL_2_) \n\n[FindLaw](_URL_1_)",
"Because it's a fraud. People get promised wealth and at a certain point in time the people at the bottom get fucked. That means those people get fucked over that promise, essentially paying money for nothing.\n\nI mean I would have expected you to have realized the answer when you typed the word fucked. Do you think it's in any way ok to take someone's money and then give them nothing?"
],
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2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"http://www.fbi.gov/scams-safety/fraud/fraud#pyramid",
"http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/pyramid-schemes.html",
"http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/ftc-action-leads-court-halt-alleged-pyramid-scheme"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why are pyramid schemes illegal?
I know what they are, and I understand that people on the bottom get fucked, but I guess I don't get why that makes it illegal. It's not like they're lying to people. Please note I'm not arguing against this, just trying to understand. | [
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0.09733885526657104,
-0.012355657294392586,... |
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