Question: How did the people who mummified the bodies in Egypt thousands of years ago, knew that their methood will preserve the bodies for so many years?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How did the people who mummified the bodies in Egypt thousands of years ago, knew that their methood will preserve the bodies for so many years?

Science. Research. Experimentation. Trial and error from generations of mummifiers (the funeral directors & embalmers of their time). I'm sure they tried different treatments on animals and then checked on them periodically to see which method was working the best with the least amount of decay over the years/decades. Mummification wasn't just for the kings and ultra rich. They are finding mummies of more common people. Of course the procedure, wraps, and mummification wasn't of the quality of what you'd find for the rich people. Even back then you got what you paid for. Did they know the bodies would last for several thousands of years? Probably not, but you never know what they hoped for. It might be written down somewhere though. Maybe try asking this question in r/egyptology. Someone over there might know.


Question: When you get a stomach bug and vomit, why do nausea and vomiting continue even after the stomach is empty?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 When you get a stomach bug and vomit, why do nausea and vomiting continue even after the stomach is empty?

Your stomach is just trying to throw everything out and will keep doing it until the stomach knows it’s empty. It’s not as smart as you are so it keeps going for a while.


Question: ; If stomach acid breaks down food, then how does the body absorb the nutrients it needs and sends it to other organs like the liver?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 ; If stomach acid breaks down food, then how does the body absorb the nutrients it needs and sends it to other organs like the liver?

Digestion is a lot more complex than the stomach breaking down food. The stomach acid and the digestive enzyme it produces mostly breaks down protein. The other stuff is just mashed into smaller pieces by the stomach squeezing. The food then goes into the the small intestine, where different enzymes are added, which break down fats and carbohydrates. Additional enzymes to further break down proteins are added as well. Eventually, everything is broken down to individual molecules, which the cells along the intestine are able to grab ahold of. They then pass the molecules through the cells and into the blood (sometimes in an indirect way that is hard to explain here)


Question: How can we be sure that super colliders work the way we want them?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How can we be sure that super colliders work the way we want them?

Well the theory of how we measure them is based upon how we think they act, so it's not like those are two completely separate problems. But in regards to this latest anomaly, my understanding is that the tests are seeing the expected byproducts of these particular collisions and those byproduct particles are reasonably well understood and they're fairly confident in what they're seeing. The issue is that the ratio that those two byproducts are being produced seems to be slightly different than the prediction. That doesn't completely rule out some sort of experimental error, which is why they're going to do more testing, and hopefully either figure out what the problem is, or just build more confidence in the fact that muons are acting unexpectedly.


Question: Why Are Cane Fields Burned After A Harvest?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why Are Cane Fields Burned After A Harvest?

Plant ash is also an incredible, fast-acting fertilizer as it's been broken down and ready for reabsorption.


Question: How did it work: the wired casset tape that played music via a portable CD player?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How did it work: the wired casset tape that played music via a portable CD player?

There were devices that had a coil inside a cassette-sized shell that created a magnetic field. When inserted into the player the coil ended up positioned next to the pick up head of the tape player. The coil's magnetic field induced a current in the similar coil of the pick up so it simulated a tape being played.


Question: Why is Unemployment Insurance taxed, ffs?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why is Unemployment Insurance taxed, ffs?

EI is income, and all income is taxed. This may not apply to you, but it it important for others. For example, people that do seasonal work will often claim EI in their off months. They might make a lot of money during the year, but still get EI. In this case, EI will contribute to their total income and thus it should be taken into account when judging tax. You may be on EI now, but there is no guarantee that you won't find a job tomorrow and earn a bunch of money for the rest of year. You might be on EI, but there is a chance that you might be making a lot money with investments. Therefore, EI should be taken into account with regards to total income, and taxed appropriately. If EI wasn't getting taxed, you would make less in EI. Taxing it is good because because it means that those who make a lot of money in addition to EI will get taxed more. So, if you get EI and make no other income, your average tax will be very low. For those with high income, their overall tax will be high. In essence, you make more from your EI by working less than a person with EI would be from working more. Example: Let's say you and someone else get $2000 a month in EI. You earn no other money, so your average tax rate is as low as it gets, maybe 10% or something. This means that you would have to pay back $200—you get $1800 a month. The other fellow makes a lot of money, so his average tax rate is 20%. This means that he would have to pay back $400—they get $1600 a month. If EI wasn't taxed, they would lower EI payments and give everyone $1700 per month (the average between you and the other guy). You end up losing $100, but the guy that earned more gained $100.


Question: Why does your ear sometimes hurt when you fly in an airplane?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why does your ear sometimes hurt when you fly in an airplane?

Going up higher in the atmosphere, the pressure of the air changes. Your inner ear, basically an air pocket on the other side of your eardrum, needs to be the same pressure as the air outside your eardrum. So the pain you feel is the pressure difference. We scuba divers experience the same thing in reverse as we dive into greater pressure underwater. To balance this you can do a few things. Chewing gum is the most popular method on airplanes. Opening your mouth very wide or simply swallowing usually opens the gap to your inner ear and allows the pressure to balance as well. Divers will hold their nose shut while GENTLY blowing with their nose to push air into the inner ear and balance the pressure.


Question: How do wolves and other predatory animals know which part of the prey to attack first?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How do wolves and other predatory animals know which part of the prey to attack first?

They watch their parents do it for a few weeks before doing in themselves. And the chain keeps going back until one wolf tried going for the throat and it worked better for survival (way oversimplifying).


Question: if the continents shift back into a Pangea-like landmass, what would happen near the coastlines?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 if the continents shift back into a Pangea-like landmass, what would happen near the coastlines?

The world is split into ‘plates’ on which everything sits. When two plates collide they are most likely to push against each other and create mountains.


Question: why are video games moving from standalone titles to to Microtransaction heavy models or Free-To-Play models?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
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- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 why are video games moving from standalone titles to to Microtransaction heavy models or Free-To-Play models?

Money. It turns out that if you make a free to play game with microtransactions, most players will pay nothing or only a small amount, but some people will get addicted and spend hundreds or even thousands on it. Because there's no upfront cost to start playing the game, there's the potential to have far more players than a traditional game. So even if most of those barely spend anything on it, there are enough "whales" (actual industry term) who pay more than enough to make up for that. It doesn't really benefit gamers, it's not meant to. It's meant to make money.


Question: Why or how does an energy wave (like infrared waves or micro waves) hitting a surface result in a movement on the atomic level?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
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- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why or how does an energy wave (like infrared waves or micro waves) hitting a surface result in a movement on the atomic level?

Super cool question. All forms of electromagnetic radiation (light, Radio, microwaves) are photons with different energy levels. When a photon collides with and electron, the electron can absorb the photon and gain an energy level. (Also if an electron drops an energy level it emits a photon) Because electron configuration determines atomic interaction, this change in electron energy must also result to some change in the atomic interactions How does the electron absorb the photon? Great question that I don't have the answer to as it is much more in depth into particle physics (quarks, bosons, leptons) / quantum electrodynamics and those are most certainly not eli5 content.


Question: I know cracking your knuckles isn’t bad for you, but it seems like everyone has a different opinion on cracking your neck. Is it actually bad for you? Why/Why not?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 I know cracking your knuckles isn’t bad for you, but it seems like everyone has a different opinion on cracking your neck. Is it actually bad for you? Why/Why not?

I believe why they suggest you don't do it, is because there are many other joints, bones, nerves around the neck area and not knowing how to do it correctly might cause injury.


Question: How come forging doesn't seem to have improved since the metal ages ?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How come forging doesn't seem to have improved since the metal ages ?

Things like forged by fire and other hand crafted forging is more for the novelty than practicality. There are modern ways to make knives for example, but they don't make good TV shows or collector items.


Question: Why do we need to "clean" surfaces and _then_ disinfect? Why can't we just do it all at once?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why do we need to "clean" surfaces and _then_ disinfect? Why can't we just do it all at once?

> Someone told me it's because bleach isn't good at getting up dirt, It isn't so much dirt as it is oils. You probably know that oil and water don't mix very well, and our body produces oils to cover our skin. This means that grime produced on surfaces humans interact with tends to be oily, sticking dirt to it. What soaps and detergents do is have a molecule with one end that sticks to water and the other end stick to oil. The soap then forms a very thin layer allowing tiny droplets of oil to be carried away by water, cleaning the surface. Without removing the oils the disinfectant can't reach the things it needs to kill, as they would be shielded by layers of oil and grease. So you can't skip the soap part. The problem with trying to use something like bleach and a detergent at the same time is that some kinds of detergent can interact with the bleach. If they contain ammonia for example the bleach can chemically interact to produce chlorine gas. When inhaled this will corrode the lungs causing chemical burns that leak fluid and effectively drown you in your own blood. Not cool! Of course this won't happen with every combination of household cleaners but since the average person isn't a chemist it is a good rule of thumb just to not mix cleaners.


Question: How can a bank lend out more money than it possesses?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How can a bank lend out more money than it possesses?

I am the bank. Alice comes to me and deposits $1,000. I loan out $900 to Bob. Bob buys supplies from Charlie for his business for $900 and Charlie deposits that money with me. I then loan out $810 to Dave. Dave buys supplies for his business from Eric for $810 and Eric deposits the money with me. I still only have $1000 in cash, but I've used it to loan out $1,710. My customers have $2,710 on deposit with me, but thanks to fractional reserve banking I'm not required to actually have all of that money in cash available to everyone.


Question: How can Iodine strips be used to prevent infections on a wound, but at the same time Iodine itself is dangerous to handle?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How can Iodine strips be used to prevent infections on a wound, but at the same time Iodine itself is dangerous to handle?

Like anything it's about the right amount for the right use. Without enough water we die, with too much we die.


Question: Why do we pay paycheck taxes then also taxes when we buy stuff?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why do we pay paycheck taxes then also taxes when we buy stuff?

Different taxes go to different budgets. Also, state / county / city / district etc might appropriate taxes differently. For a general rule, federal taxes go to things like the military, medicare, social security etc. State taxes might go towards roads. County taxes might go to street lights. City taxes to local schools. Local taxes to local parks. Every area is a bit different, for instance in one town you may pay 8% sales tax while across the street sales tax may be 8.25%. Sales tax may go to one or more budgets, state + city for instance. Some states have no income tax while others may not have sales tax. Usually these deficits are covered by other taxes, higher property taxes to cover the missing income tax for instance. Or higher income tax to cover no sales tax. TL;DR you pay for a lot of different things with a lot of different taxes.


Question: - There are around 300 million people in the US, why do 1.5 billion census forms need to be printed?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 - There are around 300 million people in the US, why do 1.5 billion census forms need to be printed?

It's not just census forms - it's mailings in general, *including* forms. Letters and other mailings including information leaflets are included in the number.


Question: How do we know that Pie is actually infinite digits, and not just an overly long number that we can’t understand? It still doesn’t make sense to me.

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How do we know that Pie is actually infinite digits, and not just an overly long number that we can’t understand? It still doesn’t make sense to me.

To show a number has infinite digits (and that those digits don't repeat in any pattern) means showing that the number is irrational. Rational numbers can be expressed as fractions of integers. That's most of the numbers you're used to. Irrational numbers can't be expressed as a fraction. For instance, the number 1,414 can be written as 1414/1000, so it's a rational number. √2 is approximately 1,414213... and it goes on infinitely without repeating patterns. It is an irrational number, so there are no numbers "a" and "b" such that a/b= √2. The proof that pi is irrational is a bit complicated, but the proof that √2 is irrational is easier to understand. The [wikipedia article]( URL_0 ) has some proofs of that.


Question: What are complex numbers and why are they useful?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 What are complex numbers and why are they useful?

The original impetus for complex numbers was the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. While the phrasing has undergone some modification over the years, the basic premise is that a single variable polynomial has a number of roots (places where it evaluates to zero) equal to the highest power of the polynomial. So if you've got f(x) = x + 2, you've got a polynomial of power 1 that crosses the x-axis at a single point (x = -2). However, the problem with this is that it's not actually true with real numbers. Consider the parabola: f(x) = x^2 + x + 1 If you plot this parabola, you'll notice it's entirely in the top half of the plane. It never crosses the x-axis and thus has no roots. From the standpoint of mathematics, this posed a dilemma. Without the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra being true, algebra wasn't 'closed' - you could follow all the rules and end up with results that lay outside the system. The solution they came up with was to come up with complex numbers - a way to create non-real roots that would make the FToA true. However, the consequences of this were far reaching. One of the most important is with regards to periodicity/rotation. If you multiply two real numbers, you just end up with a larger or smaller real number. If you continue to perform such multiplications, you just proceed linearly off to the infinite/infinitesmals. However, if you multiply complex numbers, you can create a cycle of numbers. If you keep multiplying i by itself, you get the sequence: i, -1, -i, 1, i, ... This is how periodicity/rotation work. They return to the previous value at some point and repeat. As a result, complex numbers proved to be an excellent way to model anything that rotates or repeats. All of the trigonometry you learned in high school can be replaced by complex representations. Since complex numbers tend to be easier to manipulate than trigonometric ones, it meant you work much more easily with all the real world periodic/rotational issues.


Question: Why was there such a large fall for Oil Prices in 2008?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why was there such a large fall for Oil Prices in 2008?

Primarily because technological advances in fracking opened up oil sources consisting primarily of shale deposits, which the industry had previously been unable to utilize.


Question: Why are manual cars becoming obsolete?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why are manual cars becoming obsolete?

Because to most people the benefits of an automatic outweigh the benefits of a manual. Things like slightly improved(which has been equaled in all but the most infinitesimal ways by automatics) gas mileage, more control, the ability to push start, and "the feel of driving" and all that aren't big deals to most people. Not having to constantly move their hands and feet around in order to change speeds is. People like simplicity and ease, and "push this pedal to go faster and this one to go slower" is about as simple as you can get. "Push this pedal and then slightly let up while pushing this other one while using this hand lever" to move, and "oh yeah make sure you're watching this dial and listening to the engine sounds so you can keep using that hand lever and other pedal while driving" is frankly just a tedious pain in the ass to most people who just want to be somewhere else. And while car aficionados might not get it and don't agree, driving is, to the vast majority of people, somewhere between a chore and a necessary mundane task to get from point A to point B. There is no "fun" or "pleasure" aspect to it. It's that boring and sometimes stressful waiting period between where you were and where you want to be. Driving is the loading screen of life. Best to get it out of the way with the least hassle. Look how much people are eagerly anticipating driverless cars. Not only is the act of driving not fun to most people as is, they're pretty keen on removing themselves from the equation entirely and doing something, anything, else while they're moving from one place to another.


Question: If the sun rises from the east and sets in the west, why is a south facing room the best for growing plants?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 If the sun rises from the east and sets in the west, why is a south facing room the best for growing plants?

Here in the northern hemisphere, south-facing windows get the most sun because of axial tilt. For most of the year, when the sun is at its highest point in our sky, it's actually off to the south a bit.


Question: How are black holes in space created? Also what are they?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How are black holes in space created? Also what are they?

A black hole is a pinch in space-time caused by the presence of an unimaginably dense object. Much in the same way that an object will fall towards the earth because of the earth’s gravity, objects will also be attracted to a black hole. But unlike the earth, black holes create a gravity well that is so strong that not even light can escape (hence the slightly misleading name). Black holes are normally created by the collapse of large stars, which leave behind a crumpled, condensed core. Supermassive black holes (like the one we believe is at the center of our galaxy) are likely cause some other way, which gets a little more complicated.


Question: why does it take "up to 10 days" to be removed from an email list if it is all electronic?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 why does it take "up to 10 days" to be removed from an email list if it is all electronic?

It is often instant. If they say it may take up to 10 days, it could be for different reasons. More legitimate reasons might be that emails are scheduled to send ahead of time, and their system doesn't edit the list of recipients for scheduled emails when someone is removed. Less legitimate reasons might be because the page where you remove yourself from the list has intentionally tricky wording, so people often check a box that's actually indicating they want to stay on the list thinking it will do the opposite. If they believe it won't take effect immediately, they won't notice the problem at first and may forget about it entirely.


Question: How do rich people use donations as tax write-offs to save money? Wouldn't it be more financially beneficial to just keep the money and have it taxed?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How do rich people use donations as tax write-offs to save money? Wouldn't it be more financially beneficial to just keep the money and have it taxed?

You're getting a lot of different answers here, and most are correct but people here are talking about cash donations. There's another big type of donation that rich people make too and that's in illiquid/non-marketable assets such as real estate and/or shares in private companies. The ELI5 is a little difficult, but the gist is that for private companies, getting a 'value' is about 99% art and 1% science. Accounting is a lot more assumptions and guess work than people would like to publicly acknowledge. So what an individual can do is offer to donate, say, 10% of his company to a charity. Let's say that the company did really well last year so that guy can easily find an accountant to say that 10% is worth $10M. So the guy has a $10M tax deduction he can use as he sees fit (subject to AMT and other shit, but you get the point). The guy also knows that last year's performance was a blip and if he repeated that 10% donation this year, he'd only get a valuation of $5M. In effect he's got an extra $5M from the valuation. When I was younger, I was on the young alumni board for the university I went to for undergrad and we used to see this all the time. Someone would donate property/illiquid securities/art/etc with an 'assessed' value of (say) $10M, but when the school went to sell it, they'd only realize (say) $3M in cash. But the guy would still get to keep the $10M tax deduction. To a guy like that, a $10M tax deduction could be worth $4m to $5M easily. I'm sure you're wondering, and yes this is in that 'gray zone' that's just millimeters from being tax fraud. However, the IRS rarely pursues these cases 1) because they are *really* hard to win, 2) the school doesn't really care b/c they still just got a $3M donation, and 3) the school isn't going to 'help' the IRS (beyond bare minimum compliance) b/c the school would have to give up the $3M. A similar, but different, application of this idea is where Mitt Romney reported a [$102M IRA]( URL_0 ) by having accounts toy with the value/valuation of the assets within the IRA. There's no reasonable way you could ever get that much into an IRA....unless you got your accountants to depress the value first then re-value later. ***EDIT:*** I'm getting a lot of questions about how this worked for Romney. Here is a *purely hypothetical* example based loosely on when Bain Capital took out Domino's Pizza that I put in a lower comment - I'm putting it here so more people see it: I'm going to make up the exact numbers, but this is the mechanics: Romney had a type of retirement account where you could but $30K cash per year in the account tax free. He also had a private equity firm invested in private companies. Romney took $30K cash, put it in the retirement account each year - tax free. Each year, his accountants would say, 0.X% of your portfolio companies is magically equal to $30K, so Romney would take the $30K cash in the tax-sheltered IRA and buy 0.X% of his companies personally. He did this for about (I think) 15 years. After a while, he converted it to a ROTH IRA meaning that he'd pay a small one-time tax hit but withdrawals are tax free. Later on, his private equity company would sell the individual companies that it owned (or take them public). When they were sold, Romney would recognize the gain BUT it was now within the tax-sheltered IRA he'd pay no taxes and because he converted to a ROTH IRA, he pays no taxes on withdrawals. Genius. Here's a sort of hypothetical example. In 1998, Bain (Romney's PE company) bought Dominos Pizza for $1.1B. They probably used a standard PE structure meaning that they borrowed $1.0B and put down cash for $100M. So the company is $1.0B debt and $100M equity. Romney puts in $30K each year to buy some of Dominos ($30K/$100M = .03%/year). He buys .03% per year, for a total of .45% of Dominos after 15 years. At this point, he converts from a traditional IRA to a ROTH IRA paying roughly $100K in taxes ($450K in contributions multiplied by his tax rate at the time of the conversion - maybe a little more or less than $100K, but in the neighborhood). Then they take Dominos public, which they did. Dominos is worth $10B as of right now, so Romney's 0.45% of Dominos would be worth $45M. ***All completely tax free*** because its in a ROTH. In reality, he has an IRA worth $102M, so my example is off by about half, but you get the basic mechanics. The IRS looked at it and said it was aggressive but not illegal when he ran for president in 2012.


Question: How do dishwashers clean everything so thoroughly?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How do dishwashers clean everything so thoroughly?

It's a combination of high pressure hot water sprayed over and over and over again, and a detergent in the water that breaks down grease and food particles and dissolves them into a solution in the water to be drained away. Even without detergent, just the hot water spraying repeatedly for the cycle does the majority of the work.


Question: Why does root mean squared not equal 0?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why does root mean squared not equal 0?

Because when you square positive numbers you get something > 0, *and* when you square negative numbers you also get something > 0. Average a bunch of these together, you're going to see a positive average.


Question: Why can't some functions be integrated?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why can't some functions be integrated?

These functions can be integrated as well, but we can't write that integral down as a closed-form expression. For some functions (such as sin(x^(2))), we can only express the integral with the integral notation, but that integral exists nontheless.


Question: How can you tell where a cyber attack is coming from?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How can you tell where a cyber attack is coming from?

A data package always has a recipient and an origin. The package contains information about who it's for, and where it's from. A sender address and a recipient address. And, since you know the address of the sender, it's kind of a good hint, don't you agree? Unfortunately, that is all that it is. A good hint. The stated sender can have nothing to do with the data, since the information can be spoofed. And even if the package comes from a specific computer, doesn't mean that you can automatically blame it's owner for the attack. His computer can be hijacked and controlled from someplace else. But that is a well known part of he game, and you will have to start over at that computer again and find out where it's controlled from. An attack often comes from several hijacked computers at the same time. If you look at all of them, you'll hopefully start seeing a pattern with where they are controlled from.


Question: Every other celestial sky is either nearly all cloud or almost no cloud — what makes Earth's perfect balance in achieving about half cloud so unique?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Every other celestial sky is either nearly all cloud or almost no cloud — what makes Earth's perfect balance in achieving about half cloud so unique?

Our atmosphere *is* all cloud. It's a cloud of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide. In order to survive on Earth, we've evolved to see the wavelengths of light that pass through our atmosphere.


Question: What is MSG? Why does it make everything taste delicious? And why is there such a bad stigma around it?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 What is MSG? Why does it make everything taste delicious? And why is there such a bad stigma around it?

You have five *basic* taste receptors: bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and *umami*. Umami flavor is that savory, usually described as meaty flavor that you get from things like red meat and soy sauce. The molecules primarily responsible for activating the umami receptor in your tongue are *glutamates* or glutamic acid. It's used in the body for a *lot* of things, including protein synthesis and as one of the most abundant neurotransmitters in your nervous system. Fortunately, your body can make its own glutamate but it helps to get more from other things, which is why you have receptors to taste it and why it tastes *good*. If sugar is pure sweetness, glutamate is pure savoriness. Mono-sodium glutamate is, then, a stable salt molecule made of a single sodium atom attached to glutamic acid. It tastes a little bit salty from the sodium and also just like pure umami taste. Adding it to something is like giving your tongue a big punch right in the *savory*. It's like soy sauce without being nearly as salty and without some of the other tangy flavors (and in fact, soy sauce gets the majority of its flavor from naturally occurring glutamic acid, including MSG). It's the [pure essence]( URL_1 ) of a perfectly cooked, unseasoned steak. It's like turning cheddar cheese into an essential oil. Our taste works best when flavors are complimented by other flavors - that's why things like lemonade taste so good, with the sour citric acid complimenting and balancing the sweet sugar. MSG added to a food boosts the savory flavors which compliments the other, complex flavors to bring them out and make everything taste like you died and went to [Ron Swanson]( URL_2 )'s version of heaven. It's controversial mostly [because of racism]( URL_3 ) and people not understanding how chemicals work. MSG as an additive is artificially made and in the 1960s people started paying attention to artificial chemicals in their food. Someone wrote an article complaining about heart palpitations and dizziness after eating Chinese food and that was enough to cause a bit of a panic - in large part due to xenophobia. Racially biased studies suggested a link between MSG and this so-called "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome." Subsequent studies (that were done properly) have since suggested that MSG is not harmful and any ill effects felt in association with MSG are probably a result of the [nocebo effect]( URL_0 ) - you *think* you should have negative symptoms so you expect them so you cause yourself to feel bad.


Question: Why is it after I hear a song I like I continuously replay it untill I am sick of the song?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why is it after I hear a song I like I continuously replay it untill I am sick of the song?

It’s probably because it makes you happy, and since you crave that happiness you’ll do what makes you happy (playing the song over and over) until it’s not giving you happiness anymore :)


Question: How does switching the rotation of a ceiling fan decide whether the fan gives cool air or warm air?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How does switching the rotation of a ceiling fan decide whether the fan gives cool air or warm air?

It doesn't. Rotation decides whether the fan is sucking the cold air up or pushing the hot air down.


Question: How are scientists able to calculate how far away something is in outer space?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How are scientists able to calculate how far away something is in outer space?

Astronomers use something called the "Cosmic Distance Ladder." Essentially, we can directly observe the distance from Earth of very close objects (like other planets, using radar). Then we can use that information to learn about the distance of further objects (like the Sun, using a little trigonometry and the orbits of nearby planets). Then we can use that information to learn about the distance of even further objects (like nearby stars, using a comparison of how they appear when the Earth is on one side of the Sun vs the other). After that point, the cosmic distance ladder is mostly based on "standard candles." These are objects with known luminosity, like certain kinds of stars. Their brightness from earth is just a function of their luminosity and their distance from Earth. Hence, if you know their luminosity and observe their brightness, you know their distance.


Question: why countries with weak currency don't remove multiple zeroes off their money to make it worth more?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
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<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 why countries with weak currency don't remove multiple zeroes off their money to make it worth more?

It happens, but it doesn't make the money worth more. It is only a cosmetic change that turns larger numbers into smaller ones, but it does not change anything about the underlying value. Turkey did just that in 2005. They replaced all their banknotes with new ones that had 6 zeros less on them. 1,000,000 old Lira would be worth 1 New Lira. Prices in shops and wages and bank accounts and debts would have 6 zero lobbed of them to go along with the new money. It didn't mean that anyone in turkey suddenly was any poorer or richer than before. Nothing changes on a practical level. The new currency just looked less ridiculous and was easier to handle. The main benefit that the government had been after to make a statement. the currency had undergone some very big inflation which is why they ended up with such large numbers, and the move was supposed to signal that this was now over and they were in normal times now. It was supposed to boost confidence in the currency that further inflation would be limited. This also shows why more countries aren't doing it. For example the Japanese Yen started out being worth exactly the same as the US dollar when it was crated (they were both copies of the Spanish dollar, the pieces of eight from pirate lore.) Since those days both Japan and the US have undergone some inflation. Japan thanks in part to losing WWII has undergone a lot more though. 1 US dollar today is worth more than 100 Yen and prices expressed in Yen all seem a lot larger than ones expressed in Dollars pound or Euro. Japan could lop of two zeroes of their currency to get it more in line with other world currency, but frankly they don't need to. The two extra decimal places are still manageable and Japan doesn't have to prove anything to anyone about the stabilize of their currency. Anyone looking at the Yen today will see the scars of past inflation on it, but also know that it is in the past. With Turkey observer had no such confidence and thus the government had to artificially boost it. Other than the practical aspects of keeping price tags short revaluating your currency like that is something you do when you need to project strength that people don't think you have. It might be seen as a sign of weakness itself. There is also the fact that switching out all your banknotes and coins for new ones like this will be an expensive undertaking and one not made unless there is some very good reason. Prosperous countries only undertake such projects when there is a clear benefit like all the Euro countries switching to a common currency or to a lesser degree when the British a few decades further back decided to go decimal with their coins.


Question: why is cleaning my computer of junk files the proper way painfully slow but using a 3rd party "cleaner" app way faster?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
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Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 why is cleaning my computer of junk files the proper way painfully slow but using a 3rd party "cleaner" app way faster?

Oh man, here we go with bad analogies. Ccleaner is like wiping down the surfaces in your house, taking out the trash, and sweeping up. It'll get the extra junk out, like temporary files that weren't erased properly, or Internet data you're not using, but it doesn't mess with programs, and it won't touch most folders on the drive, because it doesn't know what can be safely deleted. Disk cleaner acts differently, the most deletion it will do is cleaning the recycle bin and your Internet history. It has a second function though, which is very CPU hungry, it does file compression. That's like packing down a sleeping bag or a tent, it takes time and work, and you end up with something smaller than you had before, and every time you use that file afterward, you have to spend the time and energy to unpack it. This sounds good in practice, but disk clean up doesn't always know what to pack down, and it can cause errors and slowdowns in your computer. I don't recommend using it. Instead, get familiar with your C: drive and the apps you have stored there. Uninstall old apps, and keep your downloads and documents regularly clean. And if all else fails, backup your important stuff onto an external or flash drive, and format the whole hard drive to start again, you'll have a faster computer and more space.


Question: Why is it so difficult to make synthesized instruments sound like their real-world counterparts?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why is it so difficult to make synthesized instruments sound like their real-world counterparts?

First, I want to suggest that your experience might be coloured by 'availability bias'. If you ever hear a synthesized instrument good enough to fool you, then, more or less by definition, you won't know you've heard one. One pretty popular brand of synthesized and sampled acoustic instruments, is the Native Instruments Kontakt line, and you can listen to previews of many of their soundpacks here: [ URL_1 ]( URL_1 ) Instruments like these are used extensively in movie soundtracks as well as other music. I bet that lots of them will sound pretty real to you. & #x200B; But why is it hard to do this in general? The answer is a bit different for each instrument. Fake pianos started to sound a lot more convincing a lot earlier than fake guitars, for instance, because there isn't all that much playing nuance to capture in a piano note. The note can be struck hard or soft, and it can be held long or short, and that's just about it. Two parameters, velocity and duration. In piano playing, all the expression and nuance doesn't come from fine details about the note itself, but from how they're put together. A single note on the guitar, though, can have all kinds of inflection on it - picking technique, fretting/voicing, bends, tremolo, all that stuff. It's a lot more work to come up with a simulated model of a guitar which captures all those things about someone's playing style. And even if you \*have\* come up with a convincing virtual instrument model, that doesn't necessarily mean composers and players will know how to use it effectively. Most music composition and production software has a quite generic, non-instrument-specific approach to writing out melodies and chords. There's no standard way, for instance, for a composer to tell a virtual guitar instrument, which chords should be strummed upwards and which should be strummed downward. People using these instruments might have to manually edit their compositions note-by-note to add tiny minuscule timing offsets to simulate strumming, since if all 6 notes in a guitar chord are struck at exactly the same time, it will sound unnatural. It's the same for many other instruments, like saxophone or violin, which allow for a huge number of different ways to play a single note. Most computer and keyboard-based composition workflows do not have good ways to expressively simulate those technique nuances. Edit: Here are some examples of [wind controllers]( URL_0 ). If you wanted to get a convincing synthesized saxophone sound, controlling it with one of these would be a must. Playing the sax line on a piano keyboard or drawing it out on a sequencer grid just wouldn't cut it.


Question: Why does stroking animals relax/calm us down?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why does stroking animals relax/calm us down?

i covered this topic in a class in university way back in the caveman days they would sit around the fire with their half wild dogs stroking their fur elicited the guard guard guard instinct in the animal thats the theory anyways so basically the theory is we were able to relax knowing we were protected


Question: How does a breathalyzer work? If it's measuring the alcohol in your blood, how does the air in your lungs indicate that?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How does a breathalyzer work? If it's measuring the alcohol in your blood, how does the air in your lungs indicate that?

Your lungs are where your blood and air get almost close enough to touch, across the membranes in the lungs. While oxygen and carbon dioxide are the main substances transferring, alcohol too will “evaporate” from your blood and enter the air, which you exhale


Question: I always hear that for large amounts of CGI in movies and TV shows it costs a lot of money. What is costing so much money?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 I always hear that for large amounts of CGI in movies and TV shows it costs a lot of money. What is costing so much money?

You probably have a preconceived notion that CGI is cheap. Because lots of shows, particularly animated shows, are filled with CGI these days. Or they're entirely CGI these days. You'd be hard-pressed to find a children's show airing on TV these days that isn't CGI produced for example. So it's a reasonable assumption to make that CGI must be some kind of relatively cheap way to do things. Basically like cheating. The difference, though, is that CGI in shows like that are cheap because they can take advantage of the same assets and use them over the course of an entire show. Take a show like Paw Patrol -- nearly every single episode, the animators are going to use the same exact character models, the same exact environments, probably a lot of the same objects as well. The animations are floaty and not very convincing, because they don't really have to be. Some of their animations might also be reused, or serve as bases to be tweaked into whatever they need for minimal effort. Creation of all these assets probably wasn't cheap, but once they have them, they can be reused for season after season. The only cost at that point for the animation is spending the time to animate the sequences, and maybe create a few extra assets unique to that one episode. This is way less expensive than something like hand-drawn animation, where very little can be re-used since it all needs to be drawn from scratch. Though, hand-drawn is also computer assisted these days, it's why shows like Family Guy look far more rigid than they did in their earlier seasons. With a large-budget live-action film, though, this game is completely changed. Now, you don't get the luxury of reusing anything. Every frame of that film where CGI is used is going to be a unique frame with some kind of unique effect going on. All of those frames have to be hand-crafted, and any assets they need will need to be created completely from scratch for the film. On top of this, they also need to put in a lot more effort to make the CGI look realistic (if that's what they're going for) and seamlessly blend it in to the shot using complex techniques. That inflates the cost *a lot*. We're essentially talking the difference between a toy space ship you can buy at Walmart and an actual billion-dollar satellite built by NASA. The Walmart painting probably did have a considerable price, but once they hashed out the design and built a factory to mass manufacture it, it could be mass produced with ease and sold relatively cheaply. But that billion-dollar satellite is one-of-a-kind, and was made completely from scratch using very expensive tools and put together by some of the most talented people in their field. And it's mostly only good for a single launch. EDIT: Also worth mentioning: if you have a film that is purely live-action, you're going to need resources that are tailored to this kind of production. Sets to shoot, physical actors, cameramen, lighting experts, practical effect technicians, costume and makeup artists stunt doubles, audio engineers, props and prop designers, extras, the works. And all the catering and human resources that that expects. With a CGI-only film, you'd probably replace a lot of that with lots of animators, riggers, digital artists, and that jazz. A film that is purely one or the other only has to dip into one of these. But a film that tries to marry the two together has to pay for both. Or more likely, contract a firm that can provide one or both of these parts for them.


Question: What is the difference between a normal derivative and deriving on a particular point of a function?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 What is the difference between a normal derivative and deriving on a particular point of a function?

On nice functions you can apply normal rules for derivatives to get a value or a function describing the derivative *everywhere* ( if you get a function and not a constant as result, you just insert the point you want to know the derivative of in the function to know the derivative of that location. But all functions are not so nice, some functions don't have an analytic description of their derivative, then you can go back to the definition of derivative and calculate it on a point, i.e. look at the value difference if you take a small step h forward, divided by the step length, then make h as small as you can without becoming zero. As to deciding where to derive it, you probably have a reason why you need to calculate this derivative, from that reason it should be obvious (although the answer may be "every point") - if you don't know where you need the derivative, I don't know why you'd want to calculate it in the first place!


Question: Why do European cities not have massive population sizes compared to US, Asia?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why do European cities not have massive population sizes compared to US, Asia?

The most populated city in the USA is New York City, at 8.5 million. The most populated in Europe is Istanbul at 15 million. The second most populated in the USA is Los Angeles, at 3.8 million. In Europe, it's London at 8.9. The third is Chicago at 2.7, and Berlin at 3.7. The 10th is Jacksonville at under a million, and Budapest at 1.7 million. It seems the premise of your question is wrong.


Question: with skyscrapers being built so high, is the air inside them pressurized? And what happens if a window is broken?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 with skyscrapers being built so high, is the air inside them pressurized? And what happens if a window is broken?

No the air is not pressurized, some of those windows even open. You have to go significantly higher than the worlds tallest building to have pressure be an issue. Its not even an issue on most mountains. Cold is a lot more of an issue. But no they are fine.


Question: How do video game display mechanics work?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How do video game display mechanics work?

This is highly dependant on the game. & #x200B; One semi-common option that some developer's do is tie the updates to the framerate (and lock the framerate when they do that). In those cases, you won't get a higher FPS with a better PC because the game is artificially limiting the rate to keep the physics working as expected. (There are some stories of games like this where if you remove the limit on the FPS everything in the game suddenly moves much, much faster). Additionally, this can be bad as a slow computer will run at a framerate less than expected, and the physics will slow down accordingly. Its done, but doesn't seem to be good game design. & #x200B; The other common way that I know of is to just have 2 threads: one for graphics updates and one for physics updates. In this case, whether or not your 10000FPS actually shows you 100000 different unique frames per second is dependant on how often the developer chose to update things. Its possible that the physics only get updates 60 times a second, but your camera movements and character position (i.e. things that are based on user input and not on time) might be capable of updating much faster. (Pure speculation, but I bet most games \*don't\* do that, and instead update character/camera position at the same time a slice of physics is calculated. I may be wrong though)


Question: How is a large national debt bad for the economy?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 How is a large national debt bad for the economy?

In and of itself, its not. Japan has one of the highest debt to GDP ratios in the world at over 250% - which means they owe 2.5 times their yearly GDP - but no one seriously considers that to be a threat to their economy because almost 100% of Japanese government debt is "internal debt". Internal debt, which is debt that a government owes to its citizens, doesn't have any effect on the economy by itself. This is because that debt, and the spending it fueled, *would have existed anyways.* The money to fund that debt came from citizen's savings - and they would have been saving the same amount of money regardless. Similarly, if the government hadn't borrowed the money, someone else would have. The only thing that the government debt and corresponding spending did was to shift where the money was spent. In the absence of that internal government debt, the money would have been borrowed by either corporations, who would invest it in their business, or by private citizens, who would use it to buy stuff. Because of this, the total amount of debt in the economy stays the same. Whether or not that government debt and its corresponding spending has a long term positive or negative effect depends on how the money is spent. What you have to compare is how efficient the government's spending was at creating long term economic growth and how effective private sector spending that it replaced would have been at doing the same thing. And its not a simple matter of one always being better than the other. For example, generally speaking the government is terrible at investing in industrial production while the private sector is terrible at investing in infrastructure. So what it all boils down to is how the government was spending the money. If the government was building a new road that was necessary to alleviate traffic congestion, that's probably an efficient use of the money. But if the government was building a new road that dead ended into a river, then that probably was not an efficient use. ___________________________________ Or to give you a simple example of how internal debt works - imagine the following situation: You have $100 extra dollars this month and two neighbors, "The Government" and "The Private Sector". Since you're not going to spend that $100, you decide to loan it out. If you loan it to your neighbor "The Government" he's going to spend it on fixing up the road outside your house. If you loan it to your neighbor "The Private Sector" he's going to spend it on building a pool, which he will allow other neighbors to use for a fee. Which one of those loans is better for your neighborhood depends on how badly the road outside your house needs repairs, and how much your other neighbors want a swimming pool. In reality it may be that you need both of those things, and the most efficient way to loan that money out is to split it between the two neighbors so that the neighborhood ends up with some, but not all, of the road repairs and a moderately sized pool. That's how internal debt works. In the absence of the government borrowing that money, it all gets borrowed by someone else to build the pool while the road falls into disrepair. But if the government borrows too much then there isn't enough left over to build the pool, so you end up with the greatest road in the world but no one wants to actually use it because there's nowhere to go. ___________________________________ That being said, "external debt" is generally considered a negative. You can look at Greece as an example of this. The Greek Debt Crisis was triggered in 2010 when the Greek debt to GDP ratio hit 140%. That's far lower than the Japanese debt to GDP ratio, but the Greek government debt was almost 100% external debt. External debt is money which a country owes to foreigners. This debt does increase the total amount of debt in an economy, and worse, sucks money out of the country as the debt is repaid. In order to have a positive impact on the economy, that debt needs to generate more economic growth than the cost to repay it - and that can be very hard to do. That doesn't mean that external debt is always bad. It is possible to outgrow external loans, particularly when interest rates are near 0%. But historically speaking, countries with high levels of external debt *always* suffer an economic collapse and as a result external debt is generally seen as having a negative impact on a country's economy.


Question: Why Electroshocks Hurt so Much?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why Electroshocks Hurt so Much?

It a combination of involuntary muscle contractions and in a lot of cases heat is generated as the charge passes through your body causing burns. There are horrific images around of these burns. Deadly stuff.


Question: What does a particle really look like?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 What does a particle really look like?

Although I fully understand where you're coming from, your question doesn't really make sense if you think about it more thoroughly. Single particles are so small that we can't see them. We can only see the effect of particles when they do things to light. Imagining them as tiny little balls is useful in many situations but you can just as well think of them as invisible things just like electric or magnetic fields. > Do they have color? No. Individual particles are too small to affect light in such a way that we see it as colors. > Are they solid? What makes something solid is a weak force between its particles that keep those particles close enough to each other. So, for something to be solid, we need many of them and individual particles can't be solid. We can't say what their state is since they don't have one just like we can't say what color a magnetic field has because it's doesn't have one.


Question: What does E = MC[squared] mean?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 What does E = MC[squared] mean?

Basically, it's a simplified form of a slightly more complicated equation that shows that mass is actually a highly concentrated form of energy. If you have a certain amount of mass, it's theoretically possible to convert it into a certain amount of energy. How much energy that would be is represented by the equation E=mc² -- the energy (E) is calculated by taking the mass (m), multiplying it by the speed of light (c), and then multiplying it by the speed of light *again*. From even a tiny amount of mass you can get a huge amount of energy: if you had 1 kg (a little over 2 pounds) of mass, and managed to convert all of it into energy, it would be like exploding 40 *million* tons of TNT. We can't actually convert all of the mass into energy. In a nuclear bomb, only a tiny fraction of the mass is actually converted into energy, but even so a single missile can release enough energy to destroy an entire city.


Question: Why do certain medicines (like nusinersen) used to treat rare and life-threatening conditions have exorbitant prices to them (say $125,000 per dose) making them inaccessible to people that need them to live?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within <thinking> </thinking> and
<answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <thinking> reasoning process here </thinking><answer> answer here </answer>.
Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <thinking> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <thinking> tag or after the closing </answer> tag.
- Do not include any text or commentary between the closing </thinking> tag and the opening <answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<thinking>
[Your detailed chain-of-thought goes here]
</thinking>
<answer>
[Your final answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why do certain medicines (like nusinersen) used to treat rare and life-threatening conditions have exorbitant prices to them (say $125,000 per dose) making them inaccessible to people that need them to live?

In the USA, companies are free to invent new medicines at their own expense. These are their property, and they are free to keep them secret, or to give them away, or to offer them for sale at any price they choose.