q_id
stringlengths 6
6
| category
stringclasses 12
values | question
stringlengths 5
4.6k
| reponses
stringlengths 28
9.92k
| response_number
int64 1
489
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
hqze9w | Physics | If the universe is always expanding, that means that there are places that the universe hasn't reached yet. What is there before the universe gets there. I just can't fathom what's on the other side of the universe, and would love if you guys could help! | The fact that people here answer this with confidence talking about the surface of an inflating balloon and stuff, makes me really see how gullible people are. They read something and then just accept it without thinking further. They also love to repeat it when someone is confused about the universe. Telling that balloon metaphor is like saying "God created it" when asked where the universe comes from. It answers nothing. The balloon is inflating. Ok, but into what? That's right. There is no plausible answer to this. It's like asking an ant about Java Script. | 34 |
c3xtt3 | Technology | Why is the picture in night vision goggles green? | When the light enters the goggles, it's converted to electricity, then boosted electrically, then the light hits a phosphor screen (like the screen part of old school CRT displays) and converted again to light. There's no way to preserve the color, so it's effectively a black and white image, but it's converted to Green because our eyes see better contrast that way. | 8 |
mab7pw | Other | How do YouTube & other social media/platforms store the massive amount of data uploaded to their site? Will they eventually run out of space? YouTube gets 500 hours of content uploaded every minute. How do they manage to store all of this data? They can't do this forever, will they eventually run out of the resources to store it all? | They use both heavy compression and tons of storage. If they are having capacity issues, they buy more storage. | 2 |
mng9jj | Other | Why are countries in cold climates more developed than those in hot climates? I know this is not always the case, but why do developed countries generally have colder climates than the underdeveloped ones? | As with many issue in history, this can be debated endlessly. However, I'd start by noting that what you're observing isn't actually true. Industrialization began in *specific* cold climates because: - They didn't have many resources. - They did have the right resources (such as coal) for industrialization. The English industrialized. The Eskimos didn't. If you're going to build a factory, are you going to pay top dollar for prime cotton land many miles away from the steel/coal mines or are you going to build on otherwise useless rock near them? Everything then flowed from there. The United States didn't industrialize because it was cold. It just copied the English. Within the U.S., it industrialized near coal mines and on land that wasn't particularly suitable for agriculture. Since cash crop agriculture tends to be a warm weather phenomenon, that means an industrial North and agricultural South. If you can pick some place to build a factory, you're not going to pick prime cotton land far away from the mines you need to feed your factory. | 2 |
5uz00n | Other | Is there any benefit to having ice cream prepared on a marble slab? | Marble takes ages of compaction geologic formation. Basically, rock is preasurized under the earth under such conditions that it changes. The act of it compacting makes it denser, tougher, overall more resistant to damage and weathering. Rocks and minerals react under different temperatures. Typically you can note more durable minerals will take higher temperatures to melt down. Some minerals are no longer deposited from volcanoes because the Earth just doesn't run hot enough to melt them and let them enter a lava flow and be taken to the surface. Quartz is an example of an unstable mineral. If I remember right it melts at about 600 degrees Fahrenheit. The more unstable a mineral or rock is the easier it breaks down. So back to marble. It has undergone intense pressurization and heat to form. And this is more stable. This means it will not break easily if at all if you slam a metal scoop on it many times. Marble also retains cold temperatures well and heats up slowly, so you can keep cold things colder, easier on it than on say an aluminum tray. Durable, resistant to damage, holds cold temperatures well, looks pretty, and can't very easily chip away into your ice cream. Nobody wants marble flakes mix-ins. | 9 |
6pxgz3 | Economics | Amazon's Jeff Bezos is now the richest person on Earth because Amazon's stock went up and he owns 80 million shares. How does someone rich from a company's stock actually obtain and spend money? Do they have to sell shares constantly? | It depends on how much liquidity he needs. Bill Gates gets $180 million every 3 months from quarterly dividends from Microsoft stock, so he doesn't have to sell shares. Amazon doesn't pay dividends, so if he is paid in stock, he would have to sell it. Apple works the same way. If Jeff Bezos has holdings in other companies that do pay dividends, he could use that instead of having to mess with Amazon stock. | 11 |
6ou2z0 | Other | How necessary is writing "Ambulance" backwards? | Honestly, in an ideal world, sirens and lights would be good enough, but ambulance operators hedge against the fact there are enough bad drivers on the road to make them useless. Say, you are listening to music loudly in the car. In that case, looking at your rear view mirrors would be quicker and safer than turning to see the vehicle and identify it as a ambulance. A light could also belong to other service vehicles, which could be deemed to be of lower importance by mistake. Also, EMTs are advised to not turn the sirens and lights on, unless absolutely necessary. You can read more on this here. URL_0 | 2 |
9hh11s | Culture | Why is white pride racist, when no other "colour" pride is considered racist? | Its not inherently racist, but I can see why people would consider it as such. As a comparison, I am an atheist, which automatically puts me in the 5% of the US population. When the church preaches about being persecuted it kinda pisses me off, as Christians are literally the biggest religion worldwide. So in the same manner minorities frown upon "white pride", I frown upon the church's persecution complex. It just seems kind of nonsensical to organize pride events for a majority. The need to express pride arises because you are an exception to the norm. | 13 |
6foitf | Technology | When listening to music, it sometimes feels like I'm hearing it faster or slower than before? Sometimes I get the sense that I'm hearing a song slower or faster than the last time I heard it. Any idea why? Or can there actually be variance in output depending on device i.e. streaming, radio in the car, etc. Thanks! | Sometimes we feel euphoric when listening to really good songs, the brain releases dopamine, adrenaline, and other chemicals. These chemicals can enhance and change how we experience the song, it can seem faster, slower, smoother, louder and so forth. By listening to a song too often your brain no longer feels rewarded when listening to it, it has become predictable. You then experience the song without the effects of these chemicals. It might seem 'slower' than before. | 1 |
iqz42s | Other | Why do so many employers love people that work long hours and do almost nothing, but hate people that get all their work done and leave early? | Management probably assumes those who are staying for 12 hours are actually working for 12 hours so they think those who only stay for 8 are slackers. | 4 |
73wohi | Economics | How can anyone survive as an 'out of work actor' in New York City or LA when people with full time degree-required jobs can barely afford to live there? | I lived in Barcelona as a bohemian starving-writer type. If you're not living off your parents, it boils down to: a) living with people b) living in a shittier part of town c) having a bit of a safety net built up; this can be either monetary capital or social capital (that is, having people in your immediate vicinity who'll cover your rent if you have a lean month in the understanding you'll pay them back when your next job comes in, or being able to barter skills for things you need) d) realising that just because you're living in the big city, it doesn't mean you can necessarily afford to do all the fun big-city things that the tourists can do e) getting secondary job (or jobs) to cover your costs until your creative job starts to pay off f) doing it in your twenties, when *everyone* seems to be struggling to get by and so you don't feel like you're wasting your life. Honestly, it's not as much fun as the sitcoms make it look -- but at twenty-nine, I'm glad I did it. If I had my time again, I'd probably go back to sleeping on a couch in that shitty apartment... but if I had to do it again from scratch, you wouldn't be able to pay me enough to go back to it. | 7 |
g3ed1x | Biology | How come most people can hold their breath up to 30 seconds pretty easy, but when you’re in a rear naked choke (your throat gets constricted) you lose consciousness in less then 5 seconds? | Two different things going on. Holding your breath is stopping air flowing to you lungs, which oxygenates your blood. Rear naked choke is stopping the blood passing through the arteries in your neck, which restricts oxygenated blood supply to your brain and you pass out. Did this help? | 3 |
gfvneb | Physics | what do they mean when they say that spider webs are stronger than steel? How is that possible? As in the title. | If you have a fiber of spider silk and an equivalent weight piece of steel wire, it takes more force to break the spider silk than the steel wire. This is not a theory, it's an experimental result from putting the threads and wires in a failure testing machine. Every college materials science/engineering student does this experiment; it's part of learning how to do materials lab work. | 5 |
5s5gfd | Technology | Why is automaton suddenly a big deal? Hasn't it already been happening for a long time? What's different now? | It has never been as efficient as it is now. Before job replacement ratios were very low. Technology replaced a few jobs, but a few new jobs were created. Roughly a balance. The problem now, is that technology is so advanced, it is replacing jobs far faster than new ones can be created. It isn't a group of horse care takers being replaced by a car mechanic, it is a software engineer replacing hundreds, sometimes thousand of people in a given field. Our current economic model isn't designed to sustain changes like this. Changes like this, with our current economic model will lead to massive unemployment and a huge wealth disparity. Major revolution needs to occur, but our current society is easily placated through a variety of methods which most are unable to recognize. | 51 |
e2b5jh | Biology | why can’t great apes speak? | It is coded in your DNA how you get built from just an egg. It contains info to make a whole new living being. However as you are coded in a way that you will be a being that talks, you have that tools avaliable to you in that code and will eventually have that tools in final build. It is really similiar to building a computer. Lets say you were an android in human form; to be able to speak first you need phsical tools for that such as tongue, cords, lungs etc. Then you will need what we can call the hardware. In our brains; we don't start with perfect software(driver) for many things but we get to have hardware(sound card) that allows it to be used to start with. It is such a neat way because we create our own software based on our own hardware. Our senses gather informations which we are not familiar with at first such as sound, noises, light etc. then in time we learn to give them meaning and finally create a software that effectively hears, sees etc. This way we get to have a custom made driver for our own system and even if we would be different from other humans, we get to have a nice working set up since its custom made for each of us. If that wasn't the case and we started with an inbuild software then any difference in our build could make our software have troubles. Here comes to your answer, even with brain power equals to us, without our tools, apes may still not be able to speak as we do since they won't have the process I described. It is not only our intelligence that allows us to use all the sound gathered by our ears to understand. First our hardware along with the software in our brain filters the sound and gives them meaning. Only then we use the filtered sound for listening. If we didn't have strong tools for filtering meaningful noise in a way that can be effectively used in communication, we would have hard time with it as well. | 16 |
ennoe3 | Physics | what does it actually mean to say the universe is expanding | Imagine two ants walking towards each other on the surface of a balloon that's being inflated. If the distance separating them in the beginning is small, they can reach each other quite easily because 1 cm expanding by a factor of 5 only adds four cm to the distance between them. If the distance separating them at the beginning is big, the expansion of the balloon becomes dominant over the ants' movement: if the surface again expands by a factor of 5, an initial 20 cm becomes 100 cm. So in the same time span that added 4 cm to 1 cm, 80 cm is added to 20. This is why all objects tend to move away from each other only on the largest scales. On smaller scales(ants walking) it just happens too slow. | 2 |
7hmd8m | Repost | How does “activated charcoal” work and why has it become so wildly popular in beauty/cosmetic products? | So, lots of comments asserting that activated charcoal doesn't actually adsorb toxins off the skin. 'Toxins' is, of course, a nebulous, sort of meaningless term in this context, so that doesn't surprise me. But does charcoal in a skin-care product really not adsorb things like the bacteria that can cause ance, or excess sebum and oil that can block pores and cause breakouts? In my own experience, some charcoal face-wash scrubs I've tried were quite potent at cleaning oily skin. Maybe even too strong. | 16 |
6jvmzi | Other | Why have animals still not figured out that roads are dangerous for them? | To be fair.. Roads are not dangerous, cars are. Some animals are aware of the danger. I live rurally, I drive a quiet country road every day to get to work. I have seen moose, deer, birds, and so forth, on the road. Admittedly prairie chickens are dumb about the road. Honestly I don't know how they survive. They just stand there. But if you look at other animals most do make a dash when it comes to crossing the road - they just are not able to perceive that they are not fast enough to outrun the faster car. Studies in kids show that kids (human kids) cannot really judge if a road is safe to cross or not until they are 9. Most cannot gauge the speed of the car. I imagine other animals have a worse time because in nature they don't encounter predators that travel at 100km per hour! Deer do get confused by the headlights - oncoming headlights must really be confusing to them :( how could they know it is a risk? But I must say that in the day they do see cars and know there is a risk. They know that cars stay on the road. They panic and run across the road, typically the first deer will make it, it is the second deer that is nearly always the one that gets hit - that second deer doesnt have time to think, it just wants to follow it's friend. I do note that crows understand the risk. I have seen them run onto the road in front of me and run off again safely. | 4 |
7dbylg | Culture | Why does old music (30's, 40's) always have this typical "old music" sound? Bit of an odd question, but hear (read?) me out. Whenever I hear music from these early periods of music, whether on early movies or gramophone records, it always has this very unique sound. Like, the first couple songs in this video. URL_0 It's not just lower quality or such, it's... recognizably 'oldies', even taking into account the different styles of music - nothing modern that I've heard of any style sounds like it. Voices, instruments, everything. Why does old music sound the way it does? | The first episode of “Between the Liner notes” podcast series tells the history of the transition from tinny recording of music to the modern broad frequency hifi sound. This is one of the most fascinating stories ore ever heard! Let just say it involves WW2 nazis, smuggling and radio superstars of the 1950s URL_0 | 5 |
73imxy | Other | Why do ancient computers deal with astronomy? As a computer scientist, I often come across facts about ancient analog "computers": the Antikythera mechanism, astrolabes, etc. Why were the topics of astronomy and astrology of such interest as to warrant making these relatively complex tools? | They're useful for religious ceremonies, many were timed by the planets and seasons. Almost everyone had a festival for the winter solstice They're useful for seasons, they can tell you things like "when the sun rises between those two big rocks then spring is upon you and you should plant next week" They're useful for navigation at night. If you know that you need to sail east and your tools tell you that Venus will be visible in the east at sunset tonight then your navigator just has to sail towards Venus tonight | 3 |
l5n8lz | Other | How is Wish still an active website and vendor when they sell so much fraudulent products and scam people put of money? | One it's cheap. Two China does not care. People like cheap things. A friend bought a taser on Wish and all it did was tase the user. | 4 |
9zrlci | Physics | If we see planets in the past due to them being lightyears away, how do we know alien life doesn't exist on said planets? | We don’t know. Whatever happens there “now” we have no way of knowing. That said, assuming we are average in the universe it does not matter much since there should be enough alien civilaztions out there older than us who we should see already. The fact that we do not is an interesting yet unsolved issue of science. Look up Fermi’s paradox for details. | 2 |
5o9uke | Other | If exercise makes your heart beat faster, how come it lowers your heart rate eventually? | Think of it as a muscle, like it is. A weak muscle has to work harder to accomplish a task, whereas a strong muscle doesn't have to work as hard. Your heart beating quickly while under no strain will not change. Put your heart under strain repeatedly and it will strengthen to accommodate that strain, and while under normal use it will work more efficiently and beat slower. Like your brain. Without use, it'll work harder when called upon. When used regularly, it will strengthen and while at rest it will be more capable of instantaneous requirement. Applies to anything really. | 1 |
9bzevj | Engineering | How do boat sails work if the wind is going the wrong way? If the wind is going towards you, how are you going forward? It doesn’t seem like a very reliable system, same if there is no wind. | To sail up wind you basically zig zag. You set your sail and turn your Rudder to angle up wind slightly. Then turn around and repeat. It takes a while. | 4 |
gp28fo | Other | : How do we know the rate of unreported rapes ? | Similar to other crimes through surveys. You could ask a large group of people if on the last year they got raped and then if they reported it, and then you get your answer. | 3 |
mjo1sl | Engineering | Why does public restroom doors always open inward? This forces you to touch the door handles AFTER washing your hands. If it was the other way, you could just push it open without touching it with your hands and possibly pick up germs from someone that didn't wash their hands. | It is a safety feature that has to do with the hinges. By making the door turn inward, the hinges are on the inside of the stall. Thus, no one could pop the hinges to access the person inside a locked stall. | 4 |
9blot2 | Chemistry | What happens to oxygen in space? | It disburses very very thinly, and that's about it. There's nothing super special because as far as oxygen is concerned, space is just a really low pressure environment. | 2 |
915vx1 | Engineering | why is it that wind farms stop their turbines from spinning? I understand that they will be stopped for maintenance reasons, but I feel like I see more turbines stopped then spinning, and I’m wondering why that is. | They need to match the electricity output to demand, if there is not enough then that energy will go to waste, or even cause surges that could damage the grid. This is a problem a lot of people are looking into, ways to use or store that spare electricity, like pumped storage hydro or even using electric car batteries. But for now they have to just turn them off | 3 |
5ztjiu | Biology | Why do our feet have arches? Wouldn't it be more advantageous to have your weight distributed over the entire surface of the foot? | I think that the arch is the result of our elvolving from mammalian ancestors whose foot was more extended, like most mammals today. If you look at a dog or cat, you will notice that what is analogous to our heal, on them is way off the ground. They use the extended end of the foot or paw as the only point of contact with the ground. This is more conducive to speed as the tendon acts more like a rubber band and springs them forward. Primates tend to have more of this surface in contact with the ground but still hsve the tendon which extends the foot in walking and running. The arch comes from the natural shape resulting from the evolution of our foot to a more flexed foot while maintaining some mechanical advantage for the tendon that extends the foot. If the arch collapses much of the mechanical advantage of the extensor tendon is lost. Also the bone that make up the arch collapse and are wear abnormally. | 22 |
f23jiu | Engineering | How is the structural integrity of very old buildings, bridges, etc. tested to ensure suitable use by people, cars, etc? | On the back of this, are they periodically checked? A bridge in Nottingham has been declared unsafe as they found rust in the support s or something, I’d like to know how and why they found out. | 5 |
due095 | Other | What is a life sentence? This sounds really dumb, but I don’t understand the concept of a life sentence. It’s quite common to get a life sentence with a minimum time before parole, which isn’t at all life in prison. What length of time is a life sentence, if it’s not the rest of the person’s life? | You are under permanent prison sentence, but you may be released before you die, however you are not free you are just released under parole any breach of the parole conditions and you are returned to prison to complete your sentence. | 2 |
ny0dd4 | Biology | Why is nutrition such a difficult topic to research? There is a massive amount of conflicting research/information on nutrition out there. Eggs are great for us, eggs are clogging our arteries, eating carbs is good and gives us energy, carbs make us lethargic and fat. As someone who, after years of treating their body like crap, wants to make an effort and eat things that are good for me, it seems impossible because at this point I feel like whatever arbitrary statement about food you take (like, eating 1/2 green apple increases your metabolism but only on Tuesdays and Fridays), you will find some type of research "confirming" it. Why is it so hard to have concrete research/evidence of what is good for our bodies and what isn't, at least generally? Isn't it science? How are we supposed to know what to eat?? | The effects of nutrition are hard to study for a lot of reasons. One big one is that the effects of a diet aren't always obvious in the short term. You might be eating something now that's bad for you, but if it takes 30 years of eating for problems to manifest you're not gonna know for a while. That's why it took people so long to agree that smoking was bad: One cigarette won't hurt you much, but doing it for years will. You cannot easily study the longer term effects of a particular diet on humans. You cannot control what people eat for years on end, and you cannot trust that they accurately report on what they've eaten for the last several years. Also, human body by itself is: 1. insanely complex and complicated 2. varied from person to person, dependent on climate the person lives in, varied between sexes, between races, genetics and basically due to anything that affects you in any long-term way And than, science is all about control experiments where you change a single variable at a time. That just can't happen with human nutrition. Hard science, e.g. physics, chemistry, etc.. build rigorously on basic, well established, mechanisms of nature. In general, with hard science, when you claim something, you find a correlation, come up with a theory of a mechanism on how you think that correlation comes about and then come up with a way of testing the mechanism by controlling all other factors and seeing if your mechanism really works the way you thought it did. Bio-chemistry would be the 'rigorous' hard science that should be behind nutrition and medicine. Unfortunately there is a huge gap between where bio-chemistry ends and where nutrition start. In some cases, proper bio-chemical mechanisms can be shown. More often though, nutrition come up with claims purely based on correlations from observational studies, where the underlying bio-chemistry is not understood at all. Due to factors like these, the research studies coming out in nutrition have a huge signal-to-noise ratio problem to the point where you can pretty much find them to support any personal pet theory, well accepted by the field or not. | 4 |
6ib2xl | Culture | Why do people throw pairs of shoes onto telephone wires? | From my limited knowledge of rap videos and secondhand information: it means a place where drugs are sold. I was in a sketchy area deep in Florida when I was younger, and asked my guide what the shoes meant. He told me it means you can easily score in the neighbourhood. | 3 |
cfu2pv | Technology | why don’t companies do their sensitive work on computers that are not connected to the internet, and therefore unhackable? | Security is often a trade off between safety and useability (as well as cost of course). In particular, air gapped systems have severe disadvantages precisely because they are disconnected. Looking up public information, interacting with your community of peers, emails, etc. is all made more difficult. The increased security of air gapped systems is only worth it in certain circumstances. Companies usually hope their other security measures (firewalls, encryption of files, etc.) are good enough to not be victims of untargeted attacks (most normal worms and viruses that live in the "wild"). This is the case for most small and medium business enterprises and perhaps some multinationals. Organisations who feel at risk of targeted attacks (some branches of government, law enforcement, defense contractors, perhaps some firms with a lot of high value industry secrets) can and do take more security measures, including air gapped systems. | 8 |
bfoavp | Engineering | Why are escalator step surfaces jagged? It just seems to be a extra safety hazard for any escalator accident where the victims falls down while using them. Is there some underlying benefit to this design? | the way an escalator works, the stairs as well as the floor want to meet very tightly. this prevents things such as clothing from getting caught in the mechanism, among other things. now unfortunately, the steps can't just be smooth blocks of metal. people would slip. so they are cut in a gripping patterns that can move through a comb that will clear any obstructions | 3 |
ceb3ha | Biology | Why does our skin prickle when we start to sweat? | Never happened to me. Maybe you need to exfoliate, the wet sensation on dead skin? | 12 |
6dgeth | Biology | Genetically speaking who is closer to my father, myself or his brother? | We have two types of genes: the ones in our chromosomes and the ones in our mitochondria. You get half of your chromosomal genes from your mother and half from your father. On average, you share about half of your chromosomes with first order relations (brothers, sisters, mother, father, your own sons and daughters, etc). Your mitochondria only come from your mother. The egg cell that was fertilized by your father's sperm had mitochondria. The sperm did not. You received all of your mitochondrial DNA from your mother. Your father and his brother share the same mitochondrial DNA. You have your mother's mitochondrial DNA That means your father is genetically a bit closer to his brother than to you. | 2 |
9ot4kr | Biology | Why does being upside down cause the blood to rush to your head, but standing up doesn’t make it rush to our feet? | It does. Ever stood for a really long time and have your ankles swell? That's fluid pooling at your feet. | 3 |
b2r0p2 | Biology | Why do carbonated drinks burn? | The CO2 reacts with the water in our mouths and the drink to produce small amounts of carbonic acid. This creates the tingling burn you feel. | 2 |
kace93 | Biology | Why fish die when removed from water eventhough they can find more oxygen on land than in water? | The gills need to be really spread out in water to get enough oxygen out of it. The water keeps the oxygen getting bits spread out. Without water, the oxygen getting bits aren't spread out and get clumped together. Which means most of the oxygen getting bits aren't being exposed to air. | 2 |
86mdvj | Culture | The meaning behind "Don't Tread on Me" | In 1751 Benjamin Franklin wrote a commentary in his newspaper *Pennsylvania Gazette* about the policy of Great Britain to send convicts to America, suggesting that America should thank them by sending rattlesnakes to England. In 1754 he published a now famous woodcut cartoon that [depicted the colonies as a rattlesnake]( URL_0 ) during the French and Indian War, with the caption "Join, or Die." This was generally the start of using the snake to represent the union of colonies as their own group independent of Britain. Later in 1775 the motto "Don't tread on me" was recorded as being used by Marines enlisted in Philadelphia. The general meaning is something like "Check yourself before you wreck yourself." | 4 |
7nuq0g | Mathematics | The key characteristics and differences between Euclidean and Non-Euclidean geometry | Euclidean geometry for the most part assumes you are drawing your shapes on something like a sheet of paper on a table. That table and paper might be infinite in size, but in general you expect certain things to happen or not happen when you draw your shape no matter where you draw your shape on that paper. For example if you draw a triangle in Euclidean geometry then the measure of all the angles will add up to 180 degrees. But there is no reason that paper need be flat. Anything we do to the paper to make it not flat is Non-Euclidean geometry. You could for instance roll it into a tube and tape the edges. Now you have very similar rules but things play out a bit difference. Now for example you can draw a line in one direction and depending on what direction you pick perhaps it goes on for infinity like before. Or perhaps if you pick another direction it goes around your loop and reconnects with its self forming a circle. Pick somewhere in between those and the line spirals around the paper endlessly. Normally in everyday life we use Euclidean geometry. If we were in a city with a bunch of square blocks all the same size, you could solve things like 'If I go 3 blocks north, and then 4 blocks east, how many blocks would I have traveled had I just gone in a straight line from my start location to my end location.' Answer - '5 blocks.' But the earth isn't a flat sheet of paper (much to the disappointment of the Flat Earthers) and is more like a sphere than a piece of paper. So you can do things like 'I'm at some point and I walk 5 miles south, I then turn 90 degrees. I then walk some distance in a straight line. I then turn 90 degrees in the other direction and walk 5 miles north. I am now back at my starting location. Where am I?' Answer? There are many such locations on earth! The most commonly known location is the North Pole. EDIT: Some people are pointing out that part of my explanation is incorrect. I'm not going to change it though, as the basic point is to demonstrate that a flat surface behaves differently than non-flat surfaces. Sure Mathematicians might have a very well defined view of flat surfaces, but often well defined math principles aren't easy to express in an ELI5 perfectly. So I'll accept that I'm wrong about cylinder, but leave the analogy as it really is intended to be just a quick primer into getting your mind thinking in a non-euclidean way. | 13 |
9p5193 | Biology | How do our brains convert low voltage electrical signals into thoughts? | Some people try to describe the brain as a computer, but the analogy doesn't really hold up, since the brain is in fact many *billions* of very simple computers, all working at the same time on a variety of different tasks, but all in concert. Several neurologists and science writers have likened it more to a "symphony" (which is both closer to the truth and reflects the wave-like nature of brain function), but I usually describe it as being more like the command structure of a ship -- there may be one person "in charge", but there are many hundreds of crewmen, each able to think on their own and each able to interrupt the normal function of the ship in the event something unexpected happens. On a small level, each neuron has multiple inputs (usually many hundreds) and one output, and when inputs from other neurons reach a certain threshold, the neuron "fires", and sends impulses to the inputs of other neurons. Inputs can be excitatory (bringing the neuron closer to firing) or inhibitory (bringing the neuron back to its base "relaxed" state), and these "weighting" of these inputs changes over time based on whether they occur in close proximity to the neuron firing (i.e. a connection always receives an input just before the neuron fires, so the neuron starts paying more attention to it and firing whenever it receives this input in the future instead of waiting for other inputs). There are tens of billions of neurons doing this at the same time. & #x200B; What happens in short order is that "circuits" in the brain form which reflect observed relationships between sensory information such as vision and sound, and in humans these relationships are the basis of memory formation, language, and conscious thoughts. In short, these "circuits" are activated when enough of their associated inputs (a related sound, sight, smell, etc) are activated within a short time frame or with an overwhelmingly strong stimulus, at which point each neuron in the circuit fires in short sequence and begins triggering other nearby circuits as well. You can play with a similar concept using [Tensorflow's Neural Network Playground]( URL_0 ) or I can give you a circuit diagram to create an artificial version of a neuron to play with. | 10 |
f3akd8 | Technology | How does an electric guitar pick up only sounds from the strings and not speech for an example? Edit: Thanks for all the answers < 3 | The real question to me is, how DO they still pick up your voice if you yell into it? If you have a lot of gain and turn it up, you will hear the voice, and it’ll do it with the strings muted directly over the pickups so they aren’t vibrating. | 4 |
9jtnaw | Other | Why is the Queen in chess the most effective piece? I wouldn't have thought thought, given the age of the game, that women in that time period would be considered combat masters or respected so highly. | It is called “vizier” or “vezir” in some countries like Turkey, which was the highest ranked official in Ottoman Empire after the Sultan. Makes sense since vizier was responsible for war preparations and governing more than the Sultan himself. | 15 |
8kakui | Other | Why do humans find violence so satisfying? What makes us want to hurt somebody and why does it make us feel good and not instant regret or sorrow for the person we hurt? | Again... because as as species we crave on endocrinal positive responses... we are adrenaline junkies. | 4 |
a783s4 | Other | What is the Westminister system of government? I grew up in America so I only learned about the American system of government in school. I know the 'Westminister system' is how the governments of the United Kingdom and many other Commonwealth countries work. How does it function? How are laws made? Etc Related: Why does the UK in particular seem to abhor coalition parliaments? | Think of the House of Representatives in Congress. In a Westminster System, the House is elected in a similar fashion, where the country is split up in multiple sections based on population and represent by a single elected person. However, instead of voting directly for a President, the majority party voted into the House would become the government, and the leader of that party would become the Prime Minister. So, the USA's Prime Minster would be Paul Ryan—until the new congress takes over in January. Technically, the leader of the dominant party in the house doesn't have to be Prime Minister; it is the Crown that decides and they can chose whomever they want. In Canada, it happened twice where a senator (un-elected) was made the Prime Minister, but that was back in the 19th century. However, in order to stay true to a democratic ideal, the Crown usually picks the House's lead party member. Passing laws is similar to the US system. A bill is proposed in the Lower House. In Canada, the bill is read and debated on three times. At the end of the third time, the House votes. Most of these votes are called confidence votes. This means that if the lead party loses this vote, it becomes a vote on non-confidence, which means that the House is dissolved and an election will take place. If the vote passes, the bill then goes to the Upper House (the Senate), who also read and debate the bill three times. In Canada, the Senate is appointed, not elected, and they never vote no. In theory, they are suppose a guard against populism and say no to terrible bills. After votes yes by the Senate, the bill must get Royal Ascent from the Crown. In the UK, this is done by the Queen herself. In Canada, this is done by the Queen's representative, the Governor-General. Similar to the Senate, they never say no. If the Crown did say no, it would similar to the President's Veto Power. After the Royal Ascent, the bill becomes law. Elections also work differently here. When elections take place, the government is dissolved, which means that there is no formal government. The elections occur soon after the House is dissolved, and once the elections are over, the new government takes over right away. There are no formal dates for elections, and they can take place at anytime for any reason. | 1 |
dgry99 | Chemistry | What is so special about vinegar that it is used as a cleaning solution? I see vinegar being recommended for all DIY home cleaning solutions (even for cleaning urine, which I would have thought needs an enzymic cleaner). What is so special about it? | One thing that hasn't been touched on is that vinegar and other carboxylic acids have hydrophobic and hydrophilic parts, meaning that they aren't necessarily repelled by either fatty substances or aqueous/polar substances, though they are relatively polar. Point is, it happens to make it easier for water to wash grime away at that point. This is all in addition to the fact that it is an acid, as well. tl;dr: It's a combination of factors with polarity and acidity being the most significant ones. | 5 |
fmqlhn | Other | What is a clause and independent clause in English? | A clause in general is just part of a sentence or a sentence. A dependent clause is a part of a sentence that cannot be a sentence by itself. An independent clause is a part of a sentence that can stand alone on its own. This is mostly used to decide whether to use a comma, a semicolon, a word like "and" "or" "but " or any other connector type word. Example: [The man went to the store], {and picked up some eggs. } The part in brackets is the independent clause. The part in curly braces is the dependent clause. | 2 |
92x3yx | Biology | Why can't we drink salt water, but we can eat salt and then drink water? | Well eating straight salt then drinking water is just as bad. Salt water has A LOT more salt then you think it does. | 3 |
9no5pv | Technology | How do computers store information? And why is there an integer limit in computing? | To better elaborate on the integer limit: on one bit (a 0 or a 1) you can store two possible numbers. Let's choose 0 and 1. Now if you have two bits, you can store twice as many as there are twice as many combinations now: 00, 01, 10, 11. These also happen to be the representation of 0, 1, 2 and 3 in the binary number system. Three bits allow you store twice as many (000, 001, ..., 110, 111) which can represent numbers between 0 and 7. In a decimal (base 10) system, whenever you add a digit, you can store 10 times as many numbers: 0-9 on one digit maximum, 0-99 on two digits maximum, etc. In a binary (base 2) system, whenever you add a digit, you can store 2 times as many numbers: 0-1 on one digit maximum, 00-11 on two digits maximum, etc. Computers store numbers in a binary (base 2) system, where 1 is represented by a jolt of electricity or a mark on a disk, and 0 is represented by no electricity/no mark. A 64-bit CPU does everything with 64-bit (64 digit) numbers. One bit can represent two numbers, and with every new bit twice as much, so we have 2\^64 (2\*2\*2\*...\*2\*2 all in all 64 times) possible numbers. 64-bit values thus can either store the first 2\^64 integers, or more commonly the first 2\^63-1 positive and 2\^63 negative integers. | 3 |
axre6a | Biology | I'm a left hander but I don't operate as one half of the time, what gives? To summarize, I'm a left hander, I eat with my left hand, I write with my left hand, I paint with my left hand and that's how I've identified myself. However when it comes to most sports and physical actions, I suddenly become a right hander. I've also pretty much never really experienced any of the "inconveniences" left handers experience dealing with right handed tools. & #x200B; Am I actually just a right hander in disguise or is my brain confused on what it wants to be? | You are not, in fact, a left hander. There are 5(!) different types of handedness. In order of how common they are, you have Right Handed, Left Handed, Cross Dominant, Ambidexterous, and Ambilevous. You are the same type I am, the third, Cross-Dominant. Like you I used to think I was left hand, but I am not and neither are you. Cross Dominant means that we don't have a single handedness for all things, but what hand is dominant varies according to whatever you are doing. So you are left handed writing and painting, but right handed when using tools. You and are are less than 1% of the population, so rejoice in your uniqueness! | 6 |
bpm36y | Biology | How is it that when our body is turned upside down our stomach acid doesn't flood into our esophagus? | If you’re curious about the sphincter bit, try burping when you’re upside down after eating/drinking. What your wondering about will happen. Puke everywhere. | 3 |
6xypde | Other | How are child actors exempt from child labor laws? And who gets the income, the parents or the child actor? | They are not exempt. Child labor laws don't mean that kids can never work. It just restricts hours and types of jobs. Typically, the parents control the finances of their children. However, due to past events of parents spending all of their children's earning, a percent of a child actor's earnings is put into a trust until they reach legal age. | 2 |
ftj876 | Biology | How do zoo owners hang out around tigers and lions? Why don’t these animals tear them to shreds? Does it mean that wild animals can be domesticated? Edit: I watched Tiger King on Netflix and apart from all the craziness in that documentary, I was also shocked to see how comfortable these people were around Lions and Tigers and vice versa. How does this happen?! | Wild animals can be *tamed*, but that is not the same thing as domestication. Domestication is a multi-generational process where an organism *evolves* to become more adapted to human use. We bred dogs to be friendly and to fetch stuff. We bred cattle to be calm and let us put harnesses on them so they could pull plows. This takes place over generations. Eventually the animals evolved into entirely new species or subspecies, genetically distinct from the wild animals populations they came from. With zoo animals, they're not domesticated. They're wild animals that are held in captivity, which isn't the same thing. But any animal can learn to be calm around humans, to see humans as non-threatening, and to appreciate humans that are trying to help them (like by bringing them food). The tigers and lions at the zoo are tame, not domesticated. It would take a couple hundred generations at least for them to evolve into domesticated animals. | 3 |
ig1b8e | Biology | How exactly do sunburns work? This may end up being more of an ELI15, but how do sunburns work? And how does switching between sunlight/shade affect burning? I assume, if it takes 10 minutes in direct sunlight for you to start burning, and at the 5 minute mark you go inside for 15 seconds it won't magically reset the imaginary timer. Is there some interval of going in sunlight for x minutes and then shade for x minutes that could theoretically prevent you from being burnt (obviously it would be different for everyone and every circumstance). Sincerely, Someone who gets sunburnt a lot. | A sunburn is actually a radiation burn, caused by your body's inflammatory response to the ionizing gamma radiation damaging DNA within your cells. Sunblock works to absorb those gamma rays before they enter the body. Melanin in the skin serves the same purpose. There certainly is a time factor involved in onset of sunburns, but most of the time it can take hours for a sunburn to become apparent. So you'd probably have difficulty figuring out the timing. | 1 |
k3tlaw | Economics | Buying Shares vs Options | The ice cream stand example earlier is a better description of futures than options. Stock is not a tangible good like ice cream, it is about ownership. So let's say the ice cream stand has 1000 shares of stock. Each share gives you 0.1% ownership in the stand. You are aware of a looming ice cream shortage, and know that this particular stand has huge reserves in the garage. You want to maximize your profits when the stand strikes it rich. So... The current share price is $10. You buy 10 options at a strike price of $15. This means you have the right to buy ten shares for $15 each until the option expired. Each option costs you money, let's say $0.10 each. Next week the ice cream shortage hits and the value of the stand goes way up. Now their shares are $20 each. You can exercise you options and buy ten shares for $15 each. You can hold on to the shares, or immediately sell them at market price for a nice profit. If the ice cream shortage didn't happen and the stock stayed at $10, then your options would expire worthless. I just described "call" options to buy a stock. There are also "put" options to sell stock. | 4 |
7jr7e7 | Repost | What causes heat tolerance differences between people? | So many different things. Amount of muscle and fat, overall size, skin density and sensitivity, size and distribution of sweat glands, simple preference. Women tend to get cold faster than men because their network of blood vessels is denser in their core, causing lower blood flow to extremities like fingers and toes. | 1 |
k3xuxy | Biology | Why are Saudis and certain people from the Middle East fair skinned, if they live in the desert? | Not true, there are more brown or darker skinned saudis than light skinned ones. A lot of Arab countries have different racial mixes such as Lebanon, Saudi, Jordan, etc. There are dark and light skinned people living together. Even India has light skinned people in the north who are descended or mixed with Mughals, while the darker tones are in the south. You have to remember that borders don’t dictate skin color because people will blend or conquer surrounding territories which ends up with the mixing. Mexico has light skinned people descended from the Spaniards, indigenous people descended from Aztecs, and mixes called mestizos. | 2 |
84mzli | Economics | How can Netlifx offer a great selection of movies and series without ads running ever fifteen minutes, yet traditional cable tv can’t, even though they charge customers much more than Netflix does? | Cable TV use to be ad free, that was originally why you bought cable. THEN Cable TV wanted to make more money and started adding ads. Now They want more money and squeeze content and put in more/longer ads. | 7 |
8qbqyl | Biology | How can psychoactive substances speed up the likelihood of developing a mental disorder - if someone is predisposed to it? | In a healthy brain, there's an incredibly complex system that helps the brain manage the connections between neurons. There's always new connections being formed, old connections being destroyed, inefficient connections being streamlined, yadda-yadda, etc, all based on a system of chemical and electrical signalling that I can't possibly give an ELI5 explanation for. The takeaway point here is that the brain is always simultaneously growing and trimming these connections, and this process underlies everything from learning to memory to adaptation in general. This process is *everything*. Many mental disorders are caused by glitches in this system which cause the brain to not "wire itself up" properly. Maybe the brain is cutting connections it shouldn't, or forming connections it shouldn't, or not forming them properly in the first place, or any number of other possible failure modes that all result in unusual mental functioning. If your *brain* is messed up, then your *mind* will be messed up. By definition, psychoactive substances affect the brain by throwing extra chemicals into the mix. Sometimes (but not always) these chemicals can have an effect on how this wiring process happens, and trigger or accelerate the kinds of malfunctions that lead to mental illness. In other words, chemically speaking, certain psychoactive substances are like throwing a wrench into the fine-tuned machine that is your brain. Some people's brains are robust enough for the wrench to not cause any permanent damage or changes; however, for other people whose brains aren't *quite* as well-balanced, the wrench can knock enough things out of whack for the brain to make problems worse on its own long after the wrench has been removed. | 13 |
c1lwej | Other | How come studios can't make movies with IP they don't hold the rights to, but shows like Robot Chicken can have any characters they want show up? | Copyright law provides exceptions for satire/comedy... basically, you're not stealing content and using that content for your own benefit directly, you're making fun of it, laughing at it, or otherwise commentating on it in a way that doesn't preserve it's aspects that the copyright protects... more or less. A similar concept is 'transformative' works | 5 |
5meqrp | Biology | Why do top nutrition advisory panels continue to change their guidelines (sometimes dramatically) on what constitutes a healthy diet? This request is in response to a report that the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (the U.S. top nutrition advisory panel) is going to reverse 40 years of warning about certain cholesteral intake (such as from eggs). Moreover, in recent years, there has been a dramatic reversal away from certain pre-conceived notions -- such as these panels no longer recommending straight counting calories/fat (and a realization that not all calories/fat are equal). Then there's the carbohydrate purge/flip-flop. And the continued influence of lobbying/special interest groups who fund certain studies. Even South Park did an episode on gluten. Few things affect us as personally and as often as what we ingest, so these various guidelines/recommendations have innumerable real world consequences. Are nutritionists/researchers just getting better at science/observation of the effects of food? Are we trending in the right direction at least? | In addition to political issues, which have been well-covered, it's incredibly difficult to study human nutrition for the simple reason that you can't possibly control what someone eats 24/7. Every nutrition study has cheaters. It's not possible to know how they cheated, and therefore every study on the subject is subject to completely invisible skewing of the data. You could lock people in a facility and control what they eat that way, but that'd be unlikely to pass an ethics review. So, nutrition science is flying a bit more blind than other fields. | 21 |
dx0fga | Physics | Why is the past underground? | The Earth is a churning ball with a thin crust around it. It has volcanoes spewing ash and wind blowing dust all over the place. That ash and dust falls down onto the ground. We can see it accumulate on cars and tables and other things left standing for a while. Eventually enough dust falls down that the bottom layer is less like a bunch of particles and more like a film. That film can build up and compress to become rock. But unless something comes along to push the rock up again, then the stuff that came before is going to necessarily be underneath the stuff that came after, because it would be near impossible for a human to fossilize first, then have a dinosaur come after him and get buried on top. | 2 |
a0vuja | Technology | What color are mirrors? If the color white is supposed to reflect all visible wavelengths of light, does that make mirrors white, technically? | Well mirrors are silver. Generally mirrors are silver backed glass. The silver reflects all wave lengths so in some sense they are technically colorless... but it’s better to just think they are reflective... also keep in mind that most glass has a green hue to it (if you look at a piece of mirror glass from the edge) so that can also technically skew colors... idk for sure but that’s what I’ve been told | 2 |
9byi4r | Chemistry | Is there any significant difference in chemical composition between men and women shower gels,shampoos etc. ? | Functionally speaking, no, it's the same chemicals doing the actual cleaning, loosening up dirt & oils, and letting water rinse it away. The only other typical difference comes down to fragrance. Non-functional differences in shape/size of the bottle, color & label design, etc. also mostly exist to convey different gendered qualities; in the sense that they're not really going to use a pink bottle with flower-print labels and a dainty font on a masculine product. | 2 |
cr2vje | Other | How did the Australians lose the Emu War | Because the emu war was like a total of 8 guys with two machine guns and barely any ammo looking to cull several hundred thousand birds across thousands of square kilometres. The emu war is only called as such to meme it, as it was undertaken by returned veterans with equipment supplies by the government. | 3 |
9x6y6t | Technology | Why do come car stereos only have Bluetooth for calls | In the beginning, bluetooth was for headsets, so people you didn't have to spoil your fashion with dangling wires (and wired headphones are kind of a pain when wearing a suit or even a sport jacket). Later, bluetooth expanded to support near-music-quality audio. This is a separate mode of bluetooth, and isn't supported by older devices. | 1 |
7fyfa6 | Biology | How do we always know when someone is watching us? | Actually, we don't always know. There would be fewer kidnappings and street violence if people were aware they were being watched. I have a nephew who feels like he has no soul, a number of family members stated that they are not aware of his presence, it's kinda creepy. | 2 |
7vga5a | Chemistry | theoretically, if you put wood in a vacuum and heat it up to a high enough degree, could you melt it? | > theoretically, if you put wood in a vacuum and heat it up to a high enough degree, could you melt it? No. If you put wood under a vacuum you would have water and other volatile compounds start to boil away, even before you heated it. Once you heated it and pumped away the gasses you would be left with something very much like charcoal. Mainly composed of carbon you could keep heating it but carbon sublimates in a vacuum so it would never reach a liquid state. It would go straight from a solid to a gas. | 3 |
74ccu7 | Culture | How did dolls that were modeled after bears - animals that are scary face to face - become so popular, turning into what are now known as 'teddy bears'? | The name teddy bear comes from former United States President Theodore Roosevelt, who was commonly known as "Teddy" (though he loathed being referred to as such). The name originated from an incident on a bear hunting trip in Mississippi in November 1902, to which Roosevelt was invited by Mississippi Governor Andrew H. Longino. There were several other hunters competing, and most of them had already killed an animal. A suite of Roosevelt's attendants, led by Holt Collier, cornered, clubbed, and tied an American black bear to a willow tree after a long exhausting chase with hounds. They called Roosevelt to the site and suggested that he should shoot it. He refused to shoot the bear himself, deeming this unsportsmanlike, but instructed that the bear be killed to put it out of its misery, and it became the topic of a political cartoon by Clifford Berryman in The Washington Post on November 16, 1902. While the initial cartoon of an adult black bear lassoed by a handler and a disgusted Roosevelt had symbolic overtones, later issues of that and other Berryman cartoons made the bear smaller and cuter. Morris Michtom saw the drawing of Roosevelt and was inspired to create a teddy bear. He created a tiny soft bear cub and put it in the shop window with a sign "Teddy's bear," after sending a bear to Roosevelt and receiving permission to use his name. The toys were an immediate success and Michtom founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Co. At the same time in Germany, the Steiff firm, unaware of Michtom's bear, produced a stuffed bear from Richard Steiff's designs. Steiff exhibited the toy at the Leipzig Toy Fair in March 1903, where it was seen by Hermann Berg, a buyer for George Borgfeldt & Company in New York (and the brother of composer Alban Berg). He ordered 3000 to be sent to the United States. Although Steiff's records show that the bears were produced, they are not recorded as arriving in the U.S., and no example of the type, "55 PB", has ever been seen, leading to the story that the bears were shipwrecked. However, the story is disputed - Gunther Pfieffer notes that it was only recorded in 1953 and says it is more likely that the 55 PB was not sufficiently durable to survive until the present day. Although Steiff and Michtom were both making teddy bears at around the same time, neither would have known of the other's creation due to poor transatlantic communication. Source: This was easily found on Wikipedia at URL_0 | 1 |
hly7ft | Other | What do pharmacies do in the 15-20 minutes it takes to fill prescriptions? | Starts with the pharmacy technician (usually). Enter your information/insurance information into the computer. Enter the information from the prescription into your file. Cross reference any other perscriptions to ensure you are not getting a medication filled before it is due (depending on insurance requirements). Create and print the label. Get the medication bottle from the inventory and count the required medication. Attach label to filled bottle. Also label with warning stickers if required. Attach labels to pharmacy bag ( that holds your medication for privacy reasons). Then the pharmacist goes over the medication and makes sure it doesn't interfere with other medications you are on and does a double check that the pharmacy technician entered the doctor's prescription accurately/counted currently. For narcotics they will triple check and re count the medication for safety reasons. Then it is ready. | 2 |
6dzcyt | Physics | If a fan is turned on in a very dusty room with the window open, will all the dust eventually leave the room? | Assuming the air contains enough turbulence to stop the dust from settling then yes, I imagine all of the dust would *eventually* leave the room in an idealised situation. However in reality that's probably not going to be the case due to dust settling in air pockets. | 1 |
dm3e1k | Engineering | How does the transformer increase or decrease voltages and currents. For example, how does a step down transformer decrease the voltage and simultaneously increase current? Shouldn't the current supplied by the source be the constant? The structure is obviously not some sort of a compressor that compresses the current and make the voltage high of some kind. The knowledge I have about transformer is very basic and that is that the e.m.f induced in the secondary coil depends upon the number of turns of the coil and works on the principle of mutual induction and I also understand the fact that the power is kept constant but how can a transformer *increase* current for say? | The formula for electric power is P = V * I, where V is voltage and I is current. A transformer works by taking the energy on the input/primary side, and putting it through windings/coil, which create a complementary magnetic field. That field, in turn, links the input coil to the output/secondary coil. The magnetic field from the primary changes constantly, as the alternating current supplied to it changes. Each time the primary field changes, it "induces" a current to flow in the secondary coil. In a transformer that had the same number of windings in each coil (not a very useful device AFAIK), the changing field on one side would be mirrored by a changing field on the other side, and the current and voltage would be the same. But the idea of a transformer is to change the voltage, usually. So, if you put 10 times as many windings on the secondary side as you do the primary, the changing magnetic field will still induce current to flow, but at only 1/10th the voltage, as there are ten times as many wires that the primary field has to induce that current in. However, each one of those wires in the secondary coil carries current, and so you have ten times as much current on the secondary side as you do the primary. It's important to note that no electrons or current actually cross from the primary to the secondary; all of the action is induced by the changing magnetic field. So you are NOT limited to the amount of current on the primary side. Conservation of energy does apply though, and although there are small losses in any transformer, in general, P^in = P^out. So, since the voltage is reduced by ten, the current must increase by a factor of 10. | 1 |
jn6hwz | Biology | when you get an organ removed (like a uterus, appendix, etc.) what's to stop your other organs from falling into that now open space and getting all jumbled up? | There isn't really a lot of empty space in your body. Wherever there aren't any bones, organs, muscles or large blood vessels there's just fat. Everything just sort of settles, and most organs that can be safely removed are pretty small. The uterus rests at around 3 inches by 2 inches by 1 inch (7.5cm x 5cm x 2.5cm) while a woman isn't pregnant, and the appendix is smaller than that. | 4 |
7fsoyg | Culture | Why does Japanese and Chinese media seem to portray the Buddha as some sort of dogmatic deity, when the crux of his teachings were that he's just a guy. | Buddhism spread from India to China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia over a period of centuries and although all schools of Buddhism trace their origin to the historical Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) the Buddhist traditions throughout Asia differ in their specific "theology". The most popular forms of Buddhism in China, Korea, and Japan hold to the existence of Boddhisatvas (individuals who refrain from attaining enlightenment in order to altruistically assist other beings still in the cycle of rebirth) who are treated very much like gods or major Catholic Saints from a Western perspective. These forms of Buddhism incorporate Hells and Heavens and demons of various kinds in their mythology in addition to the Buddha. | 4 |
d0fpoi | Technology | why is "hand-made" synonymous with high quality? | It works by making you think the product is unique and someone out there made it just for you, so you are special somehow. | 4 |
7viqfz | Technology | Space Freezing So, if depictions and movies are true: if a human is tossed into space and freezes upon contact, why don’t other things freeze in space as well (human in spacesuit, satellites, rockets, the flag we “put on the moon”, etc.)? | IIRC, heat needs a medium to travel through, and as space is 'nothing' the heat loss simply isn't that quick. You'll be dead from lack of oxygen and depressurisation boiling your blood long before you freeze solid. Fun part is that you can boil and freeze at the same time. | 3 |
g1q4id | Chemistry | Why does medicine expire? | Pharmaceuticals can break down over time, either due to oxygen, heat or other chemical processes. These can impact the efficacy of the drug as there will be less than the stated amount of active ingredient in each dose. In some cases the break down products can be toxic! this was the case with the heartburn medication Zantac which was recently pulled from shelves because it was shown that exposure to high temperatures can lead to the formation of a toxic byproduct. In reality, the expiration dates are much shorter than what would actually be required to break down the drug significantly. Pharmaceutical companies are required to routinely put batches into a "stability" program. In a stability program the product is stored at various conditions and the product is tested regularly to determine how it breaks down over time. The expiration dates are based on that. | 2 |
kfh7k0 | Biology | Why can't men have multiple orgasms? | I read a study years ago that analyzed the shape of the penis as a mechanism to essentially "scrape out" competitor's semen. Perhaps a refractory period, as it's called, is to reduce the likelihood of being in comparison with yourself. | 1 |
abb620 | Other | What do the defendants on To Catch a Predator actually get charged with? Yes, these people are gross and deserve to be apprehended. However, did they actually commit any crimes? They never actually talked to an underage girl, just an agent pretending to be one. They never actually go to a kids house, they just think they are going to. And even one they get there, it’s an actress who looks young but is actually over18. Again- not arguing that they are disgusting low-lives, but just curious what they get put away for. | Police can bust you for soliciting a minor for sex, even if there's no real minor. It's no different from them busting you for attempting to buy illegal drugs from them, even if they don't have any illegal drugs. | 2 |
5x2qub | Other | Why do some people stop liking something when it becomes popular/mainstream? Nirvana, Game of Thrones, Punk; They all seem to have had fans who were passionate, and then as soon as these things became mainstream, some of those people just jumped off the ship. Does anybody know the psychology behind it? Why do we often place emphasis on something being exclusive and 'alternative'? | Everything we do "pays us" some dividend. Sometimes it's the pleasure of the thing itself. Sometimes it's the pleasure of the novel. And sometimes it's the pleasure of knowing the experience is "rarefied" or exclusive. So some people like jazz because it speaks to them. And some people like jazz because it is unpredictable and so is capable of surprising them. And some people like jazz because they know that very few people in their circle like jazz. Now people tend to shit on that third class, and that's largely because the people in that class tend to come off as shitty. They tend to _seem_ like they are just in it for the cachet, so we assume they don't _really_ like it, they just want to be seen to like it. The thing is, from a point of real or social evolution, this behavior is wholly valid. The lust for the rarefied can keep information or behavior alive during the period of least immediate value. For (simplified) instance, the guy who's totally into martial arts during the times of peace for reasons that nobody else seems to "get" is refreshing and remembering the practices. When a time of less peace comes around, the community with one master of the obscure art will have an advantage over the community with none. Of course evolution is a jerk, so we get more "mall ninja" than fu masters over any particular span. Rarefied information has low fidelity. So, for example, I like watching videos and reading about obscure techniques in blacksmithing and metallurgy and pottery. I know just enough to be dangerous, but that's substantially more than most people know. So if I were stuck in a primitive situation and I needed to make crude pottery or reshape a piece of metal, I'm pretty sure I could manage it without having a kiln explosion or cracking my metal stock. And if I can combine what I know with a few other people we might be able to make something fairly advanced. We may look like "twelve monkeys trying to reassemble a banana" while we all figure out what we know and what we are guessing and all that... But from an evolutionary standpoint that beats burning down the village or killing everyone in an explosion. So there are good reasons for the mall ninja to be among us, but that doesn't make them less annoying. 8-) | 8 |
e6e7no | Technology | why if I factory-reset my phone it wont be as fast as the day I bought it? | All operating systems (regardless of device) that receive regular updates will run slower. This is primarily because those updates either address security concerns or stability issues. These are either resolved by adding additional checks or additional processes to the system, or in some cases deliberately slowing the system down. Apple has previously admitted to deliberately slowing down certain older models to protect aging batteries. | 1 |
jd8sph | Biology | Why did royal monarchs who practiced inbreeding end up with genetic mutations in their families? | Lets imagine that you have a genetic mutation. Its recessive and rare. Recessive means your kids only have a risk of having the disease or deformity if both you and your partner have the same recessive trait. But since it's rare, the odds of your partner having the same thing is pretty unlikely. But let's imagine you and your partner have kids - some will be fine and some will be carriers. Now imagine your offspring procreate together. Their odds of having a partner with the same recessive mutation is *astronomically* higher. Obviously things are less extreme and fast when marrying, like, cousins rather than siblings. But if it happens generation after generation, things will go to shit. This is actually true of any closed communities. Like with the Amish, who have incredibly high rates if very, very rare diseases. They all came from, like 200 or 300 ancestors, iirc, and haven't really added much genetic diversity (people leave the Amish, but they rarely, rarely join). The other possible way mutations happens is with a dominant trait, like with the [Habsburgs]( URL_0 ). Basically a relatively normal prominent jaw became more and more extreme throughout centuries of inbreeding. To the point where some family members towards the end had such extremely deformed jaws that they couldn't even chew their own food - their teeth didn't touch. It's sort of the same idea as dog breeding. Except without the intention to magnify a trait. | 1 |
7q95d3 | Biology | Why do women’s breasts change so much after breastfeeding and not return to original condition? | Gravity is the biggest enemy of women's breasts. Having breasts stretch to make room for milk will make permanent changes. | 1 |
6f05c8 | Chemistry | How exactly does my pickle jar still smell vaguely of pickles after several trips through the washer? | Basically the way soap works is that it forms molecular bonds with a lot of sticky and food type molecules. These bonds are generally stronger than the bonds between food and skin, or food and glass. Then when you introduce hot water to the situation you're adding energy, which is used by the molecules to jump from the weaker bond to the stronger one. So why doesn't the vinegar brine of pickles leave the glass? Because the bond with soap isn't strong enough. Dried vinegar forms a very strong bond with glass, so it has to be physically unbonded (pushed off with enough pressure) not molecularly unbonded (chemically sticking to the soap). | 1 |
633lbc | Culture | Why does it seem like all Caribbean islands (Jamaica, Bahamas, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, etc.) seem to be third world countries, with terrible economies and infrastructure? This is not meant to offend anyone from these countries, its just the impression I get being American. Someone I know just got back from a service trip to Jamaica to teach first aid and CPR to villagers and describes a place where everyone is poor, and there are no jobs and no place to go. Are there any particular reasons, historical or otherwise, for this trend? I have been to Bermuda and the Bahamas and even in the high traffic tourism areas you can tell how poor the people are and how sadly hopeless their situations seem. | It's a complicated question but i'll give it ago: Poor governance and an atmosphere of zero accountability permeates much of the Caribbean. Blatant corruption, often at the highest levels of government, frequently goes unaddressed. Small islands like the Caribbean certainly dont have it easy despite the year round sunshine. Aside from sunlight, most of these islands have little natural resources of their own, and are forced to import majority of goods which makes the cost of living higher. It would be unfair to say that a history of slavery and colonialism have not played a role in the Caribbean's current predicament, but as a person who lives here, it would be disingenuous to be blame anyone else but ourselves. | 8 |
cthtwu | Physics | Why does time only have one dimension? A quick google search got me some articles about scientists debating the possibility of more than one, and analogies of rivers and flows which I somewhat get. But given that analogy, and I get the constraints of what analogies cover, wouldnt a constant flow in every direction be the opposite of what a dimension is? | A dimension is nothing more than an "independent thing". That is, it's something you can change without also changing something else. As such, you only need one value to define it. Up/down is a dimension because you can change height without moving forwards/backwards or left/right. Consequently when you ask "how tall is it?" Only a single value needs to be given: "it's 10m tall". Location on a map, however, is 2 dimensions because you need to know 2 independent things to answer the question. You need latitude and longitude because there are many latitudes along the same longitude and vice versa. For time to have multiple dimensions you would need to be able to specify 2 or more "things" that can be changed without changing the others. Since you only need a single value to know when something occurred, time is a single dimension. | 1 |
5zgtle | Engineering | Why/how do stone buildings burn down or get damaged by fire? I'm taking a college course on Ancient Greece and rome and you her about these stone structures that are "burnt down" and I just can't imagine how its possible. I feel silly. | In addition to what people here have already said, often the supports for floors and the roof are wood. If those burn and collapse, especially if they do so asymmetrically the beams can lever portion of the walls down and even if they don't you're left with a shell that has few no no internal supports and is heavily weakened. | 3 |
82ojs0 | Biology | How do viruses know what to do despite not being alive? How do they know to attack cells and stuff if they aren't alive? Is it by chance? Are they mechanical? | Viruses “know” what to do because the rna, enzymes and various other biological makeup operate in a very mechanical fashion. The chemical composition operates in the method it has evolved too do. For example, when a virus injects it’s material into a host cell, the rest is almost autonomous: the various (and specific to which virus) viral injection materials (RNA enzymes etc) does what it does so to speak... bind to various receptors, inject it’s own dna into the cell manufacturing sites etc. For simplicity it’s easier to imagine a virus as an autonomous sack of material, if triggered the process is automatic: enzymes don’t “know” what to do, if something fits in its receptors it will attempt to bind/do its specific operator. These things are basically a container of bouncing materials waiting for them to bump into each other and interact. Being “alive” is a debated and subjective term, | 6 |
8qu40n | Technology | How does emergency call work on cellphones even if they dont get any signal from their carriers? | Because any carrier will support a 911 call, even if you are not on the network. If the phone is unable to reach any carrier, it will fail. | 4 |
f7wxyp | Biology | What is that satisfying chill that goes down the spine from time to time when you pee? | They’re called pee shivers there are two theories/explanations 1. The heat loss from your warm pee leaving the body causes a temperature drop and the body reacts by shivering 2. Is that the body’s nervous system gets confused | 1 |
i5ribs | Technology | How are phones and other electronics waterproof only up to a certain depth, which is usually shallow like 3m at most? | It’s water resistant not water proof, they can resist water damage from rain or spills or getting briefly dropped in water, things that could most likely happen in a regular persons life, although timing them underwater is an interesting way to measure that | 4 |
8byh35 | Biology | Why are African runners better at middle/long distance running than athletes from other continents? | Africa is the most genetically diverse continent by far, since the rest of us just are the descendants of the few that left. So some African populations have lived in areas suitable for long distance running for long enough to have an edge. Others not. | 8 |
ejsaep | Mathematics | how do you count cards in blackjack? | You assign a value to every card thats played, low value cards get a +1 and a high value card gets a -1 This way you keep track of how many high value cards are left, so if the total count after a round is +7 you know that a bunch of low value cards have been played and the decks contains pretty high numbers (which is your cue to increase your bet) Edit: this is one of many ways and you need a strong grasp of the game and be discrete to even make this worthwhile | 2 |
im61j8 | Technology | Why is USB-C so much better than other connectors and why are so many enthusiasts obsessed with them? | It’s like comparing a cross-threaded garden hose to a 6” firehouse. WAY more power capacity. Huge pipeline for data. Dummy proof durable connector. Because it handles way more power and data, it can power big devices easily while handling loads of bandwidth. | 3 |
itm1v3 | Engineering | why are guns still so loud? Why hasn't gun technology improved in tandem with noise cancellation technology? | The noise from a gun is two sources. The boom from the exploding power and the *crack* of the bullet’s sonic boom. The quietest gun is a gun with a suppressor and using “subsonic” ammo. It’s a much smaller powder charge to begin with, so less boom and no *crack*. | 4 |
g0s9lh | Biology | Why are moths nocturnal when they could be awake during the day to get more light? | Because the birds that would eat them are mostly active during the day. Being active when your primary predators are not is a common survival strategy. | 1 |
6pr54b | Technology | If video takes up so much memory how does the U.K. store all of their CCTV footage? | You seem to underestimate how much space the gov't can get for storage. I work for a private company and our lone office server has 500TB worth on it, that doesn't include the network connection to corporate. We have a warehouse that is all server banks. | 2 |
9bnsdb | Biology | How are brain surgeons able to remove a tumor inside the brain without damaging the brain? | I lost all use of my left arm and most of my left leg. Luckily thru lots of rehab I gained back partial use of my left hip and knee joints below the knee has never come back. So in response to ops question, they do as best they can and it really depends on the type of tumor. | 21 |