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coou1r | Biology | How can we tell hot and cold object apart? Also, if i were to touch an ice cube, what would the “cold sensation” be created from? Is it similar to how we could recognize fur or silk if we felt it? Or is it the sensation our body has associated to heat leaving our fingers rapidly when we touch something that cold? And why does really hot water feel cold for a second? | You have nerves in your skin to detect a lot of things. The way all of them *broadly* work is that the nerve cells contain some kind of protein that will change shape in response to a stimulus, and when that happens the nerve cell fires. So, imagine a protein that acts kind of like a [memory metal]( URL_0 ). It has a certain shape, and when it gets heated it changes shape. That change activates other proteins that cause a cascade of activity in the cell that ends with the nerve cell - a *sensory neuron* - firing an impulse to the *interneurons* that carry the signal to your brain. And from their your brain does its magic interpreting the signals so you are consciously aware of the heat. Similarly, you have nerves with proteins that change shape when they become cold. And your intuition is correct: you aren't sensing the cold of the *object*, per se, you're sensing that your skin is cold - presumably because it came into contact with a cold thing and heat left your skin. Likewise, you sense heat because your skin becomes warmer, again presumably by touching a warm thing. You may wonder, then, how your brain knows the difference between the warmth of a fire near your hands and touching an actual hot object. Your brain is *really good* at interpreting signals in context. When you touch a hot thing, you don't only get signals from the heat-sensing nerves, you also get signals from the pressure-sensing nerves that react to your skin touching something. Years of practice touching things teachings your brain that warm+pressure=you touched a warm thing, vs warm+no pressure=there is heat *near* your skin but not touching it. Interesting related information: there are different levels of "activation" so not all of the nerves go off from the same level of warm or cold (or pressure or whatever). The more go off, the warmer or colder or whatever your brain thinks it is. You can trick your nerves into believing you are touching a warm or cold thing with certain chemicals. Capsaicin is the chemical in spicy foods that makes them spicy, and it turns on the nerves that sense heat without actually heating them. So when you eat a hot chili, your mouth *feels* like it's on fire, but nothing harmful is happening. (It should be noted that although capsaicin doesn't actually hurt you, it *can* send your body into anaphylactic shock because it's freaking out about the non-existent fire so much. Don't do dumb stuff like eat a spoon full of pure capsaicin powder. Even in the best case scenario, you probably won't feel very good.) The chemical menthol is found in mint leaves, and it activates your cold-sensing nerves, which gives you that refreshing cool feeling when you eat mints and peppermints and such. Finally: there are also *nociceptors*, which are a different kind of sensory neuron that specifically activate in response to harmful or damaging stimuli. You have both *warm*-sensing nerves and *burning hot*-sensing nerves. The heat-sensitive nociceptors are the ones that can "short circuit" your nerves and send signals directly to your motor nerves. This is how reflexes work - the nociceptors trigger and before the signal even reaches your brain, your muscles are activated to jerk your hand away from the thing that burned you. | 1 |
5z738o | Other | How does Flint, MI still not have clean water? | You can't fix a city's entire water supply infrastructure over night. The system is underground, so even the parts that can be dug up are under streets and people's yards. Then there's the parts that run under buildings and such.... Not to mention, it's been winter up there. The ground is frozen in winter, which adds that much more labor to the whole process. | 9 |
lsxhmh | Biology | How does a pain relief pill (such as Advil) know you have a headache and that’s where it needs to do it’s magic? | No pill just knows it nots magic what happens is certain chemicals have certain effects ie it’ll block the pain transmitters so you don’t feel that pain that’s there | 2 |
eu7wxk | Biology | why can healthy eyes look in only one direction, i.e. why can’t our eyes look in different directions from each other? | Under normal conditions, there's these control centers in your brain that tell your eye muscles to move at the same time. Your brain has to receive the same image from both eyes so that it can paint the world around you. If the left eye is looking to the left and the right eye is looking to the right, then the images don't match up and it makes you feel sick. Longer, not ELI5: Light enters your eyes and the information goes to the optic nerve, optic chiasm, and ultimately to the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe (back of your head). Information is processed here and the output is sent to the muscles that control the eyes via cranial nerves (CN) 3, 4, and 6. CN 3 controls basically every eye muscle except for the superior oblique (CN 4) and the lateral rectus (CN 6). However, before the information from the primary visual cortex can be transmitted to the eye muscles, it has to go through certain control centers. One of which is the medial longitudinal fasciculus (MLF). The MLF is responsible for conjugate horizontal gaze which means it makes sure that the muscles for looking left and right contract at the same time so that your eyes are moving in sync. It does this by sending information to CN 3 (responsible for medial rectus) and CN 6 (responsible for lateral rectus). There's another area called the rostral interstitial nucleus that is responsible for conjugate vertical gaze, which is for looking up and down. | 3 |
84lnje | Engineering | How does an architectural drawing get translated into a physical building? Who decides how many bolts, the type of material, etc? | When you’re talking about things that detailed like bolts, it’s usually the building codes that take precedence because the construction company never wants to spend a dime more than they have to. For instance, when putting in a plywood shear wall, you need to nail it to the studs; the architect and/or structural engineers will (based on local building codes) usually put nail size and placement requirements directly on the blueprints (for example 12d @ 4” oc) which means 12 d nails, every 4” on center. In the real world, these are rarely followed “to a t” because things get in the way and we’re dealing with people.....Also, things come up like let’s say the plywood guy is 3 nails short and he’d have to drive to Home Depot to install those last three nails on a sheet of plywood that already has 97 nails in it. Chances are he’s going to say “meh, close enough” and move on. Inspectors aren’t checking every single sheet of plywood and counting every single nail and comparing it to the plans. Fortunately, architects/engineers/building codes apply safety factors into the design to account for everything from variances in building materials to “nailing issues” TLDR: these specs are usually on the blueprints. Source: I’m a structural engineer. | 2 |
8vjrv2 | Other | how does big game hunting, such as sanctioned trophy hunts in Africa, increase the hunted species' population size? | This isn’t an African example but it’s just as close. In Nebraska we have a fledgling population of Big horn sheep that were brought in to make the wild cat hills their home. After a few years the state held a huge ticket draw that brought in a bunch of money to the Game and Fish department. The way the draw worked was you paid $200-$400 ( thousands of people from all over the state apply) for one tag that expired at the end of the year. The state then gave you a guide who watched the herd and he told you which one to shoot and even then you weren’t guaranteed to get a big horn. Usually you got an old ram or an ewe who was a burden to the herd and was holding the younger ones back. The population has actually increased and sightings have gone up since the were introduced in the mid 2000’s. Now the biggest threat to them is the rising cougar population that the state recently brought a hunting season back on. Edit: your not always guaranteed to fill the tag. | 4 |
j1p0li | Engineering | How does hot water work in apartment buildings that don’t have hot water heaters? | In Brazil, in apartment buildings that don't have a common heater, it is usual to have either electric heated showerheads, electric passthrough tankless heaters, or gas passthrough tankless heaters in the apartments. | 2 |
c98o1g | Engineering | How do the factory pipes and vats that produce something like biscuits or mayo stay bacteria and mold free if it's running 24/7/365? | As others have stated, most machines get shut down periodically to be cleaned in place. To add to this, most factories will have multiple machines so that production can continue while one line is down. I was helping wire up unrelated electrical equipment in a bottling plant once. They would shut one line down and flush cleaners through the pipes and nozzles that carried beverages. Meanwhile, workers would spray, hose, and wipe down external surfaces. All the while 9 other lines are bottling, and once this machine is clean and running again, another will be taken offline for the same process. | 21 |
aby3wq | Technology | Why did the burning of “The Library of Alexandria” set us back technologically? I’ve seen here recently a few posts and comments stating that humanity was set back a few hundred years in terms of technology with the burning of The Library. It’s peaked my interest as to why? Why would the burning of an ancient library set us back so far in the future. | Knowledge was fragmented then, and the information lost wasn't accessible. Most human knowledge and inventions are based off of things we learned in the past - We don't have Reddit without the Internet, we don't have the Internet without Computers, we don't have Computers without resistors, etc. Say resistors were invented by someone who didn't share the knowledge widely - it was only in their personal effects at home - and their house was set on fire with arson (and that person was killed), someone else would need to re-invent resistors before someone could invent computers. Just the same, the knowledge lost in the Library of Alexandria wasn't replaceable - it all had to be replicated by someone else, and that information may have been more common knowledge had the library survived. | 4 |
cqbunp | Technology | Why are passwords that mix uppercase/lowercase and alphabet/symbols considered more secure? Don't hackers have to try every combo anyway? I see tips like this all the time. Assume a properly randomized password, let's say "bvi1oyn7mo." Is that really less secure than "bvi1OyN7Mo?" | Yes and no. A random password is a random password whether it’s all lowercase or not. If I’m a hacker and I’m trying to brute force your password by guessing random passwords, I’m just as likely to guess all lowercases as a mix of cases so it doesn’t really matter. You also usually can’t brute force a password anyway, most websites lock you out after a certain number of incorrect guesses, but, even if they didn’t, it would literally take super computers at least decades to brute force most modern passwords. We think computers are real fast, but any conventional computer that operates within the laws of physics will almost never be able to try every combination of passwords fast enough to get the right one in any useful amount of time. People are saying it is actually more secure because it gives a hacker more characters they have to guess out of when you use capitals, but if capital letters are an option, it doesn’t matter if you don’t use them. The hacker won’t know that. That’s like saying if your password doesn’t have the letter ‘G’ then it’s less secure because the hacker can just use an algorithm that doesn’t use the letter G and still guess it even faster. Sure, but they’d have to know you didn’t use a G in your password. If you *can* use capitals, a random password is realistically no more or less secure if it just by chance didn’t use any. However, most passwords are not random, and websites (and hackers) know this. Most people don’t use a password manager or something and so they use passwords based on things they can remember, like a sports team they like or something. So let’s say you like the Yankees, your password might be “Yankees19”. If I know you, or even just overheard a conversation about how much you like baseball, then that’s not too hard to guess, it’s your favorite sports team and the current year. But if you make your password “YaNkeEs19!” Well now it’s a lot harder to guess. It’s not enough to just know your favorite sports team because you’ve psuedorandomly capitalized some letters. You’ve already increased the complexity by a fair amount for someone who has to guess it, but you can still just remember it’s the Yankees with some capital letters. I also think realistically a lot of websites say that just to get you to stop and think instead of putting something trivial for your password just to finish your account creation. Just saying to use a secure password probably doesn’t stop as many people as not letting them move on unless they have a capital letter and a special character, at which point they’re more likely to just in general try and think of an actually good password. The moral being, it doesn’t matter for random passwords, but for the typical not random passwords most people use, it makes it harder to guess strategically. | 3 |
611vqm | Other | Why aren't we always aware of the reasons for our emotions ? for example sometimes one might feel sad or depressed about something which later turns out to be false and there was a bigger, deeper issue all along. Edit: thanks for all the input. I've seen a lot of thought provoking and intelligent answers here. My apologies if I answer late as I didn't expect so many people would be interested in something like this. Keep the answers coming guys :) Edit2: I'd really appreciate if someone can compile all the sources and links in this post into comment so that so that everyone can benefit from them easily (I'd do it myself but I'm currently on mobile without a computer, doing my best to answer all these comments and it would be very hard for for me to collect all sources) also if a mod could stickey it that would be even better. | Please be careful. Emotional imbalance is chemical and not psychological. You can shit talk yourself with the art of positve thinking as much as you like but if your chemistry is off it will do more harm than good. I am bipolar & ADHD and I am 100% certain that my emotions are completely screwed and out of whack with reality. | 13 |
9kzuse | Engineering | Why is the keyboard qwerty instead of abc? | The reason dates back to the time of manual typewriters. When first invented , they had keys arranged in an alphabetical order, but people typed so fast that the mechanical character arms got tangled up. So the keys were randomly positioned to actually slow down typing and prevent key jams. The QWERTY keyboards were made so one could type using keys from the top row of the keyboard. This random arrangement became standard. Source: URL_0 | 3 |
fk7hlz | Biology | why does caffeine make you feel better temporarily when sick and why is it in so many allergy/cold/flu meds? | Caffeine also has mild analgesic ( pain killer ) effects. In chemistry it is also known as an impact booster. It makes the effects of the cold or flu medication which is usually a form of pseudoephedrine/ acetaminophen absorb faster it increases its effect. Also the active ingredient in cold and flu medications ( pseudoephedrine or pseudo epinephrine ) is normally a vasoconstrictor, it makes the blood vessels constrict - Caffeine is also a mild vasoconstrictor. This vasoconstriction is why your sinuses suddenly clear up and you can breathe. Your sinuses when you have a cold are congested with blood flow to the tissue, this congestion ( swelling ) is what leads to the feeling of pressure and why you can't breathe normally through your nose. The vaso constrictor constricts blood vessels reducing blood flow, and thus congestion. For the fellas reading this, this is often the reason why if you are on cold or allergy medication it is often difficult to get an erection. You may also notice penile shrinkage as if you just went swimming while on these medications- again... constricted blood flow. The active ingredients in erectile dysfunction medications have the exact opposite effect. They are called vasodilators. They relax or open up the blood vessels allowing for more blood flow. This relaxing of blood vessels effect is also one of the primary mechanisms in high blood pressure medication. Fun fact, Viagra was being developed as a blood pressure medication initially, the ability to get an erection was a side effect noted by the clinical staff while studying the side effects of this new blood pressure medication on patients. Pfizer obviously saw the potential market value of this so-called side effect and rebranded Viagra as an erectile dysfunction medication instead of a high blood pressure medication. | 3 |
aaljex | Biology | How do emulsifiers (like egg, ice cream and milk) cause digestive problems? My wife has had a food poisoning experience many years ago when she was 15. Since then she has been lactose intolerant. In fact, this is more a term for convenience and is actually highly likely products that are emulsifiers. Such as milk, ice cream, sausages and mayonnaise but not cheese, products with cooked diary such as butter in cakes. How do these cause problems in digestion? It is a severe reaction and dares not eat them. How are emulsifiers digested differently to other foods? Are they perhaps trying to emulsify her stomach acid or not being broken down at all? | With the exception of sausages, all of the products you listed contain milk, specifically the sugar lactose (hence *lactose intolerant*). However, everyone is different and can react differently to lactose. Lactose intolerance is caused by a decrease in the production or complete lack of the enzyme lactase, which is what your body uses to break down lactose. The sugar lactose is found pretty much exclusively in mammalian milk. For the entire history of mammalian life on the planet before about 10,000 years ago, mammals only ever drink the milk of their own mothers and only until they're weened, at which point mom stops producing lactose and there's no reason to continue production of lactase. Humans drinking milk into adulthood is a recent innovation that only occurred after the agricultural revolution. So the gene to continue production of lactase into adulthood is a recent mutation and *most* people are lactose intolerant, most often starting in late adolescence. However, disruption of your gut flora (like, from food poisoning) can cause the onset of lactose intolerance. Cheese is humanity's way of cheating and getting the benefits of milk without the pesky diarrhea that comes from drinking milk when you don't have lactase. Bacteria is allowed to colonize the milk and as they do their thing, the bacteria produces its own lactase, breaking down the sugar and leaving most of all the other nutrients alone. So cheese tends to have less lactose in it - the harder the cheese, the longer the bacteria has been allowed to break down lactose. Often people who are lactose intolerance can eat varying hardnesses of cheese, depending on the severity of their intolerance. Similarly, baked goods usually contain (relatively) little milk, and the yeast (if there is any) can help break down the lactose. Heat also breaks apart lactose, so a baked food will have less lactose than a cold dish with the same amount of milk. And of course, butter is essentially cheese that isn't cheese yet, so some of the lactose is already broken down. All of which explains why someone might react to *some* products with milk in them, but not all. As for the sausage... Could just be that she has difficulty digesting fats, in which case emulsifiers would *help*. Based on some quick research, there's evidence that artificial emulsifiers added to fatty foods to help us digest the fat may be disrupting our gut flora in unexpected ways. Regardless, that's a pretty narrow topic and only your doctor can tell you why *you* (or more accurately, your wife) is having digestion problems with sausage - or milk products, for that matter. | 1 |
6w2hlh | Biology | Why do toddlers love to hand you things? I'm babysitting for my nephew (20 months old) and for the past hour we've done nothing but essentially play fetch. He's grabbed just about every toy in the room and runs to bring them to me. By the time I've tossed it back, he's grabbed another and is running it over to me with a smile on his face as wide as the Mississippi. I'm curious as to what part of development makes this so joyous for him. | It's called shared attention and is one of the primary ways we as a species learn. Also includes pointing at things. Children with autism most often do not develop this kind of shared attention, so that is one of the primary ways that doctors diagnose children at such a young age. | 48 |
6p83n3 | Economics | How can large chains (Target, Walmart, etc) produce store brand versions of nearly every product imaginable while industry manufacturers only really produce a single type of item? | I worked at a factory that would buy 1 tonne bags of nuts and repack the same nuts for retail as a supermarket brand and two different name brands. In this situation it was about scale, supermarkets would pay marginally less because they would simply buy more, which means production was simpler (no line changes) and you'd get better rates on packaging (and they'd also use cheaper, lower quality packing). In this case they charge less because they make less money per bag of nuts sold. But because they control placement on shelves (and own all the sales data) they could move a lot more stock than the name brands. In summary, it's usually some combination of: - comes from the same factory as name brands - cheaper, lower quality inputs - no/low marketing costs - control over distribution/resale - more sales | 50 |
jr8l65 | Technology | How does the start/stop feature in newer cars save fuel and not just wear out the starter? | Others answered the question well enough, but I want to note one major disadvantage of start/stop systems. While the starters are up to the task, any time an engine is started, is the point of maximal wear. All modern car engines run on plain bearings which require oil pressure to work properly. Once there is enough oil pressure, the shaft runs on an oil film and has no contact/rubbing on the plain bearing. The only time it does not have the oil pressure, is during startup when the pump isn't spinning yet. If a normal car starts up once for one trip, and a start/stop car starts up 10 times, that is a big difference. Engines generally aren't made differently on cars equipped with it or not. On the long term, I am sceptical whether saving that minimal amount of fuel at idle engine speed outweighs the environmental impact of a car with worn out crank bearings (which usually meant it is just discarded). But this does not matter to manufacturers, all they aim for is getting to those legal emission limits for new cars... If you use a car for 10 years instead of 5 years, it is way more ecological than a start stop system, because it means one less car had to be produced. | 14 |
hzeg7p | Other | How/why is 'Jewish' a religion AND a race? | Unlike other religions, perticularly Christianity but also Islam, Jews do not actively recruit new members. It is also much tougher requirement to be considered a Jew then other religions. This means that most Jews today is the decendents of only twelve tribes. This makes them a seperate race as marriges between Jews and non-jews have been rare. | 1 |
f7l6vu | Culture | When words are translated to English, how is the spelling of those words determined, and who makes the decision? The question struck me while playing a game featuring a character named Ratonhnhaké:ton (pronounced Rah-Tone-Ha-Kay-Tun). Reading his name in the subtitles made me wonder how it’s spelling (using the English alphabet) was determined. | Some linguist comes up with a transliteration scheme, and if other linguists and translators like it, it becomes a de facto standard. Sometimes academic organizations and governments pick one and make it official. That's why words sometimes change (Peking - > Beijing) or are used inconsistently (Qaddafi, Khadafy, Gadhafi + about 100 more), the transliteration scheme changes or there is no single scheme everyone agrees upon. | 2 |
knmlxf | Economics | who does the government owe when they’re in debt and why does government debt matter? | The government sells treasury bonds, essentially. That is its debt. Countries, companies, investment firms, and even you can purchase treasury notes. Basically you give the government money now and they promise to pay you back with interest later! Suppose you want to buy a big TV. You could use a credit card, and that would be debt. You can't afford to pay it all at once, so you make payments. Meanwhile, interest is accruing. If the TV was $500 and you make just minimum payments, you might end up paying $800! But the point is, if you are paying $30 per month, that is $30 you can't use for anything else, like rent or food. Government debt is structured differently, but you can think of it like it has to make a yearly payment on the debt (which is actually maturation of the treasury notes). This becomes problematic when the position of the budget going to pay the debt obligations becomes really big. Now imagine you bought a car for $50000 and your payment is $1000 monthly! Ouch! That's likely a large chunk of your money each month! How will you pay rent? How can you afford to do other necessary or fun stuff? Look at Japan. The proportion of their budget just to service their debt is over 30%! This means they need to keep taxes higher and services lower in order to maintain their budget. They recently raised the general sales tax, for example. Imagine: without that obligation, they could lower taxes or provide more services to citizens! | 2 |
avkttx | Biology | when people describe babies as “addicted to ___ at birth”, how do they know that? What does it mean for an infant to be born addicted to a substance? | They’re generally referring to newborn withdrawal from maternal drug use. Some pharmaceutical drugs can cause withdrawal symptoms but are still used during pregnancy because the benefit outweighs the risk, but generally neonatal withdrawal is seen with maternal illicit drug use. | 23 |
7ru2k4 | Repost | if human skin cells reproduce and you essentially have different skin than you did 5 years ago, why do scars never disappear? | From what I understand scars are made of collagen fibres, and when the layers of skin move from the deeper layers to the surface to eventually be shed it simply moves around this different structure of collagen fibres (the scar) instead of eventually shedding the scar as well | 1 |
5mdt0b | Biology | Why do humans laugh in bursts like "Ha ha ha" instead of one long "haaaaaaaaaaa"? | Because it's caused by contractions of the diaphragm. The sudden intake or exhale of air causes it to be in short bursts. & nbsp; When your brain thinks something is funny, sends a bunch of happy hormones around your body. You diaphragm spasms, contracting your lungs, the expulsion of air causes you to need to breath, this cycle increases your heart rate to get oxygen to all the important parts of your body, which stimulates the release of endorphins, which increase pain tolerance, and make you happier. Why does it do this? We're not entirely sure. The leading theory is that it's a way to bond with a group (which is an important trait for primates). As laughter is often contagious, when everybody is getting happy hormones, they want to keep the group around. | 4 |
bb1arj | Other | why do some restaurants haveceiling fans that are barely moving? As the title states, many restaurant will have ceiling fans running. They're barely moving; way slower than a residential fan on its lowest setting. I've seen them inside restaurants and outside on patios. Is there a reason for this? | educated guess: most restaurants are designed by interior designers, architects, or electrical engineers long before the employees come in and start working. most of those building industry professionals don't know squat about ceiling fans or air conditioning. they choose "decorations" like ceiling fans based on a client's requests or whatever looks good to them. sometimes, ceiling fans are selected solely for looks/ambiance and don't even need to provide any breeze. many restaurants have air conditioning and that cooling system is usually (but not always) calculated to cool the restaurant based on square footage, expected occupancy, and local temperatures/weather. by the time restaurants have their grand opening, they may discover the following: * the ceiling fans are too high to provide any significant air movement * customers are too cold and they request to have the fans turned down * restaurant workers are there to work and make money. they don't have the time or interest to figure out how to adjust the ceiling fans for each different table of diners. if turning it off (or turning them to low speed) appeases a customer and nobody else complains, chances are that the fans will remain off for the rest of the shift source: been selling ceiling fans for over 5 years and have seen tons of construction projects get ceiling fans based on looks, based on how much budget money is left, and rarely ever based on airflow or cooling capacity. | 2 |
hzl3pk | Biology | How do people survive getting stabbed so many times? I see on the news and stuff "man stabbed 26 times, in the hospital." It seems like if you got stabbed that many times you wouldn't just be cottage cheese, you'd be jelly. | The Human body is incredible at keeping itself alive as long as possible, all those victims most likely got saved on their last minutes/seconds of life. All depends on where they get stabbed, If you're trying to kill someone why not just stab them in the neck and heart to ensure that they die? | 2 |
9e30xs | Biology | How do cuts in our mouths not become horribly infected with all the bacteria inside of them? | Saliva works as an antibiotic, as well as the continuous cell division in the mouth which heals the cut real fast | 6 |
k6kdz3 | Technology | How does video data travel vast distances so quickly (in milliseconds) on Zoom chat? Recently had a zoom chat with my cousin in US (I am in India). Still blown away by the fact that millions of bits of video and sound data can travel across half the planet in seconds. How is it possible? | The distance (along the surface) between the US and India is about 13,500 km. Your data will travel close to the speed of light at around 300,000 km/sec. In an idealized sense, this means it will take roughly 50 ms (about a 1/20 of a second) for the data to travel. Obviously there is some pre- and post- processing of data sent that must be done and the data doesn't take a direct route, but all these things generally are much smaller factors than the physical travel. | 2 |
9xshnn | Economics | What is the difference between an MLM and a pyramid scheme? I'll take the easy joke: there is none. | You basically got it, but the nominal differance is a pyramid scheme is purely the scam part. There is no real or meaningful business going on, it's purely people making money off the "you pay the guy above you and then recruit new people and they pay you!". & #x200B; MLM is basically the same thing but there is some selling going on as well so some amount of outside money is coming in to support the structure other than purely the pyramid part. It's a pretty meaningless distinction a lot of the time and much of MLM puts the absolute bare minimum to not be illegal but the separation is supposed to be that MLM runs some business that involves a payment pyramid and a pyramid scam just has the pyramid part and no realistic business attached. | 3 |
i86ni6 | Biology | breasts are signs of fertility, hips promote child bearing but why are men so attracted to butts ? | The butt is part of the hips. It's also it's the largest muscle in the body, might be an easy way to judge lower body strength. | 3 |
9oxa2a | Economics | How do updated currency notes reduce counterfeit money if legacy notes remain valid? Money bills (and sometimes coins) get regular updates in order to make it harder to fake them. But since old ones (i.e. ones that were easier to fake) remain valid currency, how does this reduce false money? Since criminals can simply continue faking the old bills. | There is a point where presenting a brand new legacy bill isn’t going to be plausible. Then there is a point further after that where people you’re trying to pass the bill onto will automatically think it’s a fake because they either don’t remember or never knew what the legacy bill looked like. | 3 |
bj7pxi | Biology | Where/how does puss from cysts and spots go/breakdown in the body if left 'unpopped'. I assume it doesn't just sit in the blood stream forever, if you excrete it out, how does it get there. | Biologist here: Pus (also called Liquor Puris) is a protein rich fluid thats basically made up of dead white blood cells from the immune system that had been fighting the invaders that formed the cyst/boil/wound. The body constantly breaks it down and the liver filters it out of the blood and into the waste system, but as the fight continues more white blood cells form more pus, and the body continues to keep throwing it out. After the invasion is dead, no more white blood cells are dying or coagulating inside the wound. The body eventually works it all out using enzymes in the blood to break it apart and filter it out thru the kidneys. If the body is creating pus faster than the body can remove it, it will continue to grow the cyst until it bursts or needs drained, forming an abscess | 1 |
con96y | Physics | - Is sterilization by radiation dangerous to humans? Is it dangerous when we consume products and food that were sterilized by gamma radiation? | No. First, gamma Ray's are a form of electromagnetic radiation, like light, or microwaves. They pass through the food, but are not retained in any way. There is no physical or chemical mechanism associated with food irradiation that can make the food dangerous. Second, irradiation had been used for decades on spices that are imported into the US, to kill pests and their eggs. There is no observed deleterious effect on the consumer. Third, irradiation had been used for at least some military rations without observed effect on consumers. If love to have irradiated fresh strawberries available. They can last for a week or more on the shelf without growing mold, of kept clean and undamaged. They are still susceptible to degradation from bruising, which releases internal enzymes that dissolve their tissues. | 2 |
7dzxcs | Mathematics | If any distance can be halved, at what point do you stop touching something? | Uh... if you're taking your finger off something, then the distance will increase, halving is a decrease. Also, from a physics standpoint you never actually touch anything... Aside from those, you're describing a form of one of Zeno's Paradox. Ultimately the solution is the fact that in the limit, 0.99999.... is equal to 1. | 3 |
70w8uk | Biology | Why is it that, when taking "magic mushrooms" or LSD type substances that people often report feeling that "everything is connected"? PS: Ive been thinking about this for a few months now and finally decided to ask the question. A few months ago, I was randomly stopped at a red light and was watching the adjacent traffic move. Then, all of a sudden, and for a fraction of a second, I felt that everything was connect on the planet and that time was rolling along. The feeling quickly subsided and I have not been able to tap into it again. When I concentrate, I can still bring up the feeling, but its not as intense as it was initially. Note: I was not on anything, and have never tried the substances mentioned in my title. Thanks! | Hallucinogens make parts of your brain communicate that don't normally communicate. Since your perception of the world is a total manifestation of your brain activity, more connected brain activity feels like a more connected world and environment. Also everything really is connected, it's just one of those things that people tend to really really focus on while tripping. | 4 |
6ao6hb | Culture | Why do children like children's music? Or is more of a social construct? I can see how sound effects and slow bpm to process each phrase would help them get into the story, but otherwise don't see where the whole "aesthetic" of it comes from? or is it* (correction for the title) | Somewhere I heard children enjoy repetition more, so that explains why they'll listen to the things a billion times. They also like playing with words and sounds since it's new to them. | 3 |
84atb5 | Physics | Stephen Hawking was an ardent supporter of the many-universes interpretation. I always figured it was mostly theoretical and not backed by science (please forgive me I’m a novice in this field). How can we actually explain that such a phenomenon actually exists using scientific evidence? | Quantum Mechanics showed us that isolated particles do not have a position or speed. They only have *possible* positions or speeds. And this isn't that we *can't know* what these are due to disturbing them by measuring them it's that they *don't have* defined values. Again, they only have *possible* values before being measured (interfered with). Now we also know, and everyday experience confirms this, a measured (or interfered with) particle has a definite answer to its location or speed. So what happened to all those other possibilities? Maybe they all happened. For all of them to happen requires other universes. So maybe there are infinitely many universes for all the possible locations and speeds of all particles. While this simplifies, in a certain way, the question of "What happened to those other possibilities?" it leaves the problem of being (as far as anyone knows) completely unprovable. Because these other universes are completely seperated from ours (because the things that make it another universe didn't happen here). | 8 |
6q00zl | Culture | Why is there a market for all-black films like Girls Trip or Soul Plane, but there are no similar films for Asians, Latinos, or other minority ethnicities in the US? | .....Asia has a huge film industry. That caters specifically for Asians. And Asian Americans. And it's 99.99% filmed of Asian actors (with exception of Matt Damon) So why does American Hollywood cater alot to a population thats 15% of the American audience but not Hispanic minority thats 17% of the population. That'd be the real question. | 3 |
8udlzv | Chemistry | How do artificial flavourings work? Do you mix a bunch of chemicals and end up with a strawberry tasting substance, is it just a process of concentrating the original food, or something else completely? | Nature produces some compounds that we find particularly tasty. We're able to identify the structure of some of those compounds, and some of them are also pretty easy to synthesize, so we do. | 1 |
i8t8li | Physics | I Still Don't Understand What Entropy Is? I've Had It Explained It To Me So Many Times Before, But I'm Having A Hard Time Understanding What It Is Still. | It turns out that things in the universe are only interesting when they change. Change only happens when there is energy available to cause the change. For example, one common form of energy is heat. Heat is the energy of random particle motion. Molecules in a solid vibrate back and forth but stay in their assigned locations mostly. Molecules in a gas whiz around bumping into things and bumping into each other. Sometimes the energy creates change. Fast moving air molecules in your oven bump into your food and provide the energy for chemical changes that cook the food. However not all energy is USABLE to create change. If our whole planet was already the same temperature, the energy of fast moving gas particles can’t DO anything because all the other matter on the planet is already moving just as fast. Your food is just as likely to give energy to the air molecules as the air molecules are to give energy to the food. So nothing actually happens even though there is plenty of energy. Entropy is how we describe the “uselessness” of the energy in a system. Energy is only useful if it is organized. High energy over here, low energy over there. Stuff happens when energy moves from here to there. In this case the entropy is low. When the energy is totally randomly distributed, there is no organization and no DIRECTION that energy can flow and do things. In this case the entropy is very high. We define entropy as the measurement of how much of the energy is lost to disorder and unable to do anything. | 2 |
bmjv3s | Biology | Why does our brain occasionally fail at simple tasks that it usually does with ease, for example, forgetting a word or misspelling a simple word? | Similar question. Home come sometimes you can remember that a person's name started with a specific letter but you can't remember the rest of the name? | 13 |
88omq7 | Other | How did Scotch come to be known as the most luxurious liquor and why? | Because Scotland is the home of whisky, the only place where you'll find so many firms that have been making it for so long. But today, Japanese whisky is arguably of equal quality and luxury. | 4 |
6e9yel | Technology | When you edit an application or image with Notepad, what are the thousands of lines of random characters it shows? | Notepad assumes that *everything* you try and open with it is a text file, even if it's not. ASCII and ANSI are two popular systems on how to encode text as zeroes 'n ones, and Notepad, no matter what, starts looking for text encoded in these manners. Usually it finds *something* that matches the rules of the encoding and tries to show what letter it thinks it found. However, it's totally wrong and barking up the wrong tree, the random characters it shows don't really mean anything. A good metaphor would be if you didn't know the symbols for the numbers, **did** know the symbols for the alphabet, and saw a 0. "Aha," you think. "That's the letter O!" When no, it's not, it just looks like that because that's all you know. Notepad is kinda the same, it doesn't know how to make sense of JPEG or application data but it knows what letters look like, even when the data ain't letters. | 2 |
79qeqx | Physics | Why can’t you add 2 110v household wires together to create 220v? AC confuses me. I can connect to AA batteries together in series and get 3v. How come two 110 volts AC wires can’t be added together to create 220 volts AC? For example, I want to charge an electric car fast but I don’t have a 220v outlet. It seems to me like you should be able to take two separate 110 outlets, plug the into a box that puts them in series and blam-o0: 220v. What prevents this (I’m assuming this violates some law of physics) from being a thing? | They may be 110v from neutral, but are they 110v from each other? If you have a 9V battery and hook up two leads to the positive and a third to the negative terminal and put them in series, you're not going to get a 18v potential on the circuit, you just get a circuit with varying resistance. All of your 110v outlets in the house are (if wired properly) in parallel with each other at the breaker box and on the same phase, so not much will happen if you attempt to put them in series. You *can* put a 220v breaker into your box off the two hot leads coming from the weatherhead to get a 220v outlet. | 7 |
692syx | Technology | Why electric cars are not regular thing? | They *are* a regular thing. The electric car market is real and growing. Living in California, I know several people who now drive electric cars. They were not common until recently, because batteries did not store enough power cheaply enough, while storing a lot of power in the form of gasoline requires only a container that holds liquid. But batteries have been improved lately, through the hard work of thousands of engineers and scientists. | 4 |
e0qspp | Psychology | Why is listening to aggressive music so cathartic even though I myself am not physically or verbally venting? | [This article]( URL_1 ) from Psychology Today defines "extreme music" as music that is "chaotic, loud, powerful and [has] emotional vocals that contained themes of anger, anxiety, depression, social isolation, and loneliness." It explains that extreme music has different effects on people depending on their mental state. People who are in a stable, comfortable position will find extreme music uncomfortable or disturbing, while someone who is going through a period of anger, anxiety, or depression will find it soothing. The article explains that extreme music "provided participants with an outlet to help process their emotions in a healthy manner." The [Psychology Today article]( URL_0 ) cited by u/Fixedentropy explains four reasons why people who are sad listen to sad music. It seems safe to assume, just based on logic and my own experience, that those are the same or very similar reasons for why angry music is calming to someone who is angry, anxious, or depressed. Those reasons are: 1) Connection. You feel the same thing as the artist did at some point. That makes it seem more normal and manageable. 2) Message. That artist got through it, and went on to succeed, and in fact used it to further their success. 3) High aesthetic value. Music you can relate to gives you a much more appealing distraction from the negatives in real life than music that wouldn't "ring true" to you at that time. 4) Memory trigger. The article points out that using music in this way is actually *not* helpful in elevating your mood. | 15 |
5sqqvs | Culture | Why is the education in the US so bad or called bad by many people? | Why are people upset about DeVos? In the 2014-15 school year, Texas spent $9,559 per student in grades K-12 (DMN). Public schools are being compared to the outcomes of private companies like Hockaday, which charges $22,833 for day school (per a Google search). For the record, Hockaday is a stellar school. Send your kid there, if you so choose. This isn't about Hockaday. Public schools teach every kid who comes to their doors - Mayflower legacy and recent refugee; PhD parents and 6th grade drop-out parents; rich and poor; gifted and special needs. K-12, which is longer than most countries. Everyone. And they have amazing successes. Most people in America who are successful (defined any way you want) are products of public schools - even the majority of those people who are now anti-public schools. Private schools take who they want, if the applicant can pay. Public schools have no application process. No fees. No anything. They teach who shows up. No matter what. Ankle bracelet because you are awaiting trial for murder? Come on in. English is your fifth language? Or not one you know? Have a seat. You are capable of learning at a 2nd grade level? Here - take Biology and try to pass the state mandated exam. If you fail, it will be your teacher's fault. Public schools are beset by arbitrary evaluation systems, bizarrely awful state tests that bring in millions to private companies, and constant belittlement. They are told they have "plenty of money" and "anyone can teach" by people who haven't set foot in a public school in decades, if ever. And now the answer is pull funds away from public schools trying to serve all to give to private companies that will only serve a few? In what chapter of The Looking Glass is that logic? Yes, public schools fail sometimes. Sometimes all of the talent and effort and tears and desire cannot leap the hurdles in the paths of some kids. But they try. And they cry real tears for the kids who don't make it. Real tears - not political ones. Today public school teachers and administrators and students and parents were slapped in the face by 50 Senators and Vice-President Pence, who said a political donor with no public education experience is worth more than they all are. Despite pleas from tens of thousands who are in the trenches every day, and know of which they speak, these 51 people put party and politics above the best interest of millions of kids. | 3 |
jkrtmi | Physics | If the Earth orbits the Sun and electrons orbit protons/ neutrons, why are there no intermediately sized objects that display this behavior? | Electron 'orbits' are mechanically very different from planetary orbits. They are not elliptical, and cannot really be compared in any way. Electrons do not orbit atomic nuclei, but rather, they vaguely float around the nucleus with no particular direction. Anyways, smaller object gravitational orbits totally exist, however in the presence of a strong gravitational field, they can't really exist because Earth's gravity is dominant in this region. | 3 |
8vf7io | Chemistry | How does carbonation work? Furthermore, when you see a single constant stream of bubbles arising from the bottom of a glass (of, let's say, beer), what is the origin? Why does it stay in the same spot and not move around the cup? What keeps the stream of bubbles going? | Carbon dioxide is a gas that can be dissolved in water. Soda and beer are stored under pressure in bottles/cans that keep the carbon dioxide in solution. When the pressure is released, the gas can come out of solution, and a tiny rough spot can be a nucleation site (starting point) for bubbles. | 3 |
5trq71 | Other | Approximately 20% of the items I order from Ebay never show up. I live in Denmark and mostly order small items from far-east Asia. Where do they end up? | You're not having a unique experience at all; that's a pretty common complaint. A little internet searching can give you all the ins and outs but I'll give you a general summary of what's going on: Chinese E-bay vendors are particularly notorious for having a high percentage of items not delivered to western buyers. Many sellers are little upstart enterprises operating with entirely different business practices than we are used to in the west. Western sellers typically acquire their inventory on spec in hopes of reselling it, or at least have a reliable way to supply it in a timely manner as needed. Often Chinese vendors won't. They will list and sell items on the assumption they'll after the sale be able to acquire them locally and simply don't hold any actual inventory on hand or guaranteed way of acquiring it. Sometimes that doesn't pan out and they can't get the item they thought they would be able to (or more often they listed and sold a larger quantity of the item than they can acquire) and they just ignore your order and hope (since often purchases from there will be pretty cheap) it isn't worth your time to go through the necessary steps to file a claim with Ebay. Unfortunately user feedback is also notoriously unreliable for Chinese based vendors as buying fake feedback is widespread and incredibly cheap there. I'm not saying never buy anything from a Chinese Ebay vendor, I've personally had good experiences, but some common sense risk management is worthwhile. You should only buy items from China that are cheap enough that you're willing to occasionally eat the cost of a purchase that you'll never get. You can always go through process of filing a claim with Ebay to try to get refunded, but such sellers are also notorious for dragging that process out. They claim they re-shipped the item or such. Sometimes they'll even forge shipping documents. They try to make it a hassle so you to just give up and drop the claim. Many buyers will. That paired with the orders they are able to deliver allows them to tell Ebay your experience must've been due to your local customs/mail/etc and not their fault because look at all the orders they filled that didn't end in a founded claim. So Ebay lets them remain a vendor. For what it's worth Amazon vendors based in China don't really have this problem associated with them (at least no where near as widely) since Amazon is known to be much more scrupulous with it's vendors. | 2 |
74u7vh | Other | how can you determine if a potentially valuable signature is authentic? | I'm not able to do this personally, but on TV when I see people do it they check out the ink to confirm it's not written in sharpie if the person lived in the 1800s lol then they just look at other signatures they have on file or online and compare the 2. | 1 |
ipcvg7 | Biology | why are certain drugs more addicting than others? I know it has to do with the chemicals interaction in our brain, but I'm curious as to the specifics on why cocaine is more addictive than methamphetamine | Ranking which drugs are more addictive is actually a bit complicated. There are a lot of different things to think about. Here are a few important ones: Reinforcement: how likely someone is to use a substance again and again Dependence: how difficult is it to quit, and how much users feel that they need the substance Tolerance: how quickly do users feel that they need more of the substance to get the same effect, and how much is needed to satisfy cravings Withdrawal: how severe are the symptoms of withdrawal of someone stops using the substance You could make a case for which drug is more addictive based on any of these factors. For example, cocaine has very high reinforcement. It causes a very strong, very fast high. This high appears quickly, but it also wears off quickly with a crash. That crash feels much worse than the high, so users will often seek out more cocaine to reach that high again. With that said, compared to other drugs of abuse, cocaine has low dependence, low tolerance and only mild withdrawal symptoms. Meth would have a lot of similar properties to cocaine, though the high lasts much longer and is typically considered to be stronger (cause more chemical release in the brain at similar doses compared to cocaine). Meth also tends to cause more dependence than cocaine. Something like heroin, for example, would also cause a very fast high and is very reinforcing. Unlike cocaine, someone who uses heroin will be much more likely to develop both physical and psychological dependence to heroin. There is often much stronger craving and much more severe withdrawal symptoms with heroin compared to cocaine, so people who use heroin will often feel the need to reuse even if only to prevent a miserable withdrawal. As you mentioned, all of these properties will be different from drug to drug based on different effects on chemicals in the brain. Certain chemicals will be more prone to causing changes in the brain that lead to the development of dependence and tolerance. Beyond this, how quickly a drug kicks in (often related to things like the size of the drug molecule, how easily it can cross the blood brain barrier, and other properties of the drug itself) and how long a drug lasts can impact things like reinforcement and withdrawal symptoms. | 1 |
ennory | Other | How does Merriam-Webster make money off of dictionaries these days? | Attorneys do have uses for both older editions and newer dictionaries as definitions can change over time. I might find myself arguing that because X meant Y 100 years ago, the new definition it doesn't include situations involving Z, today. | 28 |
a1j6o1 | Economics | How has Germany one of the largest economy in the world even though they lost two world wars? | Additionally to things like the Marshall Plan: We call it "Soziale Markwirtschaft" which triggered the economic boom Germany experienced during the 50s under Ludwig Erhard. It's a mixture of socialism and capitalism where you're free to build your own business but there's lots of regulation and social safety nets for workers and the unemployed. This way we got to build a strong domestic market with the German population having a strong ability to consume and the market being able to grow. Simultaneously people were financially secure enough to start own businesses or seek education without "risking" too much. Additionally we have to admit we had some industrial powerhouses (Siemens, Bosch, BMW, etc.) which started before the World Wars and stayed in Germany. This and that we had a wall that let cheap imports in from the GDR while keeping cheap competing labour out (compare US and Mexico) | 3 |
bux7vt | Other | What happens after dye pack explodes? Does the dyed cash go into trash? If so, does the bank replace and restore the same amount of money? | Damaged money can be returned to the US Treasury and replaced. Banks already to this all the time when bills get torn or worn out, a bunch of died bills is just a slightly larger order to place. | 2 |
n594xj | Chemistry | - what does a water softener do? In fact, what even is hard water? Don’t say ice. It’s low hanging fruit and you’re better than that. | Normal tap water contains irons, calciums, magnesiums and a whole host of other minerals in it. This depends on the areas the water comes from, the facilities that clean it and the piping it runs through. The more minerals there are, the “harder” the water is. A softener is something that removes some of those minerals, the most common/efficient being a reverse osmosis filter. | 2 |
87edrr | Chemistry | Are tea and coffee metabolized the same way water and dry herbs/beans would be separately? Does the water undergo a chemical change when it steeps/brews? About what percent of the initial water is metabolized by the body normally? | Although other answers are correct in saying that coffee is part of the grains only I would explain different. Your body doesn't metabolize them differently, almost no substances change from the original grain, and they are metabolized by the same mechanisms in the body. These mechanisms are known to be useful for almost all kinds of molecules. They are very unspecific. However the coffee will be absorbed quicker than grains and that changes the amount of substances your body has to deal in a time. That can lead to different metabolic pathways. So in this case yes, they are metabolized differently. | 2 |
e6ofpe | Biology | How do we know that a species has definitely gone extinct (as opposed to just being extremely rare/elusive)? | Take the Northern White Rhino. It is big enough that we know exactly how many are left: two females, neither of whom could carry a calf to term, no living male. It's extinct, with the caveat that scientists MIGHT be able to produce an embryo from frozen sperm and eggs that MIGHT implant in a southern white rhino, and MAYBE carry to term. But for all intents and purposes, it's gone. Littler creatures can be deemed to be gone if X number of years go by and none have been reported, and it is known to have a limited range. We know for example that orangutans have a very small range, constantly being lost to palm plantations. There will still be a population in captivity when the last wild ones are gone, but probably not enough to provide adequate genetic diversity. | 6 |
8t1djx | Economics | Why do companies have the same merchandise in their stores with all different names, like home goods, TJ Maxx and mashalls. Why do some companies like TJX (which owns all T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and Home Goods stores) have the same merchandise in multiple different named stores, they all sell the same stuff. Some of these stores are all in the same shopping center, doesn't is cost more money to rent 3 stores in the same shopping center than just one larger one? Isn't running 3 stores with all different names costing them more money in over-head? | Often this situation comes out of mergers... Say TJ Maxx buys out Marshall's. But Marshall's may have their loyal customer base, and TJ MAxx has their own, and probably 90% have no idea they are now the same company. On the corporate level, it allows them to do some A/B testing of changes to see what works... maybe they decide to take one more upscale and be more like Nordstrom Rack (where you get $200 shirts for $75, not $50 shirts for $15). Or maybe one focused on younger shoppers and one more on baby boomers. I'm not saying these are the actual differences, but that they can find ways to cater to slightly different demographics. And many of their shoppers choose to shop at them because of the "thrill of the hunt" for the right thing or great deal, so giving them more hunting grounds will increase likelihood of them buying something then and remembering the successful hunt the next time they are shopping for something, creating loyal customers. | 4 |
cuabo0 | Economics | Disney World is such a money maker, why are the cities surrounding it so poor with such a housing crisis? Poor Florida. | All the headlines say that central Florida is experiencing an *affordable* housing crisis. This is different from the housing crisis that followed the Great Recession, where lots of people couldn't afford mortgages they had already taken out and lost their homes. This crisis means that some people in the region can't find housing in their price range. You can get in that situation by having a lot of low income people, by having a lot of expensive housing, or both. Central Florida isn't exactly the richest region in the US. It's swampy and plagued by heat and hurricanes. Some counties have poverty rates up to 30%, though the areas around Disney World are more in the 15-20% range, so it's unlikely that Disney World is making surrounding communities *less* prosperous (though that's a low bar). Disney World could be contributing on the supply side. If you are a real estate developer in the region, you will probably get a higher return to building a resort, hotel, or timeshares than you would with inexpensive resident housing. Land is in fixed supply, so every vacation home in that area takes up property that could be use to house residents. This could be compounded with the fact that even if Disney World pays a decent wage, it's paying a lot of people to do relatively unskilled jobs like concessions and janitorial work. Those jobs are necessary, but the people who do them are getting priced out of the areas around their workplace, forcing them into longer commutes. | 5 |
7eqah4 | Other | Can someone please explain Marxism? | "From each according to his ability, and to each according to his need." Also: “I do think at a certain point you've made enough money” . | 3 |
7fbgpb | Physics | How come nuclear waste storage facilities need to possibly last longer than civilization? | > I understand that it stays radioactive for thousands of years but what warrants the construction of storage facilities that need to last longer that civilization on Earth? We don't really plan for civilization to end. If you know how long civilization is going to last then by all means let the rest of us know, because that is very much an open question. But nuclear waste storage facilities are planned around how long the waste will remain dangerous. Even if a future civilization forgets it is there and doesn't know what to do in order to contain it, it would be a dirty trick to leave such a deadly trap. It isn't going to kill all life on Earth but it can certainly taint a large area for a very long time. | 1 |
8dgirz | Biology | Why do animals that consume poisonous snakes not have difficulties digesting the poison? | Something digesting a poisonous snake would have trouble with the poison. But what you are probably thinking of is **venomous** snakes, and the relevant thing about venom is that it is injected into the blood stream to become effective. The venom breaks down during digestion and isn't harmful. | 1 |
77q4jf | Engineering | if silk is as stretchy as elastic and stronger than steel, why isn't it used more often for... everything? | Spiders typically produces several kinds of silk of varying properties and compositions. The strongest type is the dragline silk they use to dangle from. This typically has an *Ultimate Tensile Strength" that is about half that of grades of steel used for wire ropes. (Note that the strength of steel can vary significantly based on the composition and the processes used to strengthen it.) The difference is that the density of steel is about 7.8 gram/ cubic cm while silk is about 1.2. So, overall, silk has a much better *Strength-to-Weight ratio* than steel. However, currently the material with the best strength to weight ratio is carbon fiber. CF is common for applications that require extreme strength, vibration resistance, and minimum weight such as aircraft, drones, car body parts, The reason that synthetic silk hasn't been a commercial success, is complex. Apparently, the properties of spider dragline silk involves some sophisticated chemical processing tricks, performed by cells in the spider's silk gland. This yields a fairly complex, well ordered molecular structure. Moreover, the individual silk fibers themselves have a sophisticated multilayer structure. The processes spiders use to produce silk aren't well understood. Laboratory made silk tends to have disappointing properties, and a molecular structure that is rather disordered compared to spider silk. Silk is biodegradable. In fact some spiders eat their old webs. But this is a problem in many applications where you'd want to use something like silk. For example, you don't want your clothes to start decomposing in the wash. You don't want to go climbing and discover that your ropes are moldy and smell terrible. Now, considering that there are synthetic fibers already on the market that have equal or superior properties such as aramid or high modulus polyethylene, and require much more straightforward and simple processing methods, silk is a bit of a non-starter. Unless it can be made more cheaply and the demand for biodegradable fibers grows. | 2 |
ervkgl | Biology | After an adrenaline rush, why do humans experience a sudden severe drop in energy? Would this not be disadvantageous for primitive survival? | It would be disadvantageous, but consider the timeline: You're confronted with something that you identify as posing serious threat to your safety -- be it losing control of a vehicle in the snow or pursued by a predator. Your body dumps adrenaline into your system which temporarily gives you a dramatic boost to your reflexes, stamina, and strength. This is the "fight" in the "fight or flight" reaction. But you have to understand that the rest of the time, your own brain limits your body in what it can do so you don't hurt yourself. Your body is far more capable than you know, but if you were to use that full extent all the time, you'd cause permanent damage to your joints, ligaments, etc, to say nothing of the fact that higher blood pressure (from increased heart rate) would take a long term toll on your body, and immune and digestive systems are suppressed during this "fight or flight" phase. So the crash you feel is the price you're paying for that boost that saved your life. It might put you at a disadvantage if you were confronted with another life or death situation, but the fact that it got you out of one is probably enough to genetically select for it over generations. Edit: might as well fix those typos with the traction this is getting. Lotta people have pointed out that the "fight or flight" I refer to is a lot more nuanced than the binary representation I made. [This]( URL_1 ) comment does a good job. Edit 2: thanks for the gold, damn. I am amused by the fact that the most popular reply to this post is "holy shit it's the [kaioken]( URL_0 )!" The second most seems to be the number of people pointing out the parallels between this and chronic stress/PTSD | 9 |
68zqb8 | Repost | why does tensing your legs help you reach orgasm? E: holy shit 6k upvotes. E2: just a note, I did my search beforehand and apparently I didn't do it correctly. Move on. E3: reposts should be considered on a case by case basis. Or somehow allow archive posts to be marked active again or at least commentable. New information can be discovered by simple conversation in a short time period. You can't expect people to get an answer to things from the past if the previous post either didn't answer the question or is outdated (not saying that's my case but just makes sense for others). | Has some interesting answers to this repost URL_0 | 20 |
5w8jbu | Repost | Why are Microsoft computers more prone to viruses compared to Apple computers? Also why does Microsoft have so many more operating system updates compared to Apple? | It's the economy of scale, more people use Windows. Therefore there's more incentive to create viruses for it. Also Apple is expensive, and most viruses come from poor Eastern Europe and Russia. Not many hackers can afford one. | 3 |
5lua15 | Other | The UK miner strikes | At the time, the coal mines were all owned by the UK government and ran at a loss overall so tax money covered the shortfall. The government was opposed to paying high subsidies to keep the loss-making coal industry running. Very little mechanisation had been introduced to coal mining in the UK, so was very inefficient and expensive due to the high labour costs. The government wanted to stop subsidising the coal industry by introducing mechanisation to try to reduce costs, closing down any mines that were never going to be profitable, and selling-off the profit-making mines to private buyers. The National Union of Miners (NUM) was very strong politically, many Members of Parliament were chosen and funded by the NUM. Their large numbers meant they were able to co-ordinate strikes to disrupt the running of the country until they got their way. The government was also opposed to this and wanted to reduce the unions' power. Introduction of mechanisation and closure of unprofitable mines was very unpopular with the NUM because it would ultimately lead to miners losing their jobs, the UK needing fewer miners and reducing the NUM's power. This was across a wider backdrop of the government wanting to reduce the number of manufacturing and industry jobs and introducing more office-based (service) jobs that was also unpopular with unions generally and causing large-scale unemployment. As the UK was very reliant of coal for electricity, etc, the NUM thought they could coerce the government into changing their mind by calling a strike that would cause coal shortages. The government had prepared for this so shortages never materialised and the NUM were unsuccessful. | 1 |
alqm2q | Biology | How our metabolic rates can be wildly different from each other Cause like, if two people of similar body composition eat the same thing and then do an identical activity, the calories burned isn't always equal, and can be drastically different. Where is the energy going in the person with a higher metabolism, that isn't happening as much in the person with a lower one? | Lots of things can contribute to different metabolic rates and body composition, including amount of lean muscle mass, age, gender, hormones, genetics, and your microbiome (especially your Bacteroidetes:Firmicutes ratio) just to name a few | 2 |
noem64 | Biology | Why does cold water make my sore throat worse, and why does warm water sooth it? Generally, shouldn't colder temperature help with inflamation. On that note too, why does gout, another inflamation, also react badly to the cold? | The esophagus (food pipe of the throat) is one long muscle. While the heat will open the vessels, it will also help relax the muscles. Inflammation is also part of our healing process, so increasing blood flow can help some. So cold, while it can numb pain, doesn't help healing in those regards | 1 |
dmhc2j | Economics | How do people who start new businesses, stores, etc., figure out from the start how much to charge for their items in order to make a profit? | They create a business plan that works all of that out. It is pretty much a budget, but for a business, where they lay out all their expenses and what income they expect to make to see if everything adds up. You typically need a business plan showing your plan to profitability in order to get a business loan. | 4 |
68k80o | Repost | How do music makers know if a melody has been taken or not? If say a song you thought up just happens to have the same melody as another song you've never heard of that's already been published and copyrighted how would you know before you make a mistake of using that song? | This actually happened w/ Guns n' Roses 'Sweet Child of Mine' and some Australian band who released a VERY similar sounding song years earlier. Somehow I don't think 80's sunset strip rock bands were listening to Australian pop music in the pre-internet era with easily accessible music, however take a listen and see what you think: URL_0 | 48 |
9j3e43 | Other | why are Americans so against Puerto Rico becoming a state? | You might try posting this in r/askanamerican. Subjective questions are not allowed on ELI5. | 3 |
6vb3w9 | Physics | Do combination colors such as green exist naturally, or are they always a combination of blue and yellow light? I know generally how color forms in a person's vision - the object absorbs all light except the color(s) that it reflects and thus you're able to see the color easily. But take the color green - blue and yellow make green. But green also exists in the rainbow spectrum... Do all plants just reflect both blue and yellow spectrums to create a green spectrum in our vision? | Green is actually one of the primary colours of light that our eyes can detect. It's yellow light that's a "mix". But yellow does actually correspond to an actual wavelength of light. Our eyes can't tell the difference between actual yellow light waves and a mix of green and red light. There are "fake" colours such as magenta, which is an equal part mix of red and blue. Since red and blue are on opposite ends of the spectrum, the wavelength that's between them is green, rather than something that looks like a mix or red and blue. | 2 |
k8wljd | Other | why it is that we laugh when someones telling us something serious Whether its a laugh or smile, same concept, but why? | If you can compare the situation to a comedian telling a good joke: The build up may cause anxiety or worry to form, but until you fully understand the concept or 'where the joke is going', your body eases up a bit. Botox can actually solve depression in some cases, because the brain recognizes 'smiling' to 'happy!' Also, the other comment about it being a 'defense mechanism' is not wrong. | 2 |
73qlca | Technology | When deleting data off hard drives to cover your tracks, why do we often see the drives physically destroyed? I'm talking about in movies and TV shows, like Mr. Robot, when trying to delete evidence or something on a hard drive/usb drive, often simply deleting it isn't enough. I am aware that simply 'deleting' something doesn't necessarily remove it, (it just sets that chunk of data as available to be written over) and forensic data recovery can find it, so I am asking more specifically how can you recover data that has been properly deleted. Like written over, formatted, and wiped clean. Is physically destroying the drives just to be 100000% sure or is there an actual chance that if found the data could be recovered? | To add to all the other explanations, you do not need to wipe a drive multiple times to securely erase it. I’m on mobile so it’s hard to get sources but there has been lots of evidence that more wipes did not erase information any more securely than just a single pass with zeros. To be fair, there has been a study involving some magnet reading machine that tried to read back the data after being wiped seven times, but it was a research case and it never went commercial because of the cost, and also because it wasn’t very credible. (Never mentioned if the data read back was intact or even if it was able to be read back.) Movies often use gross oversimplification, because it’s easier to explain to the non-technical people and it’s faster to move along in the plot. | 11 |
ng2kgc | Biology | How does an intoxicated person’s mind suddenly become sober when something very serious happens? | It doesn’t. But... your sympathetic nervous system kicks in to overdrive during crisis. This involves a big wave of drugs that the body gives itself. It counterbalances things.... sometimes... | 21 |
cvfolo | Biology | How do domesticated young pets, a puppy for example, develop the natural habits they have even when they grow up without their parents? | It's instinct. for instance, my lab always points his tail straight back along with his right paw. Their instincts make them good hunting dogs. Their instinct is to point and aim their snout towards game. This shows the hunter the location of their quarry and allows them to move into gun range. Its all instinct, just like how humans hold their breath under water. | 2 |
62h01m | Other | Why are bus steering wheels almost parallel to the ground, whereas car steering wheels are almost perpendicular to the ground? | because the steering wheel is connected to the front wheel by a long column called *drumroll* the steering column if you look at the side profile of a typical car, the driver sits above and behind the front wheels. hence the steering column needs to connect diagonally. if you look at a bus, the driver sits very much vertically above and in front of the front wheels. hence the steering column needs to connect directly downwards and backwards thru a seperate linkage. | 1 |
mwfqkp | Biology | Does one bad apple spoil other nearby apples or doesn’t it? It has recently become clear to me that there are two types of people: * some believe the saying is “one bad apple **doesn’t** spoil the whole barrel” * some believe the correct saying is the opposite: one bad apple **can** spoil other apples in its vicinity Which is the original phrase? Which is true, scientifically? | Yes it does. This is in reference to when apples were stored in barrels to last the winter. | 4 |
dzcauk | Other | How is pansexuality any different from bisexual? | The difference is negligible and really changes depending on who you ask. Do not that bisexuality does NOT exclude trans people. There are bisexual trans people, bisexual people can be attracted to trans people, etc. | 11 |
dsy2xt | Biology | When you lower your cholesterol, where does it go? When people have high cholesterol, and they take steps to lower it, such as eating less animals, dairy, etc., where does the cholesterol go? Does it leave the body or stay in the body in a different form? | Cholesterol means a few different things. At the most basic it is a chemical that is the basic structure for many hormones (testosterone, estrogen, etc) and also serves to strengthen cell membranes. The "cholesterol" often referred to in the blood is a mixture of cholesterol, fat, and proteins that is responsible for transporting fat throughout your body for energy in little droplets, because fat is not water soluble. High Density Lipoprotein (HDL) is considered "good cholesterol." It is essentially an empty sphere/container with relatively little fat molecules inside. Low/Very Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL/VLDL) are full of fat molecules and considered "bad cholesterol." If LDL and VLDL levels are too high in your blood, they can stick to the sides of your arteries and cause immune cells to try to remove them. This process causes a lot of inflammation which further closes off arteries and attracts more LDL/VLDL. The type of fat matters too: saturated fat is stickier than unsaturated fat. Think about a stick of butter versus olive oil running through your veins. But LDL and VLDL are still necessary to deliver energy through out your body. When you exercise or otherwise burn energy, LDL and VLDL drop off fat molecules in your muscles and then become HDL. HDL is then re-filled most commonly in your liver from dietary intake of fat. So lowering "bad cholesterol" is more about fat/caloric intake and exercise than cholesterol intake. | 2 |
axc4hk | Physics | Why supernova jets are emitted exactly from poles? | There are two parts to this question, so I'll start with one and build the other on it. First, supernova jets are emitted from the poles because the star is spinning. The stuff near the equator is being pushed around by various forces, whereas the stuff near the poles stays mostly still. This allows some smaller forces to act near the poles that don't have as much effect near the equator. These smaller effects are responsible for the jets we sometimes see. Second, jets are emitted *exactly* from the poles because stars are not balls. They aren't solid spheres with surfaces, they are clouds of plasma. So most of the jet isn't from the surface of the star, it's from the interior. As it travels outward, it's acted upon by all the forces I was just talking about, either pushing it into the center of the jet (and the pole) or stripping it from the jet entirely. By the time it jets out into space, it's become a narrow beam centered exactly on the pole. | 1 |
g86rxr | Physics | Where does lever effect come from? Referring to atomic levels, since the formula is F*d, what would the atomic level explanation be for this phenomenom. | Molecules in a solid hold their structure when the object as a whole is moved/rotated/altered. This is what makes them a solid. I'll assume a homogeneous material for the lever. What's happening at an atomic level is that the individual molecules are essentially held together magnetically. The negative parts of one molecule attract the positive parts of the other. These forces are strong enough to keep the molecules connected to each other, but not strong enough to rip the atoms in said molecules away to a different molecule. A movement like a human-scale lever isn't enough acceleration to break these magnetic attractions between the molecules. When molecules at one end start to move, the little magnets pull on the other magnets down the line at the speed of sound in that material. The speed of sound is the speed of "push". So imagine you had a 4 mile section of steel. If you somehow pushed one end a foot quickly, it would take about one second for the part 4 miles away to push as well, so for a while the section of steel would be 4 miles minus one foot. The speed of sound is about four miles per second in steel. | 1 |
l52hrq | Economics | How do companies get money from an IPO? I understand companies go public to raise funding and become larger. Practically, how do they get money from the shares? | Because they are the ones selling the shares to begin with. You buy the shares you want by giving them your money. That's how they raise the money. | 1 |
96bcqc | Physics | How do scientists at the Large Hadron Collider safely create and record temperatures of 5.5 trillion degrees? | Primarily by making it happen to a very very small amount of material. 5.5 Trillion degrees sounds like a lot, but in terms of mass x thermal energy, the sample size at that temperate is so small that if you distributed all the energy there into a bucket of water, it wouldn't boil. The LHC is aiming to create a very specific set of conditions on a very small sample. They use a lot of energy to smash stuff together and witness high energy interactions, but it happens using a very small amount of mass. | 5 |
82nbi9 | Technology | Why does an aircraft carrier store all the planes on deck? What happens if they need to scramble jets? | Two main reasons: 1. Operational readiness. It's a lot faster to launch an aircraft when it's already waiting on the deck than having to lift it from the internal hangars first. 2. Space. If you keep aircraft both on the deck *and* in internal hangars, you can keep many more on the ship than if you only had them inside. It's worth noting that not all navies do this. Keeping armed and fueled aircraft on the deck has the disadvantage of a risk of fire breaking out and quickly spreading between the parked aircraft. Check out the USS Forestal fire if you want to see how much damage that can cause. | 8 |
arqi4r | Other | Why are bike lanes not on the footpath? | What’s wrong with taking up room on the road? Economical, health economically and for nearly every reason cycling is better than driving. 90% or something is trips under 5km anyway. | 3 |
6hduko | Economics | Credit Card debts in the US. How do you accumulate CC debts in the US? I'm German and I can't possibly do this with my CC. My bank granted me a CC with a credit line of 5k€. Once a month, they take EVERYTHING I owe them from my giro account. If my giro account is in the minus, they charge a 6.9% interest per year on that. There is 0% interest on my CC. So it is basically a free loan for up to 4 weeks. How does this work in the US? | It's likely the same way it works in the UK. You spend on a credit card and you don't have to pay it all off at once. We can choose to pay back whatever we want on it as long as it's the minimum payment amount or more. You then have that debt until it's paid off. Depending on the limit of the card some people can just spend all they want and accumulate a massive debt which will then take them years to pay off. | 3 |
6mpcz8 | Economics | Why are salaries at fast food places like McDonald's so low, even though they're multi-billion dollar companies? I'm just wondering why these restaurants can't afford to pay their employees a little more. They're incredibly rich companies. It's no skin off their noses, right? | Can they? Yes. Do they need to? No. The qualifications to be a McDonald's worker are so low that basically every person in the United States could do it. Not only that, but the amount of training required to get them up to speed is minimal. You now have a situation where if you work at Mcdonalds, every American is a potential replacement for you, and could be trained and running with in two weeks. Keeps wages down. | 3 |
7bpb8o | Engineering | What happens when DC current is applied to an AC induction motor? | If you have a big DC source supplying the power that can supply enough power then your AC motor will suffer a "thermal event" Without the changing of the AC signal then the motor won't spin, if the motor isn't spinning then it doesn't push back on the current by creating "Back EMF", and without it spinning the motor just looks like a long wire, aka a short which will lead to the motor acting like a toaster not a motor. | 1 |
hd5ot0 | Physics | If the planets orbit in elliptical orbits, and the sun sits at one of the foci for each planet, what's at the other foci? | The answer is nothing. The eclipse and the foci are just mathematical solutions to what happens if two objects is attracted to another with a force that inversely proportional to the square of the distance and it moves an initial sideways motion. Is it is not the larger object that sit in the foci it is the barycenter of the two objects ie the center of mass of both. And both will orbit that point. In a situation like a satellite orbiting earth or earth around the sun, the foci are very close to the center of mass of larger objects so the common simplification that one is ins the foci is valid. But if you look at the earth-moon orbit the barycenter is 4670km or 73% of earth radius towards the moon from the center of the earth. So you significant wobble when moon orbit is For the sun and Jupiter, the barycenter is just outside the sun. This wobble has been used to detect planets around other stars. For Pluto and is moon Charon it is 1.8 Pluto radius from the center of pluto and it is [quite clear]( URL_0 ) in image of the obit that both orbit a common point | 3 |
fvc5y6 | Biology | How can you lose an entire limb and survive, but sever a single blood vessel in your limb and bleed to death in seconds? | First of all, bleeding to death in seconds is a Hollywood trope. The only blood vessels that transport enough blood by volume to die in seconds are typically very close to the heart, in the torso, and protected by the rib cage. Generally, wounds that would sever those veins or arteries would strike the heart itself, which is pretty universally fatal. The heart can sustain very little injury and function enough to keep a person alive. Any sort of puncture wound, even if it partially punctures the tissue, often tears into a full opening under the stress the heart bears while pumping blood. Most vessels in your limbs, even if completely severed, would take 15-20 minutes to bleed to death. You would probably fall unconcious before that though, around the 10-15 minutes. That being said, typically, wounds become more fatal the longer it remains untreated. A properly applied turnicate on a severed limb to stop the bleeding is enough to extend an injured person's life from minutes to hours. | 6 |
k2m4if | Technology | Why do GPU cards need "separate" RAM? With GPUs, they typically state RAM values as well. Why would GPUs need their own RAM when I have RAM cards installed as well? Or does the GPU really draw from the memory cards I have? | Graphics computations take a lot of that memory, and will therefore put a lot of traffic through the bus that allows the motherboard to interact with normal RAM. It creates a bottleneck that can/will impact performance. A common thing laptops do is to only have the graphics processor from a GPU on the motherboard - and leech off the total system RAM, this saves them space on the motherboard so they can keep the laptop slim. But this also means that you won't have great performance even if it's using a top-of-the-line graphics processor, because it's hitting a bottleneck at the RAM. If you're using a tower, though, space isn't really much of an issue as it is for laptops - and they can/will avoid bottlenecks by giving the GPU it's own memory to read/write from. | 3 |
90tw5o | Technology | If games can render near photo-realistic graphics in real-time, why does 3D animation software (e.g Blender) take hours or even days to render simple animations? | Games cannot render near photo-realistic graphics in real-time. Not even close. Most of their graphics are pre rendered. 3d animation software takes days because it do all of the work by itself, it's not already completed. | 24 |
7qdvn9 | Physics | If light moves at a constant speed, does it never need to speed up? How can it be instantly at 300,000km/s? A photon of light from the sun travelling at that speed passes me, as I turn on a torch. Each light photon hits the ground at the same time, right? Doesn't the torchlight need to accelerate to the 300,000km/s speed, so it should lag behind? Edit - Spelling | Consider that **everything** moves at full speed through space time. Me, you, photons, everything. As photons are massless, they travel at full speed (~300,000km/s) through space, but do not travel at all through time, they do not experience time. On the other hand, we are massive objects. We travel at full speed through time (travelling forward through time at a rate of one second per second), but are relatively stationary in space. However, the faster we move through space, the slower we move through time to balance things out. We are always travelling the same speed through space time. When viewed as 4 dimensional space time, everything is travelling at full speed, all the time. | 14 |
iqhrob | Biology | What is consciousness? | As near as we can tell, consciousness is an emergent property. For generations now we've failed to positively identify a biological or physiological mechanism responsible for it, yet we clearly have it. We've believed for a very long time that humans are the only species on the planet with true consciousness. But because it's so hard to define and describe it, and as our understanding of animal intelligence has expanded over the last century, we've begun to identify some species (dolphins, whales, corvids) that may or may not experience a level of consciousness more similar to our own than previously expected. Netflix's *Explained* series had an [episode on animal intelligence]( URL_0 ) you may or may not find interesting. | 1 |
7wi0dg | Other | What are curlers screaming about? | The sweeper has a better view of the rock, but the rest of the team has a better view of the overall geometry. | 4 |
9qh0jh | Physics | What is Ionization energy? | An ion is an atom that has gained or lost one electron, leaving it with a positive or negative charge - this is the loose definition of ionization. Ionization energy is the measure of the amount of energy required to remove one electron, thereby ionizing an atom. | 1 |
6joke5 | Physics | Copenhagen Interpretation. Imagine you have a cube. To describe the cube, you need equations. When the system of the cube is unobserved, it is described with multiple equations and is therefore indefinite. However, when you observe the system, the equations collapse into one single equation that describes the system in a definite state. So say the unobserved system's equations were a + b = c, a = c + c - b^3, and a + b + c = c + b + a/2. When the system is measured, the equation becomes a + b + c = d. Therefore, the muddy fuzzy indefinite system becomes clear and concise. That's the Copenhagen Interpretation is in my head. Is that correct? I have lots of difficulty comprehending classical physics that is represented with equations. Now, the pilot-wave theory. Assuming that a system contained one electron, that electron exists in an epistemically ambivalent state wherein it both exists and doesn't exist, à la Schrödinger's thing*. So, in my head, this means that there are two equations describing the electron, wherein one equation describes the electron exists in spacetime and the other describes it not existing. Now, when the system is measured, the two equations collapse into one equation and the particle begins existing in spacetime. In my head, this is the pilot-wave theory. Is that correct? * = I can't mention this thing because the Automod deleted the post thing it's be better suited for r / this-thing | This answer is not going to satisfy you, and I must stick to an ELI5 requirement but the best I can do here is say that I understand what you are asking and we all struggle with the notion. Here I go: In your first paragraph you are describing a cube that exists and has a real measurable quantity. It is unchanged whether we look at it or not. We don't yet know the actual measurement of the cube, but we know perfectly it's proportions without even seeing it. True this cube exists as a concept, and I can tell you exactly the formula for this unseen cube before either of us measure it, and lo and behold this formula will always be right, every time. But the cube did not collapse. It existed before we measured it. Now for your second paragraph. Pilot-wave theory is great for intuitively understanding what is going on for laymen such as ourselves, but it is never meant to be an actual description of what the quantum world looks like. There are not two descriptions describing the electron. There is only one, and it is the Schrödinger description. The Schrödinger description is one of the most accurate, yet admittedly unsatisfying equations humanity has ever discovered. As much as it hurts, an electron is everywhere and nowhere simultaniously. For real. And electrons are all identical. Feynman himself in a moment of frustration exclaimed "There is ONLY one electron! And it is everywhere". He just may be right. You mentioned that you have difficultly understanding classical physics, but I think you understand classical physics just fine. The better you understand classical physics, the more the Copenhagen description hurts. Classical physics is the world of Newton that all makes sense before the modern, more accurate world of Einstein's relativity and then Copenhagen. At the end of the day your electron is certainly not like the cube that is undiscovered, with all it's qualities known in advance yet unknown. Your electron can only be expressed as a probability at best, knowing everything and nothing about it at the same time. | 1 |
i2ec61 | Engineering | What's the obstacle between us and automated driving? It seems like we have all we need. Is there something big in our way? | The technology and hardware isn't there yet. I remember viewing a vide on the topic once, and fully autonomous driving is still way far off. In terms of steps, 1-5, we're currently at about step 2, where step 5 is where we want to be. & #x200B; It's mostly a matter of time, software gets developed and fleshed out, and the hardware gets progressively stronger without requiring more space or power. But it won't be next year, or the year after. | 1 |