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cqp7vo | Other | How do actors/actress do sex scenes in tv/film? Im talking about the ones where actors/actress are fully naked and you can see their asses. | Hi! Film producer here! So when it comes to sex scenes, everything begins with actors consent of course and you have Sex Scene Coordinators who orchestrate a lot of that paperwork and so forth. However, when it comes down to actually shooting a sex scene there's a lot that is considered for the actual image itself which involves actors, costume design, set design, and the sex scene coordinators. More often than not, if we can cover an actor (by blankets, shot trickery with clever placed items/furniture, or simply clothing that fits the scene with action that implies sex) then we will do that first. This keeps actors clothed and comfortable, letting them focus on their characters in the scene and the story itself that's being told. Any nudity that is necessary in a shot can be broken down into 'levels'. Level 1- Fully clothed as mentioned before, including revealing clothes/underwear. No explicit nudity implied/required. Level 2 - Actors only remove the clothing that is necessary to imply explicit nudity in the shot. E.G. Its a waist up shot, actors are clothed from the waist down in whatever they find comfortable. Level 3 - Nude coloured underwear. Usually small briefs for a man, and a thong with a small bra or even pasties for a woman. Useful for shots that a far away or for obscured actors behind patterned glass or light fabrics. Level 4 - Only the bits get covered. You have a little pull-string nude-coloured bag that a man puts his cock n balls in, and a sticky, nude 'patch' that covers the womans vagina or a even a very hairy merkin that covers the whole vagina. Depends on what's necessary. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WILL AN ACTOR BE FULLY NUDE ON SET WITHOUT A LOT OF EXPLICIT KNOWLEDGE, CONSENT, AND PAPERWORK. Actors will only be nude for the shots where it's 1000% necessary with clothes being taken off/put on between shot changes and lots of cover for between takes. This is also normally only seen by a bare bones crew as most actors ask for a 'closed set' when performing these scenes. SOURCE: Am independant film producer. | 13 |
a3iz33 | Biology | How did courier birds throughout history know where to deliver their letter? | Courier birds were usually "carrier pigeons". You put a "coop" - basically a box with some straw and a few small doors - up on your rooftop and raised a pigeon in it, and it made that box its home. Then comes the secret. Pigeons have excellent sense that help them navigate long distances. They can use the earth's magnetic field to find their way home once released from pretty much anywhere else, even if they don't have anything visual to look at as clues for direction. So, once your pigeon makes your coop its home, you take that pigeon to some other location, maybe send it to the front lines of the current battle, or to a different city. There it stays until it's needed to carry a message. Then your agent at that location ties a message to its leg and releases it, and it flies home, delivering the message. Fun fact: pigeons also make excellent smugglers, and have been used to bring small quantities of drugs over borders. | 4 |
n0g8kz | Physics | How do speakers produce multiple sounds at the same time. | Basically you're adding together sounds. All the sounds added together make a pattern, and the speaker vibrates that pattern. It's a bit like... Imagine painting. Splash blue paint on a page, the light reflects and you see the page and blue marks. Splash yellow on the page, the light reflects and you see yellow. Splash those two exact same patters on the same page, you'll see blue, yellow, and green where they mix together. It's a bit like that, except instead of the light reflecting off the page and paint and into your eye, the speaker vibrates the mix of sounds together into your ears. | 7 |
j4xqzg | Engineering | How does water in the public water supply obtain enough pressure to move tens of km/miles and into the taps without losing any of the pressure? | Simple hydraulics? Water doesn’t compress. Push here, it squeezes out there. This is the way. | 6 |
i32dtj | Biology | Why is it if a person eats a 5 pound steak or something, they won't gain exactly 5 pounds? I just watched a video of a guy eating a 9 pound pizza but when he finished it, he ended up gaining 21 pounds | That video is total bs, he ate/drank something besides just the pizza, or is wearing different clothes, or in Some way is screwing up the scale. It breaks the laws to physics, the conservation of matter, to turn 9 lbs of food into an extra 21 pounds | 5 |
90uzkh | Other | When a bike chain slip off the cassette and you place it back on any speed, the derailleur place it back on the speed it was on before it fell off. How does the derailleur know which speed it was on before? | Bike derailleurs, unless you are talking about electronic ones, don't "know" anything. The derailleur has a spring that tries to put it in the gear closest to the frame or, in some rare cases, furthest from the frame. That position is set by a limiting screw to keep the derailleur from pulling the chain all the way into the frame .The cable then sets the position a specific distance away from there for every "click" of the shifter. In a correctly matched system, that distance is the same as the distance between the cogs on the cassette. The cassette and chain on modern bikes also have ramps machined into them which help smoothly guide the chain across the cassette if it isn't inline with the derailleur. Basically, after the chain falls off, if you don't touch the shifter, the derailleur position doesn't change and it is lined up with a specific cog. Once the gears start turning the ramps will guide the chain back to whichever gear the derailleur is lined up with because the chain is trying to stay in a straight line. | 2 |
k4dang | Chemistry | Why are grease and electrical fires bad with water? Also would it be possible to put them out with excessive water, like throwing it into rain or the sea? | Oil and water dont mix and water is denser than oil so it sinks. The heat of the pan or surface will instantly boil the water which is now under the grease. The steam and boiling action will fling oil everywhere and basically cause an explosion. Google a video of it. If you drop oil or grease that's on fire I to a large body of water the flaming grease will just sit on top and continue to burn. And water is a conductor so dumping water on an electrical fire is a good way to electrocute yourself. | 3 |
c34lta | Biology | Why are animals and fauna no longer as large as they once were? What has changed about our world that mega fauna and mega animals no longer exist? | Humans. Look at Australia, Europe, America. Wherever humans spread to, megafauna vanish. They’re either really good food sources or dangerous predators to exterminate, and early humans had zero interest in conservation. | 5 |
egp7nb | Biology | why our body gets a burning cold sensation when we are cold and go into hot water (typically happens with cold feet and hands) | No blood in finger No feeling in finger Warm water on finger but no feeling so brain says this must be hurty | 2 |
8m13n8 | Technology | Data storage. How are drives becoming much smaller but the storage capacity becoming much greater... | Your teacher tells you the final is 1page open notes. First start making your notes using normal pencil and 8.5x11. You run out of room, so you decide to redo the notes using sharper mechanical pencil with regular 0.5mm lead and you write smaller letters. You run out of room again and you decide to use even sharper 0.3 mm lead and write even smaller. The individual data box where hard drives are writing data is getting smaller and smaller. You used to be able to measure it with a ruler. Now you can't see it with a regular microscope | 1 |
a57gij | Biology | How are Rats and other smaller Mammals with tiny limbs capable of moving so fast? | Very light body/very strong muscles. More power than we do + much less weight makes for a faster animal. | 5 |
c65ot7 | Biology | Why don’t humans have the natural instinct to chase anything that moves like most predators do? | Humans are omnivores with very large brains so we can overcome many instincts about hunting as well as our hunting methods being different from animals like cats and dogs. That being said throw a tennis ball across a school yard and watch what happens | 3 |
963ytn | Physics | If every living human body disappeared off the face of the Earth all at once, would anything happen to the planet's orbit? | Yes! There would be change in the orbit of the Earth. The Earth does not technically orbit the Sun, rather, the two objects orbit a common point in space, called the barycenter, about 450km from the center of the Sun. (still *well* within the Sun, but the Earth causes a 450km "wobble" of the Sun) If all humans were to vanish, the barycenter would change by about 30 nanometers. | 1 |
cjcpfi | Biology | Why is it advised to NOT give water to someone that's bleeding due to an accident? | There seems to be two major explanations for this. The big one is it's a choking hazard. People who are severely injured tend to vomit or could have trouble swallowing. So there's a chance this could end up in the lungs and now you have more problems to deal with. ~~A minor explanation is that when suffering trauma, shock is a big concern. Shock can cause your body temperature to drop. So giving water could sap heat from the casualty.~~ this appears to be bullshit. If you are with an injured person and they request water it is advised to moisten their lips. Less than a mouthful of water. Just enough to wet their mouth and make them comfortable again. | 13 |
6f1r36 | Economics | What are annuities, what are the different types, and what are the differences within them? How can they be used to advance one financially? | Actuary here. I've worked with annuities at a life insurance company for several years. There are two basic types of annuities, deferred annuities and payout annuities. Deferred annuities act like a bank account. You put money in and it grows at a fixed rate or some other rate determined directly or indirectly by a market index (depends on the type of deferred annuity you have. These are usually used before retirement. The money grows tax deferred, which means that you don't pay taxes on the earnings until you start withdrawing the money. Payout annuities provide income, either for retirement or from a lawsuit payout (aka structured settlements). These can have both life contingent and non-life contingent pieces. Life contingent means it's dependent on the life of the person. This makes life contingent annuities good for protecting against living too long in retirement. Non-life contingent means a fixed amount of time, e.g. 20 years. You'll often see a "life annuity with 10 year certain." That means that it pays out for the maximum of 10 years or the life of the person with the annuity. | 2 |
5zm0cd | Culture | The Ides of March What was it? How was it observed? Were there "Ides" of other months? Is it still considered to fall on March 15 even though we use the Gregorian calendar? | The Ides were the middle of any month, on the Roman Calendar. It was supposed to concur with the Full Moon of each month. On the Roman Calendar, March (called Martius) was actually the first month, so the Ides of March was the first Full Moon of the new year. All Ides were sacred to Jupiter, the Roman supreme deity, but the Ides of March in particular involved celebration and tradition to welcome in the new year, celebrating the deity Anna Perenna. The notoriety of the Ides or March was changed when Julius Caesar was assassinated on that day. Interestingly enough, Julius' Julian calendar changed the first month of the year, altering the Ides of March's original significance. | 2 |
9ecq3k | Other | how do we know that our calendar is accurate? | The calendar is based on the position of the sun relative to the other stars in the sky, as seen from earth. This is something that has been observed by humans since ancient times. So even if every calendar-keeping device disappeared and every human forgot what day of the year it was, as long as we knew what position of the sun corresponded to what day on the calendar, we could figure out that today is September 9. There is then the issue of what year it is. The year number is of course arbitrary and varies among cultures, but human cultures are unlikely to lose track of years. | 2 |
75esyn | Physics | The most recent physics noble prize | You've already gotten some solid explanations about it, so I'll try to add onto those a bit. Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, but until LIGO, nobody had ever been able to observe them because the warping they cause are *incredibly* small. So how did they detect them? LIGO is a very advanced laser interferometer, which is a device that works (on a very basic level) by splitting a laser beam into two, shifting one half of it so that it will cancel out with the other half, and recombining them. If nothing happens to the unshifted half, then the two "deconstructively interfere" (essentially, cancel each other out). However, if something causes the unshifted half to change in some way, the two won't cancel out, and light will be sent to a detector. As the ripple from a gravitational wave passes through, it warps space-time. This has the effect of making the path that the unshifted half of the LIGO interferometer takes have a *very, very slightly* different length, which causes the two to not cancel out completely. The problem is that since the change is so slight, it's extremely difficult to detect that it has happened. LIGO was able to detect that slight difference, and through it, discover strong evidence for the existence of gravitational waves as predicted by Einstein. I was lucky enough to intern with some physicists working on trying to design improvements for LIGO (not the ones who won the Nobel; LIGO is a huge undertaking with lots of people working on it) a couple of years ago, so seeing all of this happen recently has been really cool. | 2 |
co7b9z | Biology | How do we bleed without tearing a vein? If blood runs in our veins, how come we bleed when we get a (not deep at all) cut? We don't cut our veins (I think) because we would die from that? How can we bleed? | Same reason you can drive to your house from the interstate. Veins and arteries are the interstates. But there's also boulevards and side streets called venules and capillaries that take blood all the way to your skin. | 10 |
7ut7z9 | Chemistry | Atomic Theory was there although they weren't able to actually see the atoms by that time. How did they come about the notion of Atoms and Sub-Atomic Particles like Protons, Neutrons and Electrons? | **Electrons** By energizing gases with electricity, scientists were able to produce a stream of glowing particles. Since these particles were affected by magnetic fields, they were able to determine that they had a charge (a negative one). Based on how the magnetic fields deflected the particles, they could estimate their mass. Thus, they discovered that atoms could emit these very tiny, negatively charged particles that they (ultimately) dubbed "electrons." **Atomic Nucleus** Since atoms are overall neutral, there must be some positive substance to balance out the negative electrons. The first explanation was that atoms existed as some sort of positive blob in which electrons just existed. This was known as the "Plum Pudding Model." This was disproved experimentally. They took a very thin sheet of gold, a single atom thick, and shot positively charged alpha particles at it. Most of the time, the alpha particle would just shoot through, as expected. However, sometimes, it would deflect backwards, which was unexpected and could only be explained if there was a concentrated positive mass in the center of the atom. Thus, the nucleus was discovered. **Protons** Protons could be isolated in streams of particles much in the same way that electrons could. But since protons could be bound together in nuclei, it was more difficult to isolate them as single particles. It was always commonly believed that Hydrogen was a theoretical building block of heavier atoms, and Hydrogen nucleus was the smallest particle of positive charge they could account for. It was eventually discovered that all atoms had some multiple of this Hydrogen nucleus, which they dubbed the "Proton." **Neutrons** Unfortunately, while the discovery of electrons and protons improved our understanding of the atom, it was not a complete picture. There were many properties of atoms that could not be explained with just protons and electrons, so scientists theorized there was a neutrally charged particle somewhere in there: the neutron. Per the norm in atomic and subatomic studies, they learned more by smashing things together (a tactic still viable today). They found in some experiments the emission of particles that were as heavy as protons but did not have a charge: they found the elusive neutron (after initially mistaking it for gamma radiation). **Quarks** Things get a little more technical, but basically the development of quantum mechanics called a lot of our existing theories into question, forcing us to rethink how the universe operates on a tiny level. Part of this was to redesign protons and neutrons as consisting of smaller particles which they called quarks. The discovery of quarks happened much like the discover of other particles. They smashed things together and see what came out of the resulting explosion. Behavior in magnetic fields allow us to determine charge and mass. | 1 |
h1355n | Biology | When the doctor/nurse takes blood from you, why do they try to find a vein, not an artery? And also why is this mainly done on the arm as opposed to other parts of the body? | Veins bleed less than arteries when you remove the needle, because the pressure is less in the veins. They are easier to see as well, the arteries in the arm can be felt but not well seen. Another thing people aren’t saying is risk. Doing arterial lines and ABGs have a risk of vasospasm, which is when the vessel “clamps down”, and can restrict blood flow. This is bad because arteries supply tissue with blood, and the tissue will die if it gets no blood, but that’s fairly rare. We do arterial lines in the wrist because there are other arteries that also supply blood to the hand, should vasospasm occur in the artery we are working on. The arm is just easiest, and least uncomfortable for people. | 12 |
e7q3bu | Biology | How does your muscle grow stronger/thicker upon being damaged? | To add to the other answers, nobody really knows if it is the damage that causes growth. Other competing factors are tension, metabolic stress, or other mechanisms that i frankly don't know. Edit: this study for example found that the body does not increase protein synthesis in muscles until after the microtraumata are rrepaired. This might indicate that one should maximize their training while trying to minimize muscle damage. URL_0 | 3 |
8c2k42 | Culture | Why do men have a higher insurance rate, and why is that not considered discrimination? | Empirical evidence, i.e. years of automotive insurance claim data, clearly shows that men are involved in more accidents, costing more money. | 5 |
gwxizh | Other | how do long surgeries work? do they do shifts with another surgeon? like is there someone always on stand by if the one working on the person is tired or need to use the bathroom? | Also, you work differently on the table. I stood there for hours and hours not feeling anything cause you are highly concentrated and just do what needs to be done but afterwards you basically drop cause then exhaustion finds you. Thats for emergencys or difficult operations. There are some elective ones that also takes ages there you are not that concentrated cause its not a life or death issue and you let another one take over or go for a break while another takes over and comes back. The instruments for example in our hospital have to be ordered the same way by everyone in case when I drop to the ground or get sick of a sudden another one can take over without loosing time rearrange the instruments | 4 |
gsysej | Biology | How are science able to determine what colours animals can and can't see? | You test the animals. You teach an animal that if it sees a $ in a pattern of dots, touching it gives a food reward. Then you put a red $ on a blue card, and see if the animal reacts. Then a red $ on a green card, then .... When you look at the pattern of right vs wrong, you know which colors the animal can distinguish. BTW, this is also how we test for color-blindness in humans, only without the food rewards. | 4 |
5y2q9x | Mathematics | If I flip a coin 1 million times, what are the odds of having an equal number of heads and tail ? If I flip a coin 1 million times, what are the odds of having an equal number of heads and tail ? | Having *exactly* a 50/50 split over 1,000,00 trials is a very small probability - way less than 1%. Getting *close*, on the other hand, is very likely - 68% of the time you're be within 500 either way & 95% of the time you'll be with 1000 either way. [Lots of boring math stuff about probabilities and binomial distributions can be found in this /r/askscience thread]( URL_0 ). | 2 |
7su189 | Technology | Why have Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter during the past year gone from chronological newsfeeds to “customized” newsfeeds? | I think an idiom from the world of IT is relevant here: "If a product is free, you aren't the customer; you **are** the product." Facebook exists to package your attention span and sell it to advertisers (as do nearly all free services). They have extensive research that tells them this is the most effective way to monetize your attention. The entire Facebook interface *especially* your timeline is tuned to engaging you emotionally to get you to continue to click on Facebook content, delivering more information to Facebook about your preferences which is sold to advertisers. | 7 |
5w85dr | Technology | Why do glasses need UV protection when people who don't need glasses are fine without it? | Glass need extra UV protection because the theory of glass is to foucs the light at the back wall of the eye (where the photo receptors are), if the sunlight passes through a lens without UV protection and there will be a high intensity of UV rays which would be harmful for the eye. Furthermore, the normal eye(without glasses) also protects from UV rays, but as the lenses of the glasses concentrate the intensity of light falling on the eye. It harms the eye all in all | 4 |
830i40 | Biology | How/why do different strains of marijuana produce different effects? | The active ingredients in marijuana are called cannabinoids, of which there are over 100 known. All of these have different effects, both on their own and in interaction with others. Different strains are bred to have different combinations and concentrations of these, referred to as the strain's "cannabinoid profile". | 18 |
64ar8x | Other | What's the difference between clementines, tangerines and mandarins? Edit: Damn, front page, thanks you guys. | I am not botanist but I do like me my citrus fruit so I will take a stab at this. Basically mandarins are naturally occurring citrus fruits, along with the pomelo, citron and Papeda. Tangerines are a descendant of mandarins or closely related to mandarins from Morocco. Clementines are a human made hybrid of oranges and mandarins. Now that we are to oranges, they are a hybrid of pomelo and mandarins. Most citrus fruit you eat and can find are generally hybrids of the first four there. Edit: I apparently need to learn how to count... | 15 |
d3jiwx | Physics | Flight path of the international space station If you look at a map of the global the flight path of the ISS moves in a wave across the earth. Last month the ISS flew over my house from NW to SE. tonight it will fly over again from SW to NE, How is that possible? | It isn't moving in a wave; it's moving in a straight line. The Earth is a sphere. The map you're looking at is, I presume, a flat rectangle, and that distorts the surface the closer you get to the poles. The ISS' orbit is at an angle relative to the equator, so there's a point where it gets as far south as it can, and then starts heading north again. That's the bottom of the wave you see on the map. | 3 |
7as73h | Technology | How are racing games able to show the time with an accuracy of 1/1,000 of a second when they run at only 60 FPS? | what's being displayed and what's being recorded are entirely separate. the game knows exactly when you crossed the line at 1/1000 second accuracy. but it only displays it at 1/60 accuracy. you'll never be able to tell the difference. it's like if you're recording something once every second, but you only give updates once a minute. that once a minute update is your fps. | 3 |
fl8huf | Biology | how birds, bees and other small flying creatures remember their path back to nest? No roads, no boards, no directions, still able to reach home daily after few miles of search for food. *after flying few miles | Roadnames and signs and stuff are not the only landmarks available for navigation. Imagine yourself in russia with all the street name,signs and directions in unreadable characters. You would chose different things as landmarks, like that big tree down the block, or the funny looking house around the corner and stuff like that. Or the small river a few minutes walk past the big tree. | 2 |
and2e3 | Biology | How do bees survive if we keep taking honey from them? like they need that stuff too right? | Think about honey as rent, we don't take all of it, just like a landlord wont nick all of your money if you have been a good tenant,because they want you to rent in the future. | 3 |
6yjytk | Physics | How come adding or removing protons creates a completely new element, while adding or removing a neutron or electron produces a relatively minor change (isotopes and ions)? | Well, adding or removing an electron is a big deal. Na(0) burns in water, while Na(1+) makes it salty; Cl(0) burns out your lungs and ultimately kills you, while Cl(1-) just helps Na(1+) make water salty. Adding or removing a proton is a big deal, too -- because "as above, so below", one more proton "below" (in the nucleus) means one more electron "above" (in the electron shell), and electrons are a big deal. Neutrons, however, have no electric charge, adding or removing a neutron doesn't affect number of electrons. So no big deal (unless that neutron makes the nucleus unstable, but this is another cool story). | 3 |
jfb37f | Economics | How does investing work, and what reasons would you have to encourage more people to do it? | You basically put money into investment goods. You buy parts of a company, or so called derivates, that are for example options to buy something later. The reason why so many people try to encourage it has 3 aspects. First the platforms make money by taking fees. Then other traders enjoy inexperienced competition they can draw money from, and third companies like investments because it helps them expand. | 1 |
m3c85o | Technology | What is camera obscura? How and When it happens? | Imagine you have a large TV screen facing a wall 2m away. The light from the TV is hitting the wall, but you can see a picture on the wall. It's just all fuzzy. This is because the light from the TV shines out in all directions. The top of the wall is getting hit by light from the whole TV. Now suppose you put some kind of screen up in the middle, 1m from each side. You poke a tiny hole in the centre, which lets a little light through. Now, the top of the wall can see through the hole to the bottom of the TV. Similarly, the bottom of the wall can see the top of the TV. This means light from the TV shines through the pinhole onto the wall, and projects an image of the TV which is upsidedown and back to front. The smaller the pinhole, the dimmer the image is because less light can get through. But *also* the sharper the image is, because the light is more directional. This is how a camera obscura works. But instead of a TV, it can just be the outside world. If you put a film inside, you have a pinhole camera that you can take pictures with. | 2 |
6i8dpv | Culture | How come humans usually do not consume insects? Even though they are a great food source and most omnivores have no problem eating them, including our closest animal relatives. | What do you mean humans do not usually consume insects? What kind of humans have you been hanging out with? | 8 |
6gxlis | Economics | In what aspects is the Great Depression of 1929 the same/different from the Financial Crisis of 2008? I have basic understanding of economics, but I would appreciate it if someone could compare and contrast the two recessions in simple understandable terms. Thank you in advance! | You can't really compare the two beyond "they were both really bad." I'm more familiar with the causes of the 2008 Crisis. But to generalize, a *lot*, on the causes of both: **Great Depression:** A stock market crash triggers a mass bank panic triggering cascading bank failures triggering a general contraction in consumer spending due to people hoarding their savings in anticipation of *really hard times*. This grinds the global economy to a halt, triggering mass layoffs and unemployment, exacerbating the current crisis. The Hoover Administration, believing the initial crisis was a simple market correction, does nothing to alleviate it, exacerbating the crisis as it continues to spiral out of control. National governments hoarding gold supplies (looking at you France and the US) also worsens the crisis because the inflexibility of the gold standard constrains the ability of governments to stabilize their economies; this leads to many governments abandoning the gold standard as the crisis worsens. The Crisis is *further* worsened across the world because many governments respond to it by raising tariffs, which means everyone else raises tariffs in retaliation, grinding global trade to a halt. All of these factors contribute to what was by far the worst economic crisis in human history, which is only alleviated by unprecedented government intervention in the economy by every affected Western government. **2008 Recession:** Privatization of mortgage loans, the massive expansion of the mortgage derivative market, and lack of government oversight of the two lead to an excessive relaxation of loaning standards for mortgages - the banks had run out of people to issue safe loans to, but since they want to reap even *more* massive profits they elect to relax their standards and issue progressively riskier loans to people with lower income. In 2001, the Federal Reserves lowers interest rates to 1% to offset the effect of the dotcom bubble, but the War of Terror combined with Bush Administration tax and monetary policy leads this interest rate to remain low for a dangerous amount of time, leading to the rapid development of an enormous housing bubble in the real estate market. The market for mortgage derivatives becomes many, many, many times larger than the actual market for real estate. When the Federal Reserve gradually returns interest rates to normal levels from 2006-2008, the bubble bursts, millions of lower-income Americans default on their (extremely risky and unwise) mortgages, causing the bottom to fall out of the real estate market and the mortgage derivative market. By this point the system has become so ridiculously complex and interconnected between the big investment banks that many of these banks start failing, exacerbating the crisis. Because all other Western economies are very closely tied to the US economy, this crisis affects the global economy as well. The Crisis would have been much, much worse, but the US government intervened by bailing out the big banks and injecting stimulus into the economy to maintain the level of spending. Furthermore, the crisis is compounded by the long-anticipated failures of both Chrysler and GM, who also require a bailout to stay afloat. However, because of the interventions the Crisis is much more manageable and the economy recovers within a few years. The biggest difference between the two is that by 2008 a policy of government intervention to stabilize the economy in a crisis had become common sense, while back in the 1930s it was viewed as unnecessary until the crisis had spiraled completely out of control. Both of these crises demonstrate how close the relationship is between the private sector, government, and the consumer population - all are interconnected, and what affects one will affect the others as well. | 2 |
di7bjc | Biology | How does laying in a dark room, silent, motionless, eyes closed but conscious not give us the same benefits of actually being asleep. Trying to understand how being unconscious changes how our bodies regenerate during this time even though they are physically in the same state. | If I remember correctly, then a Ted Talk explained it that when you are awake, then nutrients go into the brain cells, making them expand. This process takes place the whole time you are awake, but when you sleep, then the "flow" reverses and that allows the waste from cell activity to get removed, thus the cells themselves "rest". It also explained that because of this process, actually going for an all-nighter would have a similar effect to a concussion. Edit: video [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 ) | 3 |
6g1nkh | Other | how do loud snorers not wake themselves up? | Some actually do wake themselves up on occasion. My grandma did it often. For those who don't wake up it is similar to how we get used to bad smells after a while. Our body filters it out if it experienced it often enough. | 3 |
l9e9vm | Other | Regression to mean in practical life: So I just read about to regression to mean in great detail in a book. It pointed out as side from effort/skill, luck has a great influence in outcomes. This lead we wondering that exam papers we give are also affected by our luck as regression to mean applies on it. So are papers really the right way to evaluate Students? I would really sore'Kate you thoughts on it. Sorry for bad english | Regression to the mean works on the principle that it's easier to perform at a level that is "average" for you than one that is exceptionally good *or* exceptionally bad. You might do really well or really badly on a test, for example, but if you did tests of similar difficulty a hundred times, the vast majority of them would have scores within a few points of where your real skill lies. Sure, you'd have outliers where you scored perfectly or where you failed nearly every question, but those would be just that - outliers. | 1 |
fh1s5z | Chemistry | If heating things up causes them to expand, how come clothes shrink when putting them through the wash? | Fibres cling together when shrinkage occurs. The temperature is not the culprit. Agitation is more often the cause. | 1 |
6cz6m4 | Biology | Why does sweat smell? | Your skin is covered in mostly harmless bacteria. The moist environment created by sweat is a prime breeding ground for those little single-celled bastards, which produce stank-assed chemical compounds as waste products, leaving it all over the place like shitty roommates you can't get rid of without killing them all. | 1 |
9gk3x9 | Technology | Why is a PIN number considered safe with 4 numbers while a password needs 8 chars with numbers and capitals? | For a credit card, the PIN is an *extra* layer of security on top of needing to physically possess the card with the magnetic stripe. The card itself is the primary security layer, with the PIN adding extra protection against theft. For an online service, the password is the *only* layer of security, since the login is often public information. Because of this, the PIN doesn't need to actually be very secure in order to do its job. Consider the PIN to be a type of 2-Factor Authentication. The 2 factors are, as the saying goes, "something you have and something you know." For an online account, "something you know" is the password and "something you have" is your phone. For your credit card, "something you know" is the PIN and "something you have" is the card itself. In both of these cases, the second factor is usually pretty weak--most 2FA tokens are what, 6 characters tops? This is because the security comes from the fact that they're a second factor. Making the second factor stronger has a poor cost/benefit trade-off. Now I have no idea why your PC has both a PIN and a password. This only makes sense to me if either a) the password is for the (online) microsoft account and the PIN is just for the PC or b) the PIN gives user-level access but the password is required for admin functionality. | 4 |
8jrho2 | Culture | Charles Darwin was an Anglican, spent a lot of time studying theology, and in no way were his works an attack on the church. Now days he is viewed as a symbol for atheism. Why? | This is mostly a US based view, which has proliferated elsewhere via the internet. The majority of Christian denominations accept that evolution is real. However, a vocal minority of American denominations read the Bible literally and therefore assert that the theory of evolution can not be true. This vocal minority has therefore decided to paint Darwin as preaching a doctrine that is anti-Christian, or atheistic. In response to this, many atheists have risen to Darwin's defence, and claimed him as a figure for themselves (you may have seen [this parody]( URL_0 ) of the Jesus Fish symbol). Simply put, some Christians believe Darwin's theory conflicts with their beliefs. While some atheists are happy to be pissing of those Christians by boosting Darwin. | 24 |
933xm2 | Biology | Waking up suddenly at 4:30AM feeling full of energy vs falling back asleep for another 30mins and waking up feeling like you could use another 6Hrs. | When you sleep you need them to be in 2 hour measurements. Usually with a minimum of 6 hours. That extra 30 minutes seems like a great idea but you cannot fall asleep fully in 30 minutes. | 2 |
6cy93m | Other | How can there be so much opiate prescription drug abuse when, in theory, the number of manufactured pills and the number of prescriptions are known? Isn't it obvious the pills are being abused? It seems like it would be easy to see either the total number of pills made is roughly equal to the total number of pills prescribed. Of course there would be error, but the apparent market of the illicit opiate abuse seems to dwarf the actual intended purpose. | Yea it has a lot to do with big pharma pushing opiate pain relievers. They're cash cows for those companies that produce them. A couple decades ago opiate pain relievers were reserved for extreme circumstances and pain. But big pharma began pushing for their use with more common ailments. There are plenty of numbers on the the amounts of pills being shipped to each state but practices to stop overprescription is difficult. I've even read that Purdue the maker of OxyContin has a database of doctors they are watching as possible "pill mill" doctors but don't share it with the DEA saying it's not their job to police prescribers. It's really all about the money. | 55 |
i6klyn | Biology | Why do people get wrinklier with age? | If I recall URL_0 has to do with the elasticity of your skin slowly lessening over time. | 1 |
9i8lr1 | Engineering | what is stiff suspension and why would you want it? I’ve heard a lot of people in the car and mountain bike worlds talk about stiff suspension. I thought the purpose of suspension was to absorb shock and make as smooth and comfortable a ride as possible. Therefore wouldn’t it be better at this if the suspension was spongy and not stiff? Why would you want a stiff suspension? Surely you could just get a fixed bike with no suspension if that’s what you want? | The art of "dialing in" a suspension is a science and an art form. Too soft and the car will bounce around all 4 wheels like it is riding on balloons. Too stiff and bumps would rattle your teeth and brains to mush! Lotus, a British exotic car manufacturer, is generally known for being the masters of this art. Soft enough that when you hit a bump initially, that 1 corner of the suspension 'absorbs' the energy and travel distance without upsetting the rest of the car. Yet you want it stiff enough that the suspension "pushes" that one wheel back down on to the road as fast as possible to maintain traction after hitting the bump. The other aspect to all this is momentum transition. If you slam on the brakes, the front of the car nose dives downward , or the opposite, accelerating hard transitions the weight to the rear of the car lifting up the nose of the car. Turn left, and all the weight transitions to the right side, lifting weight off the left wheels. If your suspension is too stiff.. you WILL lift the left wheels off the ground. Too soft.. and the car will just lean and lean, not really getting leverage down to the wheels to help grab the pavement. | 6 |
98hl58 | Biology | When you scratch a scab, why does the scab grow back instead of normal flesh? | Cells on blood vessel walls produce anti-clotting factor. When a blood vessel is cut the blood escapes and comes into contact with cells that do not produce anti-clotting factor. So platelets and blood cells collect and form a clot. This stops the flow of blood. Then with blood flow stopped the blood vessel wall cells will start to divide to repair itself. Fibrous proteins will collect at the site to create a matrix for the cells to build on. Cell division is not a speedy way to close the gap. So if the gap is more than a few cells wide the fibers will keep building up and forms scar tissue. If the clot is outside the body it's a scab. When the wound is healed the scab falls off. Inside the body the clot would be broken down and reabsorbed by the body. If the scab is removed prematurely blood will leak out and produce a new scab. | 3 |
k5khxy | Engineering | what exactly do engineers do as a profession? | depends upon the type of engineer. some, like chemical engineers, have to create chemicals within a specific set of parameters with lots of research. others, like electrical engineers, need to fix things having to do with electrics and possibly create new electrical systems. so basically, Google is right when it says the definition of engineering is "the branch of science and technology concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, and structures." | 8 |
i1gv4l | Other | What does the road sign “Speed Limit enforced by aircraft” truly mean? | I used to see this on the highway at the border of NH/MA. The airplanes would fly overhead and calculate the times, then relay them to Troopers waiting at the toll stations at the border who would direct them to the sides to be ticketed. | 5 |
5zizpc | Biology | why is porn considered 18+ tough kids in 7th grade already learn about sex | Its important for kids to learn about their body since they're about to experience, or are starting to experience changes in their bodies. It's not as important for Johnny to learn that Katy might like it if he were to choke her a little while he sticks his dick in her butt | 3 |
64qrai | Biology | Why does cold water on the top of your head feel soothing and refreshing, but on your shoulders, chest and back, it's downright painful? Try it with your next shower. | I can't explain it, but as someone who has been shaving their head for the last 40 odd years, I can tell you that I've experienced very few things in this life that feel better than sinking my freshly shaved head into a smooth winter cold pillow. | 1 |
8e2z4p | Technology | Why x,y (0,0) in computer world positioned on Top-Left instead of Bottom-Left like in mathematics? | The first computers only printed out text (on actual paper) and later displayed text on monitors. And text is printed from top to bottom, so the y-coordinate for the character grid starts on top. I guess nobody wanted to have a different coordinate system when they introduced graphic modes. | 3 |
6ma2om | Biology | What makes the human body age/deteriorate?while we are young,our body develops and repairs faster compared to older self. | DNA strands could be loosely compared to shoelaces. The plastic caps that tip shoelaces (aka aglets) prevent the laces from fraying. There is a similar cap called telomeres on DNA as well. One of the theories is that as DNA replicates and as it winds and unwinds itself, the telomeres get damaged and shorten. The telomeres help protect the DNA strands themselves. Once the telomeres are damaged past their point of no return, then the DNA strands themselves start getting damaged and can't replicate as well as they did when we were younger. | 2 |
gyg1iu | Physics | Without air resistance, is it even possible to hit, kick or throw a curve ball in space? | Without **something** providing the resistance necessary, it's impossible. However, instead of using air pressure, you could throw a "curveball" by utilizing a source of gravity instead. You wouldn't need to apply any spin to the ball, but a source of gravity could cause the ball to curve. NASA does this all the time, it's called a "slingshot" or gravity assist. | 1 |
g3n0si | Biology | why were animals so colossal millions of years ago and why are modern day animals so much smaller than they used to be? The megalodon, terror birds, 7 foot penguins, dinosaurs, etc. | The largest animal to ever live is currently alive and swimming in the oceans. For you comparison you've got a bit of selection bias. The animals you've mentioned were alive and went extinct at various periods in the past 300 million years and are comparing them to animals only alive today. In addition only animals that are large tend to leave behind easily identifiable fossils so there's another layer of selection bias happening. | 5 |
6fl1ma | Repost | why movies generally shoot at 24 fps, but video games generally go for 60 or higher fps for the most cinematic experience? | Mainly because of motion blur. When your videogame creates the video, each frame is generated separately, and is a completely static image - you can take a screenshot and it will not appear as if it was a part of a video. When you shoot a movie, each image is exposed for a non-negligible amount of time, such as 1/60 or 1/100 of a second. During this time, motion is captured in the image, resulting in a small blur. This contributes to making the video appear more smooth. [This video]( URL_0 ) shows the difference between high shutter speed (= no motion blur) and low shutter speed (= motion blur). | 3 |
n6ipus | Biology | How high level athletes prevent their joints from deterioration with so much impact suffered everyday? Just watched some basketball and parkour videos and I was wondering how their bodies can handle it | Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, steroids. Most people think of gigantic muscular guys like Barry Bonds when they think of steroids, but tons of athletes use it not necessarily to get huge and gain muscle, but rather to speed up their body's recovery. | 14 |
ax6iga | Other | If crops have to be rotated often, how can trees (food producing or non) live and thrive in the same spot for decades? | A couple of reasons. Crops are mono-culture meaning there’s one thing growing. And then most of the plant is harvested. This depletes the soil of nutrients. A forest with trees is highly diverse. Each plant brings a specialty to the party which is good for the forest. | 3 |
bv66hj | Economics | How is Uber losing money? | It’s the biggest open secret in the start up world. You don’t *want* to turn a profit, because once you do you cease to get investments and you have to start paying investors back. As you continue your rounds of investments the initial investors get a higher percentage, so the last thing you want to do is have to pay those people. Chances are, they don’t have enough cash on hand to do it anyway. At best you want to be cash neutral, but ideally you stay in the hole until you IPO and then the public pays your investors back. It’s also part of why all those c-suite positions at virtually any tech company are 6 figures and crazy benefits. Part of it is to attract and retain talent but part of it also is to burn as much of the money as possible. So everything is designed to cost themselves money, and as you scale you’ll gain more investors and spend more money. And then eventually you’re a household name, or the only option, and that’s when you go public and let everyone else pick up the tab. [Here’s a great TechCrunch article about it ]( URL_0 ) | 5 |
cjcpfi | Biology | Why is it advised to NOT give water to someone that's bleeding due to an accident? | It takes time for your body to absorb water. From what I’ve read it takes about a half hour to absorb half of whatever you drank and an hour to absorb it all so drinking fluids is fine if you donate blood, not up you are hemorrhaging. This is why intravenous or intraosseous infusion fluids are the preferred option. IV infusion is the most common common depending on the gauge of the needle and flow rate you can keep someone hydrated all day in the hospital or push fluids into someone who desperately needs them. It’s very simple to administer an IV, find a vein and stick it. IO infusion allows you to administer fluids and medications directly into bone marrow. It is more effective at delivering fluids and medications and allows you to treat a patient who cannot receive IV fluids like someone who is lost so much blood their veins have collapsed. The sternum is a common site for IO insertion. As has been pointed out the last thing you want is to have your injured patient eating or drinking. IV and IO fluid schedule actually in the circulatory system bypass and stuff so there’s no concern that the patient will vomit and aspirate it during a surgical procedure. I no doc, just a former EMT. | 13 |
ln14q1 | Technology | What is a fusions reactor and why can't we make one? How would a fusion reactor work in theory? I hear every few years that fusion energy is in the near future. Though it always seems to be only in the near future. What are the issues stopping us from creating fusion energy? What can we not figure out yet? | Simply, it’s the idea of shoving two atoms together so hard that they join together, or fuse, releasing huge amounts of heat energy in the process. The problem is that this requires more force than the gravity at the core of Jupiter. It requires forces like the internal pressure of the sun, which is exactly what a star is. A star is a mass of gas with so much gravity that hydrogen atoms fuse to form helium. Recreating those forces on Earth requires huge amounts of energy. So far, it has required more energy to produce the forces than we get back from the fusion reaction. This is the problem we need to solve. | 2 |
9y5em4 | Engineering | How can the Voyager and other craft go to such extreme distance? How does it have enough fuel? Why can't we send humans like that instead? I'm curious about these pictures that I see all the time. Voyager or some other spacecraft sends pictures of distant planets, being some light years away. Even pictures of Earth looking like a speck of dust. How did it travel so far? How is this possible? For humans, I understand it would take tons of more specialized equipment but surely we can send them a great distance than the Moon. Most of what I say might sound very uninformed and downright wrong. So anything and everything related to this will be very much appreciated. Thank you for your replies! | Funny, I was watching the documentary about this on Netflix just yesterday. They launched two of these guys. Oddly enough, Voyager 2 launched before Voyager 1 (the press was annoyed about this). But it was because Voyager 1 traveled faster than Voyager 2 and would catch up, then passed it. Both are launched and use other planet's gravity to "sling shot" them and pick up speed. They got some crazy cool pictures of a few planets and their moons. And after it passed the last planet Carl Sagan asked for them to turn it around and have it take picture of the solar system from the outside looking in. The various scientists thought this was dumb b/c there was essentially no scientific reason to do it. But Sagan though of it as commentary on the Earth. The Earth was a tiny dot, not even one pixel on the picture that was taken. Every human that exists, that had ever existed was on what appeared to be this tiny spec in the solar system and that we should take care of this planet. | 20 |
6olm8f | Other | "uptown" vs. "downtown" Watching movies/shows set in America, you always hear stuff like "Let's go downtown" and "He lives uptown". What determines whether a part of a town is uptown or downtown? Is it just purely North vs. South or is there something else to it? | It comes from New York City. Manhattan (where most of the skyscrapers are) is actually a long skinny island and when the city was founded the development all concentrated in the southern end of the island. So anyone who lived outside of Manhattan said they would go down (that is south) into town and if they needed to go to the northern parts of the island (some parts remained rural until into the 20th century) they were going uptown since that is the opposite of downtown. This convention held even as other parts of the city that are actually south of downtown (like Brooklyn) came about. A subway line can only run two directions so its easy to know which direction you're going if you have a downtown train and an uptown train even as the cardinal direction changes. Now NYC even has a "midtown" which is the major skyscraper district located roughly in the middle of Manhattan Island. Midtown developed with the building of major commuter rail terminals like Grand Central Station. That then spread to other cities. | 4 |
a7ba86 | Technology | During the late 80s to mid 90s, every home computer came with their own operating system. Now almost all home computers comes with just Windows, why? | The short answer: because Microsoft, lead by Bill Gates, engaged in illegal anti-competitive actions to drive competitors out of business and establish a near-monopoly. They engaged in [wide-spread predatory business practices]( URL_4 ) designed to drive out direct and indirect competitors in the OS market. To give just a few examples: - Microsoft used their domination of the office suite market (Word and Excel) to sabotage their competitor DR DOS, by having their software detect when it was running under DR DOS and [falsely report that it wasn't compatible]( URL_0 ). - Microsoft used their growing monopoly power in the PC market to "negotiate" deals with PC manufacturers ("agree to our terms, or we'll stop supporting your PC") for what became effectively compulsory royalties. Royalties were tied to the number of PCs sold, not the number of Windows OS supplied. Consequently, if you bought a PC from a major brand they paid for Windows regardless of whether or not they actually supplied Windows. Of course they passed that cost on to you, the consumer, and **you still paid for Windows** even if it wasn't supplied. This ["Microsoft tax"]( URL_1 ) made it impossible for alternative OSes such as BeOS to compete even though they were much better and faster. - Microsoft partnered with IBM to develop OS/2 for servers, while secretly using the knowledge they gained to develop Windows NT as a direct competitor. Then, before OS/2 could be established in the server market, they dropped out of the partnership released NT, and used their domination of the PC market to likewise dominate the server market.^1 (Funnily enough, the early versions of OS/2 written by Microsoft were full of technical flaws which similar early versions of NT did not suffer from. It was only when IBM more or less re-wrote OS/2 themselves was it a decent server-class OS, but of course it was too late by then.) In the 1990s, the US Department of Justice [took action against Microsoft]( URL_3 ) and found that they had [acted illegally]( URL_2 ), but by the time Microsoft was found guilty, the US government under President Bush Jr lost its stomach for doing anything about it and merely gave them a slap on the wrist and made them promise to not do it again. But for a time, there was real talk about splitting Microsoft into two separate companies to break the monopoly. The longer answer would have to acknowledge the effect of non-predatory economic factors such as network effects (if all your friends used Windows, there are advantages for you to use Windows as well), piracy (software piracy helped MS DOS spread in the first place, and especially helped Excel and Word succeed against more established incumbents such as Lotus and WordPerfect), high costs of entry etc. The Dept of Justice findings of facts does a good job at explaining those as well. Nevertheless, the major reason that Microsoft dominates the OS market is that they illegally lied, cheated, sabotaged competitors and stifled innovation. We're still paying the price for that now, even though Microsoft appears to (mostly) no longer be acting in such ways, thanks to legal actions by both the US and EU threatening to break the company apart, plus the disruptive effects of the Internet. ^1 Microsoft never dominated the server market to the same degree they did the desktop. Unix and Unix-based OSes, especially Linux, continue to hold a large share of the market. But among the *DOS compatible* server market, Windows dominated. | 9 |
6udxmd | Biology | When you get a massage, the masseuse seems to push the knots to specific spots to make them disappear. Where do they go? | There's little scientific evidence to support massage as a recovery technique in terms of waste product removal. The circulation increase from massage is achieved tenfold simply by using the muscles you want circulation to improve in. I.e. Athletes conduct 'warm downs' that are specific to the musculature they just used. A football player will often be told to immediately jump onto a stationary bike once off the field from a game to keep circulation going to his legs after the final minutes of sprinting in a match. Simply walking around will increase your circulation. As for your muscles feeling better after a massage? They were tight, they got stretched, now they're less tight. Just use a daily flexibility program to reduce your muscle stiffness and increase your joint ROM (range of motion). You can do active stretching (you stretch your muscle as much as you can) and you can do passive stretching (someone else stretches your muscle to varying degrees). Google search PNF (proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation) stretching techniques if you want to learn more or try it yourself. We're taught that if there's no harm and something can cause psychological benefit (placebo effect) in an athlete, then you may as well do it. (4th year Exercise Science + Rehab & Exercise Physiology student). This is an unpopular opinion because it could be detrimental toward the massage industry but there's no concrete evidence or meta analysis that currently support massage's supposed effect of enhancing recovery and maintaining performance. (These are two very important recovery goals.) Please do keep in mind that when performed after a soft tissue injury a massage is definitely not recommended. You'll throw up afterward as you're messing with the healing process. (Specifically a soft tissue injury with an inflammatory response.) Please don't take this reply as an insult to massage techniques or the people who perform them. They're very skilled (sometimes) and very passionate about their job (always IMO). Those are two great things to have in someone you purchase a service from. They provide an awesome service that I'm sure will be around for a long time. However as soon as someone tries to push their supposed scientific evidence behind massage physiological benefits onto me, it annoys me. There are no marked physiological benefits that have been concretely proven from massage. It's purely a psychological thing. (A damn good psychological thing, don't underestimate the mind.)(Psychological benefits were anecdotally recorded in most studies.) The gilded top comment reply is essentially correct up until: "when you find a knot (trigger point, sore spot or whatever you wanna call it) when you press on it you are pushing that calcium myosin mixture out of the area back into the venous system" There's no proper evidence when you combine both the disproving and proving papers to suggest that you're pushing anything into the venous system. This claim simply doesn't exist. If you'd like an example of a successful recovery technique that does manage to reduce oedema and enhance venous return then check out 'cold water immersion'. It has nothing to do with calcium reuptake or myosin filaments. It does however utilise the hydrostatic pressure applied to your body when immersed in water as well as your body's natural response to cold water immersion. These seem like big words but they aren't complicated at all. When you hop in a pool at the shallow end and walk to the deep end (slowly increasing water immersion from your waist to your neck), you can feel the pressure building over your body. That's the hydrostatic pressure. The cold water component is typically conducted in 10-12 degree Celsius water (freezing cold and horrible) and your body reacts to this by shunting blood away from the peripheries (vessels near skin) and toward the core (closer to the heart). This stops us from losing heat so easily when we need to conserve it. (Our body has an optimal temperature of roughly 37 degrees Celsius in which our metabolic life maintaining cellular activities perform best.) When we heat up we do the opposite, we dilate the blood vessels near the skin which lets us lose heat faster so that our core temperature doesn't go too far above 37 degrees. (These are homeostatic mechanisms.) I'll leave a link to the AIS website. The Australian Institute of Sport is an international leader on recovery technique research in elite athletes. (I'm Australian, I'm not affiliated or an employee of AIS). There's alot note to this topic but I'm on my mobile so I can't write a lecture's worth of important extra details. Please also keep in mind that CWI isn't for every athlete or person. It's actually detrimental to a small degree for weight lifters. Essentially you want to build and progress your muscles via protein synthesis (increased window post workout for PS), you don't want to reduce blood flow to the muscles which is what CWI does. If you're training for physical adaptions (muscle bulk+) it's probably not for you. If you bulked pre season and are just practicing football drills and maintaining muscle then CWI can help because that higher protein synthesis window is not as relevant to you.(Ignore this paragraph if it's not relevant to you, it may seem confusing!) Link from my mobile: (It goes straight to a PDF download, just Google search 'Cold water immersion AIS' if you don't like links or it doesn't work.) URL_0 I've never heard of a calcium myosin mixture and have found nothing peer reviewed to support this idea. As far as I know myosin myofilaments are just a component of the cross bridges that allow us to move. Just Google 'Sliding Filament Theory' to understand it better. It's actually super interesting to understand but it's too much to explain in a Reddit reply. So it's true that we use calcium to unlock Troponin from it's position atop Tropomyosin which effectively blocks myosin filament crossbridges from attaching to actin filaments when we don't want them to (muscle relaxation). In short, calcium is the key, troponin is the lock, tropomyosin is the gate and actin was the thing behind the locked gate that myosin wants to attach to. There's no concrete evidence to suggest that massage as a recovery technique removes 'excess calcium' that the sarcoplasmic reticulum didn't reuptake. (Reuptake occuring as a result of our CNS signalling the muscle to relax). I'm happy to keep answering replies but please keep it civil. I'm not here to rain on anyone's parade. I get massages whenever I can afford them because I enjoy them too. I've performed localised massages on athletes as a sports trainer while I've worked in Aussie rules football clubs in my area and if the player is happy then that's often all that matters. TLDR: Zero meta analysis or concrete research to prove anything other than a psychological benefit from massage. Please keep in mind that the potential for physical benefit is possible but it isn't proven across studies (varies widely) and is often the result of a psychological benefit. Edit 1: Thank you for the gold. Edit 2: Typos fixed and a paragraph added. Edit 3: Sorry if this is not ELI5, please feel free to send criticism that I can use to clarify my post further. I'm a newish Redditor. Have a great day! | 20 |
9rw4wm | Economics | The economic feasibility behind an all-you-can-eat buffet - how much calories does an adult eat on average there? | Menu Flexibility: Buffets also have lots of flexibility with what they serve. If one week the price of salmon fillets increases, they can remove it from the buffet. The same goes for any other item that’s increased in price, whereas a restaurant with a fixed menu wouldn’t be able to do this so easily. Cost of goods: Another aspect is the advantage of purchasing items like vegetables in bulk quantities to save money. Rather than the manager heading to he local market for potatoes, the buffet can have them shipped in from somewhere else with less quality for a lower cost. Buffet setup: Buffets are often set up with saving money in mind. You’ll probably find items like mashed potatoes or other filling yet cheap options before you get to main courses like chicken breasts or prime rib. By this point, most of your plate will be full and you’ll be less likely to take the items which are more pricy for the buffet. Other factors: Buffets might offer smaller than average plates for guests or offer large soft drinks with free refills. If a customer fills up on two big glasses of soda, they probably won’t eat as much food, and they’ll see the portion size of the drink and refill as a good deal for them | 3 |
evlrcl | Physics | what has the large Hadron Collider discovered exactly? | Not really an answer, but I got to tour the Atlas Detector last summer and I brought my big B & W film camera (shoots 6x7cm negatives). [Here's a print]( URL_0 ), it was cool to be standing in front of one of the most advanced, modern things on earth and shoot it with a 1970's camera. Such an awesome day! | 14 |
6cimaz | Other | The difference between a contract and closing in real estate and why there is a gap between them | Real estate is expensive. And therefore there's expensive due diligence that's required. Usually there's a mortgage involved, which means the mortgage lender has their own due diligence to perform. But nobody wants to pay for the due diligence unless there's a reasonable chance that you'll actually go through with the deal. So what happens is that you begin ny haggling over price, assuming everything is as the seller says. Then you sign a contract with a bunch of contingencies. The buyer will often hire an expert home inspector to make sure the house is up to snuff, and maybe pay to test the air for radon and (if it's private well water) the water for contamination. If it's an old house, they may test for lead paint. All these things take time, and if bad things show up, they need to renegotiate the price. In the meantime, the lender is hiring an expert appraiser to make sure the house is worth what they say. They'll also hire a civil engineer for a plot plan; it's not a full survey, but will at least give a rough idea of the property layout and make sure there are no obvious incursions over property lines. They'll also hire a lawyer or expert deed researcher to do a title search, and make sure there are no unexpected liens or other problems with the property. And, of course, they'll do a credit report and possibly confirm the buyer's finances and job situation. So you see there's a lot of stuff to do, and it's not worth doing without a contract (except, maybe, for pre-qualification on the mortgage, since the buyers know they're going to buy something eventually). Once everything is confirmed, all the changes made and inspected, is when they'll have the closing. At this point the closing agent (either an escrow agent or real estate lawyer, depending on location) actually manages the signing of all the paperwork, the most important of which are the deed, the mortgage note, and in some states, the mortgage lien. It's this session, when all the final paperwork is signed, that's called the closing. | 2 |
7u9hc7 | Physics | Why is that sometimes if I stand right next to a radio the signal comes in strong and clear but the moment I step away it becomes distorted and almost indistinguishable? | You're a big bag of conductive salt water, and your body absorbs, reflects, and refracts radio waves in a complicated way. Essentially, you're a big antenna. Standing near the radio, you'll have some effect on how strong a signal it receives. For example, there may be a structural part of the building that is blocking the signal from reaching your radio, but by standing nearby, you may bend some of the signal that went around the structure back toward the radio. | 3 |
6o6r29 | Technology | How does NVIDIA manages to bring driver updates to such a large and old lineup of GPUs ? 1. New drivers for GTX 4xx lineup is still supported until today. 2. Every year has at least 10 different GPUs, desktop and laptop. 3. Not to mention with different operating systems either. | It's their core business to do this. If they would only support the latest video cards the customers would get very upset and all move to other brands. Also, the nvidia cards all have a fairly similar architecture. Making a change to the new 10xx series or to the older 4xx series is (probably, i don't know exactly what the code looks like) not that different. You can compare this to garages still repairing cars that are older or microsoft still supporting older operating systems. | 1 |
httvc1 | Other | What do freemasons do? | To be fair, unless you are a freemason, you aren't allowed to know a lot of it and they aren't allowed to tell you. There are some mason lodges that take women, BTW. It isn't all dudes. There is a lot of pomp and pageantry and costumes and reciting things. But there is learning and growing and fellowship and so on. It's like belonging to a church or fraternity. But with classes. | 8 |
c2sgm5 | Other | How do electric fences shock things if they are only touching one end of the wire, not allowing it to complete the circuit. | Electricity likes to flow to earth ground via the path of least resistance. The wires on electric fences are not insulated. When built, the electrical resistance of air is greater than simply continuing along the wire. When an object that also has contact with the ground touches an electric fence, the object is now the path of least resistance to earth ground, so the electricity flows through the contacting object to the ground. | 3 |
6co2mi | Culture | Martin Luther's 95 Theses In layman's terms, what were Martin Luther's 95 Theses? I know it was basically a list of his faults with the Catholic Church, but what were his faults? Why did he feel so strongly about these faults that he felt the need to break off instead of try and fix the problem? | The 95 Theses were principally Luther's challenge to/criticism of the then-active practice of selling "indulgences." An indulgence is essentially the idea that you can give the Church money and be absolved of the consequences of your sins. But in even _more_ lay terms: it was the idea that you could buy your way into heaven. (The practice of selling indulgences understandably touches on several other practices of the church and concerns of the faith, so the Theses were a little more far-ranging than just indulgences, though.) Among other things, Luther thought that the practice encouraged believers to just buy their way out of trouble instead of pursuing true repentance. He also thought the practice discouraged giving to the poor - why help out some poor sap here on earth when you can buy a nicer place in eternity? He also laid a ton of criticisms against the concept of purgatory, which was fairly entrenched in the indulgence dynamic. We're talking about 95 separate points of argument here, so it's kind of tough to boil them all down. > Why did he feel so strongly about these faults that he felt the need to break off instead of try and fix the problem? He was tried for heresy and excommunicated from the church. The 16th century Catholic church wasn't really known for compromising with its opponents. | 4 |
df5nk4 | Biology | Why does the brain produce dopamine and endorphins when we are scared? "When we get scared, we experience a rush of adrenaline and a release of endorphins and dopamine. The biochemical rush can result in a pleasure-filled, opiod-like sense of euphoria". Why, though? What is the purpose of chemicals that makes us feel good in the context of danger? | They'rr chemicals that don't just do one thing. Dooamine makes you happy, but it's also used by your heart, and other parts of your brain related to cognitive function as well as muscle control. Under flight or flight, it signals your heart and circulatory system to kick things up a notch. The other effects are just the byproduct. Endorphins are similar, they're our bodies painkillers. Essentially your body is getting ready for heavy exertion and to take damage. The other stuff is a byproduct | 2 |
6y2ywv | Technology | Why are coins historically round? Seems like square coins would be more efficient/easier to cut from a sheet of metal. | coins are stamped not cut, a circle was easier to stamp. Later it's all about make counterfeit coins harder to make by adding dots(roman), lips and etching. Each thing ups the price of the initial equipment required reducing forgers | 3 |
5zd8dg | Repost | How are clubs and other social gathering places allowed to have "Ladies Night" without people pulling out the discrimination card? | In general it is because 'ladies night' benefits both groups. Yes, men don't receive the monetary discount that women do, but they gain the benefit of there being more women in the club/at social gathering that would not otherwise be there. Therefore no one complains. | 2 |
bs2j39 | Biology | If cell membranes are made up of lipids (fats), why do foods like lettuce have so few calories even though there are a lot of cells in it? | Plant cells have rigid cellulose walls that are largely indigestible to humans. What little nutritional value they do have is often inaccessible. More generally, cell membranes are very thin comparatively. Think of a big bucket filled with water balloons. They fill the bucket, but there's hardly any balloon rubber in there. | 2 |
9643og | Biology | How Is It That A Pain Suppressant Like Ibuprofen Or Acetaminophen Don't have dependancy issues But Others Like Morphine-Derivatives do? | There are two different mechanisms of pain reduction: One way is to block the sensation of pain centrally, URL_0 the brain. In the brain, there are receptors called "opioid receptors", which affect your body in many ways if opioids bind to them. One of the most important effect is pain reduction, but they also affect your mood (euphoria), digestion (constipation/slower bowel activity), muscle tone (this is why overdosing can lead to respiratory paralysis), vigilance/consciousness (sedation), cardiovascular system... There are endogenous opioids which your body creates by itself, like Endorphines, and exogenous ones, for example morphine, fentanyl, and codeine. Because they do not only reduce pain, but also have other fun effects when they bind to your opioid receptors, you will enjoy taking them! You might want to keep taking them even though the pain is already gone because you like the other effects so much. After a while, your body develops a tolerance and you have to take more and more just to feel normal - the endogenous Endorphines produced by your body are no longer strong enough to fulfill their natural purpose, so if there isn't a supply of exogenous opiates, you will feel anxious, start sweating and shaking, have muscle cramps, and be in pain. This is called withdrawal. Congrats, you're now addicted to opioids! The other mechanism of pain reduction doesn't act centrally and doesn't affect the brain. Ibuprofen and the other non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) block an enzyme called cyclooxygenase (COX) (yeah I know). Your body needs COX to synthesise prostaglandins, which create pain and inflammations, but also have other important functions like helping blood coagulation; COX also play a role in protecting your stomach lining against the stomach acid. So if you block COX, you'll reduce inflammation and pain, but you might also "thin out" your blood or get stomach ulcers. Since NSAIDs don't act in the brain and don't have all the fun effects of opioids like euphoria and sedation, you won't get addicted to them. | 3 |
f0f5b5 | Mathematics | What does the Mandelbrot set mean, what does it stand for and how does it work | **Whole Numbers** Okay, so you have your basic numbers, right? 0, 1, 2, 3... got it? Good. What happens when you go the other, get to zero, and keep going? **Integers** You get negative whole numbers which, when combined with the positive ones, get you the integers. But what happens when you try to divide integers and it doesn't divide evenly? **Rational Numbers** You get fractions which, when combined with your integers, gives you rational numbers. But what about all those numbers that can't be represented by integer fractions? Like pi and sqrt(2)? **Real Numbers** The number line you used to draw in grade school? This is what that is. Every single one of those infinite points that make up that line? A real number. It's all the integers and rational numbers and all the other numbers in between. Makes up the "real" numbers. That's all the numbers there are, right? **Imaginary Numbers** The way we have been expanding our universe of numbers is by pushing boundaries. Taking your positive whole numbers and going past zero gets you integers. Taking integer ratios gets you rational numbers. Finding numbers that aren't integer ratios gets you the reals. What other boundaries are there? Well, we all know what a square root is, right? When you look for the square root of a number you are asking what number you can multiply with itself to get your number. So the square root of 4 is 2 because 2\*2 = 4. You can do this for any positive real number and get an answer. But what about a negative number? What about -1? What is the square root of -1? It isn't 1 because 1\*1 = 1. It also isn't -1 because (-1)\*(-1) is also 1. So there just isn't an answer. Right? Well we were fine with that until some problem solving methods we were using back in the day suggested that questions like these *did* have answers and answers that *didn't* break mathematics and appeared to be necessary to solve the kinds of questions we were asking. So we found a whole new area of numbers. "Imaginary" numbers. They revolve around the *number* i which has the following relationship: i^(2) = -1 And then all of the multiples of i, from 2i to -4i even exotic things like pi\*i. What happens if you take the imaginary numbers and smoosh them together with the real ones? **Complex Numbers** Turns out you *can* mix them. But what is a good way to represent that? Well, we have a line for representing the real numbers, why not a line for representing the imaginary numbers? Okay, but interestingly, both these lines share a number in common: 0. They intersect. Two lines, intersecting? Now you have the axis of a graph. Instead of a line, you have a *plane*. The x-axis of this graph represents real numbers. The y-axis of this graph represents imaginary numbers. All the space in between represents the combination called *complex numbers*. For example, 3 + 4i is a complex number. Finding it is easy, you just treat the real and imaginary components of that number as coordinates on the graph that is the complex plane: (3,4). That's where it's at. Now... let's get to the... **Mandelbrot set** The Mandelbrot set is just the application of a simple rule on complex numbers and then mapping that result to the complex plane. That rule? 1. Pick a complex number. Let's pick 1. 2. Start at 0. 3. Square it (0^(2) = 0) 4. Add our complex number (0 + 1 = 1) 5. Repeat steps 3 & 4... forever We can see what the next few iterations would be: 1^(2) \+ 1 = 1 + 1 = 2 2^(2) \+ 1 = 4 + 1 = 5 5^(2) \+ 1 = 25 + 1 = 26 ... And so on, and this gets larger and larger, forever. What if we pick -1/2 to be our complex number? 0^(2) \+ -1/2 = 0 - 1/2 = -1/2 (-1/2)^(2) \+ -1/2 = 1/4 - 1/2 = -1/4 (-1/4)^(2) \+ -1/2 = 1/16 - 1/2 = -7/16 ... This one isn't getting larger, it's kind of bouncing around a bit. Do it long enough and it'll settle down. But what about numbers with an imaginary component like i? 0^(2) \+ i = 0 + i = i i^(2) \+ i = -1 + i (-1 + i)^(2) \+ i = 1 - 2i - 1 + i = -i (-i)^(2) \+ i = -1 + 1 ... Okay, we can see that this one is just going to bounce around but not really get any larger. So we can categorized the results here: numbers that just get bigger and bigger forever and numbers that don't. The numbers that don't? They are the Mandelbrot set. If you take all those numbers and put a dot where they are on the complex plane, you get this: [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 ) **What's the Big Deal?** Well, first is the fact that you have this one simple rule that produces such a complex result. That diagram has infinite complexity! Normally, with some curve on a graph, the more you zoom in, the simpler it gets (the more it resembles a straight line). With this, the details *never* smooth out. It just reveals more and more complex features. Being able to tie such complex and chaotic objects with a simple mathematical function is truly amazing. There are other sets like this (like the Julia set) and have expanded how we think about mathematical complexity and chaos. Not to mention it looks cool! | 1 |
9i9r09 | Engineering | What causes batteries to leak in a device when they don’t leak in their original packaging? | Batteries work by producing electricity with a chemical reaction. The reaction stops when no electricity is being used. In lower cost (zinc-carbon) batteries, the outer casing of the battery is made of zinc, and the zinc is actually one of the chemicals that reacts. This means that the casing of the battery actually gets used up as the battery is used up. When the battery is depleted the remaining casing is extremely thin and fragile, and can leak. Batteries which have never been used won't have gone through much of the chemical reaction so still have a reasonable thickness casing, so are tougher and don't leak. Better quality (called alkaline) batteries are less likely to leak because the casing is not part of the reaction. However, the reaction produces gas, and the gas builds up inside the battery. This build up of pressure can cause the chemicals to leak out through tiny cracks or holes in the battery. | 2 |
7n4nn8 | Technology | How is the Criterion Collection able to restore movies that are 50 plus years old to Blu Ray quality? | Boils down to: How many megapixels does film have? Infinitely many! It’s because the image isn’t divided up into tiny squares (the pixels) and is perfectly smooth. Film is far more detailed than digital as it’s analogue so it’s a good source for making better and better versions. | 2 |
jf4bog | Physics | The change of volume to surface area ratio with a change in dimensions seems like black magic Sorry it's a long question. I've never understood the standard explanation that ratio of the two simply changes with an increase in dimensions. If I have a cube that is 1 meter x 1 meter the surface area is 6 square meters and the volume is 1 cubic meter. Ratio is 6 to 1. If I double the dimensions the cube now has a surface area of 24 square metres and volume of 8 cubic meters. So the larger cube has a ratio of 3 to 1. Sounds like it makes sense so far. BUT if I now hand the larger cube to an alien who doesn't use meters. Their unit of measurement is a foter. 1 foter just happens to be exactly 2 meters long. The alien says the larger cube has a ratio of 6 to 1. Therefore any cube of any size can have a ratio of 6 to 1, or for that matter any positive ratio depending on the arbitrary choice of the unit of measurement. I cannot reconcile this. | A ratio is just that, a ratio. Ratios do not have units. You’ll note that if you try the division the units cancel each other out. Imperial, metric, alien, etc doesn’t matter. | 2 |
9gmo3d | Technology | If condoms are still only 98% effective even when used perfectly, what is the “ineffective” 2% caused by? None of the previous posts that I’ve found answer this exact question, and I’m not finding any good explanations on google. I’m not referring to the condom breaking because that would be an obvious failure. I’m asking if there are ways for sperm to get through even when used perfectly. | Nah it's more like a 99% effective but they just can't say 100% because there is a chance the condom breaks or a manufacturer defect. At least that's what I've heard | 3 |
dh3rcp | Other | How are rubik's cube competitions set up? Wont they have to have the same set up to make it fair? | Surprisingly deep answers here. I'm amazed at some of the questions people think of on this sub and never fail to learn something I never realised I wanted to know! | 7 |
b73mgf | Technology | How do bugs in video games pop up in a certain function when the developers update a completely unrelated feature? Thought about this today as Minecraft got another snapshot where the devs added/fixed some features with villagers, but there’s a bug where texture packs can’t be changed. How can this happen? | Think of all the different components of making a game, or any software at all, and how they might interact. You have the textures, but they have to be mapped on to a 3D model that represents a block, or your character or a monster, or an NPC like a villager, then you have the animation of how the 3D model moves, and then the AI that works out when those modes move, and where. Then you have the code that deals with your input (mouse clicks, scrolling, key presses), and the code that deals with the game state (where you are stood, what item you have equipped, what items you have in your inventory, your level, your experience points), and much much more. All these different pieces work together to give you the game that you play. But in order for that to work, they have to talk to each other. Some parts are more tightly ‘coupled’ than others, which means they talk to each other more, or rely on each other more. So there are a lot of dependencies, and potentially pieces of data being passed across the entire application So if you change how the data in one part is computed, and that is sent to different parts of the program to help compute other things, but those parts weren’t expecting different data, you get bugs! Because they weren’t programmed to handle this new data that it’s never seen before. Or, the change you made removed some data that another part was expecting, then the other part would break too. This can be caused by anything, because programming is hard. There are so many things that might depend on areas of the game you are editing, that you might not be aware of, and program for. And unless you sit and test every aspect of a game after every new feature, you never know. | 2 |
dufapq | Other | What is "the left" and "the right" and all that politics stuff? | Left and Right aren't American terms. They originated in France centuries ago, during the French revolution, as the people who supported the monarchy sat on the Right in the National Assembly, and those who supported revolution sat on the Left in the National Assembly. You may not have them come up in your country, but they are used in many national politics. As for American politics... In the United States, there are two major political parties that mostly align with those stances. Democrats are the more liberal left-wing party. They support higher taxes, as they feel that money can be used to run government services like health care to help everyone. They support regulations on large corporations, saying that it will protect the environment and individual workers. They generally wish to increase our business and relations with foreign countries. They tend to support feminism, minorities, and gay rights. They want to decrease our military spending, saying that the money could be better spent elsewhere. They want to make immigration into the country easier. They want more laws regulating and controlling the sale of guns. Republicans are the more conservative right-wing party. They support lower taxes, as they feel that individuals would then be able to save their money to help themselves as they see fit. They oppose regulations on large corporations, saying that regulations hurt the economy and make people's lives worse as a result. They generally wish to have the USA focus just on internal matters and deal as little as possible with foreign countries. They tend to support traditional Christian values. They want to increase our military spending, saying that the money is best used for national defense. They want to make immigration into the country harder. They want fewer laws regulating and controlling the sale of guns. This is an over simplification, but that's the basic idea. | 1 |
69ehab | Culture | Major League Baseball batting strategy. Are they simply trying to hit a home run every time? Is there more to it than that? | Baseball is a very confusing sport at times. A casual fan would think the best strategy is to just swing for the fences every time right? Well, that fan couldn't be farther from the truth. The approach at the plate should always depend on the situation. How many outs? Anybody already on base? What inning and what is the score? Where is the infield playing (depth, shift, etc). Baseball is a mess to figure out if you haven't been around it for a while, and is such a slow game that many people don't watch long enough to really get a grasp on everything. TLDR: not trying to hit a home run every time, depends heavily on the situation. Baseball is a situational game. | 36 |
9335tm | Economics | Why do streaming services care so much about people with a family plan living under the same address? | They want the amount of subscriptions sold to match the amount of pairs of eyes consuming their products as closely as possible. If they could, they'd sell 1 subscription per person, not even per family. Obviously they would lose customers if they started demanding you pay an additional fee for each of your kids or your spouse, so they have to accept that families are going to share a subscription. But they're not just going to let you share it with as many people as you want. If you've got an apartment building or a dorm with 10 unrelated people of legal age, that's 10 subscriptions. They're not just going to be cool with selling 1 or 2 instead of 10 and eat the loss in possible revenue. They're running a business selling a product, not a charity. So they say you can share with your family (because customers demand it) and that you can't share with a bunch of strangers. One way to determine if someone signing on to an account is family or not is if they live at the same address. Families tend to live together, random strangers tend not to. So it's a good enough method to try to get as close to possible to their target goal. | 1 |
iblad1 | Other | How was the Equator decided upon | It's a mathematical thingamy, defined in relation to the axis around which the Earth spins relative to the Sun. There are a few interesting things that happen on the equator, mostly to do with how the Sun moves overhead. The Sun rises and sets in different places depending on the time of year; and the path it takes is different - sometimes staying very close to the horizon (in winter) and sometimes going very high up in the sky (in summer). Imagine sticking a stick into the ground, and tracing how the shadow moves throughout a day, and over different days. Depending on where you are, the shadow will go around one side of the stick or the other. During winter the shadow will be longer (as the Sun is lower in the sky), during summer it will be shorter. On the equator, during the equinoxes (the days when the day is as long as the night) the Sun moves directly overhead; rising at one point, and moving straight up to be directly above (so no shadows from the stick) and then setting on exactly the opposite point on the horizon to where it rose. The tropics are the parts of the Earth where at some point during the year the Sun is directly up (so a vertical stick would have no shadow). Off the equator, the sunrise and sunset wouldn't be quite opposite on that day, though (so it wouldn't happen on the equinoxes). Beyond the tropics the Sun never quite gets that high in the sky at any time of year. The Arctic and Antarctic circles are the areas where the Sun is so low in the sky for parts of the winter that it never rises, and also where the Sun is so high in the sky during the Summer it never sets. [Here is a neat *simulated* timelapse]( URL_1 ) showing the path of the Sun over a year in New York (so fairly far north). You can see it reaches maximum height in the middle of summer (the solstice) but due to being outside the tropics, the Sun is never directly above even then. [This is a nice real timelapse from the Arctic]( URL_0 ), showing how as the Sun sets, it never quite gets low enough in the sky to set properly, so there is no night. Final point; the equator isn't an exact line. The Earth's spin axis wobbles around a bit over time (by maybe 10m a year), so the equator shifts slightly with it. | 3 |
jee26w | Biology | If lobsters don't stop growing and don't die naturally, why has no one tried growing one to be huge? | The largest lobster ever found was 44 pounds. The oldest known lobster in captivity was 22 pounds and 132-140 years old. I give those two data points as reference, so when you ask why no one tried growing one to be huge it would depend on why someone would want to do that. For commercial purposes most people don’t want to buy a 20 pound lobster, and the amount of time it takes to grow a 3 pound lobster is significantly less than growing a 20 pound lobster when you factor in grow costs. If you meant just for the sheer monument of growing a huge lobster, science behind lobsters growing without aging is relatively recent, so if it took 140 years to grow a 22 pound lobster, someone would have started growing a lobster hundreds of years ago, have someone keep taking care of it to truly see a massive lobster which would be unlikely | 6 |
6439r5 | Other | how does filibustering work? | When a bill goes to the senate floor for debate, there is no time limit until all parties cede discussion and open for vote. Filibustering is the act of speaking for as long as possible (sometimes discussing completely unrelated topics) to avoid the vote or to encourage the opposing party to give up, depending on the level of commitment. Filibustering has gone on for days in the past, with some single speakers going on for almost 24 hours straight. They can read the newspaper out loud, tell stories, discuss recent movies, anything that is considered to be in the purview of open discussion and opinion. It is a centuries old tradition that has not been eliminated because even though it can be employed in ridiculous ways, it still has high value to both parties when used. | 1 |
70vdi0 | Repost | Christmas music really just seems to be the same 20 or so songs covered by 100s of artists. Why does no one ever release new Christmas songs? | There are hundreds of Christmas songs but the most popular ones self-perpetuate as they are the ones people most associate with Christmas, so the radio & TV & stores play them to death to get everyone in the spirit. Artists do release new xmas songs every year and a few do catch on (The Darkness "Don't let the bells end" seems to get rolled out every year these days) but a lot are just quite poor (as with a lot of pop songs - for every solid gold #1 there's 1000 forgotten ones that sank) or awful cash-ins or novelty singles that have very limited appeal. Bad Religion and Bowling For Soup did xmas albums, XFM's "It's a cool Christmas" CD has some great tracks by indie artists, and Smerins Anti-Social Club did a great cover of Walking In The Air. I actually have a USB stick full of alternative xmas tracks precisely because I get sick of the usual stuff - there's more than 100 tracks on it. if I remember I might even post a list when I find it. | 10 |
5qrxdx | Technology | Can someone please explain how Jurassic Park (1993) was visually so ahead of its time, it seems almost comparable todays visual effects? | There were only a small handful of actual CG shots and there's only about 18 minutes of dinosaurs in the film total, and most of those were puppets. These days 9/10 of a movie is CG and on bonus material you see people say stuff like, "well, we had 1,897 effects shots to do and render in the space of two months." Jurassic Park had maybe 20: - A couple of the brachiosaurus and then the watering hole. - The most during the T-Rex attacks (after breaking out of the fence and then the Jeep attack). - The gallimimus scene. - A couple wide shots with the raptors in the kitchen. - Another couple of the raptors near the end with the skeletons. - The big T-Rex finale. But I agree, it holds up so incredibly well. Edit: changed the spelling of "gallimimus" because I was on mobile and made a typo that people FREAKED THE FUCK OUT over. Good God, you people. | 31 |
gcwrcm | Chemistry | What makes "Clorox Wipes" so shelf-stable when a homemade water/bleach dilution breaks down in a couple days? | I believe Clorox wipes don't actually have any bleach in them. At least they didn't last time I checked. Clorox is just used as the brand name. | 1 |
779em0 | Technology | Why do police/fire radios sound so staticky? How do these departments that rely on radio communications understand each other? | Audio quality isn’t the main priority. Connectivity is. Meaning if an officer is three floors below street level in a concrete parking structure he can still send/receive. An officer at dispatch can reach the dive team on a lake. It’s all about dependability and connectivity. | 2 |
a4g0cx | Technology | Why does picture quality on Netflix appear to be of much higher quality than Cable TV even when both sources are outputting 1080p? Both Netflix and Cable output 1080p, but the quality on Netflix is much clearer than that of cable which looks a bit more grainy. I've even rewatched shows that used to air on cable and it's not even close. Will cable TV quality ever actually catch up? | No one is mentioning that netflix gives a copy of the entire movie database on a small server rack to every isp or most of them anyways. Instead of going long distances accross many dozens or hundreds of machines to stream your movie its a direct feed to your isp instead so the compression, bitspeed, and encoding can all be optomized and efficient | 16 |