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kww5hg | Earth Science | If hot air rises, why does an airline pilot say that 10000 feet into the air is freezing cold? | The sun is like a stove burner and the earth is like a pan on the burner. You are the grill cheese sandwich on the pan. You get warm as the pan gets warm. When you take the grilled cheese sandwich away from the pan it starts to cool the farther away it gets from the pan because the heat from the pan doesn’t warm all the air around the pan. | 4 |
8j2i1b | Biology | Why do some parts of your body heal more quickly than others? For example last Saturday (7 days ago) I caught my leg on a nail and pierced the skin resulting in a small bruise around that area. The bruise and cut are still very visible. Yesterday (about about 16 hours ago) I split open the inside of my lip. There was a cut and it swelled up quite significantly and turned a dark purple. This morning there is a tiny purple mark inside my lip and it no longer hurts. How can one part of my body heal so quickly and other areas take so long to heal? | The lips, gums, and tongue are some of the fastest healing parts of the body. If you think about how easy it is to bite yourself when chewing, you can see the advantage that rapid regeneration provides. Our mouths are disgusting, bacteria laden, and open to the unsanitary world around you. It wouldn't do to have open wounds that persisted over time. The skin elsewhere on the body heals relatively quickly but slower than the mouth, gums, and esophagus. Because it comes in contact with the environment a lot, and it's there for our protection, skin is much thicker than your gums, sturdier, and it takes longer to repair. There is a vascular component as well where higher blood flow equals faster repairs to cuts and abrasions. | 3 |
5owmtt | Economics | Why does the US have such a large defense budget | It is because of the world wars. Up until ww2 the US defense budget was quite meager. However during the war something happened - the US government enlisted the help of all the major industries to build guns, tanks, planes and ships for the war effort. This allowed people from industry to establish strong connections with people from government - and while the war lasted - this was a good thing allowing the US to produce enough material to whoop the Japanese Empire and help the Soviets beat the Nazis. But when the war ended - it became clear that this is now a problem - because now the industry people were using the positions and connections they established during the war to pressure the US government to keep spending on arms and weapons even though the war was over and they didn't really need most of them. Some would even go on to say that these people actually supported going to war (like Korea and Vietnam) just so that they could sell more weapons and stuff. US president Eisenhower famously warned the American people about this - but 60 years later it seems we can safely say his warning fell on deaf ears. TL;DR It's because of the military-industrial complex fusing into the US government during ww2 and the failure of all subsequent administrations to change that. | 8 |
8g0e56 | Other | Sucker in the room - meaning There is a quote: If you don't know who the sucker is in the room, you are the sucker. So what does this mean? I think its about Poker, but i don't know how Poker works (Need to learn that...) Can this also be used outside of poker? | People with bad qualities are often unaware they have them...that is often the very reason they continue to have them. The same thing that makes them unaware of their own bad qualities makes them unaware of it in others. If you can't find someone worse than you, you are the worst. Note this scales with skill level. A person with poor skills might be taken for a sucker by those with moderate skills, while that moderately skilled player can be taken by highly skilled players. While it is most famously applied to poker, I have heard it applied to many other situations: * Every group of friends has an annoying member no one really likes... * Every party has a creepy old guy acting inappropriately for their age... * Every service on the internet is selling a product... ...if you can't find them, you are them. | 3 |
a4uqzk | Biology | What actually happens when someone "chokes" with their own saliva and coughs afterward? And if possible, how can someone prevent it? | It sometimes happens to me... the saliva goes down the wrong pipe, its like when you are drinking something and it goes down the wrong pipe.. you start caughing because that is how you get stuff thats not supposed to be in your lungs, out of your lungs if you find a way to prevent it, please pm me | 2 |
dcg9jn | Other | why are the musical notes represented by letters in some places (C-D-E-F-G-A-B), but in others by their sound (do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do) ? I'm from Mexico and the way I learned the musical notes was by their sound, however some friends from other places learned the notes with letters. | Do-re-me and such are used to show a notes position in a scale, for example in a C major scale, C is do, D is re. A B C and so-on are the exact note names, corresponding to a specific pitch | 2 |
a57gij | Biology | How are Rats and other smaller Mammals with tiny limbs capable of moving so fast? | There’s a very basic physics equation [F = m a]. Force equals mass times acceleration. Simple manipulation shows that [a = F \ m], meaning that if you double the force OR half the mass then acceleration will double. Now, there’s something called the Squared Cube law. This law states–albeit in a turned-around way–that as something gets bigger it takes a disproportionate extra amount of resources to sustain it. This is why it’s very very hard to build buildings much bigger than we already do. This is the same law that makes a horse go splat when it falls from a tree compared to the squirrel that bounces. This is the same law that lets an ant lift 50x its body weight and only lets humans lift 3x. Now, for example: The square cube law may dictate that if we decrease mass of a creature by 50% we may only need to decrease Force it produces in its legs by 25%. So, before mass reduction: Force = 1 Mass = 1 a = F / m = 1 / 1 = 1 m/s^s After mass reduction: Force = .75 Mass = .5 a = F / m = 1.5 m/s^s Note that after the decrease, acceleration went way up. This is the reason why something like a housefly can get up to their max flying speed seemingly faster than you can clap your hands. | 5 |
dnffra | Engineering | why are houses in Tornado Alley areas made of wood instead of concrete? | Concrete houses are more expensive than wood houses. Many time more expensive. For example a tornado resistant above ground bunker has 2-4 ft thick concrete walls that are steel reinforced. Now you would only need this for the exterior walls, but that is still insanely expensive. Standard concrete cinderblock, brick, or stone walls are all easily dismantled by a tornado and so do offer much additional protection without the special reinforcement a storm bunker gets. In addition to this it is actually rare for a house to be destroyed by a tornado statistically. Houses in Tornado Alley generally last several generations of use. | 9 |
jn9qek | Other | How do campaign rallys work if people attending them are probably already voting for the person holding it? | The idea is that it builds excitement and momentum for a campaign. Most elections aren't actually decided by swaying people to your side from the middle or from the other side; they are decided by who bothers to actually get out and vote. Case in point, in 2016 only about 50% of the voting-eligible population actually bothered to cast a ballot - that is a lot of voices unheard that could easily have changed the outcome. Rallies get people excited about a candidate. Maybe you support Candidate Smith, but you are a lazy voter who may not bother to cast a ballot. If Smith comes to your town and holds a rally, you might attend and that builds your excitement in Smith's platform. When election day rolls around, you actually get to the polls and vote for him. | 1 |
kcv3qe | Economics | If lab created diamonds are becoming cheaper than real diamonds and are a lot more durable than glass, why aren't things like watch glass and phone screens made from diamonds? | While diamonds are extremely hard and therefore scratch resistant, they are also relatively brittle. So a very thin layer made out of diamond would shatter very easily. It's also still magnitudes more expensive than tempered glass. | 4 |
7wg6vq | Repost | why/how do we get more courage and self-confidence when we drink alcohol? | Alcohol serves to dull our inhibitions, which would otherwise caution us in the form of fear. | 1 |
etaecf | Biology | What happens to the good bacteria if we take antibiotics? | They die, mostly, but now there's less competition with other gut bacteria. Give 'em some nice, fibrous green stuff, like celery, so they have lots of time to sit and chew and multiply for while. & #x200B; Note: Antibiotics may cause constipation (due to the same reason your question brings up). In this situation, eating fiber is still helpful, but you should eat it slowly. Probiotics are better to take first. Ask your doctor. | 20 |
64wtef | Culture | why do some Americans distrust the mass media so much? | Several major publications (namely CNN and the Wall Street Journal as the most recent) have been shown to be editing the news out of context to serve a narrative, and a political agenda, instead of presenting factual information. There's always been some news outlets like this, but these two were considered to be less biased than the others, so them doing this is a huge betrayal of the public trust, and has affected other outlets as a result. | 5 |
gegxou | Other | what keeps the US from switching to the Metric System | Can we at least remove “cups” as a measuring unit from recipes? | 3 |
ayibec | Other | Why do some soldiers wear digital camo, is it actually useful for camouflage or is it just for aesthetic reasons? | Pixelated camo is generally better than non-pixelated. It relates to the processing that the human brain does - it is optimised to pick out shapes, primarily to identify things trying to kill us. This is dependent upon the colour scheme being used though. Issuing green camo for desert combat is basically useless. | 4 |
81o5os | Technology | What are NAT Type and UPNP and how do they affect my internet experience? Basically all i know is what NAT AND UPNP Stand for and they seem to be causing me problems that my isp doesnt want to help me fix | Internet communications get where they are going using an address, your IP address, which is unique worldwide. If a message is sent to your IP it will get to you specifically. The address is recorded as 32 binary digits, or bits. The problem then is that there are only 4 million combinations with 32 bits and a lot more than 4 million devices on the internet. To get around this smaller networks will have one IP address facing the internet at the router, and everything inside the network has a local or private IP address. Now when you send a message out to the internet expecting a reply your router repackages it with a special return code and sends it on. When it gets the reply with that return code it knows the reply is for you and not the router itself or your roommates phone. This is basically what NAT does, it translates between the public IP address and the private IP address. This leaves another problem, you have to make the initial outgoing message so that your router can mark it, and now no-one can just send a new message to you first. So how do two people that are each behind a NAT router talk to each other if neither is able to listen? Some routers allow devices on the private network to tell them "please forward me any messages you get with return code X". If your program asks for this and the router supports it then it will set up this forwarding rule for you and you are now open to receiving messages and listening to anyone using that return code. The program you use is configured to use specific return codes, so it knows what return codes to send out with. This is, very basically, UPnP. So NAT allows for one public IP address to sit in front of many private IP addresses and send messages back and forth keeping track of which messages are for whom. UPnP is asking your NAT to leave a messaging channel open for you. | 1 |
brqrwo | Biology | How do bonsai trees work? I've seen the picture of an apple bonsai tree with a single apple on it and I want to know how that happened. | The bonsai tree is a stunted tree grow to resemble a large tree in miniature. They are planted in sand and given only the bare minimum of nutrients and water need to grow. Because there is no soil to hold nutrients and water it requires careful and watchful gardening. The bonsai in karate kid is actually a great metaphor for how Mr Miyagi trains Daniel. To shape a bonsai one must imagine the way you want the tree to grow, and make cuts and add nutrients to make it real. When you cut a plant it does not die, instead it tends to grow stronger there. Plants that are tossed about by winds grow stronger roots, and firmer branches. Cut off one branch. Two take it it’s place. Where the plant finds water or sun, it grows towards these. To train Daniel, he must assess the boy and see his potential, then plan his “cuts” and “nutrient” rewards to guide his growth, until he becomes the final product that was envisioned. Each task is meant to “cut” his body in a specific way, so that he will be stronger in those ways. With rewards, he show Daniel that Mr. Miyagi’s path is good, and should be continued. | 9 |
f0kx6k | Biology | Why do human babies cry so loudly and so often? It seems like a detrimental action that would be selected out. Loud wailing could put the baby and it's caregivers in danger. A baby's cry is loud and piercing, wouldn't that be selected out ? Other animals don't seem to cry so loudly just because. If I were a tiger and I heard a baby crying that would just sound like a free meal telling me to come get it. | It’s the only way the baby can communicate. Until the child learns how to talk, crying is the only way he/she can express their needs. A change in the their crying can also indicate if something is seriously wrong. | 5 |
5uj0nh | Biology | I realize that there are colors other than just the ones on the visible light spectrum. But where would we see these other colors if we were capable of perceiving them? From what I understand, when we perceive color, it's because the wavelengths that are bouncing off of an object correspond to a color on the visible light spectrum. There are also colors outside the visual light spectrum that we cannot perceive. But IF we could perceive those colors, where would we see them? There's nothing around me that I would describe as having "no color at all," every object seems to reflect a color on the visual light spectrum. | Imagine you can only see the color red. If you have access to something translucent and red, you can basically run the experiment. (Or, if you have anything tinted and translucent, you can use that color.) With your red-o-vision, look around the room. You'll notice that [everything you see has a color]( URL_0 ), all of it being a shade of red. Now, some things that normally have no red at all (like a green apple) will look black, and things that are normally white will be indistinguishable from things that are normally red -- these are just the new version of "white" in your all-red world. Even though you can only see red, in your perception everything will have *some* color on the way from black to all-red. Now imagine someone came up to you and told you that most humans can actually see a broader spectrum, past red all the way up to violet. But to you, there's no place for these colors to fit. You would still be asking "IF we could perceive those colors, where would we see them? There's nothing around me that I would describe as having 'no color at all,' every object seems to reflect a color on my visual light spectrum." But you (back in the real world) know that's not true. You know, for instance, that while a red apple and a white sheet of paper looked the same through your red filter, they look very different once you're not looking through the filter -- because the paper is also reflecting the rest of the visible spectrum in addition to red, and we perceive that combination as white. And that's the answer: all of the objects around us that reflect visible light are *also* reflecting or emitting radiation in the other parts of the EM spectrum. If an object *only* reflects light outside the visible range, we just perceive it as black, but plenty of things that have a color to us are also reflecting light outside our visible range. If we'd evolved with the ability to see this light, we would probably have also evolved a perception of color that accounts for it -- i.e., to us, an object that reflects a particular blue looks the same as one that reflects that blue *and* UV light, but if we could see UV light, we'd probably perceive those two objects as being different colors. | 1 |
fg7npv | Technology | How different is digital zoom on a cell phone versus taking a picture and later cropping what would've been zoomed in to? | With digital zoom you save some storage space as you don't have to store all the pixels you'll later crop out. Also you don't have to open the image in a separate app to crop it, it's ready to send/post online as soon as you shoot it. | 2 |
aaocak | Other | Is there a name and/or explanation for when you know the spelling of something, but temporarily spell or write it wrong? For example, I just went to write out a text that said ‘in the morning...’ and found myself writing ‘mourning’ even though I’ve known the correct spelling/form of the word for years. It’s one of those moments where you catch yourself and end up feeling a bit silly. Just wondered if there was a word (in any language) or an explanation for it? | The best word for that would be word transposition. In this case transposing a similar sounding word. You can also transpose words when talking, "I'm going to wall over the jump." You can also transpose letters in a word. | 1 |
cokat1 | Culture | Why does everyone use the AD and BC years even if they don't follow Christianity? I feel genuinely dumb for asking but I'm not sure where else I can ask lmao | Most do it because that's how it's always been done, without thinking about it. Some are starting to use CE and BCE (common Era and before common era) | 4 |
grrh53 | Biology | What causes the seemingly random bumps and dips in fingernails as they grow? | Could be a sign of Psoriasis. It’s called nail pitting. There are quite a few systemic conditions that can manifest in your nails. If worried worth getting seen by your doctor. | 11 |
co3toy | Technology | How do some pirates get their hands on legit Netflix/Spotify/iTunes accounts and sell them for a cheaper price illegally? How does it benefit them? | They steal an account and shift the risk to you for a smaller profit but get rid of sole ownership of the account. You buy the account cheaper, but second hand not knowing where they came from. This could be not as illicit, like someone gets a bunch of school emails and sells them to groups of X people with academic plan eligibility. On the other hand, it could be a leak or hack of an account that people don’t know happened, or worse are dead or are cybercrime victims. It works most times for purchasers because it’s not very enforceable. But it can be uncomfortable, and even the smallest risk is a risk depending on a buyer’s tolerance—the illegitimate seller is more savvy than you, probably hidden, maybe abroad (usually), and doesn’t care what happens after he splits with your cash. | 4 |
g8wxna | Mathematics | The Fibonacci Sequence, especially in regards to art Please...for the love of my sanity. I've researched this topic relatively extensively and I just feel more and more stupid. I understand the rule of thirds. I understand the compounding numbers or whatever. However, a majority of the time I see the sequence imposed onto an image, all I can think is "okay, but...how? There's nothing really significant about where that's placed." Example: (poor example because I can kind of see how this makes some sense, but still) URL_0 Is it really just that it's more busy in the "center" and it gets exponentially less busy? Am I overthinking it? Am I an idiot? What's with the spiral? Is it just demonstrating the direction of the exponentiating, or does it have to do with the spacing of the colors or shapes on the image? | I'm not an artist, but I have some life experience with people seeing patterns where there are none, and this seems to be one of these things. Just reading through this article here... [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) ...it just seems to me that there is no substance to this at all. In the very first example, he shows with the top spiral that it counts when the line traces something in the painting, like the shadow on the upper left or the womans neck. Fine. But then he continues to list everything that is in between the lines as well as evidence for the spiral. As if everything can be evidence for the spiral if you want to. In the second example he supports his argument with the center of the spiral being on a focal point, but that was not the case with either spiral in the first example. Also note that in the first and the last example, he starts out by placing the spiral so that it touches the edges of the paintings on three sides and starts his argument from there. But in the other two examples, if he did that, the whole spiral would end up higher than he wanted, therefore he did not do that and hoped that no one would notice. In the second picture, the center would not be in her eye, but somewhere in her hair, making his argument baseless. In the third picture, "the upper right square is delineated by the horizon" would not work since the horizontal line would end up quite a bit above the horizon. The whole thing just reeks of utter BS to me. It seems to be one of there things that no one in the art world dares to call out because that would make him look like he is the one who just does not understand it. But I'm afraid the emperor has no clothes. | 2 |
7qz7qk | Mathematics | what exactly is the determinant of a matrix calculating, and why does it end up being so significant/useful in other matrix calculations? | I'll focus on 3 x 3 matrices. Take any 3D shape. Something that's asymetrical, like a sculpture of Vincent Van Gogh's head. Or anything else, it doesn't matter, but it should have a finite volume V. (and not zero volume, like a flat plane). Think of your 3D shape as sitting in an x,y,z coordinate system. There are infinitely many points in your shape and each of those points P is described by a vector that goes from (0,0,0) to P. So you have infinitely many vectors that describe your shape. Now suppose we have a matrix M. We can think of M as transforming vectors. Take a vector v and M\*v is some other vector (or maybe the same vector!). We're going to take every vector that's describing your shape and transform each of them with M. The end result will be another shape. How different it is will depend a lot on M, but it can be any combination of the following: your original shape rotated about some axis; your original shape scaled up or down in size; a mirror image of your original shape; your original shape skewed, as if it were made out of clay and your smushed/stretched it uniformly along some combination of directions. The volume of your transformed shape is likely different than it was originally. The factor by which the volume changed is the determinant of M. That is, New Volume = |det A| \* Old Volume. I used absolute value on the determinant there because volume ought to be positive and the determinant can be negative. A negative determinant has a straightforward interpretation: it means the transformation of your shape involved taking a mirror image. Like Vincent van Gogh's missing ear switching sides. With this volume-based interpretation of determinants we can quickly make some inferences about determinants that are pretty hard to perceive just from the definition of determinants. For one, a zero determinant must mean the transformation squished your shape to something with zero volume -- a flat plane, or a line, or a point. So any matrix that "projects" down to a plane or a line or a point must have zero determinant. Also we can infer if the transformation by M only rotated your shape without altering it otherwise, then the determinant of M should be 1, since the volume is the same. Likewise, a purely mirror-image transformation, or a mirror-image combined with a rotation, ought to have determinant -1. Also we can infer the important rule for determinants, that if K and M are both matrices, then det(K\*M) = det(K)\*det(M). I'll leave that for you to reason through. | 3 |
kzbsxn | Mathematics | How are credit card numbers generated? Can someone just type random numbers into a website and “guess” someone’s actual card, and buy something with that? | In almost any situation, some other piece of information will be verified along with the card number, such as the cardholder's name, expiration, billing address, CVC2 code (cvc1 if the transaction is in person). The card number itself is usually not enough to complete a transaction by itself. | 3 |
elbz0e | Economics | The US Economy is in debt, and borrows more every year. What's the long term effects? | Sovereign debt is different than personal debt because people die while nations do not. There is some point in every person's life where their productivity declines. This means lending to them on the promise of repayment past that point is a bad deal. On the other hand, nations are expected grow indefinitely so you can loan money to them against this future productivity. In terms of 'sustainable', there's a bit of an anthropic principle at work here. Nations don't really 'decline' - they collapse. When national productivity enters a long-term decline, this creates a situation where citizens investing in the future is counterproductive - and this destroys the incentive to work or save (and thus recover from the decline). This economic death spiral generally leads to collapse/rebirth rather than any sort of predictable economic cycles. For relatively small nations, this cost is included in the pricing of risk. Banks are reluctant to loan money to nations likely to collapse except to protect previous investments. However, for a nation like the United States, there's no way to adequately price that risk. If the United States collapses, *everything* collapses. It would be the modern equivalent of a Fall-of-Rome situation. Since there's no possible money to be made in a world-wide economic collapse, there's no upside in betting on that collapse - the only smart bet is on endless growth. | 3 |
65e1jt | Culture | What happens to people who were previously charged with illegal possession of marijuana after a new law legalizes it? | They are still guilty of that crime, unless there is a law or executive action that provides clemency for those people. | 3 |
lxludo | Physics | Why do planets in our solar system orbit the sun on the same plane? | They are not orbiting in the same perfect plane but it is pretty close. This comes from the time before the planets had formed when the solar system was just a cloud of gas and dust. The particles were just orbiting what would become the Sun in any random orbit they happened to have. The problem with this is that the particles often crashed into each other. If not actually touching they would often get close enough to get a gravity sling from each other and pull each other into different orbits. Quite often these orbits would take them out of the solar system entirely or on a collision course with the Sun. But some of the particles were less likely to crash into each other then others. The particles that were orbiting in the same plane as most of the other particles, just by random chance, would have fewer collisions. So as as particles collided with each other over and over again more and more particles would be these that orbited in the same plane. And eventually you got to the current state. | 4 |
j3qgu7 | Other | How ancient armies, such as the Roman Legions, able to feed themselves during wartime campaigns? | The Ottomans had to ways to deal with this issue. 1. They carried most livestock with the army when they went on campaigns. The livestock were mostly consumed by high ranking officials and the Sultan. 2. The towns on their road and nearby were informed so that the locals would sell them what was needed. | 11 |
60ztg5 | Other | How do those 90's "Magic Eye" pictures work? | The proper name is "single-image random dot stereogram" (SIRDS) It's tricky, and describing it without drawing diagrams is a little hard, but I'll try: Imagine a 3-D model on a table. There's a piece of glass halfway between your eyes and the model. Paint a random dot of color on the glass near the middle. Look at that dot with your right eye. Paint that same color dot on the model, behind the dot on the glass. Now look at the dot on the model with your left eye and paint the glass with a dot of the same color in front of the one on the model. Now there are two dots on the glass. Now look at that second dot with your right eye, and paint another dot on the model behind it. Keep repeating this process, alternating eyes and painting dots. Eventually, you get a line of dots across the width of the glass, spaced about half the distance between your eyes. Now do it all over again with another random dot on the glass. Keep doing this over and over again until there's no spot on the glass without a dot on it. Take the model away and look at the glass, and if you diverge your eyes the right amount, your brain will lock onto the repeating pattern of dots and reconstruct the stereo view of the model that's not there any more. One final note: the dots don't need to be random; you can take pixels from an image, and it will look like you just have a repeating image on the glass. The result looks like the image was painted onto the surface of the model. [Wikipedia article, with diagrams]( URL_0 ) | 1 |
5x55ay | Culture | If you were stumble across an undiscovered island, what would you have to do to make it your own country? | Go to the island. Set up what you need to defend it from anyone else who would want to take it from you, which probably involves cannons and missiles. Declare that you are a country to other countries and hope that they agree. That is pretty much it. What areas are countries is up to who recognizes them. | 6 |
6ioku4 | Biology | What happens to our brains when we practice a skill unsuccessfully, and one day it just "clicks"? | Can you suggest an example of what you mean? I think I know what you're talking about, but I always saw that "click" as just recognition of how much progress you've made. I don't think it's so much that you suddenly go from bad to good at something, but rather you make steady progress but probably view yourself as bad at it for much longer than you actually are bad at it, but then one day you just kinda notice how much better you've gotten. But that's why I asked for examples, because I might just not be thinking of what you mean. | 2 |
ennory | Other | How does Merriam-Webster make money off of dictionaries these days? | I think it's funny when young people come in here and think the way they do things is the way everyone does things. I'm Gen X and while I use online dictionaries all the time, I still have several physical dictionaries, because I like words and I like to look through them. There are millions and millions of people older than me who never use the internet, or only use it for Facebook and email. There are millions of people younger than me who prefer the feel of physical books. Books are not "going the way of the dodo," at least not in my lifetime. | 28 |
iytn5e | Other | how did countries get categorised into east and west when the world is round Real answers pls hahah no trolling from flat earth people | Something to remember is that language you ask the question is important too. English will give you answers from “western” perspective. If you asked in Chinese, you may find the answers will be slightly different because of culture and historic reasons. I think many people have given you wonderful answers already. | 14 |
6jonmx | Chemistry | What happens to a cucumber or other food when it's pickled? How exactly does the vinegar solution pickles are in saturate and preserve them? What changes about the cucumber's chemistry that changes the taste and keeps it from spoiling? | URL_1 URL_0 I think this is appropriate for this sub. | 3 |
6pk7rz | Economics | How did the restaurant industry convince the American population to pay their employees for them? Where did we buy into the tip system? | Customers ultimately pay for everything. That's the way all businesses work. The tip system just adds things like uncertainty and the extra work of fucking around deciding what to tip. Customers ultimately pay for everything. It's one of the reasons the whole "job creators" talking point is just bullshit on its face. | 26 |
ll6m7o | Technology | Why are telecommunications cables not all underground? | Because telephone poles came around first and when you already have the infrastructure in place, it's difficult to convince people to spend the enormous amount of money required to dig up the city/country to lay cables. | 4 |
bi159w | Other | Can someone explain the deeper meaning of these type of photos? | They're called a Rorschach Test and it was hypothesized that what people saw in the blots provided some clue to their psychological state. There's little empirical evidence that they can accurately predict anything about a patient's state of mind or predilections, but they have some use in getting patients to start talking to a psychologist. | 1 |
6ry89e | Technology | Regarding Bitcoin, what is the importance of a computer solving equations? I understand that there are people with very powerful computers solving equations for Bitcoin and that they get money for this. 1. Why do these equations need to be solved? Does it secure the entire currency from being hacked? 2. From what I understand, you don't get money for every equation solved, but you will only randomly get paid for solving equation. So this means the more equations you solve the higher chance you get paid? 3. Finally, are these simple equations, or are they difficult? Do the equations get progressively harder? | **The reason gold is valuable is that it is a token for a standard amount of human work. Bitcoin is the same but accounts for computational work. ** Why is gold valuable? Fool's gold is just as shiny. Titanium didn't tarnish. Gold is hard to forge and hard to find. A country with a lot of gold has a lot of resources to spend mining gold. Gold represents labor + technology. It has a fixed value. You can accumulate gold two ways: you can work to mine it, or you can work to buy it from someone who mined it. Since you could always go mine it, it sort of has a built in floor of economic value. Bitcoin are the same but instead of digging in the dirt, they factor large prime numbers. This is a well established hard thing for computers (or people) to do. It is the same kind of operation that makes cryptography work so if someone were really good at it (like a Bitcoin alchemist) they would have a large opportunuty cost in mining tons of coins instead of just breaking all the passwords in the world. It's unlikely for that to happen. Since computation is valuable, there is an inherent value in buying something that requires a resource (computer time) be spent on it. It feels pretty perverse but it is just like the gold standard (or [rai stones]( URL_0 ) if you're feeling curious for more weird facts about money). | 2 |
mtos57 | Biology | How do parrots copy humans on what they say, how does that work? | Some birds can learn to mimic the sounds of other birds and even humans. If a bird can learn to imitate a sound, they can copy the sounds others make. Scientists wondered why some birds can learn to imitate sounds and others cannot. The new study found that parrots’ brains have special areas for learning and remembering sounds. Like parrots, birds that can learn to imitate sounds have brains with special learning areas. Birds that cannot learn to imitate sounds do not have these special learning areas. The special learning areas in the brains of birds that can learn to imitate sounds are called a core and a shell. The core is in the front of the brain. The shell is in the back. Scientists think that this is because birds that can imitate sounds learn to copy sounds before they learn to fly. It may be that in birds that can learn to imitate sounds, the core and shell were duplicated a long time ago and have changed very little since then. | 2 |
i886hn | Biology | What does the emergent theory of consciousness mean/say? | An "emergent property" is where something isn't a single thing by itself. It is a result of a combination of many things. Think of it like an orchestra playing a song. If one violin stops, has the song stopped? No. How about if twenty instruments stopped? Maybe. Probably still the song would be going. But I could probably ask the one violinist I initially asked to stop to be the only person. To play. Ask her to play the melody of the song, and I still might recognise it. But... It isn't the same as when the orchestra played it. But still recognizable. The emergent theory of consciousness just says that what we experience as mind or consciousness is an emergent property of all the actions of all the cells in the brain. You can cut out bits, turn some off, back on again, and consciousness might be changed or diminished... But it doesn't sit and live in any one part. It is a result of all the cells acting together. Edit: typo fix | 2 |
iqfnc2 | Biology | Since sunburn is your skin cells DNA killing themselves to prevent cancer, does that mean people who heavily tan and not burn are more susceptible to cancers like melanoma? | When I was a kid I lived in New Zealand, where the ozone layer is basically non-existent so UV levels are extremely high. Even on an overcast day you can get burnt if not wearing suncream. From being there I must have got burnt at some point because now I have a fuck ton of moles on my body. Apparently I'm at a greater risk of skin cancers because of this, although I'm not sure if the moles are the risk or an indicator of the risk. I'd recommend anyone to wear suncream on a bright day. You can still tan- I usually wear factor 50 and still get tanned. | 8 |
iu4xp1 | Biology | why does a punch to the jaw knock you out? | A punch to the chin knocks you out. It rotates your head in a way that smashes brain against the skull. The point of the chin provides maximum leverage and faster rotation. | 1 |
j70rq0 | Mathematics | How can people play chess against themselves, if they know what move their “opponent” is going to make? | The best chess players can anticipate their opponents move anyway, so not much difference, so in theory playing against yourself as a skilled player is the hardest game you will ever play. Eitherway though it's more about practising strategies and giving you a look at what your opponent would do if they were you xD | 18 |
cuojbh | Technology | Why does it matter which side is up or down when microwaving bagged popcorn? | The butter is put in the bag on top of the kernels. Turn the bag over and the butter would be on the bottom. Not very effective to have only some of the kernels coated in butter but others not. | 11 |
74owxj | Biology | Why does everyone say to drink lots of fluid when you have a cold? I have a cold and everyone says drink lots of fluid. What does this actually do if I drink lots of fluid as opposed to not drinking fluid while having a cold? | Your immune response to a viral infection is more demanding on your body than if you weren't actively fighting an infection. Simply put, you need more fluids and electrolytes to build the things to fight the injection. It's also easier to not want to eat or drink while you're sick adding to the lack of proper hydration. Fever, chills, hell even just the increased mucus production are draining your fluids quicker than normal. Edit: TIL you can't mention electrolytes on reddit without at least a handful of idiocracy references being thrown at you. Nice. Edit again: "Fight the Injection" is my new band name. Don't hate. And thanks for gold ? Not sure what it does but thanks | 22 |
hefl95 | Biology | Why be a woman hurts so bad? | I'm no expert but I think it has less to do with a reason for the pain to exist, but rather with the lack of a reason for it not to exist. Evolution doesn't select beneficial traits only. In order for - not to keep something - it has to have a negative impact on reproduction. Basically if women who feel a lot of pain stopped getting pregnant or wouldn't go all through pregnancy (this is just a theoretical example) then their genes (the ones responsible to feel said pain intensely) wouldn't get passed on. If there now would be a group of women that for some reason don't feel the same pain then they would be free to have children and therefore pass their genes on. The next generation would thereby have more "insensitive" women than the generation before. That's obviously not to say that women who feel pain shouldn't reproduce or are somehow inferior. This only states why there basically is no need for nature to select women in such a way that they don't feel said pain. In essence "the implementation of 'less pain' has a higher cost than benefit". But that is just my thought on it. That's the same reason why giraffes have an unnecessary large nerve (I think) that goes from head down to their body and up to their head again. | 3 |
ebf1lt | Biology | Why do our chins wobble when we’re sad? | Have any tests been done to look at whether or bot it was familiarity of the ethnicity or whether or not it is hard coded in our DNA. | 3 |
69wie1 | Other | Where does Box Office money go? How is it distributed? Does the budget of a film include the salaries for the actors? | It's super, super complicated. That's why people refer to "Hollywood accounting" or "Hollywood bookkeeping" in general to what happens when unusually complicated accounting and bookkeeping schemes are created. Usually, the owning studio will create a subsidiary corporation for the movie. The film will have a budget, funded by the executive producer, and virtually everyone involved will simply be paid a salary or hourly wages to work on the film. After the theater gets their share of the ticket sale price, the rest of the box office revenue goes to that subsidiary corporation. If the movie makes more money than its budget, the corporation turns a profit, most of which goes to the studio and executive producer - the ones who financed the film in the first place. Two things complicate this: First, big-name actors, writers, and directors may request a percentage of the profits rather than a salary. They want to share in the riches if it ends up being a huge success. However, evil Hollywood accountants try to minimize the amount they pay those people who get a percentage by using clever accounting tricks. For example, as the movie gets popular they'll do additional promotion. They'll "outsource" the promotion to their own subsidiary corporation but have them charge ridiculously inflated fees. The movie ends up not making a profit, on the books - but the producer ends up making a killing. Example - here's what should happen Budget: $100 million (pays for almost all costs to produce film) Director promised salary: 10% of profit Box office gross: $500 million Profit: $400 million Director final salary: $40 million What happens instead: Budget: $100 million (pays for almost all costs to produce film) Director promised salary: 10% of profit Box office gross: $500 million Marketing expenses: $400 million Profit: $0 Director final salary: $0 The marketing expenses all go to a different subsidiary corporation owned by the same executive producer, so he gets rich while the director gets screwed. | 1 |
ax0wxd | Biology | Why does stress "build up over time" and why do vacations alleviate it? Is there a chemical or hormone that takes a couple days to filter out of the blood, or is it purely psychological? What day to day changes happen when I'm resting vs working? | First: stress is fueled by a hormone called cortisol. Why stress builds up over time: Humans used to experience life or death situations with animal predators so we, like most animals, created a response to these situations so that we can better survive. It’s called the “fight or flight response.” This response releases a hormone called cortisol into the body, which prepares our body to fight or flee from a predator. The way we live has evolved a lot quicker than the human body so this response to literal life or death situations is somewhat outdated, as we do not face the same life or death situations as we used to. So, this fight or flight response often gets triggered with uncomfortable social situations such as public speaking, deadlines or confrontation, or worse situations such as poverty, illness or isolation. Our body literally thinks we are facing death in these situations and must protect itself. When other animals experience this fight or flight response, they have this ability to literally shake off their excess stress (cortisol) after experiencing the life or death situation. We unfortunately do not have this ability and this stress does not always get released. This can lead to a build up of cortisol in the body. And we often activate this fight or flight response more than we realize. For example, the human body sometimes cannot distinguish between what’s actually happening to us and what’s happening on a tv or movie screen. So if we’re watching something scary or stressful, our body’s fight or flight response gets triggered as if we’re actually experiencing it ourselves. So when you’re resting (or not getting triggered), you have less cortisol flowing through you. This experience is called “rest and digest” which is the opposite of flight or flight. Although we can not necessarily stop this fight or flight response from kicking in, we can sometimes purposefully take ourselves out of it by identifying when it happens and using relaxation techniques. So it can have psychological influences. Submitted from my phone so sorry for weird formatting. | 8 |
a6ob3e | Chemistry | why is there the two rows of elements that don't fit in on the periodic table? How do these 20 or so elements fit into those two single spots? | I've seen a number of "they're not outside of the main part of the periodic table" (and related statements) with pictures of alternative periodic tables, but every example that I've seen provided so far doesn't do a good job at demonstrating this at all. Please consider the [left step periodic table]( URL_0 ). To me, I think it most clearly demonstrates the patterns seen in the periodic table. Most simply, start with hydrogen near the top right. You have two rows of the same number of elements before you reach the next row and add on four more (for the p orbitals), then two rows later you add on four more (for the d orbitals), and finally two rows later you add on for more (for the f orbitals, that were initially described as "not fitting"). Continuing this pattern, you'd expect a new set of orbitals to exist with another four elements added per row, and that's exactly what we consider when doing calculations in other areas of chemistry that consider further orbitals. (Really, these are just patterns and operations in math that happen to be applied to real-world implementations, like the orbitals of elements.) So I feel like with the left step table, not only does it show how they fit perfectly, but how you'd even expect further elements to be organised. (I'm sorry for any confusing bits and organisation to this reply; feeling sick and crawled out of bed for a few minutes, drowsily writing this response. Perhaps a better explanation would be given in my reply to an old question [here]( URL_1 ). Back to bed now.) | 11 |
f0exfc | Other | why do trees not grow above a certain altitude? I live in a mountain town and have wondered this for a long time. Also why do no trees grow on south facing slopes? | Trees need a certain amount of air, water and heat that simply aren’t present above a certain altitude is the short answer [National Geographic ]( URL_0 ) has a more detailed answer | 2 |
9m9xw5 | Biology | What gives meth users the sensation of bugs crawling under their skin? | Nerve impulses - if you know someone with restless leg, or you've drunk far too much coffee, you know the sensation of your nerves pulsing without your desire. Meth is a lot stronger stimulant so more random nerves fire, and the brain is good at making up stories to explain sensation. | 2 |
7ppt8o | Technology | Why are cartridge based video game systems inferior to disk based ones? Also, why did cartridge based system not have load times? | Cartidges required a small printed circuit board for each unit they sold. The advantage it there was a direct electrical contact which enabled the data to be read much more quickly. The disadvantage is the cost to produce each cartridge. Optical media is far cheaper to produce, but the disadvantage is the read speed of your optical drive. | 4 |
5x3oe7 | Repost | I know that we get vitamin D from being in sunglight but how? | There's a molecule in that your body uses to make cholesterol called 7-dehydrocholesterol (let's call it 7D). 7D that gets exposed to the UV-B light emitted by the sun or tanning bed is converted into vitamin D3. | 1 |
7yz31l | Engineering | Why do some street lights buzz? | For the same reason that some fluorescent lights buzz. They contain a circuit to generate a high voltage (because that is needed to pull electrons off the gas in the bulb and ionize it). That high voltage circuit is oscillating, and the rapid current changes cause rapid magnetic field changes. The leads to [magnetostriction]( URL_0 ), where the magnetic field changes cause some materials to slightly deform rapidly. They literally get longer/shorter or bigger/smaller as the magnetic field effects them. Just not by very much. Or they can simply get moved back and forth. That can cause buzzing, whining, rattling, etc. It might not even be the thing undergoing magnetostriction that makes the noise; it could be shaking something else and that thing makes the noise. The same phenomenon can cause other gizmos to make noise. Transformer whine/buzz, capacitor whine. etc. | 1 |
ascj7p | Technology | How are there Damascus steel knives if we don’t know how to make it? [take this post for example]( URL_0 ) how are they using a brand new Damascus steel knife, I thought we didn’t know how to make it? Or is it not “true” (if that’s the right word) Damascus steel and just an imitation? | The types of ores, smelting and forging techniques that the original craftsmen used to make damascus steel is lost. We have reverse engineered the products and can make similar products using modern steels. Part of the problem is modern steels are of a different alloy type, so the raw materials are no longer commercially available. | 6 |
ff0pzm | Engineering | Why do both Diesel and Petrol pumps have the same shape nozzle? | Diesel pumps nozzle are bigger than gasoline nozzle so, you won't be able to fit it an a gazoline car. Obviously, you could still pump gazoline in a diesel car. | 4 |
7n8fwq | Culture | Why are manual transmissions still so prevalent in cars in Europe? | There's an annoying amount of people here assuming an automatic car is just an objectively better "progression" of the technology because it's the only thing they've ever driven, they can't compare. If you've never tried a manual because you live somewhere that encourages autos try one (and don't be put off by how it "seems more complicated") you might find driving much more enjoyable than you did. That's why they're everywhere. | 30 |
o621zk | Physics | Why should knives not be cleaned in the dish washer? (How can water make them dull?) | In addition to the metal comments, most "good" knives have wooden handles. The water and heat combo will destroy the wood in short order. | 4 |
6kw6v0 | Biology | why do we tilt our heads back when laughing out loud? | This is just a guess from working with voice for a little while. But when you're laughing that's more air that's escaping your throat than normal and tilting your head back would open up your throat to let it out. | 1 |
76okwv | Economics | How can sites like Green Man Gaming and Humble sell steam keys at significantly reduced prices than whats available on steam? | It depends on which key seller you are talking about. Some key sellers are getting their keys in large quantities for bulk discounts, or getting a large stock during sales to resale later, or from countries where the game is sold for cheaper (as explained by other comments), or from people who got the game for free or at a low price and don't actually want the game (like game bundles, or free with GPU purchases, etc.), or even from illegal sources. Because of the unclear origin of the keys in many websites, I just avoid them and buy directly on the digital store-fronts (Steam, GoG, Origin, etc.). Humble Bundle in particular works differently. The game publishers have access to key generators on Steam (and the others but it's more rare) which allow them to put a key to activate on Steam in CD boxes, to give away some keys to reviewers, friends, or as prizes, and so on. So when Humble Bundle is organizing bundles, or for the single purchases on the store, they are getting the keys directly from the publishers, who generated them for free on Steam. No for the question "how do they make money ?". * The key sellers are relying on small margins, they are purchasing something at a lower price somewhere/somehow, to sell it a bit cheaper than the "official price". They don't do much in between, just hunt down the lower prices, put the acquired keys in their system and then the automated process can deal with the rest, so they can operate at low cost. * Humble Bundle, in single purchases through the store, they are getting some percentage on the sale. Steam would typically something like 30% (exact number is secret and is contract-based), so Humble Bundle would say 25% to the publisher : the publisher will be okay with it, since it's more money for them, and Humble will manage to get some money from whatever is left to them after they give their part to charities. * Humble Bundle, with their famous bundles : go to the bottom of the page, find the "Choose where your money goes" and you'll see exactly how much they make on the default purchases. In that case, the publishers agree for a much lower than usual price for 2 reasons : charities, and huge exposure meaning a lot of new sales that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise. | 17 |
6q5ujq | Technology | .rar .zip .7z etc why are there so many ways to compress files? Is there a meaningful difference between them from the end users perspective? | One thing I haven't seen mentioned here: rar originally broke the compressed file into multiple equally sized files. This was important when you had to move the files via floppy disc. Or when you were downloading the files via dial up. Obviously that's no longer necessary (or it's automatically handled by the transfer mechanism aka: bittorrent). But it was important at the time. | 8 |
imwi0q | Other | It’s said that, theoretically, if you fold a paper 42 times, it will reach the Moon, and if you fold it 103 times, it’s width will surpass the observable universe. How does this work? | Lets say you have a piece of paper. A standard, off the shelf piece of single-sheet printer paper (those ones that come in reams of 500 or so) is around 0.08mm thick. If you fold this piece of paper in half, you're doubling its thickness, from 0.08mm to 0.16mm. Do this 42 times, that is 2^(42), or 4,398,046,500,000. Multiply that by 0.08mm (and convert that to km) is 351,843.72 km. The distance from Earth to the Moon is about 384,400 km. Not quite there, but perhaps the original theory used paper slightly thicker than 0.08mm. If we had a piece of paper 0.0875mm thick, then that's 384,829.07 km. We've made it! Now, if we fold this 0.0875mm thick paper a 43rd time, then the distance reached is 769,658.139 km. Notice the large jump in distance? 44 times? 1,539,316.28 km. We're starting to get to some really large numbers. & #x200B; Just for completionists sake; 103 times is 887,355,420,000,000,000,000,000 km. That's a lot of football fields. ;-) Edit: fixed a few typos. And oh boy, did this little comment blow up! Thanks, and thank you OP for the fun question! | 17 |
6w2rdd | Physics | how does a hurricane have a calm eye? I've never been through a hurricane before and I'm now living in Texas. I'm not worried about the storm. I'm just curious why the wall doesn't move the air in the center more and more until there is no eye. (I once saw a why planes crash episode and they flew through the wall and into the eye. Fascinating episode.) | Imagine spinning a wheel: because the entire thing is rotating at the same rpm, the outer edges have to move much faster then the inner part. In the very centre, the wheel isn't even moving at all. It's just rotating on the spot. Now, this model is obviously quite different from real hurricanes because wheels are solid objects and the air in the hurricane hasn't got a clear boundary vs the air that isn't a part of it. The eye does behave like this, but as we move further away from the eye, the air can't keep up with the air in the centre that's rotating much faster, and so it lags behind. Why is the air trying to move together like a solid body at all though? That's because of a property called viscosity, which causes friction between layers of air. Think of getting a big stack of paper and then pressing down on it and trying to slide a sheet off. None of the sheets are attached, but the ones below have to follow the top because of the friction between the layers. Air behaves much like this, so if you have a fast layer sliding against a slower layer, the faster layer drags the slower layer with it. They aren't attached though, so one layer can move a little slower, and as you move even further out, the speed of the air drops because each layer is moving a little slower then the last; until when you're clearly out of the hurricane. Then you have still air. In fluid mechanics, these types of flow are called forced vortex (the eye) and free vortex (the edges), and to model a hurricane you have a bit of a combination of both. | 3 |
k959m8 | Other | How do you grow thick skin mentally? How does a brain not care about someone's opinion? What I always hear is "grow thick skin". I guess there should be a process to do that or a mental training. But how? I don't talk about insensitivity or sociopath behaviour, but more like being toughy when it comes to little problem. | You have to be confident and comfortable with yourself before you can take criticism from others. I say this as someone who was basically raised broken, and had to fix myself in adult life by learning how to admit mistakes, etc. Figure out your fears, figure out your strengths, and conquer the fear, and play to your strengths. | 10 |
5rn65n | Biology | Why can't we cut our body fat directly? | Fat is difficult for the body to process because it isn't water soluble, but stores energy very efficiently (compared to glucose, it stores about twice the energy per gram). It is stored in adipose tissue, whose purpose is to store fat and cushion/insulate organs. Because of those things, fat doesn't want to leave adipose tissue, and when it's forced to, it does so in small amounts to keep your blood from becoming lard. Fat is used for energy as a last resort, it's the least efficient aerobic process our cells use to make energy, and your body will start consuming your muscles before it starts consuming fat. This is why diet is so important to burning fat. If you keep taking more in, you can't burn it off, so it gets stored while your body burns off sugars and protein first. If you take too much of everything in, you end up storing some of everything as fat. Even if you work out, you're not likely to burn more than 2500-3000 calories per day, that should be your ceiling, if you're trying to lose weight, exercise isn't the thing that will do it best. You should definitely exercise, because it helps a bit and it's really, really good for you, but taking in fewer calories than you burn is the only way to lose weight, and unless you're a professional bodybuilder or some sort of elite athlete, you are only in control of about 30% of the calories you burn at most. Even highly active hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa burn about the same number of calories daily as you and I. | 3 |
d1qfp5 | Other | What do the numbers on the top of a soda can mean? | Its part of a deposit law. When you buy a 12 pack of soda for say $2, the store adds and additional 0.05/0.10 onto each can, you get that money back when you bring the empty cans back. So in Michigan a 12pack of empties is worth $1.20. | 2 |
a97ou2 | Chemistry | Why burnt stuff always turns black?? I need a pretty complex explanation pls! :C | The microscopic 'texture' made from carbon/charcoal is extremely *not* flat, or smooth, hence not shiny. The different wavelengths of light get absorbed into the carbons structure and not reflected. Imagine a mirror and how it reflects light, if you take the same mirror and crush it to dust, it will not reflect the same amount of light. Blue butterflies work with the same concept, the surface structure of the scales on the wing are spaced so perfectly, they absorbs all colours except the blue wavelength. Carbon is not perfectly spaced, and just absorbs it all. | 2 |
o9us7n | Physics | --- Higher dimensions. just can't get my head around it. please. someone. I have read the book Flatland so i get how there can be a higher dimension but I just can't comprehend it. If you have a way it can be visualised or even explained a lil bit, please tell me. Thankyou for your time! | There's an old story about 3 blind men who encounter an elephant. The first one grabs its leg, and he says "oh, an elephant is like a tree". The second one grabs its trunk, and says "no, an elephant is like a snake". The third one grabs its tail, and says "no, an elephant is like a rope". Then they get into an argument with each other. If you were to observe a higher dimensional object, you'd be like one of those blind men. You can only perceive the object as it appears 3 dimensionally. You're basically seeing a tiny fraction of the whole. We have to use analogies to describe it, because since we don't operate in higher dimensions, our brains can't picture it properly. If you were to describe a man, you might say he's 6 feet tall, weighs 200 lbs, has brown hair and blue eyes, he's wearing a gray suit and he's got a gold watch. You could describe him 3 dimensionally. But if you look at him 4th dimensionally, he's also a 5 year old child eating an ice cream cone, and he's a teenager fumbling around in the back seat of his car with his prom date, and he's an old man in the nursing home. You'd be able to see all of these things at once if you could somehow see his entire life. We can sort of imagine the fourth dimension as time. What about a fifth dimension, sixth dimension, or seventh dimension? We can describe it with mathematics, but nobody has any idea what it would really "look" like. We just get into bad analogies then. | 7 |
6drgk0 | Culture | Why are the president's connections with Russia bad, but everyone's connections with every other country are good? First, spare me any, political tongue lashing and down talking. I don't care if you're right or left or middle, or all three. I'm none of the three, I just want to know why I should care, and want to have a clue when my BF talks about it because it seems backwards to me. I'm just legitimately confused why I should care about the relations with Russia. Things seem somewhat friendly, shouldn't we want to be on good terms with them? Wouldn't they want to be on good terms with us? I don't get it. Admittedly, I don't pay alot of attention to this stuff, but it kinda seems like BS. Like they're trying to scare people by saying "ooooh its the Russians...." like it's 1955 or something. EDIT: 1. Thank you for all the responses, these make it much more clear to understand. So thank you :) 2. How the heck do you downvote an honest question? Really? Lol geez | Being on good terms with foreign governments & working for the benefit of Americans is good. Conspiring with them in secret to manipulate the public opinion in exchange for favorable business deals is not. We've got a lot of very rich people with questionable ties to the Russians who have consistently lied about it. This is a strong indicator that there's some serious corruption going on somewhere in Trump's organization. This is what people are upset about - our leaders trying to benefit themselves and the Russians more than they're benefiting America. | 7 |
8wxm1d | Chemistry | I am curious why the water stored in plastic bags still be in liquid form despite being submerged in brine that is way below 0 degrees, and immediately turns to ice once you slap the water in the plastic bag | Water has to have an impurity of some kind (air bubble, mineral molecules, divot in their container, etc) for ice crystals to start forming. So pure water that is still and in a perfectly smooth container can be supercooled to significantly below freezing. Agitating the water thus putting air bubbles in it, or otherwise giving it a nucleation site will allow for crystals to form and they will do so rapidly. | 2 |
ck5wxf | Other | Can an unethical NDA be used against someone as a means for them to keep their job? Are there any protections against these NDAs? To expand on why I am asking, I was in a discussion about "crunch" in the video game and anime industries, where employees were overworked to unhealthy degrees. There has been more and more talk of this being unethical in the last year. Someone said that this will just make the companies force employees to sign NDAs so they can't discuss their hours. & #x200B; This would, of course, be an unethical way to overwork people while holding their job above their head. Is this a viable concern, or are there laws to protect the workers against this? | Unethical dosnt mean illegal. A NDA would have to break the law to be declared void. If it was signed in bad faith or under duress... then it could be argued. | 5 |
5munjo | Other | Why tint car windows? Is this purely cosmetic or for privacy reasons? No flair as I am in mobile. | Keeps UV rays from damaging the interior. If you live in an area that gets super hot, it really does make a difference. | 3 |
5tlxd3 | Other | How did the lefty loosey righty tighty scheme of screws,jar lids, etc. become so universal? | Although its been well answered, I would like to point out that reverse thread bolts are very common in things that turn: saws, bicycles, etc | 2 |
63yv0r | Culture | If the fictional depiction of child sexualization is illegal in the case of lolicon and shotacon. Then why isn't the depiction of other heavy crimes such as rape and murder illegal in the form of drawings, animations and video games too? | There's a reason there are no child NPC's in games like GTA & Saint's Row, or the minor NPC's in the Fallout & Elder Scrolls games are normally unkillable. If it were possible out of the box, the games would probably be outright banned in most countries, rather than just getting an adults-only / 18+ age rating | 13 |
dn5rb7 | Biology | how do bugs appear in closed containers? | Eggs can survive the packaging process if things arent done right. If you're talking about a resealable container you have at home it's the same idea - eggs were laid and hatched later. | 5 |
gijgp7 | Engineering | Why armies just stood in front of each other and fired? While watching the movie The Patriot I keep seeing major battles where the 2 armies just stand in front of each other and fire. Why did they do this? This seems like a very stupid way to fight a war causing the most deaths possible | Because the accuracy and firing rate of their weapons was very poor. Keeping your men together and organized allowed them to fire in a more organized way that allowed them to fire volleys in succession and en-mass, that allowed for more hits on the enemy. If everyone hid behind cover separately, and fired sporadically at individual fleeting targets that were also hidden behind cover, then no one would ever hit anything. So, you sacrificed your own concealment in an effort to actually inflict damage consistently. | 8 |
7ument | Technology | How do planes avoid collisions above the Atlantic where there is no radar? | Any plane that has a 10 person capacity or greater is required to have what's called a Traffic Alert and Collision System which does warn pilots of nearby air traffic and sounds an alarm when a plane is within a certain distance and on a collision course. You can read more about it here: URL_0 | 3 |
dcesae | Psychology | What is borderline personality disorder | So I have BPD and I'll try to explain as best as possible but they're are a lot of good answers here. BPD is a personality disorder which means it's a group of behaviors and traits a person uses as they live their life. There is a biological and an environmental factor. Biologically, people with BPD have smaller, overactive fear centers in their brains. Environmentally, many people with BPD have trauma from abuse or some other event. Having BPD basically means you have unstable patterns in regards to self-identity, relationships, and emotions. Much of the time those patterns are learned behavior as those patterns are what helped the person with BPD survive some type of situation when they were younger. For example, many people with BPD are incredibly black and white thinkers and you can either be a best friend or worst enemy. The ability to shift the thoughts so suddenly can come from needing to disconnect with inconsistent caregivers so you don't get hurt every time they change their tune. Another example is that many people with BPD have a lack of self-identity and can be considered social chameleons. Which basically means we kind of just change our personality depending on who we're around, mainly to please others. Which is a defense mechanism from having to change who we are to please an abuser, etc. One thing about BPD is that you have really extreme emotions. Not like in a Bipolar sort of way, though, which can get some people confused. I like to explain it like this. We all have an emotional spectrum. 0 is completely apathetic while 100 is losing all control to emotion. Whatever your current situation is can raise or lower the number. Most non-BPD people hover around the 20-30 range normally when dealing with the situations of life like minor annoyances or embarrassment and most get up to 50-70 when incredibly upset. Someone with BPD is constantly hovering at the 50 range and when something triggers them emotionally, they can easily go into the 80s-100s. Basically, you feel the extreme version of whatever emotion your experiencing. Shame instead of embarrassment, rage instead of anger, euphoria instead of happiness, etc. There are a lot of people who claim people with BPD are manipulative and evil. I actually lost a friend when I was diagnosed because she claimed that if I had BPD that meant I was an evil abusive person because that was the nature of people with BPD. A lot of that comes from stigma. It's one of the most widely stigmatized and misunderstood disorders. A lot of times people chalk down crazy exes behaviors to BPD when in reality they, y'know, could just be batshit crazy. In reality people with BPD are more likely to be abused. This is not to say there aren't jerks with BPD. BPD is incredibly tough for everyone involved and when it's untreated it can cause harm to not only the sufferer but their loved ones. But people with BPD usually aren't trying to cause suffering or trying to be manipulative. A lot of times the manipulative behavior is something, again, learned in childhood that helped the person survive. Another personal example: I have a really hard time disagreeing with other people. If I disagree with a friend I get super scared they're going to hate me and never want to be around me again and the like, so I end up beating up on myself and talking about how wrong I am and how they're right and I'm so so sorry for disagreeing with them because my opinion is worthless and theirs is perfect. That, to most people, can come off as manipulative or guilt tripping. But when I fall into that spiral I'm being 100% serious about it all. I'm beating myself up because I've learned growing up that having the 'wrong' opinion from my caregiver will cause me pain or neglect or anything. I grew up learning that my thoughts and opinions were always wrong and the caregiver's was always right. & #x200B; BPD is an incredibly complex disorder but there is treatment for it that can be very effective. People diagnosed with BPD can also be un-diagnosed with it because they can lose the traits. They still might have the same emotional intensity, but the difference is they've learned better ways to navigate themselves, life, and others. The reason why BPD can be 'cured' with enough hard work is because BPD, like most personality disorders, is a pattern of behaviors and reactions that are learned from the environment plus the biological component. It's possible to un-learn those patterns and learn healthier patterns even if you can't change your brain chemistry. I'm nowhere close to un-learning everything and I'm still trying to unpack a lot about how I grew up and why I am the way I am but since my diagnosis I've become a lot better at interpersonal communication, emotional stability, and the like. Once you can recognize those patterns it's easier to pull yourself out of them and change them. So I can catch myself doing something and redirect my thoughts and know that of course my friend isn't going to hate me and leave me for not liking their favorite book. You can also learn how to tell when you're reaching that extreme emotional intensity point where you have a hard time being able to reason and de-escalate before you get there which I've gotten a lot better at as well. I do want to specify that there are people with BPD that are fucking terrible. But there are also good people with BPD. Many times someone who runs into a terrible person with BPD will claim all people with BPD are like that. But, in my experience, if you've met one person with BPD....you've met one person with BPD. Just like not all people with OCD or anxiety or depression or schizophrenia are the same, not all people with BPD are the same. We're not a monolith. No group is. Hoped that helped some and didn't come off as a long rambling tangent. | 18 |
5r699m | Biology | morning wood. How and why does this happen to guys? | It's a mixture of a drop in blood pressure associated with sleeping and pressure on your prostate from a full bladder. One hypothesis is that it's a safe time for your body to "practice" erections as you may go some time without mating. Generally everything in your body atrophies and becomes useless if they don't get used. When it did this during the day randomly, it gets in the way. | 3 |
6s8tke | Physics | Why does every crowd sound the same? | They don't; try listening to the crowd for, say, a Justin Beiber concert, versus the crowd at a Metallica show, and the variance in target demographic is enough to shift the sound pretty drastically. EDIT: Or even more within the same crowd: wrestling matches from 10-ish years ago would have chants of a fairly high pitched "Let's go Cena!" and then a notably lower pitched "Cena Sucks!"; the general trend being that women and children (who, on average, have higher voices) were bigger Cena fans, whereas men (who, on average, have lower voices) were more often Cena haters. This was [lampshaded in an in-universe retirement address by Cena]( URL_0 ) who instructed the crowd to chant this way. That said: what the other folks have said here is right for general crowds that aren't biased towards any particular age or gender. But many many things in life that gather a crowd are. | 1 |
o19crp | Biology | if I do 100 pushups in a day spread out do I benefit more or less than if I do 100 pushups in a shorter time span like about 5 minutes. | Benefit is the wrong term to use. If you force you muscles to lift your bodyweight at angle (push up) 100 times in five minutes you will stress the muscles way more and thus grow more muscle in the torso and and arms (bicep, tricep, pectoral etc ). If you do 5 push ups every 20 mins throughout the day, you won't stress the muscles, but will keep a higher heart rate and thus gain a cardio improvement and gain lean muscle in the torso in the process. | 2 |
mva8io | Physics | What do physicists mean when they say photons do not experience time? They took time to get from A to B, so didn't they experience time in that journey? They had one position at time X and another at time Y, isn't that a different experience? | As you go faster, your relative times goes slower, and there is a limit to this equation when your speed is equal to the speed of light, where theorically, time is "stopped" for you if you move at lightspeed. From your perspective (where you don't go at lightspeed), the photon is to a place A and then to a place B. From the photon perspective, time don't flow, so it's both at place A and B. | 4 |
9cdryi | Biology | Why do the same species of freshwater fish (like pike, musky, perch) show up in non-contiguous freshwater bodies- especially in the Wisconsin-Minnesota-boundary waters area? Wouldn’t the separation create different species? Are they all different species with differences we can’t observe? Were efforts by humans to repopulate a factor? | Seperation of species takes hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, the fresh bodies of water havent even been their in their current forms that long. | 3 |
5ojngs | Other | Why are there so many abandoned cars in the woods? | I geocache as a hobby and I probably find one or two abandoned cars in the woods every year. I've made it a minor personal mission to figure out as much probable backstory to each car I find. The remains of [this truck]( URL_0 ) are in the middle of a forest in Old Bridge, NJ. It turned out to be a 1951 Ford pickup. Not too far from that picture I found the remains of what I think used to be an old tool shed or small barn. After some research I learned that the forest I found it in used to be a farm up until 1962, but the owners of the farm passed away and nobody in the family wanted to take it over so it fell into ruin. Eventually the state bought it and turned it into protected land, but nobody cleared out the farm so the forest just grew all around it. There's plenty of trails nearby so over time people (read: teenagers and drunk males) simply wrecked the truck a little at a time. This [VW Beetle]( URL_1 ) is less than a mile from my house and is literally a stone's throw from the edge of a large (105 acre) park that was built on the remains of a farm that the town had purchased from the owners several years earlier. The VIN on the car is still visible and it's registered to the son (deceased since 2009) of the former owner of the farm. Based on photos of the area before construction was done, my best guess is that the car was left in a barn that was situated about 75 yards from where the VW is now, and when they were leveling out the land someone just drove or hauled the car to the edge of the land, parked it, and walked away. It's been sitting there for about ten years now and is accessible with minimal effort. Body panels and parts of the car are strewn over an area about 100' in diameter, often partially buried due to the fact that the car is right next to a drainage area for the park and nearby housing development. | 25 |
6oxdlj | Repost | Who decided to make all barns red and what is the purpose of all barns being red? Drove down farm roads of Indiana the other day and every single barn was red and it spawned this question for me | Nobody cares about the color of the barn. Just as long as it is painted. And with a big barn to cover the farmers order the cheapest paint they can get. The color of the paint comes from various different pigments that is added. So the price of paint is dependent on the price of the pigment. The cheapest pigment is iron oxide as it is found everywhere in the dirt. Iron oxide give a nice red color. | 3 |
5oz676 | Other | Why do squatters in the UK have rights to where they are squatting? Why can't they be kicked out as soon as they are discovered? | "Squatting in residential buildings (like a house or flat) is illegal. It can lead to 6 months in prison, a £5,000 fine or both." URL_0 Squatters can request to take ownership of land if it is deemed the land is no longer being used etc and the original owner doesn't raise any objects. Also property law is completely different in Scotland and you have to have a registered title for property so this doesn't work. | 3 |
91ofes | Culture | Why do humans kiss each other? How did it begin? Are we the only animals that do it? | URL_0 TL;DR Animals find mates by smelling. Animals have a great sense of smell while humans don't. So some humans get close to each other and kiss rather than going around sniffing everyone. However most of the human population doesn't kiss but chimpanzees and other primates do. | 16 |
carzua | Biology | why can a 500 pound man walk but if you put 400 pounds on an average 100 pound man they wouldn’t be able to walk? Is it because the 500 pound man has muscle? And if he got surgery to remove all skin and fat and became the same body fat % as the 100 pound person, would he have more muscle? | He would have more muscle initially but because he did no exercise before outside of carrying his body weight around, he would lose that muscle as it’s not working anymore with all the fat gone | 3 |
66ha0v | Repost | Why can't video game graphics be as realistic as movie CGI or the in-game cutscenes? | Former game developer here, The difference is in the capabilities of pre-rendering and real-time rendering. A modern console can render ~400k polygons per single frame - at 60 frames per second. A pre-render in a cutscene or in a movie is going to be in the hundreds of millions per frame. Further, the equations and algorithms we use to light and color each pixel are very different. pre-render doesn't care about cost so much as correctness, because they can always throw more hardware at the problem. In video games, we fake it as much as possible. A pre-render is far more capable in their visual effects than a game engine. The two simply do not compare and they never will. As real-time rendering becomes more capable, which is strictly a hardware problem, so too will pre-rendering. | 7 |
j9qz0f | Biology | -Why is carbon dioxide okay to breathe for a while, but carbon monoxide will kill you? It’s one oxygen molecule verses two right? So why is a human reaction to them so different. | The chemical properties of CO allow it to bind to red blood cells in place of O2. With CO taking up space your body can't get enough oxygen to keep your brain operating. | 5 |
8d4tg9 | Technology | How come diesel engine have been praised in the past and now suddenly everyone seems to be against it? | Like many things, the popularity of diesel-fueled passager cars has gone back and forth over the years, particularly in the US. In the 1970s, gasoline prices shot up and diesel was significantly less expensive, so diesel cars became more popular. However, they made poor passenger vehicles, especially the American ones, and their emissions were dirty and sooty. They were largely abandoned by the 1980s as the price gap between the fuels shrank. By the 2000s, cleaner diesel fuels and turbo diesel technologies overcame the drawbacks, and their popularity returned due to their improved fuel efficiency over gasoline. But earler this decade, VW got caught programming their diesel engines to cheat on emissions tests, result in a massive settlement that took many of their cars off the road. Between this, and the general sentiment against fossil fuels, diesel's reputation has suffered. Still, the technology itself is fine, generally cleaner and more efficient than gasoline. A turbo diesel mid-sized vehicle can get better mileage than a Prius, especially on the highway. | 6 |
5oah3o | Technology | Solar panels. How do they work? | The sun creates these things called *photons*. These photons are little packets of light and energy. These are ejected from the sun trillions and trillions of time per second. When photons hit things, they can give up their energy to them. That's why light can heat things up. Solar panels take this energy and store it. The main mechanism is called the *photovoltaic* effect. Solar panels have a crystal panel that the light shines on, and inside there is a lot of circuitry which is connected to a battery or energy storage device. The crystal panel is made up of atoms. Atoms are composed of their cores, and the electrons which orbit them. The cores, assuming they have at least one proton are positively charged. To even out the charges so the atom is neutral, negatively charged *electrons* surround them. They "orbit" the atoms at different energy levels. Getting into this area any further ultimately leads to quantum mechanics and things get a little too wishy washy and mathy to do a good ELI5 on it. If a photon hits the orbit of an electron, the electron could take that energy from the photon and *excite* and go up an energy level. Now the solar panel has *captured* the energy from the sun. This happens all over the solar panel. This is where the *photovoltaic* effect kicks in. The crystal panel's exposure to light (because of how it can capture energy to excite electrons) causes a *voltage* change, and can cause an electric current in the circuit. This causes energy to flow into a battery and we can store it for later. Edit: Thanks for the suggestions /u/TBNecksnapper | 1 |
dekzpu | Technology | Why are phone calls such bad quality when something like a radio presenters voice is so clear? | Bandwidth is one issue other have brought up but another big one is your microphone and environment. Your phone microphone is just not that good. It can't be, it has to fit in your phone. A professional microphone like what the radio presenter is using is large than your whole phone by like a factor of 10. It also has a pop filter a sound bored and mixer connected. The radio presenter also isn't in some random room. They are in a room that has been designed to make them sound good. At a minimum were are talking foam sound absorbents to stop sound refection, and outside noise. The room is often a special shape as well. | 3 |
iwxrrl | Physics | What is entropy? Edit: Thanks all - if you get to read this, the comments have such a good mix of explanations! | Real ELI5, because others dont know what ELI5 means.... Entropy = Probability of that state naturally occuring Low entropy means tidies room ever where everything its placed on its place and its ready for visit of British Queen. High entropy is total mess in your room. When you assume each day of the year, more probable is second variant, because its happens 364/365 days a year, maybe 1 day, you have extremely clean room. Its because mess can mean anything. You can have 1 random item in wrong place (sock on the table) and its a mess. And this can happen with every item on every place in your room = there are 10000000000+ possible way, how your room can be a mess, but there is only 1 or 10 states, when its tidy.. So its more probable to have mess in your room. You can spend a lot of energy to make it tidy = decrease of entropy. You can spend very small amount of energy to increase entropy = make a mess. It always takes less enegy to make a mess than to clean it. Entropy increases over the time - If you dont clean your room for months, there will be dust and spider webs. There is very small probability that if you make explosion of fireworks in the room, it can make it more clean than it was before, but the chance is less than 0.00000000000000000000001%. Most of the time, it will lead to more mess. | 3 |
hwi59z | Biology | why do some fruits ripe faster in paper bags as oppose to leaving them out in the the open? | Many fruits emit a gas which speeds up the ripening process. In the open, the gas disperses, but when kept in a bag, that gas is contained and thus in higher concentrations around the fruit. | 1 |
mwbts7 | Biology | what is a chromosome? | A chromosome is just a bunch of DNA, clumped up into a specific order and shape. Your DNA wraps itself around some proteins, like thread on a spool, and clumps up into specific shapes. And that consistency means that we can study them very closely - we can point to the spot on each chromosome that codes for each of our genetic traits - hair color, skin color, sex, etc. What's important about those chromosomes is that they're consistent - they're able to make exact copies of themselves so that when your cells grow and divide, each of the two new cells gets a full set - each cell of your body has the same copy of your whole genetic code. And each chromosome comes in pairs - we have two copies of each set of our genetic code, with one copy coming from each parent. Humans typically have 23 pairs of chromosomes - 22 sets of normal chromosomes (called autosomes) along with 1 pair of sex chromosomes. | 1 |