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fq5dkk | Technology | How will ending encryption effect my life? | it basically means that anyone who wants to, will be able to access all the intricate details of your life. basically anything and everything about your life can be revealed. including all your chat convos and messages and anything you do, say, post, etc online. | 4 |
hy3vs8 | Other | Why is it generally considered that female genital mutilation is negative, and male genital mutilation is positive? | It's not generally considered "normal" or "funny" in most of the world, it's primarily a Muslim and North American thing. The overwhelming majority of men in the world aren't circumcised and in many of those places the idea that you would do that to your son is seriously frowned upon. | 7 |
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? | They don't disappear in a secret spot like the bermuda triangle. They are actually rolled/pressed/squished out by a competent masseuse (though many don't know how to do this). There is a fellow who did an amazing amount of research on this. His name was Clair Davies. You can check out his book here: URL_0 | 20 |
cki1o5 | Other | If we exhale carbon dioxide, how does giving mouth-to-mouth help a person? | You don't metabolize all of the oxygen that you breathe in. 20.9% of air is oxygen, which is what you inhale, but your exhaled breath still contains about 16%, which coincidentally is about the minimum oxygen concentration that will still support life. Artificial respiration, in conjunction with CPR, will oxygenate and circulate a person's blood sufficiently to extend their survival window significantly. Of course, 100% oxygen is far better if you have it available. | 3 |
9zng8p | Biology | How is it physically possible, across all species, for Hummingbirds to flap their wings anywhere from 10-30 or in the extreme up to 70-80 times "per second", or is that unit misinterpreted? I can't seem to find a specific answer for this in regards to *how*. It just seems so odd. My lack of understanding is taking this unit as basically saying time is slowed down for Hummingbirds. I cannot wrap my head around how this makes any sense. | Hummingbirds have tiny little wings and relatively strong muscles to move those tiny little wings. | 3 |
65zw94 | Economics | Why is it nearly impossible to print your own checks? A check is technically anything with your account and routing numbers on it that authorizes your bank to provide funds to the party cashing it. Why do we still need to pay specialty printers to make checks for us? Would the world crash and burn if MS Word had a check template? Can magnetic ink still really be necessary when I can deposit a check by snapping a pic of it from my phone? | It's a legal instrument, but it might take extra time to clear and might require extra scrutiny to assure the banks involved that it's legit. | 2 |
hai1cm | Biology | - How are birds able to fly through clouds without getting spatially disoriented? How do they avoid hitting obscured objects? | Birds hit things all the time. Wind turbines kill lots of birds, even endangered ones. Windows in tall buildings kill lots of birds because they see the reflection of sky and think there is sky in front of them. Birds make lots of babies, which is good because they die a lot. | 3 |
lzfbua | Technology | How do noise cancelling headphones/earphones work? | There's two types of noise cancelling. Active and Passive. Passive noise cancellation just means the headphones are designed to try and *physically* block sound from getting in. Just like covering your ears with your hands when there's a loud noise. Active noise cancelling /u/TheTalmidim explained better than I can. But, often active noise cancelling and passive noise cancelling tech are used together for maximum isolation. | 4 |
lxy9mw | Other | What are the natural predators of humans? If there are none, why are there none? | Lions, Tigers, and Bears - oh, my. ... Actually lots of animals would eat a human if they found a dead one. But, animals aren't idiots and the track record of taking on the planet's apex predator who specializes in endurance hunting - just having a crowd of humans chase you until you die of exhaustion - isn't a path that most animals would go down on purpose. | 4 |
ku4po8 | Other | The role that Barber Shops play in Black culture, especially for males. | Economic opportunity for black men; haircuts are in high demand. Hairstyles are important to physical appearance in black culture, and there’s loyalty to the barbershops you go to to get your hair done so it becomes personal. It’s YOUR barber, and that barbershop becomes home-like. The barbershop is then a warm locus in neighbourhoods where you can go and see friends and shoot the shit. | 2 |
ixalgo | Other | Why is it called the 'missionary' position? | It is commonly believed that the term *missionary position* arose in connection with English-speaking Christian missionaries, who supposedly encouraged the sexual position in new converts in the colonial era. However, the term probably originated from Alfred Kinsey's *Sexual Behavior in the Human Male* through a confluence of misunderstandings and misinterpretations of historical documents. | 1 |
nzusq5 | Technology | Why can't we watch over the airways broadcasts through the internet? It is 2021, how come we can't just watch network tv (CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox) over the internet instead of having to hook up a digital antenna and having the hassle of moving it around to ensure a strong signal? Yes, I am aware that broadcast tv can be viewed over paid streaming services like Sling, Hulu Live, and YouTubeTV. There are also stand-alone paid services like Locast. But why can't watching a network broadcast be as simple as connecting directly from your internet where your IP matches to the local tv market? | That's a great idea, and back in 2012 a company called Aereo tried it. Basically they developed a circuit board that had several individual tv antennas on it. Then they would set up their equipment in an office in a major city that had broadcast stations. As long as you were in what was considered the local market for those stations you could sign up to receive those stations. You would pay rent for a specific antenna and live TV would be streamed to you. You weren't paying for tv like cable, you were simply renting an antenna. I was an early alpha tester for the Houston, TX area. I live about 50 miles from Houston. The service worked great. Unfortunately the major broadcast companies didn't like the idea and they took it all the way to the Supreme Court and they ruled against Aereo. I believe they made a mistake, it would be no different than if I rented space on a tower in Houston and ran a 50 mile cable back to the tv in my house. URL_0 | 2 |
9i7z2d | Other | Why rain harvesting is beneficial to us, aren't we disturbing the natural cycle ? | First, the part you harvest is just a tiny fraction of what pours down. Second, the water you harvest isn't destroyed, it eventually evaporates going back into the cycle. | 2 |
9y4w9y | Physics | Actual Rocket Science | > but how do all of the countless successful launches work? This is what the bottom of a Soyuz rocket looks like. URL_0 Note the smaller engines placed around the main block in the center and around the outer edges of the 4 boosters. These are Vernier thrusters. By varying the thrust (and orientation) of those smaller engines, the rocket can turn. Some rockets simply turn the entire engine in the desired direction. Here's a video of that being done on the J-2X, a now cancelled rocket engine that was supposed to be used on the cancelled Ares rocket, or on the SLS. URL_1 | 2 |
dfhwr9 | Other | Why does traffic come to a standstill during rush hour? If the front cars are going the speed limit, shouldn't traffic flow consistently at the speed limit? | If you are running down a corridor, you can run at the fastest speed you want, and you'll get to the canteen as quickly as you possibly could. If your whole class gets let out, some people will run faster than others. The slower runners might get in the way of the faster runners, but there is plenty of space to maneuver around them, so most people will make it to the canteen almost as quickly as they could have if they had a free run. But a slight slowing down will happen. Now the whole school gets let out at once. All the doors open and people file out. Those faster runners are going to encounter a lot more obstacles in their way so they'll have to slow down, especially as people come out the doors. There are now a lot of people in the corridor and it will likely be moving far slower than anyone would want to be going, but we have to slow down to avoid colliding with people coming out of their class rooms, etc. Now at the canteen there is only a single door. So whilst the corridor can have 10 people running side by side, only a limited number can get through the door. This creates a bottleneck. The other people coming out of the classrooms are slip roads coming on to a motorway. The bottlenecks on the road are junctions, roundabouts, traffic lights, speed limits, etc, that will force cars to slow down at one point, this has a knock-on effect with all the other cars behind because they too are slowed down. During class, very few people are in the corridor, so going through one door won't slow you down. At lunchtime (the rush hour equivalent) hundreds of people are trying to use the canteen door but still only one person at a time can go through, and the rest of the school must form a queue. | 24 |
ab77tb | Biology | If the cold virus is so common throughout the world, and has been for a long time. Why have we not become immune to it? | Because it constantly mutates. It mutates so rapidly that it's impossible to vaccinate against it - a new strain will just show up instead. | 4 |
hepy14 | Chemistry | Why is the ocean salty? | Salt and other minerals are leached out of rocks. Once in the ocean the salt has nowhere else to go so the salinity of the ocean slowly increases over time. Lakes and rivers are not salty (except for some exceptions) because they are continually supplied with fresh water, and they have outlets into other rivers or the ocean. Lakes that are salty have no outlet, so just like the ocean the salt builds up over time. | 2 |
6d8ica | Biology | How are animals able to drink water from puddles from the road, dirty ponds, etc. etc. But if we were to do it, we'd fall terribly sick? | In part it's immunity gained by getting ill once, or a few times and surviving it. The immune system remembers what foreign organisms it encountered before and fights them a lot faster and efficiently when an infection happens again (with exceptions from the rule, not all pathogens produce a lasting immunity). In part it's evolution at work. The wolf that couldn't handle half-rotten meat simply didn't live long enough to reproduce. Disadvantages like that get culled very quickly in nature. Most people living today have a genetic immunity to illnesses that were devastating a few generations earlier. The Spanish Flu wouldn't be as bad today as it was 1918 because we're the descendants of the survivors. If there are few water sources, then those have an advantage who can use even the dirtiest puddle without major consequences. But, you also only see the animals drinking, not hiding in the undergrowth puking their souls out, or dying prematurely from infections and poison. Just because they drink something doesn't mean it's automatically ok for them to do so. If there's nothing better to be had, they'll go for it and hope for the best, not like they can go to the next convenience store and buy a bottle of water instead. | 35 |
9uk2if | Biology | What actually happens when you “tweek” your neck and it hurts to turn it in one direction? | This is a "neck spasm" - the muscles which move your neck involuntarily contract, and may remain tense and partially or fully contracted for several days. Other spasms include foot/hand cramps, abdominal muscle cramps, and charlie horses. These don't tend to last as long as neck spasms. This is very often your muscles attempting to prevent damage to your spinal cord. Poor posture, sleeping weird, or rapid head movement can trigger your body's reflex that says "uh oh, the spine is moving in a way that could cause serious injury!" Your muscles tense up as a way to immobilize you - just like a neck brace worn after an injury. Muscles can also spasm for other reasons, like fatigue or potassium deficiency. Movement is difficult and painful because you're trying to use your muscle when it's already trying very hard to not move. | 1 |
6r9uc0 | Physics | Why is it not warm at the bottom of the ocean? So I know from physics that anything under Immense pressure Increases in temperature and becomes pretty hot. Like elements as they get closer to the centre of the earth. Yet at the bottom of the ocean where pressure is around 15000psi. The temperature is pretty cold; around 0-3℃. Why is this? | Heat increase from pressure is caused by the substance compressing and the same amount of energy existing in a smaller space. Water is barely compressible. At a depth of 4km it will only compress 1.8%. Also it stays at that pressure. If you brought a bag of water from the surface to the bottom it would heat up a bit but would quickly lose that heat to the surrounding water. It wouldn't just stay warm. | 2 |
946byv | Biology | [deleted by user] | I don't work with 23andme, but I assume they worked with technology I am familiar with. Here's the basis for it: Of all the bases in the human genome DNA, most don't change because they are important or just haven't had the opportunity to change in substantial numbers yet. Some DNA bases are known to vary commonly between individuals. Some DNA base variants are more uncommon. Some DNA base variants only tend to occur in specific populations. So, if you wanted to figure how which bases in DNA, which genes, and which populations tend to exclusively have those changes, you could just collect that data. It's expensive but not impossible. The technology exists. I mean, you know that eye color varies. There's an eye color gene and individuals commonly vary on the eye color gene. Well, every gene is like that to greater and lesser extents. You can see the eye color effect because it's something we can easily observe. The other gene variants are there (and there are thousands and thousands of genes), but most variants are much more difficult to observe than eye color, and so you need genetic sequencing. Sequencing can even reveal variants that are different in sequence but have *no biological effect*, so this is very powerful method. Looking for these genetic variants across many genes is LIKE looking at things like eye color, hair color, but on a much deeper and more extensive scale. So, you might have a gene, call it "GENE123", and you might know based on based data you've collected, that the 29th base in the gene tends to be "T" in caucasians, but everyone else tends to have an "A". So, you can read just that region of "GENE123" and figure out if that DNA base is a T or an A at that spot. If it's a T, then your caucasian score (likelihood that you are truly a caucasian) goes up. And you might have statistics compiled like that for a bunch of races and a bunch of genes. So now, when you're screening someone's ancestry, you only have to read a few hundred small regions instead of reading and analyzing 100s of millions of bases worth of complete DNA sequence. This dramatically simplifies the cost and work involved. The initial cost is millions of dollars sequencing populations of known origins to figure out what marks are typical. But after that, you can drive down individual costs to something fairly reasonable, because now you're just looking for regional changes you've already identified. No race will have a perfectly distinctive marker. Genetics is much too messy for that. And an individual might have accured a mutation that makes them look like the "wrong" race accidentally. But if you have lots and lots of markers you can imagine that it wouldn't be impossible to come up with a score to figure out how likely someone is to have this ancestry or that ancestry. Does it work? I would say the science is evolving. **In principle, this should work.** But the analytics will only be as good as the data and *they are still collecting data*. But over time it's a service that *should become more reliable*. It's possible none of the services are quite there yet though. I wouldn't know. But I do know the science, and I can say the science is correct. You just have to imagine how much data you need to accurately catelog and predict all the ancestral variation in the human genome in a way that makes sense to people. An important disclaimer though: Race and racial identity are social constructs, not genetic ones. I will not argue the point here, but people can Google this idea to see where it's coming from. Basically, a genetic test should never be upending your racial identitiy. That's not how racial identity works. | 28 |
6u4z50 | Culture | Why is insider trading considered unethical, and subsequently so illegal(in the U.S.A.)? | If insiders were allowed to cheat like that, then they would make more money and other investors would make less. Taken to the extreme, and we know Wall Street likes to do that, the banking insiders make all the money and nobody else gets any. | 2 |
mv6zsb | Biology | Why do humans enjoy eating insanely spicy peppers (like ghost peppers)? | Bearable pain feels good. Your brain releases endorphins in response, which makes you feel good. | 1 |
84qejh | Biology | As we get older, why do men find it harder to pee while women find it harder to not pee? | It's important to note that **both** men and woman's pelvic floor muscles weaken over time. It's just that men have a prostate, that commonly grows larger at old age and restricts urinary flow when enlarged. Interestingly enough, this is the same mechanism that makes urination difficult while erect, as the prostate is a donut shaped gland that essentially "pinches" the urethra. | 4 |
aaar6l | Economics | How is Google Photos able to give you unlimited storage completely free? | They will use your photos to create a perfect clone of you through memories and will then sell the organs back to you when you experience liver failure in the year 2067. Its right there in the TOS. | 12 |
bfj6wy | Biology | what does a neurologist do that’s different than a psychiatrist? | They're completely different things. A psychiatrist is a doctor who diagnosis and treats mental disorders. A Neurologist is a doctor who diagnoses and treats disorders, diseases, and injuries of the entire physical neurological system. Essentially, a psychiatrist is a doctor for your mind (although they can diagnose certain conditions in the brain and treat them with medication ), and a neurologist is a doctor for your entire actual physical nervous system. | 4 |
gf7em0 | Biology | What is happening in your brain when you get that "off" feeling after watching something particularly disturbing? | Not a psychology expert, but speaking from experience, sounds like dissociation/depersonalisation. It can happen after any trauma, including secondhand. People have different thresholds for it. It's not evil in itself--it protects you, in a way. The problem comes if it lasts longer or arises at times seemingly out of the blue. It's really helpful to get a process to talk to about this. It is treatable. | 1 |
gwut5o | Other | Where does the idea of feelings being related to the heart come from? We all know expressions that imply that we feel our feelings with our heart. This is obviously unaccurate medically or biologically speaking and I understand that it is poetic/figurative but I'd like to know where this concept originated/who was the first recorded person that used it. English is not my first language, sorry for any mistakes. | Even though emotions are centered in the brain, a strong rush of emotion such as fear, anger or love pumps adrenalin to the heart, which accelerates the heart beat. So prior to the advancements in science, the heart was thought to be responsible for emotion | 1 |
5u89f1 | Chemistry | Is it possible to put out a fire by lowering the temperature alone? We learned that a fire needs three things, fuel, oxygen, and heat. Remove one of the three and the "triangle" collapses and the fire goes out. Most conventional methods of putting out a fire involves smothering it, thereby removing the fuel and/or oxygen. But is it possible to kill a fire by just lowering the temperature? As in put it in a freezer and just get it cold? And if so how low does the temperature need to be? | Yes, it's possible. A very common way to lower the temperature at the source of a fire is by adding water to the fire. The water absorbs the heat as it makes its phase change from liquid to steam. | 4 |
mig82d | Technology | why do computers (motherboards) still have ps/2 ports by default, but no such keyboards or mice have been made in at least 20* years? Sorry if wrong sub, couldn't think of where else to ask. *To my knowledge - not meant to be hyperbole, i think I'm probably underestimating here. | Fun fact - the last update on my Windows decided that it doesn’t need USB anymore, so I couldn’t log on, because neither USB mouse nor USB keyboard would work. After spending some hours I ended up with having to order a PS/2 mouse, because nothing else helped (I really was not up to reinstalling the system altogether). So I’m actually glad the computer at least had that port. | 3 |
lzetrw | Chemistry | Why does metal get cold when plastic does not? When it’s cold out and you touch metal it’s always SO COLD, but plastic seems no colder than ambient. Why is that? | What you're feeling is the ability to conduct "heat", This is called "thermal conductivity" As your body is higher temperature than ambient, things that conduct thermal energy more feel colder, as the heat moves from your hand faster. metals generally conduct heat better than plastics, and therefore feel cooler than plastics. | 7 |
d3liml | Culture | Why is Japan's Declining Population viewed as a concern when geographically they are a small nation, and overpopulation is something that seems a like a global issue? | The reason why people outside of Japan are carefully watching its population is because Japan is seen as the leading edge of a "demographic transition" that many other Western countries may soon experience. Birthrates have been declining all over the world, and many European countries would also have declining populations were it not for immigration. There may be something unique about Japan that is causing declining population, or maybe there's just something about wealthy industrialized societies that makes people want to have fewer children. Out of concern that the latter is true, other countries are watching Japan closely to see how the "inverted population pyramid" plays out, whether their population decline will ever stop, and what policies are most successful for dealing with the issue. | 8 |
ajc8lc | Culture | the different contexts of the term Zionist | Zionism is the Jewish nationalist movement with the aim of establishing a nation for Jews. People saying Zionist as a derogatory term have the exact same definition of the term. They're just implying that the project to create a nation for Jews in Palestine has effectively been a colonial project aimed at displacing 2/3 of the people (i.e. Palestinian Christians and Muslims) who were living there prior to the establishment of Israel. | 2 |
gtp70b | Other | do most chefs actually wear those chef hats, If so why? And if not where does the idea that they do come from? Been puzzling me for a while. | My restaurant kept paper hats that were shaped like old chef hats as a choke. We had to wear a hat if you were on line and if you forgot one that day, you get the paper hat | 12 |
7tkqzd | Repost | Why do the eyes move rapidly during REM sleep? | To be honest, we don’t really know. In the 1950s it was thought to be linked with the sleeper’s dreams, but the studies have been unconclusive. Peretz Lavie, who is kind of a specialist of sleep, thinks that these rapid eye movements are correlated to our brain forming memories during REM sleep, but we still can’t figure out why. Fun fact : it seems that our pattern of eye movement during REM sleep is linked to our mother tongue : Europeans, Africans and Americans have a horizontal REM, whereas Asians have a vertical REM. | 1 |
5uxh5n | Repost | If women are being paid less than men for what is TRULY the same work, then why aren't companies only hiring women? | This is a growing issue in Iran, funnily enough. University-educated women there find it considerably easier to get work than men because they can legally be paid less. In western countries the wage gap is widely misunderstood (which is not the same as it being a myth, as is often claimed). The question is not "why do women get paid less for the same work as men"- the evidence for which is debateable- but "why do the jobs women gravitate towards pay less". | 5 |
bsl0hw | Chemistry | if I place both waters into a bucket from where the two oceans meet but don’t mix, why do they mix just fine in the bucket? | The idea of "two oceans meet but don't mix" is more or less a myth. Most of the pictures of this you see on the Internet are at rivermouths or headlands, where a sharp contrast between water types is visible ... but it mixes away pretty quickly. Tom Scott did a video on this recently. URL_0 | 1 |
dhqzqs | Engineering | Where do astronauts park their rockets when they go to the ISS and how do they enter it? | The "rockets", the boosters that actually get them into space, don't actually go all the way to the space station but rather detach and fall back to earth as they ascend. The capsules they ride in dock with the space station, you can see a video of it here - URL_0 (there are other videos on YouTube as well). Basically, it has a docking port that connects to the docking port on the ISS. A seal is formed between the station and the capsule, and they can then open it up and move between the two freely. It's not like a 7/11 where people are going there constantly, these are planned missions executed by governments and they are spread out over several months. | 2 |
abqa07 | Engineering | Why do exterior doors of houses always open inwards? They are made so that they are easily kicked in with only the lock and handle keeping it secure where as if you were to try and kick it out it’s nearly impossible due to the way the frame is made. Also they need space inside for opening whereas if were to open outwards there wouldn’t ever be obstacles in the way. | Also: snow. Door opens out when you get 2+ feet of the heavy wet snow. . . . . . and your climbing out a window to shovel yourself out. Likewise, jamming a wedge under the swings-to side locks it. I’d rather be able to use a wedge to lock others out, than to be locked in. I mean think of how scarily effective reversing the swing on doors would allow arson-as-a-murder-method to be. | 6 |
62e3h9 | Repost | Why do you get heavier when you go "limp"? | You don't get heavier, you get more unwieldly. By being a weight with a shifting center of gravity extra effort is required to keep the weight steady rather than sliding off to the side. | 3 |
6egr87 | Culture | Why/How do some people get "bathroom shy"? How is it that some of us humans are unable to pee when people are talking/noisy in the restroom? Or completely unable to poop in unfamiliar restrooms?! | Being bathroom shy is tied to an instinctive response. In the wild, using the bathroom is among one of the most dangerous acts any animal can do. Not only does it leave you briefly vulnerable, but it also creates a strong scent that other animals can pick up. Being secluded and in a quiet place gives awareness to any impending dangers. In a public bathroom, the sound of talking or someone's nearby presence are triggers that are telling your involuntary bathroom parts to not work, since there is there is 'danger' nearby. On the behavior/voluntary side however, I am not sure. For myself, I stopped being bathroom shy when I got older. Some are naturals and don't wink an eye, others are not. | 2 |
7ctnp7 | Culture | Why does basically no one speak Latin anymore even though it is used in many popular countries? | Once the Roman Empire fell, there was nobody forcing people to speak proper Latin anymore. The common people, who weren't terribly educated, probably illiterate & didn't have anything like TVs and movies to keep them following the same things, so the language slowly diverged. Over a few hundred years, the language that people in different regions spoke became different enough to be considered separate languages rather than just dialects. | 5 |
5o3tlu | Technology | Why are there different versions of Windows? (ie Windows 10 Home, Pro etc) | Basically Microsoft could just sell the same product to everyone, but they want to make as much money as possible. They can't ask home users to pay the same high prices as business as many wouldn't want to pay that much and they can't just lower the price for windows for everyone to the same low price that every home user can pay. In order to maximize profits they want to sell the same product at different prices to different people They want to sell it cheaply to those who wouldn't buy it if it was more expensive and they want to sell it for a higher price to those who can afford it. So far so good. But how do you do that, you can't ask all customers to tell you how much they are able to spend before you tell them the price. If you offer it cheaply everyone will buy it at the cheapest price. To make sure that the customers with money (mostly businesses) buy windows at the more expensive price they split the product up into multiple versions (called editions or **SKU**s). They took the cheapest version and removed all sorts of features that you normally wouldn't need as a home user. Normal home users don't really need to domain join feature of windows so that gets excluded from the cheapest version. It is no loss for home users but businesses who need it will need to buy the more expensive version. Other functionality that you may not see in the cheaper editions of windows are stuff like drive encryption (Bitlocker) and similar stuff that are mostly needed or wanted by businesses. They also introduced all sorts of arbitrary limits that won't matter to normal users. Windows 10 Home edition for example only allows a maximum of 128 GB of memory, which is far more than any normal user would ever need. If you want more you need a more expensive version of windows. This was actually much more noticeable with windows 7 where "Windows 7 Starter" only allowed 2GB of RAM, "Windows 7 Home Basic" 8GB, "Windows 7 Home Premium" 16GB and "Windows 7 Ultimate", "Pro" and "Enterprise" allowed 192 GB of RAM. So they removed features and included artificial limits to ensure that people spend as much as possible for them on what is actually the same product. With Windows 10 at least Microsoft has limited the number of different editions quite a bit, there used to be far more in previous versions. | 2 |
c8997t | Biology | Why isn't general anesthesia used for even the most slightly painful tasks (for example, an ear piercing or a vasectomy)? | The more sedated you are the more depressed your respiration becomes thus with General anesthesia you stop breathing on your own and you need to be intubated on top of that you need to finance another specialized individual to safely do it and take you out of it and the side effects are much more serious. Nowadays most endoscopic procedures favor the use conscious sedation instead. | 22 |
jp0uuq | Biology | When discovering old human remains dating back 100’s of years, how are they able to determine who exactly the person was? I just recently saw a Reddit post of someone finding the bones of some old king, but there was no big database or DNA files of anyone during those times, unless I’m wrong and there always was. | It's basically a giant puzzle using a lot of archaeological and historical information. For example where did they find the bones, when did he live, how old did he get, are there any identifying items around? Does this match any historical person we have records of? Maybe a known cause of death? If we want to go deeper we can look for radioisotopes to see in wich regions this person spent time. For DNA we know some things, like we can figure out someones rough origin from mRNA wich is often preserved in bones. | 1 |
68aji7 | Repost | Why is collecting rainwater illegal in the US? | Its only illegal in some parts of the US. I live in the Eastern US, where water rights are not fought over, and I can collect all the rain I want. If you go to the western US, water rights are very important. Lakes and streams are fed from runoff rain water. Think of it this way. If my neighbor downstream has water rights, I can not build a damn and cut off his access to water. In the same way, there are places that rely on runoff water, and if everybody were to collect it, places downstream would have no water. Often a small rain barrel is not an issue, but if everybody started collecting thousands of gallons of water, there would be problems. | 3 |
6b2co8 | Other | During WW2, why were only the Japanese put into internment camps and not Germans or Italians? It makes no sense to me that the U.S would only imprison people from one of the axis country's, and not the others. | The US did in fact inter Germans in both World War 2 and World War 1. In WW1 more than a quarter million person had to register as aliens. A total 6300 were arrested and interrogated and over 2000 were imprisoned. Over 10,000 persons of German ancestry were interred in WW2. Almost 2000 Italians were detained or taken into custody. | 3 |
crarrw | Technology | The difference between a router, switch, hub, a bridge and a modem These are all networking devices that I constantly hear about but I don't know what they do. And no matter how any webpages I visit, I still leave more confused than when I originally went looking. | * The modem converts (or MOulates/DEModulates) the digital signals (1/0) to an analog medium like sound or light and back. *ELI5 A 2 way radio modulates and demodulates sound to/from radio waves in the air.* * The hub connects Ethernet lines together and repeats the signals so all the lines can hear each other. It forms a small network. *ELI5 A room with a big computer screen and everybody has a keyboard Anybody can say something by typing onto their keyboard, and everybody else can see it. If too many people type at once, it's all gibberish.* * A switch is like a smart hub. It connects Ethernet lines together, but it acts like a traffic cop, and can segment out connections. It can form bigger networks *ELI5 - Same room as above, but everybody has instant messaging and their own screen & keyboard You and your friend across the room can text to each other without bothering everybody else. You can have multiple chat sessions and chat with anybody in the room. When you need to talk to more then one person, you can setup group chats and send a message to many people at once* * A router is like a switch, but even smarter. Instead of just connecting Ethernet lines together, it can connect multiple networks together. *ELI5 - Your messaging system above, can now be used to text people in other rooms* | 14 |
l4ci5y | Biology | . How do websites like ‘Ancestry’ and ‘23 & me’ work? I am not sure if it is the altered state I am in, but I can’t seem to understand how these websites are able to track back so far before DNA could be analyzed and understood or even known?! | Well Ancestry uses reports, like birth certificates, things in the news, etc. 23 & me goes off of the genomes in your DNA, which some are specific to regions of the world/ethnicities, and my looking at the placements and mixtures, they do the path. It’s not perfect, as there have been cases of identical twins getting different results. And to know the timeline of DNA they’ve gotten samples from bones/fossils/preserved stuff from that time. | 2 |
ebf6r2 | Chemistry | Why does adding white vinegar to the laundry take care of bad smells and why don't laundry detergents already contain these properties? | My mom has always sworn by a bit of vanilla essence to neutralize smells. We've always had dogs in the house and this works really well for their bedding. Maybe 10 or 20mil of cheap-ish vanilla essence (usually for baking) in the rinse cycle makes a huge difference! I think it masks more than destroys the smell, but it's effective! Also works great when window curtains with a cigarette smoke smell... | 18 |
gpoqq5 | Technology | Grind in games | I think that a lot of the reason for grinds in video games is the send of accomplishment that comes with the reward at the end. Being able to show off your new skin or weapon after 10 hours of grind is a satisfying feeling for a lot of people. | 2 |
7lmc22 | Technology | How do the “I am not a robot” things on websites work? | Nice try, robot. You think we would just give you all our secrets? | 2 |
8mer1z | Biology | Earwax buildup, how is that determined by our body? | You have 3 primary mucus systems in your body. Your ears, your sinuses, and your digestive system. When they encounter an irritant of some kind (such as dust in your nose, spicy food, or something crawling into your ear) your body will release a hormone that will cause you to produce more mucus to protect it. But that hormone activate all 3 systems (though to a lesser degree than the primary system activated), which is why your nose runs if you eat spicy foods. Physical trauma can cause ears to trigger this hormone but eating a lot of spicy foods, having allergy, having colds often can also make buildups more likely. | 1 |
e63s3d | Other | Why do the majority of popular songs both rhyme and use 4/4 time signature? | "Most" common-practice classical is in duple/quadruple meter too. You'll see triple meter a fair amount, plus 6/8, 9/8, 12/8 compound stuff, but it isn't until the Romantic period that you start seeing regular usage of odd times or shifting meter (the earliest example I can think of is the 6/4+5/4 Promenade theme from Pictures at an Exhibition, 1874). As a disclaimer, this is also, for simplicity's sake, ignoring both pre-baroque music and "unmeasured" baroque music (like Couperin's Unmeasured Preludes). And really, if you trace modern pop music back to its roots - jazz and blues - you'll find that most of that music is in 4/4 too, and the majority of the remainder is in some sort of triple meter. It isn't really so much a lack (or a loss) of variety as it is an inherent and deeply-ingrained feature of the style. [Hey Ya]( URL_4 ) by Outkast (over 10 years old now, can you believe that?) is one of the standard go-to examples of a pop song with odd timing. To be fair, the whole thing can be broken down into groups of 2, but it features a lot of asymmetrical phrasing - meaning that if you try to count it in 4 instead of 2, you get interspersed individual bars of 2 or 6, depending on how you count it (and if you try to count it in half notes instead of quarter notes, you get some odd bars) Coldplay's [Death and All of His Friends]( URL_10 ), closing track from Viva La Vida or Death and All of His Friends (2008) has some 7/4 going on in its second half. Not sure if this song ever got radio play, but others from the same album certainly did. Taylor Swift's [Sad Beautiful Tragic]( URL_0 ), from Red (2012) is in a smooth ballad-y 6/8. 6/8 is hardly unusual but it's still a welcome break from 4/4, and despite being a B-side, a T-swift track is still about as close as you can get to radio pop. If you're willing to expand your search from "modern popular music" to any music written in the pop/rock idiom, you'll find a whole lot more examples. Pick a prog-rock band at random, pick a jazz-fusion band at random, pick a Radiohead album at random, they'll be lousy with odd times and shifting meters. Try Dream Theater's [The Dance of Eternity]( URL_7 ), which changes meter 128 times. Or Radiohead's [15 Step]( URL_2 ), which is in a straight (and to be honest, pretty damn smooth) 5. Or [Herandnu]( URL_8 ) by Weather Report. Here's [a rap in 15/8]( URL_9 ), which I was directed to several months ago when I made a thread asking about rap in odd times. Electronic instrumental artist Flying Lotus [experiments]( URL_5 ) with time signatures too (alternating 7 and 6). Dionne Warwick's [Say a Little Prayer for You]( URL_6 ) has some 11/4 action going on in the chorus (6+5) - and this one was very much a straight-up pop song in its day. [Bastard]( URL_1 ) by Ben Folds is all over the place. A band like [Edison Glass]( URL_3 ) can successfully merge complex rhythmic patterns with almost post-punky musical sensibilities (and a nod to Philip Glass in the lyrics). My point is, it's out there, you just have to explore a bit deeper than the top 40 radio stations. Hope that's kind of what you were looking for. | 2 |
98lr5w | Physics | Do satellites fall faster towards earth everyday? | They are constantly accelerating, due to gravity, but that acceleration is at right angles to their motion. Thus they do not speed up or slow down, they just turn so they go around the Earth in a circle. You are right that there is no air resistance in space (because there is no air). | 1 |
g36dri | Biology | Why does eating something hot (like a ghost pepper) make humans actually produce heat? Why does eating something very spicy make humans actually give off heat? Example: When I eat something like ghost pepper based hot sauce, I radiate heat off the top of my head. | Because the perception of increased heat in your mouth/stomach triggers the body's heat release system. It's why the Japanese say to eat spicy food in the summer to cool down. | 3 |
ddx80l | Biology | How do we grow seedless fruit if they have no seeds? | Take a plant A pollen and put it into plant B's stamen. This is plant terminology for sperm to egg. Plant B most likely will form a seed and grow a plant, Baby AB. Baby AB grows up into a mature AB but lacks the genes to properly produce seeds but still grows the fruit. You take grown AB, cut off a branch and put it in water and the branch grows roots and a whole new AB plant.. | 1 |
85uwy6 | Other | Why do science labs always so often use composition notebooks and not, for example, a spiral notebook? | In addition, if you do any work with acids or metals, spirals are terrible. Acids corrode the spiral binding, and the spirals will contaminate any trace metal samples you are analyzing. | 18 |
ac6fd9 | Physics | How can the same side of the moon always face earth? Doesn't it rotate? The fact that the Chinese just landed on the dark side makes it seem stranger. | Go into your kitchen, pull a chair out, and walk around the chair while always facing it. You'll rotate around *the chair* once, and you'll also turn *yourself* around once. | 115 |
le3692 | Technology | Why does old news footage from the 20th century all sound the same? For example: URL_0 URL_1 | What you are looking at is not news as we know it today but rather movie news. They are short movies made about current events and then distributed to the cinemas to be shown to a paying audience. People would visit the cinema to watch these reals maybe once a week. Most of the times they read the news in the newspaper or listens to the radio. But for moving high quality images of what was happening you had to go to the cinema. There is a few limits to making films in the early days and due to time and budget constraints the movie news were often some of the last places you had these limits. For example color cameras and film were much more expensive and cumbersome to work with then black and white films. So movie news were often black and white even when it had become common for the big Hollywood studios to make color films. Similarly sound was hard to work with so they often just dropped it. One problem was to collect and sync clean sound as you were filming but not all cinemas were able to play sound movies either. So the sound were usually made in the old silent movie style with a script for someone to read live to the audience and maybe some notes for an organist. The movies might have a sound track that included this voiceover and the music but could still be played on older equipment. | 2 |
kee3dc | Other | Why can't you see stars from space? | Fast exposure times means they can get good pictures of the bright Earth or lunar surface, but it also means no stars in the picture. Even in space, stars are relatively dim, and simply don't produce enough light to show up in photos set for bright sunlight | 2 |
5om3yf | Biology | How can fish be frozen, then be fully animated after thawing? Could this mechanism work with other large organisms? URL_0 (The post I'm referencing) | I'm going to copy a post I just wrote for [this]( URL_1 ) thread. Cryogenic freezing of large animals and humans creates several issues: Problem #1: Saying goes freeze slow, thaw fast. A freezing rate of -1 degree per minute is ideal for most applications. The slow freezing prevents cell rupture by allowing excess pressure caused by water expansion to leave the cell. Water crystals are also smaller when water freezes slowly and thereby do not create quite as much damage to the cells. Human body is 37C so this would be over half an hour just to get to the freezing point. At room temperature, highly metabolically active organs, like the heart and brain, show significant damage after 4 minutes of being without oxygen. What use is being cryogenically frozen, if you're brain dead? Problem #2: When freezing cells, we usually add DMSO and/or glycerol. These are cryopreservative agents that will prevent ice crystal formation and permeablize the cell membrane so cells do not burst from the water expansion. Cryopreservatives also tend to be quite toxic and must be quickly removed after thawing. It would be difficult to flush these out of a human so liver and kidney damage would likely occur. Problem #3: When "waking" cells from cryostorage, they will suddenly become metabolically active and very quickly use up any nutrients available to them. Therefore it is important to immediately supplement the cells with media containing sugar and amino acids, as well as add FBS (fetal bovine serum) which contains many trace nutrients and growth factors. It's hard to administer enough nutrients to a whole person. Problem #4: Even with a perfect freezing procedure, there will be some cells that rupture and die. While individual organs can recover from some widespread damage, your immune system recognizes when there are parts of a cell's insides on it's outsides. Immune cells activated by the exposed cytoplasmic proteins would release cytokines (immune chemicals) that would cause widespread inflammation. This would cause septic shock leading to death, the same mechanism by which a severe bacterial infection leads to death. About fish and frogs: Most lakes do not freeze completely in the winter and the ice will only occupy the first couple feet. This allows fish and frogs to remain near the bottom and simply slow their metabolism the same way a bear would hibernate through the winter. With a greatly reduced metabolism, they can live off of body fat and do not need much oxygen. Frogs that do freeze and thaw with their environment have evolved an elegant solution; they use an "antifreeze-like" blood mechanism, where nucleating proteins cause their blood to freeze more quickly than the rest of the animal. This slows the freezing rate of the rest of the body, allowing the liver to pack glucose into the cells. This glucose acts as a sort of scaffold and provides an immediate energy source to be utilized upon thawing. Nat geo wrote an interesting article [here]( URL_0 ) that talks about it, I got to learn something too! This method would help but our liver would struggle to produce adequate amounts of glucose, our brains are far larger (much easier to damage) and cold blooded animals have vastly different immune systems then us, allowing them to escape the immune mediated septic shock we would experience. Not saying it can't be done, but current technology would make it extremely difficult and risky. Source: I do immunological cancer research and freeze/thaw human cell lines all the time. Edit: About the video link - I am going to assume the fish was only in the freezer for a short amount of time and has gone into a reduced metabolic rate called "topor", much like a shorter version of the hibernation seen in lake fish during winter. If the fish was fully frozen, I would've expected it to take much longer to defrost (think about cooking frozen salmon in the oven). No information was given about the length of time spent in the freezer and it is much easier to recover from hibernation-like state than from a fully frozen state. | 3 |
6mlizm | Technology | how font designers can design for Japanese and Chinese, languages that both use millions of individual Chinese characters? edit: I guess I had overestimated how many characters these languages use -- as many pointed out, it's only tens of thousands, at the most. Thanks for the great responses, though! | Let say you want to build a lot of houses, but you don't want to design them one by one. So what you do this to design different styles of columns, beams, walls, etc. finally you assemble those structures into different houses. In building Chinese fonts, font designers would select some basic characters to build up the framework of the font. In Chinese calligraphy, the character 永 [eternity] is used to test out the decsign of the font, for it has the eight basic strokes of the Chinese writing system. After that the designers would assemble (using font design programmes) other characters using these designed strokes. Finally they must fine tune each of the generated characters (about 10000 of them) to arrive at a consistent design style. The character 永 URL_0 Common component in different characters URL_2 Fine tuning of different characters URL_1 | 24 |
k4ywb3 | Chemistry | Why do some things melt and others burn? | Every solid substance can melt, but only some substances can burn. For some substances, their ignition temperature is lower than their melting point, and they burn up before they get the chance to melt. | 2 |
6o0349 | Engineering | why does a scissor not work for left handed people but does for right handed? | My question is: do lefties use their right hand for scissors or just learn to use it with the left? It requires a weird hand tension/flex. | 3 |
me1w7n | Biology | Do plants get tired? As in, do they need to take a break from growing? | It depends on the plants, and how they're adapted. Most are surprisingly resilient and will survive extremes for a while, but not forever. The constant growth will consume too many resources if they aren't fertilized. But this can also make the plants more susceptible to pests/rot. Some plants rely on a dormancy period, where they're not showing obvious growth, but they're consolidating and still metabolizing in some way. Cooking up some flowers or something. But plants sort of operate on a different time scale. I like to imagine they see days like the blink of an eye, and seasons are more like days to them. | 3 |
e8kf4l | Biology | 5: How is it safe for chiropractors to crack people necks? | The answer is very simple: it’s not! Chiropractors can and do end up killing people by doing that. Here’s a recent example: URL_0 | 28 |
646hai | Other | Where did the "S" rating originate and why is it better than "A+"? I've searched on google to no avail. | Japanese video games. When they introduced scoring systems for levels, they stopped at A because the developers didn't expect anyone to do any better than that. But of course players exceeded all expectations and demanded a higher rating. A means you didn't do anything wrong, as such, in clearing the level. It would seem unfair if you did a perfectly good play through with no major mistakes and were graded a B, even though your run was as good as can be normally expected. But the hardcore players demanded a rating for players who go above and beyond, so S was created, then later SS and SSS and such. I don't think it's universally agreed what it stands for--some say super--but everyone just uses it these days. Edit: A reply has pointed out that some Japanese universities also use S above A, but I did a bit more digging and couldn't find anything about which came first. | 27 |
nnc04b | Other | What does this actually mean when people say private people tell you so little about themselves but you think you know a lot about them? This might be stupid but I saw this thing where it says very private people have mastered the art of telling you little about themselves but doing it in such a way that you think you know a lot. Can someone give me an example? How can you tell someone little about yourself and they think they know you? lol Is that even possible? | this can be done by mirroring someone’s sentiments. when you feel related to, you feel closer to someone, even if all they did was parrot and summarize what you’re telling them, without delving much into themselves. say you started telling some deep, emotional story about how you have trouble connecting with people because your parents never loved you, and on your 8th birthday they both forgot, and they shipped you off to your nan’s every chance they had. a private person can say just the smallest thing, like “yeah i also felt some distance from my parents, how do you think that upbringing has shaped your relationships now?” that gets the conversation back into your story immediately, and they master the art of always asking you questions to keep you talking. meanwhile, if you look at that statement about their parents, it was so vague that almost anyone could relate to it in some way. they gave no details. but because it’s a sentiment you were already giving out, you feel understood and that you guys were really connecting, when the only person giving specifics was you. | 2 |
65ihbb | Economics | What exactly is Goodhart's law? It states that 'when a measure becomes a target, it can no longer be used as a measure'. Any examples on that? How exactly is it used? | Here's some well-known examples from the software industry. Bugs are bad. The fewer bugs in a release, the better. You can even use bug count or ratio as a rough measure of the quality of a release. So you give developers a bonus for having few bugs associated with issues they've worked on. Now, as a developer, I am incentivized to: - Avoid difficult or complex issues that are more likely to result in bugs. - Argue that undesired behavior is not technically a "bug" (e.g. because the original specification does not explicitly prohibit it). - Insist that a bug shouldn't be associated with my issue without solid proof. - Have multiple bugs grouped into one "mega-bug" whenever possible. These are not useful or productive activities (as opposed to just fixing the bugs). But I am literally being paid to do them. So maybe instead, you should give me a bonus for fixing a lot of bugs. Then, I am incentivized to: - Prioritize even inconsequential bugs over all other work, however important. - Fix trivial or superficial bugs instead of deep, complex bugs, even though leaving those to fester tends to make them worse. - Insist that closely related bugs, or different symptoms of a single bug, are documented separately. - “Fix” bugs with shallow patches that don't solve the underlying problem. - *Create more bugs.* What if you evaluate me based on the number of issues completed? Then I'll pick the low-hanging fruit and no one will willingly work on the big ones. What about lines of code produced? Then I'll write a hundred lines a day until the application collapses under its own weight. | 2 |
o3yiuf | Other | - How did the mafia make money off labor unions? | A few ways, but the essential factor is that they were union members that received money and benefits. Other factors: 1. biggest leverage potential was in monopolizing so that prices could be driven up. Mafia did this with vending machines, unions, drugs. Creating barriers to entry so that they could prevent competition from underselling them...while finding ways to avoid taxation and costs was essential to making mafia advantageous over putting the same energy into legitimate options. 2. Union contract renewal. Traditionally "strike breakers" such as Pinkertons were hired to encourage people to go back to work and thus the power of the strike was broken. When the mafia offered to protect the "strikers" in exchange for % of the sign on bonuses of fake people that don't exist...and subsequently collecting wages from the nonexistent people helped. This is covered pretty well in The Sopranos where the mafia get involved with lots of white collar things to collect a wage by showing up for work whenever there is a labor audit. | 4 |
5na9sv | Technology | Google Translate's forming its own language I have read a few articles about this but I'm still very confused. I am not sure if this is something that is able to be explained simply, but it would be great if someone could try!! | An article about it from Google: URL_1 Little bit about training neural networks: URL_0 An artificial neural network was trained for different language pairs. To much surprise, they found the same (or somehow similar) neurons activate for phrases with the same meaning for different language pairs. It's thought that this means the network encodes something common to all languages (such as meaning). That is, instead of translating cow (english) to vaca (spanish), it's translating cow to some internal phrase to vaca. The same internal phrase should activate when translating vaca to lehmä (finnish). Interestingly, this wasn't intended. Training artificial neural networks is somewhat of an automatic process. The training process happened to create the internal language on its own. The internal language isn't a language in a normal sense, being able to be spoken or written. Rather, it's set of clusters of neurons where each cluster has a unique meaning. | 1 |
ctn5f9 | Other | How did people back in the day collect on gambling? There's many movie scenes where there are many people making bets on someone in a ring for example, and at the end, a person goes around collecting all the money. How did they keep track of who owed what? | Often in the movies, you'll also see slips of paper. These presumably were used to record your bet. The losers usually throw them on the floor at the end. I seem to recall slips of paper still being used in horse race bets. | 9 |
8dxk03 | Biology | Why does drinking water or holding your breath get rid of hiccups? | Hiccups are random diaphragm spasms, there’s no proven “cure” for them. I suppose if you want your hiccups to go away you’ll just keep drinking water and holding your breath until eventually they go away and there’s no way to prove why the spasms start or stop. Though hiccups can accompany over eating or acid reflux so I’m sure there’s multiple causes Edit: personally I try water and holding my breath and it works maybe 30% of the time | 3 |
jbk2gg | Chemistry | Why is a calomel or glass electrode used? I googled it, and it says this : "**Calomel** is **used** as the interface between metallic mercury and a chloride solution in a saturated **calomel electrode**, which is **used** in electrochemistry to measure pH and electrical potentials in solutions." Can't wrap my head around it. Could some ELI5 the basic premise of electrochemistry. Would appreciate. thanks! | The basic idea of electrochemistry is that a reaction happens when a metallic electrode is immersed in an appropriate electrolyte solution. This happens at the surface of the electrode, and as in all of chemistry, a reaction involves shuffling electrons around. As in everything that involves the movement of electrons, that gives the electrode a defined electrical potential, or in common terms, a certain voltage. One electrode doesn't do much - the electrons need to go somewhere. A single electrode is what we call a half-cell. Two electrodes make a full electrochemical cell, like, for example, in a battery. Now the electrons can move between the electrodes and their associated surface reactions and we get a current flowing. Now, the potential of the electrode is what we are interested in. The problem is, you can't directly measure the potential of a single electrode. You can only measure it in relation to another one. And here's the problem. What do we chose to measure against? Electrode potentials can vary hugely depending on a lot of conditions, so we need to measure against an electrode that is known to particularly stable and gives us a solid reference. Such electrodes are called reference electrodes. The calomel electrode is such a reference electrode. If we want to measure pH, we measure a pH sensitive electrode against a calomel electrode as reference and can calculate the pH from the voltage between the electrodes. That said, calomel reference electrodes are pretty much out of fashion, since we can use other references that don't require us to mess with mercury. | 1 |
cidrwv | Physics | When driving a car with an open window at certain speed, why there's a noisy sound in the ear like pulsating or drum ? | If you take a bottle of water, remove the cap, and then tip it upside down the water will flow out in a gurgle. Every so often the flow will stop and air will get sucked up into the bottle, then the water flows again. This happens because of pressure inside the bottle versus outside. If you poke a hole in the upper part of the water bottle, this stops. That's because one hole lets air in while the other lets water out. That's what's happening in your car. If you only open one window, air is forced into the car due to the speed, but that builds up pressure until the air forces its way out, and then the outside air is forced in again. That back-and-forth in pressure is what you are hearing/feeling. If you open a second window at the back of the vehicle, the air flows in one window and out the other, like the hole in the water bottle. | 5 |
6ns0p8 | Technology | How does Instant Messaging differ from e-mail? | E-mail works in a similar way to the post office. You write a message and hit send, it gets passed off and the address read to see where it goes. It gets sent to that location where the address gets read and sorted into the correct mail box. Multiple clients and multiple servers all over the world just like mail boxes and post offices. Instant messaging is multiple clients and one server. Think of it like inter office mail. Everyone gives their letters to Charlie in the mailroom and he brings it up to their office. Charlie already knows where Carol is, so he can bring her a letter quickly. If who you want to talk to doesnt work in your building, Charlie can't deliver a message. | 2 |
jai4ge | Chemistry | How does the addition on an extra oxygen atom to a molecule of H2O change it from something that is safe to ingest into something toxic? | Hydrogen peroxide has a structure H-O-O-H. The oxygen-oxygen bond is easy to break releasing an active oxygen and reverting to the H-O-H structure of the water molecule. It's that active oxygen that can react with many things to give hydrogen peroxide it's aggressive oxidizing effects like bleaching or supplying oxygen to some rocket engines. | 1 |
93du1y | Culture | Those celebrates who earn $500k to $1 million per Instagram post, who actually pays them? and how many posts a day are they allowed? | When you see a character in your favorite cartoon drink a soda that your mom buys at home. That's an advertisment. Now these people on really any creative sharing site may it be YouTube or insta. Have companies come to them because they have a big following like that cartoon we talked about. And when they can get alot of people to view an ad for let's say, a new shirt. They will be willing to pay alot of money. Because putting an ad of television already costs a whole lot more money. | 1 |
g2o5h8 | Technology | Why are Solid State Drives so large when you can fit 1 Terabyte of information on a MicroSD card? Wouldn't it just cost more to produce? Do MicroSD cards with 1 TB of information cost more than making a Solid State Drive that also holds 1 TB? | SSD hard drives on SATA connectors have performance and longevity expectations. Users fully expect to run the SATA connection at full speed for reads, and pretty close for writes. Drives are usually warranty'd for either 1/3 or 1 full copy of the disk written to per day, for the duration for the warranty on the disk. These are things you don't get on SD cards. That stuff takes space for the additional chips, including the processor, RAM for the processor, and multiple storage chips accessed simultaneously to make up the speed needs. Now, if you really want to make use of the size of the disk and you have the cash, you can get a ~16 TB SSD in the same physical size for SATA SSD disks. I think they cost over $2,000 each though. | 4 |
80e420 | Culture | How did old LPs go from mixed/negative reviews upon release to critical acclaim nowadays? I've just finished reading a book about the Beatles. It was stated that The White Album, Abbey Road and especially Let It Be initially received mixed to negative opinions among critics upon their first release. Today, these LPs are regarded as absolute masterpieces in literally every aspect possible. Even big magazines like Rolling Stone rank them at top positions in "greates-of-all-time" rankings. I get that at the time of release, nobody knew how much an LP would influence the industry or culture itself and that may be an argument for changing one's mind later on; But the music stays the same... Looking at the LP only, nothing has changed in 50 years, yet now it's exponentially more praised than back in the day. Edit: Same thing seemed to happen to Pink Floyd's 70s work, although I can see why the influence on producing music weighs in more with LPs like Dark Side | Well, the LP hasn’t changed, but the entire music scene and all of society has changed continuously since that LP was put out. When someone creates new music, a new sound, no one is used to it yet. A lot of people will hear it as harsh and nerve jangling just because it’s unfamiliar. The more people hear a ‘sound’ the more they will start to hear what is actually there in the way of instrumentation, vocals, composition, meaning etc. something that first sounds harsh can start to sound exciting. Something else that sounds boring can sound subtle, nuanced, entrancing. Even harsh sounds can become nuanced and full of subtleties once you are accustomed to them. There’s two main ways new ‘bad’ music can become ‘good’ old music. One way, entire genres spring up around the new sound. Many other artists create similar music and people become acclimated and appreciative of something they used to dislike, or at least found strange. The second way of course is when one particular example never goes away and becomes a classic. The Beatles albums are what, 50 or 60 years old now? But although they aren’t played everywhere, they have always been played somewhere. People still like them, and young people who are exposed generally like them too. They have staying power simply because many people respond very positively to that music. It wasn’t liked much by ma y people at first, simply because nothing before had sounded like that. It was a new sound. | 1 |
hth74o | Chemistry | Why do "bad smells" like smoke and rotting food linger longer and are harder to neutralize than "good smells" like flowers or perfume? | A lot of germs and bacteria grow on rotting food. The bacteria is the source of the stink. It will transfer to whatever it touches and will continue to stink unless disinfected. | 24 |
805fmz | Physics | How fires burn down stone buildings | You are right in saying that fire won't damage something made out of stone, however very few buildings are completely made from stone, rather they are made of a combination of stone and other materials such as timber that work together to create the overall structure. So when a fire starts in an old masonry structure, the stonework will be unharmed, but the fire will burn all of the flammable materials it reaches - so the timber parts of the superstructure alongside things like furniture and finishings that will fuel the fire and let it burn bigger and hotter. Once the timber structure has burnt through, any bits of stonework that were relying on that timber are now weakened and collapse, and then any stonework supported on those pieces will follow suit. So while the stone is fireproof, the fire can still cause it to collapse. | 3 |
7d2x6a | Biology | Since our bodies aren't 100% efficient at absorbing nutrients from food, wouldn't the nutritional information found on most food packaging be inaccurate, as not all of the calories, protein etc. are absorbed? | It's safe to assume that raw ingredients have accurate nutritional specs. The processing (baking, frying, cooking, freezing, etc) of raw materials does have an impact on final specs. The larger the company the more likely they have the money/budget to extract more accurate results out of the final product whereas a smaller company with limited scientific resources or skills may have a product calculated based on raw ingredient specs without taking into account the processing. TL;DR: Take nutritional specs with a grain of salt. They exist to prevent scurvy and other nutrient deficiencies. Source: I do nutritional labeling in a small sized wholesale bakery. | 4 |
a194jl | Economics | Why is Mexico not as developed as the USA or Canada? | It depends on what you mean by "developed" If you mean, are they not as technologically advanced, I can assure you this is not the case- being in a Mexican city the only difference between them and an American city is the majority language on the signs. If you mean, why are the areas between cities not as wealthy, that's down to corruption or a lack of government initiative (eg: road building, subsidizing construction, effective combating of crime) you can certainly find small towns in the US that are as bad off as some small towns in Mexico, though not necessarily for the same reasons. | 5 |
d52sro | Other | Why do different songs illicit different emotional responses. Why do some songs make us ‘happy’ and others make us ‘sad’? | Short answer: Because songwriters have spent a lot of time learning about the elements of music, and use them to trick your brain into feeling a certain way. This only works because you've heard a lot of music before, and learned the "language of music" without even knowing it. Long answer: Music is made up of a lot of elements. Let's take a look at a few of them. * Lyrics. This is the only element of music that can be truly "sad" or "happy." If you never heard a song, but read its lyrics online, you could probably tell if those lyrics told a happy story or a sad story. For centuries songwriters have paired sad lyrics with certain other elements of music, and now it only seems natural that those elements of music are associated with feeling "sad." The same is true for "happy." * Tempo. This is how fast a song goes. We find faster songs to be more upbeat and happy, while slow songs are more down and sad. This just seems natural to us, and songwriters have used that. They tend to pair happy songs with fast beats, and sad songs with slow beats. Is it possible that it's just human nature to associate fast with happy and sad with slow? Maybe. But at this point, it's as much cultural as anything. We're so used to hearing those songs in that context and we can't separate the emotion from the tempo. * Harmony. This is when two or more pitches are sounding at the same time. In music theory, we can analyze these groups of notes and give them names and categories. These are called chords. Some of these chords are associated with happy emotions, and some are associated with sad emotions. This is almost entirely cultural. In the west, we associate major chords with happy and minor chords with sad. In Persian music, for example, minor is simply neutral, and there are other chords that are used to achieve sadness. It's mostly because slow songs with sad lyrics tend to use a lot of minor chords that we (in the west) think minor means sad. This is something your brain understands even if you don't know anything about music. * Melody. This is the part of the song you would hum or whistle. It's the "main" bit of the tune. Songwriters don't just choose notes willy-nilly to make songs. Songwriters use scales, which are a certain group of notes that tend to always work well together. It's sort of like choosing a pallet of colors to work with. Once a songwriter chooses a scale, they will write melodies using notes from that scale. Just like chords can be major or minor, scales can always be largely grouped into major-type scales and minor-type scales. Again, this is cultural. Because sad slow songs tend to use melodies from minor scales, we associate minor with sad. Happy fast songs tend to use major type scales, and we think major means happy. It doesn't have to be that way, but we've heard so much music in our life that our brain is wired to interpret those scales that way. An alien would have no way of knowing what scale meant what emotion. * Putting it all together. Skilled songwriters can put these elements (and more) together to make a whole range of emotions. What about a minor song that's also fast? Maybe that feels manic. Or a major song that's slow? Maybe that feels whistful. Or a medium tempo song that's in a major key but emphasize a lot of minor chords? Maybe that's bittersweet. It's amazing how music has the power to go straight to your brain and make you feel a certain way, and it's all just mixing and matching these (relatively) simple elements. | 1 |
871dbl | Technology | how does Bluetooth works? I tried to search web for a while, but i want simple explanation from you guys. | It is a wireless technology not as powerful as Wifi. Two sets of chips, one on each device talk to each other through radio frequencies. Fairly simple but more techy read: URL_0 | 1 |
8jb7v7 | Mathematics | Why does 360° make a full circle? Why isn't it a round number like 100? | Because 360 is a nice number that can be divided evenly by many numbers - 2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10,12... It's also theorized that 360 was chosen because it is close to the number of days in a year. | 16 |
7p19q3 | Physics | Why does closing a door lessen the amount of sound that enters a room even though sound travels best through solids? My understanding is that sound travels best through solids, then liquids, and worst through the air. If that’s the case, then why do walls and other barriers inhibit sound travel? | I believe this is because energy is lost when traversing between different mediums. So when sound waves are passed from air to a solid (door), a measure of energy is lost. Then when the sound waves must pass again from the solid into the air on the other side of the door, more sound energy is lost. | 7 |
h85hdy | Other | When and How Did "Stop, Drop, and Roll" Become a Huge Priority in Schools? | It's easy to teach, it's reletively uncontroversial and it appeals to a primordial human fear. No ones gonna be on the side of fire burning kids to death, yet a lot of conservative "marriage is forever, family first" types are probably gonna be opposed to people escaping for domestic abuse for religous reasons. | 41 |
5z61tp | Physics | A piano and a violin can play the same note but their sound differs; you can tell them apart. How do notes differ with each instrument, but retain the characteristics of its assigned pitch? | Imagine the same note played by a piano and a violin, for the sake of easy comparison. In a piano, a hammer strikes the string which makes the string vibrate. The pitch of the note is determined by how often in a second the string vibrates up and down. This is the lowest so-called “mode” of the string, the “slowest” vibration, causing a big bulge: • • ••• ••• ••••• ••••• ••••••••• But, at the same time, the string can also vibrate in higher modes: the first half can wiggle up while the second half wiggles down, and vice versa: •••• ••• ••• • • • ••• ••• •••• This vibration has a pitch that’s twice as high as the lowest vibration mode. But it is not as strong. The next mode has 3 bulges, the next mode has 4 bulges, and so on... each of these modes being usually weaker than the other modes, sometimes with certain exceptions. In a violin for example, the combinations of these modes can make the string appear to vibrate in an interesting pattern, looking rather like a triangle changing its shape, the pointy bit moving from one end to the other, than round bulges wiggling up and down. This is because the bow constantly scratches the string, which creates a lot of higher modes: •••• •• •••• •• •••• •• •••• •• •••• The combination of these modes makes the timbre of the sound generated by this string. If the higher modes are very weak then the sound is very “sterile” and muffled. if the higher modes are stronger then the sound is brighter. As an example, imagine a flute and a violin playing the same note. The air column in a flute produces mainly the lowest mode, which makes a flute sound very “simple”. The same note, played with a violin, sounds much more “complex”, brighter. The reason is that the bow scratches the string over and over again, producing lots of higher modes which make the sound appear much more vivid. Each instrument produces different strengths for each of these modes, and that variation of combinations of modes makes every instrument sound different. And this is valid no matter if the sound is produced by a string or a column of air or by even other means like a vibrating metal plate or the head of a drum. Plates or bells (instead of strings or air columns) just add one additional direction in which they can generate more vibrational modes, which makes them sound even more complex, as everyone knows who has heard xylophones, marimbas or church bells before. Edit: grammar | 19 |
b0kzva | Technology | How do APIs work? I kind of know that they allow two systems to talk to each other, but how exactly does that happen? Does each system's respective APIs connect to each other to form a pipe? Is it possible for one system to have no APIs and connect to the second using the second's APIs? | An API is a document that describes how you are supposed to talk to a computer system. You know. If you want to connect to it and talk, the document describes how. Everything from login credentials to error messages to what information you can pull out of it and how to behave to put information in is covered in the API. We can kind of demonstrate this by having a normal conversation about where to find the closest McDonalds when someone starts talking to you on the street. Hungry Person: "Hello?" You: "Yeah?" HP: "Is there a McDonalds Nearby?" You: "Yeah?" HP: "Awesome, is it far?" You: "Nah. half a mile?" HP: "Awesome, in which direction?" You: "North." HP: "How far was it again?" You: "Half a mile, perhaps." HP: "Thanks." You: "Good luck." Now. if you boil that information down to an API, you have to first establish a way to ask you questions. You know, can I speak french? Italian? Or is it just English? The API specifies that. You can *just* speak English. There is just one way to ask the question. And that is defined by an api version number you can ask for. That is literally the first thing the server says when you connect to it. "I'm version 1.0" can mean "I only speak English" or perhaps "There is just one way you can phrase that question if you want me to understand it." Next, the API is for asking for directions to things. Is it *just* McDonalds? Any kind of burger joint? Any kind of restaurant? Just around here? Across the nation? Any business? THAT part doesn't have to be covered by the API. Your question has an answer. Or it doesn't. "Is there one nearby?". The server makes its own assumptions on what you actually mean when you say nearby. It's helping you to find shit nearby. There is one, or you get a no as a response. Then, the client wants to be sure that your version of nearby and my version of nearby is the same. so it asks for clarification? "yeah, how far is it, then?" And get a response. And then it asks for the actual direction. Because maybe you don't really feel like driving to your mums hood around dinner time without popping by, so you ask again. then, you know. Why would you ask about the distance again? This is where an API differs from a conversation. There is no point in asking for the same information twice. And then they agree that they are both all good and want to stop talking. so they end the conversation. API's can be simple. And complicated. They can cover really complex things. And they can do several thousands worth of a very simple thing by sending a huge list of simple tasks that it wants to have done. A bank for example that connects to another bank has an API that they talk through when the systems talk: "I have a list of accounts that we are sending money to." "Alright. toss that list over." "It's 200000 transactions." "That's fine, I'll take it." "Here it is." "Ahem, there is something broken with transaction 12453. We didn't do that one. Or any of the ones after. Fix your damn list." "Uh, yeah. Sorry about that. Bye." Or when a power company's operational centre computer connects to a circuit breaker: "Hi." "Uh, hello there. I am the circuit breaker that you have named X45t7." "I'm your master." "Yeah, I acknowledge that you are my master. What is your command?" "I request a full status report." "I am currently CLOSED and has been for 950 043 minutes. ...What is your command?" "Actually, I just wanted the status. bye." The API's define what the systems can say to each other. And how they say it. Generally speaking, it's the server that has an API. And the client is supposed to follow it. The API is the definition on how the server will talk. What it will say. If there are different ways to say the same thing. How you ask it for information. How you give it information. What the responses mean when it says them. | 4 |
ixvzr3 | Other | Why do rape victims have rape fantasies? | I wholeheartedly agree with the other answers but wanted to expand a little more. As noted, a lot of women have “rape” fantasies. But, based on those I’ve heard from friends, they aren’t REALLY rape fantasies. They are fantasies where someone else makes all the decisions, exercises all the control, and the woman gets to enjoy being the object of overt, unequivocal lustful pursuit by someone she finds attractive without having to deal with the social or moral implications attached to deciding whether or not to sleep with someone. Even (especially?) if you’ve experienced trauma, the desire to feel attractive, pursued, and to just be passive and accept pleasure makes total sense. In reality, rape is nothing like that. In reality, rape is having sex with someone you don’t want to, when you don’t want to. Genuine powerlessness is terrifying and diminishing. (And if you think there’s emotional conflict and guilt after consensual sex, it’s NOTHING compared to the shit you experience with non-consensual sex!) So far, no one has shared any rape fantasies that involve the dynamic of being forced to have sex when they truly don’t want to have sex with someone they truly aren’t attracted to. If I do hear one of those from a trauma survivor, I’ll ascribe it to the aforementioned explanation - an attempt to own the trauma and process the experience. Seriously, it’s a good question and thank you for putting it out there. Anticipation of judgment had to have been scary. | 4 |
jl1lhb | Biology | What exactly is a voice crack? | When you speak, air travels between two thin folds of flesh in your throat called the vocal folds. When brought together, the air passing between them causes them to vibrate against each other and thereby produce sound like a reed. If something goes wrong, the folds don’t come together at the right time or you slacken a little bit involuntarily, they can flop around a little. That would be a voice crack. They happen most often during puberty because at that age the larynx (voice box) grows rapidly. Speaking and singing are exercises in muscular coordination, and if your body is not subconsciously used to the size of the instrument it’s dealing with there will be more little flubs. | 1 |
fsiy8c | Engineering | Why do drill bits that are cutting into metal in commercial or industrial settings remain stationary, while the piece of metal spins? | What you are thinking of is specifically a lathe, which is used for circular cuts and working of a material (there are different types of lathes for wood and metal). Since lathes spin the metal so that it can be cut and shaped on the outside, there's no need to have the drill bit spin as well. Spinning the bit at the same time means more moving parts to fail, more stress on the motor for having to drive those parts, and more stress on the drill bit and worked metal, which could damage or break either. In terms of physics, if the metal or the bit is spinning, as long as one of them does. it's just easier and smarter to keep spinning the worked metal. | 1 |
hc2fva | Biology | How do transdermal patches work, and why can’t they be used for all medications? For the second question, is it just that some medications need to be absorbed more quickly? | They use chemical carriers that enable the drugs to pass through your skin. For home use, some people use magnesium stearate. That being said, I would strongly caution you against using that information to make your own medicine. You can easily end up absorbing compounds that you really don't want in your body. | 2 |
aybj1v | Other | How do states justify the requirement to reveal your identity to the public as a lottery winner? Do they not take the individual’s safety and security into consideration? | To show as proof the money is being won by someone and not pocketed. But yes, probably bad for individuals with unique first and last names. | 2 |
l2xrlo | Earth Science | Why is there an expiration date on bottled water? | The FDA requires *every* item that it regulates to have an expiration date of no more than 2 years from the date of production. Companies can put a longer expiration date on the item if they can prove that the product lasts longer than that, but doing so is expensive and the only companies that go through the process to do that produce frieze dried food that is intended to last for decades. That's it. The FDA just has a blanket rule that says any item it regulates needs to have an expiration date, bottled water is a regulated item, and there is no exception to that rule for bottled water. The plastic breaking down/cover your ass/whatever arguments that people have come up with to justify the expiration dates are just speculation from people who don't understand FDA labelling requirements. The plastic used to bottle the water will not break down or leach chemicals under *normal* conditions. If you store a plastic bottle of water under the types of extreme conditions that will cause the plastic to break down, the water will become undrinkable within a few weeks, not within a few years. Putting an expiration date on an item offers a company no legal protection if the item turns out to expire. Again, every similar argument has absolutely no basis. **The only reason that bottled water has an expiration date is because the FDA has a blanket rule on expiration dates that covers it. Properly stored, bottled water stays good essentially forever.** | 2 |
loycuz | Technology | Why do we need really big and small speakers to properly reproduce 20hz-20khz at high volumes, but headphones can do it just fine? | It's all about the size of the space you want to fill with sound. If you want to fill a small space, say the inside of a headphone muff, then it takes a small amount of sound. Want to fill the tiny space between an earbud and the eardrum, even a super tiny speaker can do the job. Alas, many rooms are much larger, large enough to walk around in. That takes much, much more sound energy. You could do this with many, many tiny speakers. It would be good because tiny speakers can move very quickly and reproduce a broad spectrum of sound efficiently. Alas, an array of 1M earbud speakers would cost far too much money. Instead large rooms use fewer speakers and sophisticated audio equipment that measures the room's acoustic properties and applies large amounts of power to a few larger speakers to make the right sound profile. When it comes to higher frequencies, smaller speakers can be more efficient, so the overall speakers mechanism can be made be made a little smaller by a mix of large speakers for low frequencies, medium sized speakers for middle frequencies and small speakers for high frequencies. | 5 |
84so7n | Biology | Humans enjoy music on key, and wince at off key music. Does this preference come from cultural development, or is there a science to this? | It's a bit of both. Notes that sounds good together in western music generally have a simpler ratio and stuff that sounds bad have a more complex ratio. If you grow up with a different system of notes then you are used to different combinations of ratios, for example in some eastern music they use quarter tones which just sounds like a note is out of tune to western ears | 5 |