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eli5_39422_59134

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{ "a_id": [ "er7morb" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "You’re not too far off! While I was a lifeguard I learned that. When something is caught in your throat it is pushing against the sides. As you attempt to force air in or out of your lungs to remove the object it causes a slight build in pressure further expanding your throat. (this is why whenever somone performs the hiemlieck manuver on a choking person the object in their throat usually pops out with quite a bit of force.) Anyways all that pressure build up plus the inital object that was stuck cause some lasting soreness, but it should be gone within a day at most!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dp1o8g3", "dp1otf4" ], "score": [ 4, 2 ], "text": [ "The ground above is compacted and the tunnels animals dig are relatively small. ", "Your garden variety soil is full of things other than crushed up rock- dead plant matter, water, roots etc. Roots hold give soil structure and water in soil makes it sticky because water molecules, while being electrically neutral overall, have a positive end and a negative end, so they’re attracted to each other. If the animal’s burrow is too big though, these forces can’t hold the dirt up around the tunnel and it collapses. Ever stepped on a groundhog tunnel? They’ll collapse under your weight " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ccpl4ts" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "It's important to understand that story of Galileo and his relationship to the church is not just an issue of science vs. religion, nor the conflict between the two. The story is much more complex than that. But this is ELI5, so here is the condensed version (sorry, it's still kind of long):\n\n* The Protestant Reformation occurred in 1517\n* 26 years later, in 1543, Copernicus published *On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres* in which he claimed that the Earth orbited the Sun (heliocentrism) rather than the Sun orbiting the Earth (geocentrism)\n* Part of the fall-out of the Reformation was that the Church was probably hesitant to re-interpret the meaning of the Bible, including passages that at the time seemed to obviously point to a fixed Earth\n* Most astronomers at the time said that they weren't that concerned with giving true descriptions of the heavens but rather they were just giving models that fit with the known observations. Most religious figures at the time had no problem with this.\n* Galileo made religious and scientific arguments for heliocentrism. One of his religious arguments was that earlier religious figures held to non-literal interpretations of the Bible and that they shouldn't fear doing the same, especially if we have \"complete certainty on the basis of experiments.\"\n* Religious figures at the time responded, correctly, that neither Galileo nor anybody else provided \"complete certainty on the basis of experiments\" that heliocentrism was true. \n* Besides the religious arguments against Galileo, there were physical arguments against Galileo that were hard to get past. \n* For example, if the Earth was moving, why is it that when we drop an object from a tower that it lands right next to the tower rather than far away from the tower. There was no answer to this at the time and it was a convincing argument as to why the Earth couldn't be moving.\n* Galileo came up with the idea of relativity to explain this - the idea that from our standpoint on Earth, it looks like an object falls straight down from a tower but from a different point of view (say, out in space somewhere), it looks like that same object is moving forward and down. While this seems obvious to us today, at the time it wasn't. \n* In 1632, Galileo's *Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems* was delivered to Ferdinando II de' Medici. This is the book that most people think of when they think of Galileo. The book is basically a dialogue between a defender of heliocentrism, a defender of geocentrism and somebody who defends neither. This book was authorized by the Church but officially he wasn't supposed to take a position on whether heliocentrism was true or not\n* Galileo eventually went to trial because of the book, and while it wasn't supposed to refute geocentrism, basically did refute geocentrism. In trial, Galileo denied this and claimed that heliocentrism is only a model to be used for its mathematical usefulness, but it wasn't really true.\n* The court didn't believe him, largely because the *Dialogue* seemed to say the opposite and they said he was to no longer write about geocentrism and heliocentrism. He was basically placed in house arrest - he had to live out the rest of his life (about 9 years) at his farmhouse. \n\nEdit: Grammar/spelling" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c5yn7gn" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It works much like when you blow up a balloon and pull the ends of the opening tight while letting the air out to make a high pitched fart noise. \n\n When you talk or sing your diaphragm pushes air past your vocal cords. Your vocal chords move closer together which creates a smaller opening for the air to travel through. This smaller opening creates pressure which in turn causes your cords to vibrate which makes sound. Your body can make these cords tighter or more loose depending on the pitch that you want to produce. The tighter the vocal cords the faster they will vibrate and the higher pitch they will produce. Vice versa for lower pitch sounds. \n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is a youtube video that illustrates this. The vibration is kinda hard to see because of the frame rate of the camera but the general stretching and closing of the vocal cords is there. \n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpDwhpILkQ" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ciswdpi", "ciswgx7", "ciswvmq" ], "score": [ 14, 3, 3 ], "text": [ "The escape velocity of the moon is 2.38km/s\n\nThe speed of most handgun bullets is lower than the speed of sound (300m/s)\n\nThe bullet would not escape the moon's gravity and would fall back down onto the surface.", "It would go up, then back down and land on the moon in the distance.\n\nThe escape velocity (the speed you need to leave the moon's gravitational pull) is 2380m/s. The fastest bullets in any normal gun are around 1500m/s, so it would just land in the distance.\n\nUpon googling the moon's escape velocity, [I found this link](_URL_0_) which gives a more detailed answer.", "Even if you had a gun that could fire at 3km/s, the bullet would miss earth. You would need to aim a pretty far off target in order to hit earth. Someone else needs to do the math on a lunar to earth return trajectory and minimum velocity to get back to earth reentry. It isn't enough to escape lunar gravity field." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=617" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d8ztbp6", "d8zw2ud", "d8zyt0y", "d90bpx6" ], "score": [ 8, 3, 14, 2 ], "text": [ "Your stomach and intestines (in particular the large intestine) absorb water into your bloodstream. Your kidneys decide whether your bloodstream has the right water balance, and they take water out of it if not.", "The solid waste you have is the food that you have not absorbed, and bacteria in your gut. It has never left you digestive. Your bladder is the waste that is filtered from your blood via your kidneys. ", "Well, your body is a pretty smart assorter.\n\nThe quick pass through your body involves both food and drink travelling from your mouth, down a long muscular tube to the stomach, and then gradually reabsorbed from the long intestines within.\n\n Food and drinks get subjected to several special juices called enzymes that break it into simple compounds like glucose, basic proteins and fats.\n\nMost of the water that you drink and the water in your food is absorbed by your gut with glucose. It enters your bloodstream and goes to the liver for processing before going to the rest of the body.\n\nUrine is a very fine filtration of your blood. Your blood now carries loads of nutrients and a few waste products. So the kidney sorts it out and produces urine. \n\nWhatever can't be absorbed in the gut, stays in the tubes and is converted by local bacteria into poop.", "Both solids and liquids you consume both end up in your stomach. The stomach and other nearby organs produce liquids that are delivered to the stomach regularly that break down different components that comprise your food. For example, one organ produces a chemical to break down fats, another breaks down proteins, etc. The acidic liquid in your stomach, combined with these other chemicals are collectively called gastric juice. As you eat food and it falls into the stomach, the solid food mixes with gastric juice, which breaks it down into a thick liquid called chyme. Also, the stomach also begins to physically squeeze and compress to break down food further. The chyme (a combination of food, beverage, gastric juices, etc) passes through your stomach into your intestines through a small opening at the bottom that opens at regular intervals. Then, different parts of the intestines absorb different nutrients. The FINAL stage of this process is the water component of the chyme is sucked away in your large intestines and sent to your kidneys/bladder, while the solid, undigested portion is left and excreted as poop (also the body adds a few other things besides this to excrete too such as cellular waste and dead cells/etc)." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c6erh8g", "c6erk8g", "c6es38z", "c6es6cl", "c6et1c0", "c6f69xh" ], "score": [ 2, 12, 30, 7, 9, 2 ], "text": [ "I don't think he used any loopholes (that have been proven) unless someone can prove otherwise.\n\nWhat he did do was take out deductions for things that many people get such as having kids (when his kids were dependents), having a mortgage, giving to charities, etc. I don't know how many of these he used but you can look it up in his tax returns.\n\nA loophole is not the same as a deduction. A loophole is a way to avoid taxes by playing the system in a way it wasn't meant to be played. The more complicated a tax system gets the more loopholes there are (on average). You can find some examples on the wiki page with their sources:\n_URL_0_", "The legality of it isn't an issue. It's perfectly legal. The issue is more about a debate regarding the values American society and how people think Romney views his role (benefits and obligations) with American society.\n\nThe question underlining everything regard Romney's taxes is: What taxation philosophy should society adapt in regards to people with vast financial resources? What tax rate on the 1% would lead to a society the American people want?\n\nObviously there are vastly contrasting opinions based on ideology/culture or numerical/historical data. I'm sure you'll be getting a bit of both in the other comments.\n\ntl,dr: It's not an issue of legality, but rather values.", "The answer to your question is actually contained within the question itself:\n\nWhat does \"loophole\" mean when it comes to the tax code? The *implication* is that it's something unintended, a way of following the rules to the letter but still ending up at an outcome that is contrary to what it's supposed to be. Like your mom says \"Don't eat anything from the fridge, you'll spoil your dinner\" and you raid the cookie jar on the counter instead. You obeyed the rules, but you defeated the *purpose* of having the rules in the first place.\n\nThere are two ways to interpret that. One is to say that the rules weren't set up wisely in the first place, because that loophole — there are snacks that aren't in the fridge — should never have been left open. But the other — the one your mom will latch on to fiercely — is that you knew *darned well* what the point of the rules was, and you chose to be crafty instead.\n\nThus we have the two (not mutually exclusive) opinions on the tax code in its current form: People who clearly have lots of money and could afford to pay onerous taxes are allowed not to, therefore the tax code stinks and needs rewriting; and people who clearly have lots of money and could afford to pay onerous taxes *darned well know* that they're meant to just send all their money to the IRS, and they're dirty dirty cheaters for not doing it.\n\nExcept, of course, there's a perfectly sensible third point of view that invalidates those others: The tax code is *working as designed.* People who have lots of money but who use deductions to lower their tax bill are doing *exactly* what they're supposed to be doing. Those deductions exist to encourage things like charitable giving and capital investment, and people who do those things are doing more good than they would be if they ignored the deductions and just sent the IRS a huge check. The system of credits and deductions isn't a \"loophole\" at all, but rather an example of the tax laws being used exactly as they should be used: to encourage people to do useful things with their money instead of hoarding it.\n\nSome people think one of those three points of view is valid and the other two aren't, others think all three are valid, and the rest lie somewhere in between.", "Fun Fact: everyone looks for tax loopholes.", "The issue people have is not that he used a loophole, but that he gets to *have* a loophole to use simply because of his wealth. \n\nSee, the tax code doesn't really track where every single dollar you make in a year comes from and goes. It asks you to do that. So you say \"Well, I earned my 100k in wages this year.\" And you pay your tax rate\n\nThe wealthy have more options available to them. They can say \"Well, my wealth increased by 40hojillion this year, but it wasn't wages, it was interest. So I'll be paying the lower \"capital gains rate\" instead of the income rate. Thank you very much. \n\nIt's also much easier for a wealthy person to find deductions. Charitable donations, business losses, depreciation. All this can add up to reduce the amount of taxes paid even more.\n\nWhile all this is legal, to some it doesn't seem *fair.* They say: Why should those with the greatest capacity to pay taxes have the greatest ability to avoid those taxes?\n\nRight or wrong, I don't know. That's just how things operate today.\n", "Lots of rich people who use tax loopholes do not want to be president, living on the taxes of people who pay them. *Some* rich people do not dodge taxes. I think Elvis Presley was a famous example. " ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loophole" ], [], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cifk3p1", "cifk7r1", "cifke0y", "cifks2f" ], "score": [ 7, 3, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "It's the time when the most couples are together, and you're already in bed so...", "Night is when you're home from work.\n\nIt's significantly harder, though by no means at all impossible, to have sex at work. ", "The key word in the title of your post is \"primarily\". People have sex at all times of day, all the time. However, in the media, it is shown that couples have sex at night. I can't necessarily confirm as to why that is, but in real life, it is because people typically work during the day. People work early morning (9ish) to the evening (5ish) and then go home to their partner. That's when they have the time to do it. ", "I'm already naked" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c4l5ih4", "c4l6pw0" ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text": [ " > I don't have a credit card or any kind of loan that I am paying to help it out.\n\nGet a credit card, use it for gas, when you get home after buying gas, pay off your credit card from your debit account.\n\nRepeat, forever. This is the cheap way do it, in that you won't pay interest. If you have SOME money on your card over the course of a month, you'll prove you can pay regular payments, which will likely increase it more, but that obviously costs some money and isn't ideal for most people.\n\nIn general your credit score is an estimate of how smart it is to loan you money. If you don't have a credit card, they're not really sure how smart it is. If they can make some money lending to you (your interest payments) it becomes a pretty good deal. If you miss payments or default then it becomes terrible.", "A big problem that I had having such a low credit score was that anything I applied for I would just get denied. I would research and ask questions just like yours to find out what I could do. I was irresponsible when I was younger, but now that I have learned my lesson and become more financially responsible, what can I do to prove to lenders that I am capable of managing my debt? It was very hard and discouraging. There were apartments I couldn't rent, I couldn't get any type of loan. Walmart said no, banks said no, every thing that required a check, no no no. Well what the fuck, how can I improve my score if no one will give me a chance. It makes no sense!\n\nI found my break in a secured credit card. I made a $200.00 deposit, and I got a credit card with a $200.00 limit. You want there to be a balance on that card at the end of the month when the bank reports your card to the credit card agencies. If you have already paid it off ahead of time, then they report no balance and this does not look as good. Once you get your bill, the balance is reported, and then you pay off the balance in full and acquire no interest. This is revolving credit. It shows lenders that you use the credit given to you and you are responsible enough to pay it off. After 9 months of paying like this I raised my score. I was able to get my first car finanace in almost 10 years without any hassle. And I applied for a better credit card, and got an \"Instantly approved\" for the first time in my life. I didn't get letters for the next 2 weeks telling me why I was denied again by 6 different potential lenders. \n\nI used Orchard Bank Secured credit card. You can google it, it's easy. My girlfriend was in a similar situation she got her card through Applied Bank. \n\nGood luck!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d5jsbby", "d5jsx06" ], "score": [ 5, 2 ], "text": [ "Using the right kind of camera, astronomers can take pictures of the sun that reveal features such as sunspots and flares. By tracking these, they can then determine upon which axis the sun is rotating, thus providing poles and an equator.", "Eccentricity is a property of conic sections. Circles have eccentricity of 0, planets orbits are a bit over 0 while comets have higher eccentricities up to 1. The inclination, which is the angle of the orbit in relation to the plane of reference, is another property of an orbit. The plane of reference for the solar system is based on observations of the rotation of the solar plasma as well as the planets.\n\nThe theory of the ninth planet is based on a family of comets with similar orbital elements. There is a low chance that this is a coincidence. Assuming there is a ninth planet that is responsible for this family of comets it is possible to calculate the most likely orbit of the planet. We still do not know where in the orbit it currently is but we are looking. This is not the first planet we have discovered like this." ] }

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[ "http://www.wired.co.uk/article/planet-nine-mystery-tilt-solar-system" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "cf1flvt", "cf1fqde" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "From NASA website: the sparks are used to burn up any hydrogen that may have been leaked from the engines/tanks. If they didn't do this, there was a chance that a pocket of leaked hydrogen would blow up when the engines started.", "The sparks are for ignition, but not for the engines. They ignite any hydrogen that comes out of the engines without being ignited. Otherwise the hydrogen could spread and then be ignited by the rocket, causing a massive fireball.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n" ] }

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[ "http://youtu.be/OnoNITE-CLc?t=1m22s" ]

[ [], [ "http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts115/launch/qa-leinbach.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cfaw3jo", "cfayc26", "cfayosi", "cfaz8y0", "cfb14pe" ], "score": [ 39, 6, 2, 4, 2 ], "text": [ "Before people start chiming in that singular \"they\" is wrong, that is only correct from a prescriptivist viewpoint. Prescriptive grammar are language rules that \"they\" (schools, or whatever) tell you is correct. Descriptive grammar are rules about how people *actually* speak. From a linguistic standpoint, singular \"they\" *is* a valid pronoun. \n\n\"They\" is used as an alternative for \"one\" (which sounds snobby/overly formal and impersonal), \"he or she\", which is unwieldy, \"it\", which only refers to humans if you want to be really offensive, \"he\", which kinda ignores half the species, and made-up words like \"xe\" which...yeah. Singular they goes all the way back to Shakespeare. It is also the norm for websites that don't know your gender, like Facebook.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n[Jane Austen's uses](_URL_2_).\n\n[Grammar girl](_URL_0_) on the issue.\n\nThat said the \"declension\" (that is, the different forms of a noun, pronoun or adjective) for possessive \"they\" is \"their\", regardless if \"they\" is used for a plural or singular noun. \n\n\"[Friend] has deleted you from their playlist.\" is valid.", "They is good to use for a person that doesn't identify as either male or female, especially if that is their preferred pronoun. ", "Many languages use plural forms when referring to a singular person. For instance, in Spanish you might hear \"Vos\" (comes from the plural form of \"you\") or in French \"Vous\" (also the plural form for \"you\"). Italians use the word \"Lei\" and the same conjugation of a verb that you would use for \"he, she or it\" (third person singular) when meaning to convey respect to someone. I imagine that these all simply evolved through customs (such as referring to the head of state in plural).", " > Now, is ther actually a set of rules about when to use \"his/her\" and when to use singular \"their\" or is that one just a gender-independant alternative.\n\nThere aren't any rules, but you generally want to go for the gender-dependent word (assuming the gender is known): it just tends to sound better. However, if a gender-dependent word doesn't quite fit, go with the independent one as opposed to changing the structure of the sentence, at least in conversation. For the most part, you'll be fine using either; I guarantee that really no one will notice. I suppose one \"rule\" would be to not mix the two: the phrase, \"He dropped their papers,\" implies that he dropped someone else's papers.\n\nThe only thing I want to note is that there seems to be some cases where both the independent and the dependent sound natural, but also some cases where it seems that only the dependent works.\n\nIf I were talking with a co-worker about a random woman who left her purse in the waiting room, both the phrase, \"Can you give me her purse?\" and, \"Can you give me their purse?\" sound fine. But if I were asking my dad to give me my sister's keys, the phrase, \"Can you me their keys?\" sounds wrong. Perhaps the emotional connection and knowing one's personality makes a difference? Or, perhaps I'm just crazy and it sounds fine. If someone else has noticed something similar and could chime in, I'd love to hear.", " > Now, is ther actually a set of rules about when to use \"his/her\" and when to use singular \"their\" or is that one just a gender-independant alternative.\n\nAmerican English grammar is in a state of transition over this. Some authorities consider \"they\" as a strictly a singular pronoun, and others consider it acceptable to use it as a gender neutral singular.\n\nFor informal usage, I would say there is nothing wrong with they. For formal usage, you need to figure out which authority the person enforcing formality is going with." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/generic-singular-pronouns", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they", "http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austhlis.html" ], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e9i0p3f" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Calculation and deduction from things we can detect. Stars for example work on a balance between gravity and fusion heat. Gravity pulls the star together but once the component materials such as hydrogen are compressed and heated enough they fuse together, releasing energy which pushes the material apart. This also slows the rate of reaction.\n\nSo a bigger star then has more gravity and can burn more fuel (and is forced to do so). Heated elements also emit an identifiable spectra of light, so we can look at a star's light and determine what it is composed of. Then by gaging its brightness we can see how quickly it is burning fuel and as a consequence how massive it must be.\n\nFrom that we can conclude how old the star must be, and planets that orbit that star usually formed from the same field of material as the star. Different compositions of planet form at different speeds and so by determining the general makeup of the planet the estimate can again be narrowed down.\n\n\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cltdxg9" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "...What? I've never heard of this. Do you have a video example?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c5b0dz8", "c5b0ebb", "c5b300h" ], "score": [ 3, 7, 9 ], "text": [ "I believe there were three heavily guarded roads, and also air routes into the city.", "The Russians allowed a road into Berlin for supplies until they eventually shut it down. After that we [flew supplies to them](_URL_0_). ", "After second world war, the Soviets, the Brits, the Americans and the French sat together and thought about what to do with Germany.\nThey decided to divide Germany in 4 zones, and it's capital Berlin in 4 sectors. After some time, the British and the Americans put their zones and sectors together (the French joined soon afterwards).\n\nThe Soviets had different plans for their part of Germany, so they didn't join. However, they agreed to supply energy, etc. to West Berlin.\n\nThere were a few transit highways which allowed citizens of the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany (Western Germany) to go directly from Western Germany to West Berlin and back.\n\nIn 1948, even before the founding of Western Germany, there were a few days called the Berlin Blockade were the Soviets blocked these transit roads and also stopped supplying West Berlin with Energy.\n\nThe Western Powers managed the impossible: For over two weeks they flew supplies without stopping to West Berlin. They used old bomber planes for this, filled with Food and other Supplies; the planes were called \"Rosinenbomber\" (raisin bombers). During the blockade, the Americans flew in parts for a power plant and started building one.\n\nThe Soviets were so impressed by this (and the never ending planes with supplies) that they stopped the Blockade." ] }

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[ "http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~theed/Cold_War/c_Khrushchev_era/g_Bay_of_pigs/Media/cc-Berlin/mapWest_EastGermany.jpg" ]

[ [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Blockade" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cl7xakt", "cl7xq86" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Most of the time the actors may get to choose a few pieces to take with them, but a lot of it is kept by the studio and re-used. for instance, I know i've seen the big metal door used in X-men in a number of other places.", "Most wardrobe is (was?) rented from hollywood rental houses, and pinned to fit an actor/actress, unless they were main cast or important. Those extras you see on mad men were wearing rentals or were asked to bring their own vintage attire. \n\nIf you ever get to see a wardrobe rental warehouse, they're amazing. It's every suit, uniform, loin cloth, evening gown, dress, armor, etc. you've ever seen on film.\n\nThis is why the armor from Starship Troopers was in everything from Stargate to Firefly to Repo Men to every generic cheapass scifi movie and TV show in the last twenty years (Todd, I feel old) and then some. z\n\nThe main cast gets stuff tailored to them, but again, that wardrobe is rarely theirs to keep. Some things are loaned out by designers, for a sort of stealth advertising. Some items are made specifically for the show. Sometimes, actors walk home in things they weren't supposed to. Sometimes, actors ASK for parts of the costume, or they're given items as gifts. Sometimes, when things go bad, they get nothing. Sometimes, when things go well, they get nothing. \n\nSometimes, as is the case with franchise properties, the wardrobe is spoken for by promotional and historic exhibits (see: batman armors or spider suits). Often, the wardrobe is kept and stored specifically for a sequel, because they know it's coming and it's easier to just pull the suit back out, clean it off, and put the actor back in it than to get a new one made. \n\nAs with anything in hollywood, there are not hard and fast rules for costuming, except that there are no rules. Oh, and George Burns could smoke wherever he damn well liked, but he's dead now. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cfkquf5", "cfkquvz" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Are you asking how lasers work, or how the laser functions as a weapons system?", "This laser works like any solid-state laser, so any explanation of an IR solid-state laser will work. A semiconductor diode makes IR light at a specific wavelength. This light is amplified and cohered, then focused into a tight beam. This system is simply powerful enough to be useful against small craft." ] }

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[ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Weapon_System" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "d4v3pjn" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "To accelerate you need power - more than you were using just maintaining a steady speed.\n\nFor a comfy and quiet ride, you generally use a high gear when moving fast, because the engine it turning more slowly. However, broadly, engines can produce more power if they're turning faster (more opportunities per second to burn a bit of fuel).\n\nSo - to accelerate hard (or to climb a steep hill) you choose a lower gear which means that for a given car speed the engine is turning faster. Later you put it back into a high gear.\n\nUsing a low gear also helps when doing down long steep hills. You can use your brakes but they can get so hot that they stop working properly, so instead you make the car turn the engine fast, which makes a lot of noise and feels horrid but doesn't leave you unable to stop at the junction at the bottom." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cf71age" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Apparently, it isn't possible, but the amount of laptop batteries I have restored says otherwise." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cmt8rc2", "cmt8uj9", "cmtkchw" ], "score": [ 83, 31, 2 ], "text": [ "It's not violating federal law. The fact that Colorado has legalized pot does not mean that DEA agents cannot enforce federal law in Colorado. Rather, it simply means that Colorado police will not arrest them for pot-related crimes; DEA agents, however, are welcome to enter Colorado and arrest people for pot-related crimes against federal law.\n\nIf Mississippi tried to ban abortion, the superiority clause would take effect, which means that federal law would trump state laws, and Mississippi would not be allowed to ban abortions.", "Also, Roe Vs. Wade has made abortion laws unconstitutional. If Mississippi banned abortion, it would be an unconstitutional law.", "Marijuana laws usually are expanding rights of citizens in some way through allowing them to do an action they were not allowed to do before. It is still illegal, and the feds can still arrest you for violation of federal marijuana laws, they just usually don't. \n\nOn the other hand, anti-abortion laws are usually restricting rights in this day an age, even though the right was already given by the supreme court in Roe v. Wade and later modified with other cases. \n\nThe states aren't allowed to give less rights than are allowed under federal law, just more. They may put such laws on the books, but ultimately they would be unenforceable. \n\nOne example is with some of the southern states. Even though marriage rights for (straight and monogamous) couples was ruled by the Supreme Court to be a fundamental right during the civil rights era, laws banning interracial marriage were still in the books for many years. I believe the last state only removed it within the last five years. Those states may have officially banned interracial marriage all these years, but it meant nothing. \nAs for current anti-abortion laws, they are purposely pushing the limits on what was allowed under the prior cases in a direct attempt to get a case in front of a more conservative supreme court in order to get restrictions put back on. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "coco6tv" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "It's an automated system, so there is no \"Human Error\" to cause such a problem. If there's an error the call simply won't connect, or the text will just disappear, lost forever." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "f6b16dm" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "They are expensive, not efficient and don't scale well. So it isn't a technology that is useful (yet) for commercial power generation. The requirements for commercial power generation are very strict in many respects." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e3cplsh", "e3cugz2", "e3cuxxp", "e3cw30a", "e3cwi8w", "e3cxvqx", "e3d0j4o", "e3d153w", "e3d1ezd", "e3d1kly", "e3d1y3v", "e3d22kf", "e3d2ixo", "e3d2zsm", "e3d3vq2", "e3d3x0l", "e3d3z5a", "e3d47o3", "e3d4pej", "e3d4puy", "e3d4xlz", "e3d7srf" ], "score": [ 731, 30, 147, 21, 57, 16, 21, 10, 9, 5, 2, 4, 7, 2, 6, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "From my short experience as a construction worker, I can tell that this type of work is often done in bursts rather than steady progress hence the perception that nothing is ever being done. We can also list a short list of key factors that hamper the speed of the works:\n\n* weather;\n\n* equipment breakdown;\n\n* delivery of materials;\n\n* labor issues (sickness or shortages);\n\n* collisions (i.e. some things cannot be done in the same time);\n\n* delay of prerequisite works.\n\nIf you are doing construction pretty much every element must be in place for the works to progress and quite often unforeseen circumstances make it difficult to execute any plans in time.\n\n\n\n", "Any delays can be easily explained in 3 words: blame the surveyor\n\nIf that doesn’t work: blame the engineer", "Any road work is split in phases. The previous phase is essential to the ones after it. If one phase is delayed, the one after it is delayed and the effects are cumulative. \n\nYou can’t build the roof of a house before the foundation, but you can’t build the foundation without leveling the ground...and so it goes. \n\nIt always look like they’re doing nothing because most crew is doing nothing, as they have to wait for those who are working to finish their task in order to start working too. \n", "My dad did some road work, and really the truth is a lot of them are doing nothing but it's not really their fault.\n\nIt's not something you can do in parallel. You are reliant on the task before you and sometimes due to unexpected circumstances you just have to wait. Sometimes you are also waiting on materials, and in that case you just kinda hang around the work site.", "Sometimes parts of a job will be labor intensive (like moving objects or fetching a part for a more skilled person) but some parts will require the labor of only one person (someone with higher training doing a specific job). Just because most of the time you don’t need three people doesn’t mean you can cut the other two people because when you need them they must be close. What do you have the other two people do? Mostly stand with a shovel waiting to do their part. \n\nExample: One senior man is driving the road grinder and is doing a great job but he can’t grind up a certain patch of road. Two guys on the ground who have been standing close by jump into action with their shovels and clean up the missed debris. You driving by only got to see the job site for a few seconds and the two guys standing with shovels but not them actually doing physical work.\n\nSecond part of your question has to do mostly with inspections. You have to wait for every level of government to check every part of your job (and collect required fees for doing so) before you can move onto the next step. If one thing is wrong you may have to fix the mistake and wait days longer for the inspectors to return and let you move on to the next step.", "Health and safety plays a role in this too, any heavy hand operated equipment (such as jackhammers etc.) have insanely strict time limits on how long one person can operate them to prevent permanent damage, it’s not cost effective to give every person a piece of the same equipment as time limit is still the same per person.", "There has been continuous road work on a very small section of East downtown Dallas for like...5 years now? I think they work one week a year and just leave up all the barriers in the interim.", "Used to live in a town where they would light up the 'hood 24/7 when working on the roads, just so that they could finish the job faster.\n\nIt was loud, annoying, and the traffic sucked : But it only sucked for a short amount of time instead of all summer long.", "The house next to mine took something like 2-3 years to be completed. The crew would work for 1-3 weeks, then nothing would be done for months at a time. After the foundation had been poured, summer and fall rain collected in it (several inches) and froze during the winter. One could have gone ice skating or played hockey in it. ", "A road worker once told me that, the issue is regulatory approvals. They finish one layer of a project, then they need to call the government inspector and wait for the inspection to take place. Only then can they start the next layer.", "I point the finger solidly at concrete or asphalt cure times. Nothing touches that area until it is cured, and it passes the 7, 14, and 21 day stress tests. It takes much longer than people think to harden up properly.", "A city planner in the small city I live in told me if a contractor bids a job for x amount of dollars for 12 months they don’t get the entire amount unless it actually takes 12 months. There is no incentive to complete the job early. \n\nJust hearsay and I have no proof this dude is actually an employee of the city. He was an Uber passenger. ", "They are widening the road adjacent to our neighborhood from two lanes to four. There are people in my neighborhood up in arms that they ripped out half the old road and haven't done anything to replace it in a few months. They don't see the 24\" concrete storm drains or 80' long concrete culverts they've been installing for the last few months. Those projects take much longer than grading and paving the road surface. There is usually a lot of unseen work going on that you may not see because it's either underground or has to do with stabilizing the soil under the road. There are also the other issues like weather, red tape, phase planning, etc. that others have listed here. \n\nShort version: A lot of the shit that is getting done isn't obvious from the rubbernecking driver's perspective. ", "People also forgeting that for example when you use concrete you have to wait a month, same with soil stabilization. Next part is that ofcourse money. There is huge competition in building roads, to cut the cost down you cut workers, machines etc. Next part is just that road is rarely closed all together, you can always get around, so there is always time. I work in railway construction where the is no way around and time is very limited, we usually work 12 hours a day sometimes for weeks to finish what we have to because there are insane fines for being late.", "1. Some of the work is literally back breaking. You have to rest half the time to protect your body. \n\n2. Safety and quality. Some of the people standing around are inspectors, safety officers, and supervisors who are there to watch the work and keep everyone safe and following the plans. \n\n3. Concrete. Concrete takes weeks to cure and be tested. \n\n4. Waiting. You have to wait for others to get their part done or materials to be delivered. \n\n5. Traffic control. If you have to work around traffic and phase the project it takes 3 times longer. \n\n6. Working hours. To keep costs lower most projects are shut down for weekends, over night, and holidays. \n\n7. Other projects. The builder may be simultaneously working on a few projects and is shuffling crews around. On the same note, sub-contractors are not necessarily reliable to show up when they are needed. When your concrete company decides to deliver to someone else, you can’t do the concrete work that day. \n\n8. Weather. When it’s too hot, too cold, or too wet, the work stops. ", "Some of this can be from the materials being used having to cure. For instance concrete has to cure 28 days for full strength but sometimes you can get traffic on it in 7 days. Either way, during this time there is not much other work they can do. Same goes for other materials like lime. Lime is used to treat clay subgrades. It makes clayey soil act like non-cohesive soils and lets you compact it. Anyway, the process to mix in lime into soil usually involves mixing it in, waiting 7 days and mixing it again, compacting it, grading it.\nSo all this is to say sometimes materials involve curing time where major work can't really go on in that area.", "Another factor to consider when crews are excavating would be either unknown cables in the way, pipework not being at the location shown or an obstruction of some kind (for example a buried tank) being in the way. ", "So I work in construction and run into this issue all the time. Customers will complain that work hasn't happened when were 80% done with work.\n\nWhat we consider progress and others do is significantly different. Prep time is almost all of our work, we can demo out old wires, run new pipe, rough in our wires, all of that. That's at least 80% of the work. But devices aren't in and wired, trim out is such a small part of the job, but it's what a customer sees as \"done\"\n\nI know painters run into this too, taping, scraping, washing and everything else is almost all of their work. Slapping some paint on only takes a few hours.\n\nI don't know about roadworks but I have to imagine that it's the same. ", "Municipal service employee here! No one realizes just how time consuming road repair is. Lots of times its due to the distance our garage is to the job site. Equipment is forgotten or broken. The heat also takes its toll on us high vis wearing folk. Biggest factor I would say though is traffic. Its very difficult and dangerous to work with moderate to heavy traffic. Its easy to get frustrated and look at a road crew as simply lazy or slow. My whole perception has changed since doing this job. Also, SLOW DOWN AND MOVE OVER FOR ROAD WORKERS! Even small landscaping crews. ", "Politics and money. \n\nYou want to see decent construction times? Look at Japan, and check out why they are so much more efficient.\n\nConstruction here in the states is a racket.", "From what I know, most road work crews are unionized workers that follow a strict guideline of how things must be done.\n\nAny number of issues can come up during road maintenance that can cause delays.\n\n* Improper filing of correct licenses\n* Improper licenses of work to be done\n* Wrong materials for what is needed to be done\n* Unmarked utility lines that are discovered and requires additional paperwork and changes to maintenance\n* Union workers hit maximum # of hours for the day\n* Not enough workers to work on site\n* Weather\n* Equipment breakdown\n* Delivery of materials delayed\n* Inspection failures\n* Contractor Civil Engineer fails to include waterways and other natural resources that cross the barrier\n* Lack of funding\n* Crappy contractors", "Union workers. Come to China or Japan, watch the crews here resurface 4-5 kilometers of road in 24-36 hours." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ce0sovi", "ce0t1hm", "ce0tcg2", "ce0tdux", "ce0tl09", "ce0tr51", "ce0ts0d", "ce0twpd", "ce0twrk", "ce0u7c8", "ce0uuww", "ce0vdbm", "ce0vmg5", "ce0vwq3", "ce0w4kx", "ce0w7k6", "ce0wyqs", "ce0znms", "ce12oj3", "ce12rf8", "ce13b78", "ce14whh", "ce1565b", "ce15mfw", "ce17qtm" ], "score": [ 38, 456, 30, 2, 7, 19, 2, 7, 3, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, 3, 3, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Our metabolism is such that we burn a lot more energy. A large part of this is being warm blooded, thus we burn energy to maintain body temperature. Whereas snakes are cold blooded and thus rely less on food and more on external sources of heat.", "Your body simply processes food faster than a snake. \n\nI am absolutely **not** recommending this, but you can train yourself to be hungry less and feel full longer by simply eating much less. At various times in my life I've been forced down to eating 1 meal every 2 or 3 days. It's not pleasant but your body will eventually kind of give up on the hunger pangs. Think of your stomach like a spoiled kid; if it's used to getting what it wants any time it wants it'll get mad and demanding when food isn't forthcoming. If you don't give into it's demands for long enough, though, it'll stop throwing the tantrums.", "Mammals burn about 20x more food than a reptile of the same mass. You simply get hungry sooner because you run out sooner.", "I eat one big meal at night around 4 and 5... 2100 calories and then nothing except water and maybe diet pop(0cals)...\n\nI never been a breakfast person so it was easy for me to start skipping that, after a week or so your body gets used to just once a day eating.", "Because you're not a snake. That's why.", "Actually you can! Just takes a few weeks to get used to it. \n\nConsuming your entire daily caloric intake in a 1-2 hour period is actually a body building/fat loss technique.", "Not only can you do that, it appears to be the healthiest way to eat if you are diabetic.\n\n_URL_0_", "To all the people advocating one large meal a day, how does efficiency effect this? Bite for bite, do you actually get the full amount of energy / nutrients when your body is trying to process all of that at once as opposed to spacing it out?\n\nedit: accidentally a letter", "Because you're not a snake.", "Short answer: You need your sugar fix.\n\nLong answer: When you consume sugar or other high glycemic index foods, your blood sugar rises sharply and your body produces insulin which lowers your blood sugar by facilitating storage of glucose as glycogen, uptake of glucose into cells and conversion of glucose into fatty acids. The hunger, or more aptly cravings, come when your blood sugar temporarily drops below normal levels following the initial spike. While you'll never reach the level of a snake, eating a low-carbohydrate high-fat diet can allow you to go longer between meals by keeping your blood sugar constant as long as you're still getting enough food for the day.\n\nMore Info: \n[Blood Sugar Levels Over Time](_URL_2_) \n[Blood Sugar Insulin Cycle](_URL_1_) \n[Intermittent Fasting](_URL_0_)\n", "We have a lot more neurons in our brains than a snake, and that comes at a cost. [Check out this TED talk, it should shed some light on your question](_URL_0_).", "Mammals have much higher metabolic rates than reptiles. A snake cannot produce it's own body heat, but we can and we use a lot of food energy (calories) to do so. Also our brains are metabolically costly and take a shitload of calories (comparatively) to sustain. Source: I read books and stuff", "Relevant : Herschel Walker's Diet\n\n_URL_0_\n\nFor those who don't know, the guy is over 50, in unbelievable shape, and is just an all around amazing athlete.", "Ghrelin\n\nIt's a hunger hormone that increases appetite and decreases nausea.\n\nIf you eat at 8am, 1pm, and 7pm every day you might see an elevation of ghrelin shortly preceding the event. That is to say your body knows you're about to eat and prepares you by telling you that you're hungry.\n\nThat cycle depends on your behavior. It's different depending on your habits. Personally I eat once a day, at 10pm and have been doing so for 2 years, much like you described, only later. I start getting hungry at about 9pm, but it didn't start that way. For a week or two my body anticipated breakfast And lunch so I became hungry at those times. Eventually a new ghrelin cycle is established.\n\nShort answer, you can eat like a snake, but you can't alter your meal timing instantly without side effect. ", "Look up Intermittent Fasting (IF) or _URL_0_\nIt can 100% be done.", "You can, look up intermittent fasting. If you eat your 2000-3000 calories in one meal you will feel full until the next day (meal).", "Damn it Billy, you ain't no snake! Snake's got fangs and scales. You've got baby teeth and a tuft of hair!\n\nSnakes metabolism allows them to eat less than us, but they also do not have as much energy available at all times. They can eat once every so often and slowly get the energy from the food over the course of a long time.\n\nNow, quit stranglin yer dang sister like a python!", "You can. Hunger is regulated by hormones, and if you tried it for a week or so, you'd condition your body to get used to it.\n\nGoogle ghrelin and leptin, and maybe venture onto google scholar if you want to learn more.\n\nI only ate two meals today. And have had some days where I only ate one meal (a pretty fucking big one, in fairness)", "If we can make time release medicine we should be able to a make Time release food. You just swallow handful of \"jellybeans\" whole without chewing in the morning or something and have food slowly released all day.", "you're not cold blooded so you generate your own heat. You are much larger than a snake and you have a more complex brain and body which requires more fuel to run.", "Snakes are crazy efficient. They eat exactly what they need (in terms of both quantity and quality) and don't do a lot of moving unless it's to find more food, find a mate, or escape danger. Mammals are stupid. We have to eat almost constantly to keep up with our silly behavior. And we eat a lot of different stuff, and a lot of that stuff isn't the most efficient or healthy, nutrition-wise.\nWe expend energy so frivolously for no reason. We go on walks and jogs for FUN. We exercise and work out just BECAUSE. \"Hey guys, I'm bored. Let's go DO something!\"-You will never hear a snake something as ridiculous as this unless he was quoting a mammal in a story he was telling about how poorly designed mammals are. \n\nWe are almost always spending energy, even when we're just laying around, because our weak mammal bodies have to stay warm somehow instead of just relying on the sun like reptiles do. Also, many snakes don't eat once a DAY. Some more like once a week. Heck, I know folks who keep perfectly healthy snakes, and every once in a while, their snake will just stop eating. For like 8 months. Just because, wtf, why not? Can you imagine knowing you're so efficient that you just stop eating for most of a year because you just don't feel like spending the energy to CHEW? That is the pinnacle of evolution.", "You're not a fucking snake. Get over it, it's not gonna happen.", "You're blood is warm because our bodies use the food to heat it. The snake sits in the sun to heat and just goes to sleep when it is not warm out. ", "Do you have an insane stomach capacity? Do you not have to waste calories on warming your body? Are you capable of doing absolutely nothing for a week?", "Because you're a lousy snake. \n" ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://www.medicaldaily.com/one-meal-day-better-people-type-2-diabetes-264103" ], [], [], [ "http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2013/08/06/a-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fasting/", "http://www.allthingsgym.com/blood-sugar-insulin-cycle-graphic/", "http://www.abpischools.org.uk/res/coResourceImport/modules/homeostasis_sugar/fullscreenflash2-1.cfm" ], [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_XH1CBzGw" ], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Walker#Training_and_diet" ], [], [ "leangains.co.uk" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "culvk5k" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "They are not refugees because they are not persecuted in their country of origin for their race, religion, nationality or political beliefs." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "duccayb", "duccia6" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Your question is more or less the point. It isn't different than any other semi automatic weapon, at least not functionally. You could make arguments about ergonomics, I suppose, but the main issue is that people are hyper focusing on the one thing, not realizing it's actually not that uncommon.\n\nI guess in that sense, the thing that sets the AR-15 apart is it's ubiquity.", "There really isn't any difference between the AR and any other semi auto. I have shot lots of rifles, of all different calibers and types. The 1 thing an AR has going for it is that it can be a little quicker to unload/reload when compared to other rifles. But that is only if you are right handed. If you are not right handed it is not quicker. For example, an AR is faster to reload than say a MINI or AK. But that's about it. Also FWIW, the action of a MINI or AK is better than an AR, so that would make those firearms generally more reliable than an AR can be. But if you are counting the milliseconds it takes to reload a rifle, if you are a rightly, and AR is pretty fast to reload. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dg9tp1n" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The south was always culturally distinct from the north...for one thing much of the south was settled mainly by scots-irish who had a herding culture where it was every man's responsibility to personally protect his property with violence or he would be destroyed. The lower population of the south etc. also reduced the presence of law relative to the north. The south therefore had a far more military culture than the north...and this is why southerners were sure they would win the civil war easily. The north also felt they would win easily because of manpower and mass production...it turned out that both sides were right so the war was long and difficult.\n\nIm not sure the south was so much more religious...the north could be quite religious as well. But they did have extremely different values and cultures which made them incompatible. The south stressed traditional agrarian values while the north embraced the industrial revolution. To be honest southern slavery was arguably not as bad as norther slavery...although labor in the north was paid, the conditions of labor were horrible and the working class were not treated like humans. Contrary to popular narrative, southern slaves were often viewed as members of the family and although im sure there were some sadistic slave owners that was the exception rather than the rule. So the debate over slavery was not imho a debate about the ethics of slavery but instead about whether the US should become an industrial power or an agrarian power.\n\nIf anything, one could see the US south to be a sort of last bastion of medieval european feudalism and chivalry.\n\nLosing the civil war was quite devastating to the south economically...and it seems like the south never fully recovered." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ctnfa88", "ctnkvs9", "ctnlkxf", "ctnlqw3", "ctnlxjz", "ctnna4h", "ctnnfz8", "ctno553", "ctno82q", "ctnoe5l", "ctnoti4", "ctnpajq", "ctnpc4f", "ctnpelg", "ctnphha", "ctnpils", "ctnppd4", "ctnpwki", "ctnqmsy", "ctnqor4", "ctnqyji", "ctnr1hu", "ctnr3x8", "ctnr9sc", "ctnrb9w", "ctnrt61", "ctns1kd", "ctnsaxo", "ctnsfs3", "ctnste8", "ctnt1iw", "ctntsqo", "ctnuat2", "ctnuecg", "ctnv4aw", "ctnvaa9", "ctnwbir", "ctnx4u1", "ctnxaq5", "ctnxbsz", "ctnxgca", "ctny55s", "ctnyght", "ctnz32r", "ctnz7sw", "ctnzli9", "cto08i7", "cto0zn4", "ctnbiao", "ctnbils", "ctnbl4w", "ctnc5sp", "ctncez0" ], "score": [ 113, 22, 2, 552, 52, 43, 163, 9, 13, 2, 2, 7, 2, 2, 38, 12, 16, 23, 8, 2, 8, 6, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 22, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 10, 6, 2, 7, 3, 2, 2, 3, 14, 169, 6, 2988, 61 ], "text": [ "I saw this a while back but not sure how relevant it is. \n_URL_0_", "First animals aren't really inferior or superior, each is perfectly adapted to its niche. Animal \"intelligence\" can be very specific to different animals, some are better at working together, planning hunts, laying traps, finding various types of food etc. Some animals do exploit other species for protection or finding food. Some ants enslave others. \n\nEdit: _URL_1_ Badgers and coyotes work together to hunt\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_", "Are you TRYING to jumpstart Planet of the Apes? Because that's how you jumpstart Planet of the Apes.\n\nIt's probably the same reason why monkeys nor apes haven't developed a true tomahawk-like hatchet or hammer, or a saw. Their intelligence is still too limited. I know Coco can sign, and that's high intelligence, but not enough to create or harness fire. Otherwise we wouldn't have any forests, and Smokey Bear would be pissed lol.\n", "I'm not going to link to the video because it is somewhat NSFW, but there is at least one video of a chimpanzee using a frog as a masturbatory aid in a similar manner to a Fleshlight. I don't know if you would consider that utilizing an inferior animal, and I don't know how widespread it is, but it happened.", "Exhibit A: _URL_0_\nExhibit B: _URL_1_\nCase closed.", "Why don't they ride horses and use machine guns?", "The easiest answer is that goats don't want to be ridden. No animal wants to be ridden. Humans don't ride horses because we're superior to them, exactly. We ride them because we train them to be ridden. We figured out how to do that. It wasn't easy, but we're smart, so we did. Monkeys aren't smart enough and don't have the patience to figure out how to coax an animal into letting them ride it.\n\nAs smart as monkeys are, and as similar as their intelligence is in some ways to ours, they're not even close. They don't have nearly the level of sophistication it would take to do this. They're much closer in that way to goats than they are to humans.", "Why do you say \"inferior\" animals? Do you mean, \"dumber\"? A goat can survive in harsh conditions, eat a variety of things, survive into adult hood to breed, basically do what it needs to do. You don't see them stuck in laboratory cages being experimented on. That sounds like a successful animal to me. If you judge animal superiority by human-like intelligence that's a rather narrow way of looking at an animal. ", "just last week i saw a video from a post on reddit with monkeys riding wild pigs to get away from their african tribal hunters. it made me start to re-think the whole 'only humans domesticate animals' thing.\n\ni'm not saying the wild pigs had collars on with fancy leashes, but those pigs were actively participating in the evasion of human hunters...seemingly at the direction of their monkey riders.\n\ni dunno...", "Ants have domesticated aphids and have fungus farms... Does that count?", "In undergrad I worked with a highly esteemed chimp researcher. I wanted to go on to do research regarding this subject. So basically I'm saying, I wish I had awesome information too add to the discussion because I've thought about this in depth", "Give a monkey a goat and he'll have a friend for a day.\nTEACH a monkey to goat and by god, That'd be cool.", "Have you ever seen a goat in the wild? That thing would fuck you up. \n\nJust kidding. Animals in the wild survive by not taking unnecessary risks. Attempting to domesticate or break a goat in for instance would be an enormous waste of energy and it would be risky. Animals stick to proven methods which are passed on from mother to offspring over the course of thousands of years. Humans on the other hand developed higher intelligence and the ability to predict the outcome of their risks. Trying to ride a horse is dangerous but with increased intelligence we learned to out think other animals and to develop relationships with them. Breaking a wild horse is just as difficult as it would have been a thousand years ago because wild horses are still wild horses, which is why we breed them now to make riding them easier. This is not something a monkey in the wild would do because for millions of years they have relied on proven methods for survival. Humans are different in that regard. We can afford to do risky stuff. \n\nEdit: fixed horrific typo", "The monkey population has some disadvantages:\n\n1) there were a LOT more humans when we domesticated shit than there are monkeys now (assuming a homogenious population, we could treat the Probability of a population discovering domestication=1-(probablity of an individual domesticating an animal)^n\n\nSince there were more humans we were more likely regardless of intelligence differences.\n\n2) humans are a bit smarter, so we are each individually more likely to domesticate shit\n\n3) domestication generally comes down to one individual doing it, then passing it on to others. because of the lack of language for monkeys, there is a good chance that if a monkey domesticated a goat then it would be ineffective at telling others.\n\nTLDR:\n\nMonkeys, like children can be taught to do stuff. Try adopting one from a bankrupt hollywood star/mucision to do it oyurself!", "Who says goats are inferior?", "I dont know about you, but in the past couple months on reddit, I've seen a raccoon riding an aligator and a dolphin riding a whale.", "There's an island off Japan where the local monkeys ride around on deer.\n\nThey're not domesticated by any means and the deer eventually have enough and dump the monkey.", "Goats are inferior? Man, that's just specist.", "There's a lot of evidence that suggests chimps are missing a lot of the cooperative and collaborative elements of the human mind. \n\n_URL_0_", "I'm sad that so few here have seen Encounters at the End of the World from which OP's title is pulled from. It's a beautiful documentary by Werner Herzog on Antarctica.\n\nHere is the appropriate clip from the movie: _URL_1_\n\nHere is another: _URL_0_", "Have you ever tried to climb a tree by riding a goat? It is very very difficult.", "Simply put, the risks outweigh the rewards. \n\nYall are looking at this the wrong way. The question isn't IF primates could domesticate other animals, but WHY. Like humans, animal behavior is driven by positive and negative incentives that either promote or restrict an animals behavior. If an activity, behavior, or relationship provides more food, more security, more sex, etc, then it is more likely to be copied and passed on. If a behavior uses too much energy, or is dangerous, then it will be avoided and not utilized. \n\nDomestication of animals is a dangerous activity to undertake. A kick to the head, falling from a high place, even bites and scratches that get infected all have the potential to seriously injure if not kill an animal. So there has to be a SERIOUS benefit to go through all that effort. As humans increased in numbers, as has been mentioned, we needed animals for their poop, for transportation, for food, for animal products etc etc. we got a HUGE benefit from the energy it took to domesticate them. Primate societies aren't that advanced, so they have no NEED to domesticate them. ", "Dunno how widespread it is, but apparently some monkeys have the whole primate/canine relationship going: _URL_0_", "What the hell, do smart humans ride goats?! ELI 5 again.", "There is the video of a chimp filating himself with a frog. That counts right?", "If you could swing like Tarzan, would you like to ride a horse, or swing like a badass mofo from tree to tree, all the while calling yourself the king of the jungle?", "Did you watch Planet of the apes yesterday? lol ", "I think part of the problem with this question is that you assume animals have a hierarchy for those above and beneath them. This is something quite unique to humans because we have a frontal lobe and therefore consciousness. It is one of the greatest failings of humanity in that we believe we are superior to the rest of the animal kingdom simply because we have a higher intelligence. The problem with this assumption can be seen in the way we treat animals and specifically our fellow human beings. All aspects of our society have a need to feel superior to another and look at the problems this has caused.\n\nNo I'm not putting this out there as a point to debate, but rather as an observation, and an indication that perhaps the question needs to be asked in a different way. Take from that what you will, or nothing at all. :)", "From what I see at many parks and jungles, [they utilize the fuck out of humans](_URL_0_). Maybe other animals are just more clever than us, or less useful. ", "And why don't they drive cars, or build websites?", "Who told you that goats are inferior to monkeys, and what are their credentials?", "By \"utilize\" I assume you mean domesticate. \n\nFirst of all, goats are already domesticated and so monkeys couldn't domesticate them. To be honest, I am at a loss as to what wild animal a monkey could domesticate. I think humans probably got the easiest ones already. (Poor monkeys, I know.)\n\nJared Diamond has written about domestication extensively in Guns, Germs and Steel. \n\nFinally, in order to domesticate a wild animal, you need something like civilization. Monkeys and other animals (even some birds) do show some signs of civilization (eg, groups will have certain practices that are unique to that group, like specific calls or accents) but I've never heard of those groups engaging in something like agriculture (which is the forerunner to a lot of domestication. First humans domesticated crops, then animals, with the possible exception of dogs). \n\nDomestication of one species by another seems to require the \"top\" species to dedicate a large amount of group time/energy in order to benefit the whole of the \"top\" species. In other words, humans began to change from hunter/gatherers to farmers and once we did that, then we began to have time to do other things like animal husbandry. I haven't heard of any animals who have moved beyond hunter/gatherer though. \n\nAlso, I should think that a language of some sort wold be useful when domesticating animals. ", "Um... I'm pretty sure I've seen monkeys riding on pigs...\n\n_URL_0_", "Has nobody seen this? Baddass hog getaway car yo. _URL_0_", "Even if monkeys developed a way to control other animals, the main problem is relaying that information to others, retaining it, and to future generations as well. That's where language and communication comes in, and also having a society large enough to pass the information to others. Since monkeys, apes, and chimps live in small groups, and can only show others what they've learned, the info would get lost quickly. Showing someone how to do something without being able to explain the concept behind it is problem.", "Sometimes they kidnap puppies and keep them as pets: _URL_0_", "I worked at a small private zoo in the northeast. The owner had all kinds of exotic things you wouldn't expect in that climate, but one female chimpanzee was very unusual. The owners loved her a lot and she was mostly friendly so she had almost free roam inside the place, except near animals dangerous to her. She only had one peculiarity. She was often caught trying to masturbate one female goat. Rubbed the hell out of that poor goat's clit.", "Saw a chimp fuck a toad, does that count?", "Ants domestic aphids and milk them. They keep them around by biting off their wings and herd them.\n\n_URL_0_", "In a recent documentary about the Islands of Japan, there are a bunch of monkeys [that ride deer for fun](_URL_0_)", "So this is going to be completely buried but baboons have been shown to steal and \"domesticate\" the puppies of feral dogs. \n\nHere look: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "You want planet of the apes? Because that's how you get planet of the apes.", "The wise-ass answer is that goats don’t go where ANYONE wants ‘em to go. AND, not even a monkey wants to go where goats go. ;)", "I'm pretty sure they have utilized inferior animals......At least this one utilized a frog.\n_URL_0_", "I would say that maybe it's because they don't really need to. They function fine on their own.", "Rhesus macaque monkeys in India do ride goats, pigs, dogs and even cows. Just for the fun of it, not for travelling. I saw it in Nat Geo's \"Monkey Thieves\".", "I recall seeing a small documentary on YouTube about monkeys abducting street dogs as puppies, and they letting them grow up o in the group. They feed and groom the dogs, the dogs in turn would protect the group from predators ", "I recently watched a wildlife show on Japan, where a community of monkeys live closely with a community of deer. Occasionally they would ride the deer… at least for as long as they were tolerated. I think it was on the BBC iplayer. ", "I love this question so much. I honestly wish I had an answer for it, but I hope others will! :) Now that you bring it up, it's a darn good question. After all, various primates like chimps and orangutans do use tools, and domesticating animals is right next to tool use in the early-human advancement timeline.\n\nRide 'em, goatmonkey! Yeehaw!", "Evolution isn't a linear progression, there are no such things as 'superior' animals, all animals are superior for their respective niches and environments. ", "There are no inferior animals or superior animals in nature.\n\nBut in order for a monkey to acquire a steed, it would first need to domesticate one or come into an agreement with one. The goat would need to benefit from the ride in some way and also understand the benefits.\n\nYou try to ride a wild goat and you end up with nasty headbutt.", "Current information shows that we humans did not domesticate any animals other than the dog (which aids the hunter/gatherer's mission; you can't hide from the dog, and you can't run from the human) until we established agriculture.\n\nThe main reason that we so successfully integrated and domesticated animals like the cow, yak, pig, and goat, plays directly to how we discovered agriculture: fertilization. Animal poop is just another form of biowaste/biomass, which is more concentrated than any man made fertilizer would be for many millennia. The animals eat fodder (the leftovers from last harvest's crops that are inedible for humans), which you have no other use for, and then they poop out natural fertilizer that gets that field ready for next season's planting. Along the way you get access to milk (at least from the bovines and equines), and once the animal has spent a couple of years fertilizing your fields you slaughter it for the high value protein of the meat.\n\nAll of this makes perfect sense from a human perspective, but it is an awful lot for other primates to figure out.\n\nEdit: For a look at how equine milk has been used for thousands of years I recommend watching Babies (2010) [(Trailer)](_URL_0_)", "May I highjack this post, with a kinda relevant question? (no racism intented)\nWhy didn't africans domesticate zebras like europeans domesticated horses? " ] }

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[ [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2lSZPTa3ho" ], [ "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave-making_ant", "http://goodnature.nathab.com/coyotes-and-badgers-incorporated/", "http://culturalecology.info/man_factors/Interspeciescooperation.html" ], [], [], [ "http://i.imgur.com/Xsu770n.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/ivWTPqa.jpg" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2B1AJ3ZaUA" ], [ "https://youtu.be/x7kdDeGXUjI", "https://youtu.be/7KC865wQaWU" ], [], [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2lSZPTa3ho" ], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://imgur.com/5PjIQoe" ], [], [], [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_sfnQDr1-o" ], [ "https://youtu.be/hCkm74g4xcc" ], [], [ "https://youtu.be/7I7-SADai3Y?t=1m42s" ], [], [], [ "http://modernfarmer.com/2014/04/meet-earths-oldest-farmers-ants/" ], [ "https://youtu.be/X4wye9gI2Uk?t=3m37s" ], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2lSZPTa3ho" ], [], [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU9-TKRkaUw" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N009QUWUy7I" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ent1wb4", "ent1z4e", "ent2bwk" ], "score": [ 4, 19, 5 ], "text": [ "Diet soda is > 99% water. The artificial sweetener is extremely sweet compared to the same amount of sugar so you don't need much of it in diet soda.\n\nRegular soda is 90% water. The remainder is mostly sugar which causes it to be sticky when it dries (like the surface of sugar candies).\n\nBeer is usually 95% water. The rest is a combination of the alcohol and other grain products required to make beer. The ants are going after these products because they have calories.", "They tasted it and told their friends. Same way my friends know to ignore diet soda and go straight for the beer.", "Ants have a different type of taste perception than humans do, so they aren’t fooled into thinking the diet soda has sugar in the way that our tastebuds are" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cymn2sr", "cymn8zs", "cymv41f", "cymytfb", "cyn1e33", "cyn4su1" ], "score": [ 13, 245, 5, 35, 18, 2 ], "text": [ "I'm assuming you are talking about HTTPS.\n\nThe ISP can see which server you are interacting with - otherwise, it wouldn't be able to know where to forward the packets sent from your computer.\n\nIt can see the \"handshake\" that you and the server perform. The handshake contains the server's SSL certificate (which is public anyway) and data that your browser and the server exchange in order to set up the encryption. This includes the exchange of cryptographic keys, using a secure key exchange protocol such as [Diffie-Hellman](_URL_0_).\n\nAnything after that - the data sent between your browser and the server - is encrypted. The ISP simply sees a seemingly random stream of bits.", "They see something like\n-\n\nFrom: 1.2.3.4 (your IP)\n\nTo: 5.5.5.2 (the IP of the server you're using)\n\nData: raaw9rw90r820arj902jf8ayu29ahf92apha9h..... (a whole bunch of random-looking data)\n\nThey'll also see a whole bunch of metadata (checksums, sequence numbers) that are used by your computer/the server etc to make sure the packet gets to the right place. This isn't really related to your data, and can't be used to decrypt it.\n\nThink of it like sending a postcard through the post\n-\n\nAn unencrypted connection has the address and your message in plain view, anyone who picks the postcard up can see what you've written\n\nAn encrypted connection still has the address (otherwise how would Mr Postman know where to take it?) but you've written the message itself in code that only you and the person you're sending it to know\n\nSetting up the connection\n-\n\nThe above describes what they see when you are using an existing secure connection:\n\nWhen you first set up the connection, they'll see what's called the \"Handshake\", which is like a postcard saying \"Hi, let's use that code we made up last year. And let's use the number 5 for that clever thing the code does with numbers\". This doesn't let anyone decrypt your data either (because they've got no idea how you use that number 5, for example), but it does tell them that you're deliberately encrypting data (it's not just corrupted data), and if they broke the code, they could use the \"5\" to decrypt your message. Note that this is called *key exchange* and that the \"5\" isn't the full key: it's just part of your part of the key.\n\n\n*Edit: Thanks for the gold, kind stranger :)*", "3MjCbmQ77/rJ//YGMRW3cHwKwDWI+R9OlVL+W9Hnivs= \n^ This is literally the message \"hello world\" encrypted using AES-256 and an encryption key of \"qwerty\". You can try playing with other values here: \n_URL_0_ \nAs you can see, it basically looks like a bunch of gibberish, and unless you know the proper decryption algorithm and encryption key, it should be impossible to figure out what the original message is.", "Imagine a man who only speaks and understands Chinese standing in a German airport. \n\nHowever, in this airport, everyone wears signs that can be read in any language that state where they are going and how they plan to get there (metadata).\n\nHe can see the people, and he knows exactly where they are going, but he cannot understand what they are saying. ", "This is what they can see: \n\n_URL_0_\n(This is actually me refreshing this https:// page.)\n\nThe Source and Destination IP, Port, Sequence and Acknowledgement numbers, Length, Protocols and versions used and a bunch of encrypted data.", "Hi! I managed web filtering for a bunch of urban school districts. Even on a heavily monitored network (and believe me if you're on a school computer someone is watching where your traffic is going) the most anyone can see is a gibberish url. We even had custom built software that ran on all the school's backend hardware, to constantly monitor, and obviously block, unwanted connections and content. If some meddling kid figured out how to install tor (local admins sometimes make me wonder about the usefulness of eugenics) or managed to get to one of the billion or so proxy anonoymizers on the internet then all I could see was the point of entry and then nothing else, because the software would just give up trying to double-check the following connections because it couldn't resolve the nonsense that it was reading. \n\nHOWEVER, this does not mean i couldn't sometimes figure out where the kid/faculty was going. Please note, that if you are on a government funded network, schools, office building, DMV wifi, whatever, there are multiple layers of monitoring. I won't go into how all of them work, but be aware, If someone wants to see where you're going, and they control the connection, don't repeatedly do things that might get you in trouble. Your sys admin doesn't want to find out how you're spanking it to beastiality on the taxpayer's dime, but they will god damn well find it and hand the evidence to your boss if you make a habit of it.\n\nEdit: spelling" ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange" ], [], [ "http://aesencryption.net/" ], [], [ "http://i.imgur.com/vvVFu0c.png" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c7o03qx", "c7o198j", "c7o5229", "c7og13b" ], "score": [ 10, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Basically, tenure started out as a way to protect college professors from being fired for speaking out in favor of a more progressive way of thinking during the 1960s or so. It has since been expanded to include teachers in lower grade levels.\n\nGetting a tenure means that after teaching for x amount of time at a school/college/university/etc, you cannot be fired unless it is for a VERY good reason (e.g. illegal activities)", "It means you'll keep your job.", "The idea behind a university is that scholars should be free to pursue their research, no matter where it might lead.\n\nTenure protects them from shying away from research that might initially be unpopular. Proven scholars are basically given a job for life in the form of tenure. This allows them to take risks without having to worry about how they will pay their mortgage if they fail. ", "Tenure means \"can only be fired under extreme circumstances\". It's a mechanism put in place to make sure that those performing outstanding work in universities can continue to do so, even if they're dissenting or opposing authority. It essentially shields academic freedom.\n\nTo get a tenure, someone must enter academia via a tenure-track position, generally as an associate professor. At this point, the university keeps track of the professor's research progress and their ability to obtain grants and funding. Eventually, when there's an opening, they might be granted tenure once they have a good record and seniority." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cw9wwte" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Because they do not work. It is a placebo and supplements making false claims. Big pharma cannot cash in on it because actual drugs are more strictly regulated than supplements and actually have to do what they claim they do. We do not have a pill that will make you bigger, only surgery. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c5t2ymo", "c5t2z30", "c5t2zze" ], "score": [ 12, 9, 5 ], "text": [ "Mosquitoes are an important part of the food chain in aquatic environments. Their larva filter little bits of algae out of the water, cleaning it. The larva can then be eaten by frogs and fish, two types of creature that we generally enjoy having around.", "They pollinate plants in places where it's too cold for bees. ", "They are a critical food source for all sorts of wonderful animals like birds, bats, dragonflies, spiders and fish. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cd9wh6h", "cd9wn54", "cdaauqi" ], "score": [ 11, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Not everything necessarily has an evolutionary advantage. Some things are necessary byproducts of other adaptations, some things are the way they are because of architectural constraints inherited from our ancestors, some things simply have shown up and are too insignificant to have been removed by natural selection.\n\nStephen Jay Gould has a brilliant discussion of this kind of thing in an essay called \"Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples\". Highly recommended.", "It's an emergency backup.....kinda like pull to release handle inside the trunk of a car.", "As far as anatomy goes the prostate contracts to help expel semen so one could assume that direct stimulation of such gland could lead to more direct/intense/whatever ejaculation. I'm no expert but I see no evolutionary link, I'd guess it's just a (happy?) accident." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c2h436x", "c2h436x" ], "score": [ 11, 11 ], "text": [ "Globalization is happening all around us. Imagine your elementary school's cafeteria, with each table claimed by a certain clique of kids. The kids who pick their noses are at one, the kids who always play kickball are at the next one, and the kids who are going to grow up to be redditors are at another. It has always been this way and always will be this way, right? Wrong. One day, little billy's mom packs a pudding snack pack in his lunch, and everything changes. Billy has always sat at the table with the kickball players and has really never gotten to know any of the other kids at any other tables, but soon, Timmy from the nose-pickers table comes over and offers to trade pack of mini oreo's for the pudding pack. With this precedent of inter-table commerce set, trade picks up. Within a week, Go-Gurts are being traded to the kickballers by the redditor table in exchange for advice on how to talk to girls. Soon, the connections built up by trade between tables grow strong enough that kids feel comfortable sitting at tables that they don't normally sit at. With the barriers between cultures broken, the lunchroom has become a homogenized mixture of the various elementary school cultures. \n\nNow replace the lunchroom with the whole world, the tables with nation-states, the individual children with the cultures and traditions of each nation-state, and replace the snack packs and go-gurts with resources such as oil, minerals, food and information. You should have a pretty simplified idea of globalization.", "Globalization is happening all around us. Imagine your elementary school's cafeteria, with each table claimed by a certain clique of kids. The kids who pick their noses are at one, the kids who always play kickball are at the next one, and the kids who are going to grow up to be redditors are at another. It has always been this way and always will be this way, right? Wrong. One day, little billy's mom packs a pudding snack pack in his lunch, and everything changes. Billy has always sat at the table with the kickball players and has really never gotten to know any of the other kids at any other tables, but soon, Timmy from the nose-pickers table comes over and offers to trade pack of mini oreo's for the pudding pack. With this precedent of inter-table commerce set, trade picks up. Within a week, Go-Gurts are being traded to the kickballers by the redditor table in exchange for advice on how to talk to girls. Soon, the connections built up by trade between tables grow strong enough that kids feel comfortable sitting at tables that they don't normally sit at. With the barriers between cultures broken, the lunchroom has become a homogenized mixture of the various elementary school cultures. \n\nNow replace the lunchroom with the whole world, the tables with nation-states, the individual children with the cultures and traditions of each nation-state, and replace the snack packs and go-gurts with resources such as oil, minerals, food and information. You should have a pretty simplified idea of globalization." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "czxrw3u", "czxs6w2", "czy0oyo" ], "score": [ 35, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Oh yeah, it involves money.\n\nYou have to buy a permit from the city for permission to close the street, *then* you have to pay an off-duty cop (or for bigger productions, several of them) to direct traffic and enforce the closure.\n\nMany productions actually shoot outdoor/city scenes in different cities, like Chicago or Detroit, and make it look like NYC, since NYC permits are outrageous.", "Pretty much any time you see complicated stunts on something like a bridge, it's very likely to be CGI and they just filmed at the actual bridge for a day or so to get the footage they'd edit the stunts into. \n\nHere's an [over-the-top example](_URL_0_)...", "Pretty much every major city has a film office that handles permits as well as advertising for movie makers to choose their city over an obvious city, Some of these cities will even offer lower rates to film a NYC scene in a place that is not really in NYC or other places.\n\nThese local film offices will help the movie makers get permits that can shut down roads, set up police road blocks and even make sure that the area is prepared for the loud noises that may come for instance, in an action movie where there may be explosions to gun fire, There are a lot of requirements for making a fake explosion and even making sure the film company uses local fire department if necessary ." ] }

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[ [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy1vkItwL-g" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c6rc24f" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "We've had this thread a dozen times in the past week. Please search. \n\nMy old post:\n\n > Roth, Shapley, David Gale, and a few other people figured out how to obtain efficient allocations of goods and services in markets where you aren't allowed to use prices. Examples of these are matching students to schools, matching spouses, and matching medical students to residency. The big contribution was an easy-to-implement algorithm to match people in those sorts of markets, using nothing more than each participant's preference ranking of the other side of the market.\n\n > The basic idea is this, and I'm sorry I can't ELI5 it further. You ask both sides of the market to rank the other side. Use students and schools as an example. So students make a ranking of schools from most desired to least desired, and schools make a ranking of prospective students from most desired to least desired. Then you have each student apply to their favorite school. Schools decide to accept or reject students. The rejected students then apply to their second-best school. Schools again accept or reject, and at this stage they can reject previously-accepted people if better applicants come along. The process continues until all students are matched. You can prove that this match is optimal: there is no (student, school) pair where the student would rather be at that school than where they ended up, and the school would rather have that student than another one they picked.\n\nNote that the actual process of apply- > provisionally accept- > re-apply can all be done on a computer, and the output will be the final matching of students to schools. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cam230u" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Post-9/11\n\nAmerica: \"Hey, guys, I think the government is spying on us!\"\n\nGovernment: \"No we're not.\"\n\nAmerica: \"Yes you are!\"\n\nGovernment: \"No we're not.\"\n\nAmerica: \"Yes you are!\"\n\nGovernment: \"No we're not.\"\n\nEdward Snowden: \"Yes you are, and I worked for you guys so I would know.\"\n\nGovernment: \"Son, you just made a terrible mistake.\"\n\nSo now Snowden is wanted by the FBI and NSA and he's been on the move.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/11/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-profile", "http://news.msn.com/us/nsa-leaker-snowden-does-live-qanda?ocid=ansnews11" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c69gwb5" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "For a moment, ignore the fact that the government of the United States collects taxes. It does, but that's not important to this conversation, so pretend for a moment it doesn't.\n\nThe government of the United States — like all governments — *does stuff.* It builds roads, buys aircraft carriers, all sorts of things. In order to *do stuff* the government needs money.\n\nWhere does the government get its money? Does it just *print* money whenever it needs it? No. That's something that's been tried by governments before, in history, and it's been found to be unworkable for a variety of reasons. Instead of doing that, the government gets money through the sale of *bonds.*\n\nBonds are a very particular and specific type of promise. For example, I might come to you and say, \"If you give me $100 today, a month from now I'll pay you $110.\" That's a promise to pay money in the future in exchange for money now. A bond is a very formalized version of that kind of promise.\n\nBut what makes bonds special is that they're *negotiable,* which is basically a fancy way of saying they can be bought and sold. If you give me $100 today, I'll give you in return a piece of paper that represents my promise to pay you $110 in a month. If you hold on to that piece of paper until that date — until \"maturity,\" it's called — I'll buy that piece of paper back from you for $110 … but you can *also* choose to *sell* that piece of paper to anybody who's willing to buy it. You might buy it from me for $100, then in a couple weeks decide to sell it to somebody else for $105. That's more than you paid for it, and you didn't have to wait until the bond matured to make a profit on it, but it's still less than what the bond will be worth when it matures, so the guy buying it from you can also turn a profit. *Whomever* has the piece of paper in thirty days, when the bond matures, can come to me and exchange it for the guaranteed $110, even if the actual piece of paper changes hands a dozen times between now and then.\n\nSo the government gets money from the sale of bonds. The branch of the government that actually does the selling and buying back of bonds is called the US Treasury, so these bonds are called US Treasury bonds (and also Treasury bills and Treasury notes, but those are just nicknames for specific types of bonds sold by the Treasury, so don't let them confuse you).\n\nBecause bonds are a promise to pay, bonds are a type of debt. But bonds in general, and most particularly bonds sold by governments (called \"sovereign bonds\") do *not* work like personal household debt at all. If you're in debt, as a person, that's generally a bad thing, because you're expected to fund your life through hard work and smarts, not through borrowing. An individual person is considered to be doing well when he's free of debt, and doing less well in proportion to how much debt he has. When a person has a *lot* of debt — so much debt he can't afford to pay the interest on it — he's said to be *bankrupt,* which is basically a type of personal failure.\n\nBut not all debt works like that. Sovereign debt in particular is almost the *opposite* of that, for reasons I'm about to elaborate on. The general idea is that governments can either fund their activities through the sale of bonds or through taxation, and if a government isn't selling bonds — that is, isn't taking on new debt — then it's collecting *too much* in taxes, which is bad for the economy as a whole and the people in particular. So the rule for a person, like you or me, is that having no debt is best, having a little debt is mostly okay, having a lot of debt is bad, and having so much debt you can't maintain it is a failure, but the rule for a government is that having no debt is next-to-worst, having some debt is okay, having more debt is better, and only when a government has so much debt that its credit rating gets downgraded is worst.\n\nWhy? Because *debt is savings.*\n\nLet me explain what that means. Say you have some money that you don't have any particular plans for for the next ten years. Like for instance, you just graduated from high school, and you're going to college on scholarship so your tuition and fees are covered, but a death in your family has left you with a small inheritance — a few thousand dollars, say. You don't need that money, and in fact you would strongly prefer *not* to spend any of it for at least the next ten years; you'd rather save it so you can do something useful with it when you're well into adulthood. What do you do with it?\n\nWell, you could just cram it under your mattress, as cash. But that'd be a bad idea, because of something called *inflation.* Every year, dollars become worth slightly less. That's because the economy is doing well (in general) and new wealth is being created, so there are more dollars out there. If you just stuck your $10,000 under your mattress for ten years, when you took it out you'd find it's worth considerably *less* than $10,000! You'd have lost value over time, even though the number of dollars you had stayed the same.\n\nSo instead, you want to find a way to store your money that earns you *interest,* particularly interest that is *at least* equal to the rate of inflation. A good option for this is to buy US Treasury bonds. If you use your $10,000 to buy 10-year Treasury bonds, when the bonds mature you can sell them back to the Treasury for $10,000 plus whatever interest was guaranteed when you bought them, interest which accrues at a rate about equal to (slightly higher than) the rate of inflation. Which means your money can sit there safely for ten years *not* losing value … and in fact it'll accrue a little bit of value over time, earning you a modest profit.\n\nBut what if you find yourself in an unanticipated situation where you need your $10,000? Simple. *Bonds are negotiable.* At any time, you can simply sell them. You'll get less for them than they're worth, but more than what you paid for them, so that's good for you.\n\nBonds, therefore, are *incredibly useful things.* Lots of people want to buy bonds, not just people like you who want to store their $10,000 for ten years safely protected from inflation, but lots of commercial enterprises want the safety and negotiability of bonds as well. Banks, insurance companies, pension funds, university endowments … basically anybody who has money and who wants to be responsible with it wants to buy government bonds.\n\nThat's why more debt is better, when you're talking about governments. Governments that raise more of their revenue from bond sales are better than those that eschew bond sales in favor of taxation.\n\nAs for how the government pays it back, that's easy: the Treasury buys back bonds that have matured. With what money? With whatever money is in the Treasury at the time. In the US, that money comes from a combination of taxation and bond sales, just like all the money the government spends. So Treasury bonds are a type of rolling debt; as bonds mature and are bought back, new bonds are issued and sold, because *people want to buy bonds.* They're useful things to have around, so when one matures and gets bought back, another gets sold to take its place.\n\nYes, other countries can buy US Treasury bonds, and many do, for the exact same reason anybody does. The sale of Treasury bonds isn't limited to US citizens or businesses; anybody can buy the bonds.\n\nAs for the Federal Reserve, that's a bigger topic, and one that's only tangentially related to sovereign debt. Suffice to say that the Federal Reserve is a special type of bank called the *central bank,* and it is one of the parties — just like you and me and everybody else — that can and does buy Treasury securities." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d1padz7", "d1pajug", "d1pbncu", "d1pbzlp", "d1pcduw", "d1pcoh2", "d1pdusl" ], "score": [ 52, 12, 9, 21, 6, 8, 2 ], "text": [ "Cultural appropriation is where you take something important to one culture and use it in a way that ignores the importance of it to the original culture. Using something in its intended use is not cultural appropriation and as you said brings us closer together.\n\nFor an extreme example, people would be pretty insulted if you had toilet paper decorated with religious symbols.\n\nSome customs are specifically created as an act of rebellion against an \"oppressive\" culture and if the \"oppressive\" culture adopts those customs without addressing the \"oppression\" the first culture can feel like it's just another thing being taken from them. ", "Cultural appropriation isn't \"learning about and embracing others' cultures.\" It's essentially hijacking another's culture or obfuscating the link between the practice and its cultural origins.\n\nAs a single, but long-winded example, take slavery. In the US, blacks were - as a race and culture - segregated, isolated, and oppressed. For centuries. I think people really can't (or don't) comprehend what that must be like for a group of people. As a consequence of that, a new culture was forged, both as a natural, organic result of their circumstances, but also as a survival and coping mechanism.\n\nThis culture as thrived and changed in light of emancipation, Jim Crow, segregation, civil rights, and so forth, but it exists and it is part of the identity of the people born into that culture. Given that this culture has its roots in oppression and persecution, use of its elements by people that have no idea what it is like to grow up in that life style can be seen as insulting. It's a badge or signalling mechanism that says that they have something in common. It's a bond that they share, regardless of other differences in life-style. For people that don't share that bond to use those cultural elements for their own devalues that.\n\nIt's similar to the issue of \"Stolen Valor,\" when people claim to be part of the military when they are not, or to have been awarded certain commendations or participated in some operation when they have not. People suffer and die for those kinds of things and the \"valor\" they receive is recognition of that. For others to adopt that \"valor\" when they have not likewise suffered and bleed for it is seen as a gross dishonor.\n\nAnd the same is true (though maybe to a lesser degree) for \"cultural appropriation.\"\n\nSo, yeah, learn and \"embrace\" other cultures. But realize that those elements have a deep and important meaning to the people who belong to that culture.", " > Cultural appropriation :The adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of a different culture.\n\nThe sharing and learning of cultures in itself is not wrong.What is wrong is to celebrate the culture _URL_0_ make a culture something that it is not.\n\nMost people will love it if others learn about their cultures.But no one will like it if they do something incorrect, or misunderstand it.", "It's when a culture adopts something of significance to another culture and degrades its value.\n\nUsing sacred native american face paints as fun make up is one example. \n\nIt's disrespectful and can also be seen as a tool of oppression.", "/edit Ah, the brigade begins. I was +10, and then within an hour I'm at zero. No comments, just a sudden downswing in score. Imagine that.\n\nMy take on this is much like a lot of the issues often associated with SJW's, it's a good idea, that's been taken to extreme by a small section of the population.\n\nThe general idea comes down to not understanding what is important to others, and not really realizing what others go through. I think the example that /u/redditisadamndrug used is apt. \n\nEveryone has things that are important to them, and if you don't understand that importance, it becomes easy to not understand why someone would be offended by something in a given context.\n\nAt it's core, it makes sense: Some people get offended by desecrating the American flag (burning it, wiping your feet with it, etc). That's because what it represents to them. \n\nIf I didn't know what the american flag was, and just thought it was a towel, or rug, or hankerchief, or whatever, I could easily cause offense where none is intended.\n\nNow, I personally think it's been taken to extremes in some cases, where some people have determined that they get to be the sole arbiter of what should offend (or not offend) everyone else. And that's where a lot of the miscommunications occur. \n\nMOST people don't mean to offend, and MOST people aren't going to be offended if no offense is intended. Similarly, if something is really offensive, and it's explained to someone why that's offensive, MOST people would probably understand and take appropriate action.\n\nHowever, there are some people who seem to want to be offended by everything, and others who seem to want to go out of their way to offend.\n\nAnd that's a lot of what you hear about. The people who either want take umbrage over everything (most recent example being the lady yelling at the dude with dreads), or the people who refuse to understand why they can't just do what they want (the people who insist that no one should be offended by the confederate flag).\n\nIt's a very complicated issue that doesn't really affect most people, but there's loud assholes on both sides who make it a big talking point.\n\ntl;dr: cultural appropriation is bad when you take a thing or idea that means a LOT to someone and use it (presumably accidentally) use it in a way that offends them, or that gives the impression you think their culture is less valued than your own. But lots of people take it to extremes in both sides (it's never bad, vs it's always horrible).", "I think the best example of this is the native american headresses. In some native american cultures, eagle-feather headdress is usually reserved for a great warrior of a tribe, and can only be worn by someone who has completed many deeds. In their culture, no one else can wear it and it is highly respected, sort of like the medal of honor, I guess, in our culture. Eagle feathers can also symbolize religious meanings in other native american cultures. Its very sacred. \n\nAnd then a bunch of teenagers wear them on their heads at coachella. \n\nWould you be offended if a bunch of teens started walking around with medals of honor or crucifixes around their necks, smoking and drinking and partying, and if you asked them why they are wearing it, they all just said \"It looks good!\" and didn't know or care what the symbols meant?\n\nMost people are not mad about people using chopsticks. Most people are mad about others taking something deeply sacred in one culture and using it for dress up in another. ", "It's not. Tumblr is just loud enough often enough that it's the common group think .... Or group yell maybe" ] }

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[ [], [], [ "incorrectly.To" ], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ebkmq8k", "ebkmtpw", "ebkn1i0", "ebkn6h5", "ebkn88r", "ebknfz9", "ebkoxqt", "ebl8fqs" ], "score": [ 424, 5, 24, 25, 2, 4, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Fast may not be the correct term here. They are quick. Most small prey can accelerate and change directions very quickly, but can't run all that fast in a straight line. They look fast, but if you put them in an open area, a coyote or something similar could easily run them down.\n\n & #x200B;", "Very light body/very strong muscles. More power than we do + much less weight makes for a faster animal. ", "Because they have a very low body weight as well. \n\nThink of humans. A 4'10'' skinny person and a 6'8'' fat person decide to have a race. If you look at just limb size, the 6'8'' person should win the race because he has longer legs. However, the increased body weight means that he will probably be slower than the 4'10'' person despite the difference in length of stride.\n\nThe same principle can be applied here. Smaller creatures, such as rats, aren't slowed down as much by their shorter limbs due to their equally low body weight.\n\nAdditionally, if you are comparing it to something like a human, the difference between 2 and 4 legs matters as well. 4 legs are generally better for sprinting shorter distances while 2 legs are generally better for running over a long distance.\n\nEdit: Also, their lack of body weight allows them to accelerate quicker, but they aren't really fast. From what I can find, rats generally get exhausted at 40 feet per minute. Not that this is not their top speed but rather the speed at which they will become exhausted at if running over a long distance. Their top speed is around 8mph, but that is only in quick bursts. Humans can easily run at 20 miles per hour, which translates to 1760 feet per minute. A housecat can run even faster than humans, at around 2400 feet per minute, granted, they can only do that for a short period of time. If you made them actually run for an hour, a human can run around 8-9mph easily but the cat would not be able to keep up despite having a faster burst of speed.\n\nSo, smaller mammals aren't really faster, they just accelerate quicker and have bursts of speed.", "They may be low to the ground, but their legs aren't as short as their ground clearance. Their range of motion for their legs start at about the height of their spine, which is on the upper surface of their body, which makes their legs much longer than they appear and allows them a longer gait than you might expect.", "I mean if you wanted to evade someone, you could evade another human who is mostly doing straight grabbing motions at you pretty easily.\n\nThey're not \"fast\" the just seem that way because they're running for dear life in their head", "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. \n\nNow, 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.\n\nNow, for example:\nThe 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%.\nSo, before mass reduction: \n\nForce = 1\n\nMass = 1\n\na = F / m = 1 / 1 = 1 m/s^s \n\nAfter mass reduction:\n\nForce = .75\n\nMass = .5\n\na = F / m = 1.5 m/s^s\n\nNote 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.", "Muscle strength is proportional to its cross section, mass is proportional to volume. So the bigger you get, the lower your strength to mass ratio. ", "Some muscles move fast like a sports car, some muscles move slow like a semi truck. Little critters have lots of sports car muscles so the can run away from predators quickly." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cn6vxrm", "cn6z81g" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "When you say that surfaces do not touch that is very different than saying that surfaces to not interact with each other. The objects get very close before this happens and microscopic dimples or fibres protroduding from the \"touching\" objects can get locked togther when trying to move them. It takes some effort to unlock these fibers which we call friction.", "sticky should be from hydroplylic, been awhile since bio/chem class but ... it amounts to small hydrogen bonds. water is H20, making the overall molecule slightly negatively charged. come in contact with something slightly positive or neutral, and they will attract. sure the is Brownian motion, say the total effect of each individual water molecule bouncing of all the others. the atomic force is what binds the hydrogen and oxygen together to make it water. in this case ionic bonds." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dehx8lq" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Keep in mind cold blooded animals produce heat as well as a byproduct of cellular respiration and muscle activity- they just do not *maintain a steady body temperature*. \n\nWhen we use Oxygen to burn sugars and fat it produces heat. Moving and working will produce heat, sometimes *too much* heat and our body then has to work to cool down. \n\nTo produce heat *without* getting up and running, we have a few ways to do that. Warm blooded animals have a higher \"base metabolic rate\", that means even when we are doing nothing (like sleeping) we are using *more calories* and making *more heat* just from your heart pumping, your guts digesting, etc. Brown fat cells' job is to make heat by burning fat (white fat cells do not do this). Babies have extra brown fat but we all have some. Third, muscles! If you're really cold, what do you do? you **shiver**, this makes your muscle work ,burn energy, and make heat." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ctjcxeh", "ctjd22v", "ctjfm3e" ], "score": [ 3, 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Because you need something that is, at once, incredibly strong and incredibly light. There's not much that fits that description.", "Basically all a space elevator is is a really, really long cable that reaches out into space with a counterweight at the end. Climbing up a long cable is a much cheaper way to get to space than using a rocket.\n\nThe material the cable is made out of would need to be the correct combination of incredibly strong and incredibly light, far lighter and stronger than materials we currently use to make support cables, to avoid snapping. A material with properties such as carbon nano-tubes would have the strength/weight ratio necessary to handle the stress. To the best of my knowledge there aren't really any alternatives that have been proposed.", "Wikipedia has a list of [examples of materials and their specific strength](_URL_0_). Carbon nanotubes have a specific strength over an order of magnitude above the other alternatives. The reason you need a high specific strength is that each cross section of the cable has to carry everything below it, so it will increase exponentially. A higher specific strength means that the exponent increases more slowly. The end result is that if you halve the specific strength, you square the amount of material needed. If you don't have an extraordinarily strong material, then you'll end up with the space elevator being heavier than the planet." ] }

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[ [], [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_strength#Examples" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "el7o9eh", "el7oby3", "el7q4t6" ], "score": [ 6, 5, 2 ], "text": [ "This is just a math question. They aren't both finding 10% on top of 1.5.\n\nThe first is answering what number is 1.5 90% of?\n\nThe second is answering what number is 110% of 1.5?\n\nTake 100, now take 90% of that. You get 90. Now take 110% of 90. You get 99. Because your basis is different.", "Dividing by 1.1 is multiplying by the fraction 10/11, but multiplying by .9 is multiplying by the fraction 9/10. They are no the same.", "To clarify further, your two equations answer two different questions.\n\nThe question the first one answers is, what should the price be to obtain a 10% profit margin (and if you divide 1.667 by 1.5 you see the markup is roughly 1.11 or 11%).\n\nThe question the second one answers is, what should the price be with a 10% markup (and if you divide the .15 profit by 1.65 you see the profit margin is roughly 9%).\n\nThat's why the two equations return different answers - they're asking two different (but related) things.\n\nEdit: for garbage typing on mobile." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dyyqmry" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "My High School had a master clock in the office they used to set all the clocks, I had seen them adjust the clocks before.\n\nI imagine the connection is something akin to a speed odometer but I never saw it.\n\nOne could also extrapolate that if they dialed all the clocks backwards it would allow them to reset them to midnight/Noon, so they could sync them all without manually looking at every clock and everything forward from there would be the same rotations so the same time without manually looking at each clock.\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c2o1lhy", "c2o1m02", "c2o1tlc", "c2o3e1s", "c2o1lhy", "c2o1m02", "c2o1tlc", "c2o3e1s" ], "score": [ 3, 2, 10, 2, 3, 2, 10, 2 ], "text": [ "MS causes lesions to grow on your brain and spine. These lesions block the electric signals in your body from going where they need to go. For example, if you try to move your arm, the impulse may be blocked or partially blocked by a lesion, which, respectively, you simply won't move your arm at all, or you would partially move it as you intended. Sometime you are trying to squeeze something, but you can only use some parts of the muscles, so you do no have much grip strength and might drop it.\n\nMS makes you very fatigued, because you have work much harder for less body output. Even walking because very tiresome. Many people with MS rely on wheelchairs or walkers, and in extreme cases, become effectively paralyzed. It can even cause body numbness, visions problems, and other sensory blocks. Thinking and problem solving are also effected. MS impairs virtually every part of your body to varying degrees. Often, unforeseen side effects must be dealt with.\n\nThere is no cure. But there is treatment, such as steroids. (No, not like the kind testo-freak body builders take.) There is a large host of medicines used, and which ones are appropriate varies from person to person. Several medicines are currently giving a lot of MS sufferers hope. The medical community has made several breakthroughs in reversing lesion development.", "At its root MS is an inflammation in spots on the brain. You have these nerves that serve as communication passages in your brain and in the upper portion of your spine; the passages have a protective layer of fat around them. When the inflammation occurs the fat is damaged, which effects how well the communication passage works. The symptoms however, are far more complicated. They vary from case to case, and in each case vary from day to day. They run the gamut of neurological symptoms from a muscle paralysis to slight tingling and vision and hearing problems. My left leg has been numb for a couple weeks now and my vision blurs in and out, but that could disappear tomorrow. It is a difficult disease to explain because it leaves a different fingerprint on everyone. Many people speak of it in terms of their personal symptoms, but often (at least for me) there are symptoms that we would rather keep to ourselves. Head up, and I wish the best for your mother. ", "I literally just finished writing a medical training program on MS, so...\n\nA lot of the nerves in your body have an insulating layer like the rubber on a wire, which allows them to conduct signals quickly and efficiently. For some reason, in some people, their white blood cells think that this insulation is a germ and start attacking ut by mistake. This makes big patches in your brain and spinal cord where none of the nerves are insulated so signals can't get through as well. This means people have trouble with walking, moving, seeing, going to the bathroom, and other things that need well functioning nerves.\nUsually people have \"attacks\" of it, where it gets worse for a while, then the brain heals a bit and they get better for a while. Over time, though, the damage accumulates and each attack tends to get worse as more of the insulation is stripped away and eventually the underlying nerves start getting damaged.\n\nIt's a really nasty disease, and I'm sorry your mum has to deal with it! hope you guys are staying strong.", "My uncle had a very severe case of MS and died of complications a few years ago. I helped take care of him until his last days and he then slipped away. Give your mother all the love and support she needs. I hope your mother is able to live a long and pleasant life!", "MS causes lesions to grow on your brain and spine. These lesions block the electric signals in your body from going where they need to go. For example, if you try to move your arm, the impulse may be blocked or partially blocked by a lesion, which, respectively, you simply won't move your arm at all, or you would partially move it as you intended. Sometime you are trying to squeeze something, but you can only use some parts of the muscles, so you do no have much grip strength and might drop it.\n\nMS makes you very fatigued, because you have work much harder for less body output. Even walking because very tiresome. Many people with MS rely on wheelchairs or walkers, and in extreme cases, become effectively paralyzed. It can even cause body numbness, visions problems, and other sensory blocks. Thinking and problem solving are also effected. MS impairs virtually every part of your body to varying degrees. Often, unforeseen side effects must be dealt with.\n\nThere is no cure. But there is treatment, such as steroids. (No, not like the kind testo-freak body builders take.) There is a large host of medicines used, and which ones are appropriate varies from person to person. Several medicines are currently giving a lot of MS sufferers hope. The medical community has made several breakthroughs in reversing lesion development.", "At its root MS is an inflammation in spots on the brain. You have these nerves that serve as communication passages in your brain and in the upper portion of your spine; the passages have a protective layer of fat around them. When the inflammation occurs the fat is damaged, which effects how well the communication passage works. The symptoms however, are far more complicated. They vary from case to case, and in each case vary from day to day. They run the gamut of neurological symptoms from a muscle paralysis to slight tingling and vision and hearing problems. My left leg has been numb for a couple weeks now and my vision blurs in and out, but that could disappear tomorrow. It is a difficult disease to explain because it leaves a different fingerprint on everyone. Many people speak of it in terms of their personal symptoms, but often (at least for me) there are symptoms that we would rather keep to ourselves. Head up, and I wish the best for your mother. ", "I literally just finished writing a medical training program on MS, so...\n\nA lot of the nerves in your body have an insulating layer like the rubber on a wire, which allows them to conduct signals quickly and efficiently. For some reason, in some people, their white blood cells think that this insulation is a germ and start attacking ut by mistake. This makes big patches in your brain and spinal cord where none of the nerves are insulated so signals can't get through as well. This means people have trouble with walking, moving, seeing, going to the bathroom, and other things that need well functioning nerves.\nUsually people have \"attacks\" of it, where it gets worse for a while, then the brain heals a bit and they get better for a while. Over time, though, the damage accumulates and each attack tends to get worse as more of the insulation is stripped away and eventually the underlying nerves start getting damaged.\n\nIt's a really nasty disease, and I'm sorry your mum has to deal with it! hope you guys are staying strong.", "My uncle had a very severe case of MS and died of complications a few years ago. I helped take care of him until his last days and he then slipped away. Give your mother all the love and support she needs. I hope your mother is able to live a long and pleasant life!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cmp4m0z", "cmp6nr2" ], "score": [ 8, 3 ], "text": [ "Early films were all filmed to reels of transparent films with stills of each frame. In the early days someone can just take some transparent paint and color each frame one by one. Oftentimes the script have descriptions of the costumes being worn and the looks of each character. If those descriptions were not available you can just guess the colors. ", "It's not \"real\" color, so much as \"true\" color. It's color that would appear normal for the times. Since most sets built for black and white cameras would actually use wildly different colors to compensate for early television camera's lack of contrast controls.\n\nThere's a picture floating around out there of how the set for the Addam's Family show actually looked in color. It's pretty wild." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cdemuae" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ " > If my leg were to fall asleep\n\nThat's not cause by cutting off circulation. It's caused by compressing the nerves between your leg and brain, causing them to stop transmitting sensation to the brain.\n\nThat said, circulation *can* be cut off (see [deep vein thrombosis](_URL_0_)), and it's a *medical emergency*.\n\n > what happens to the blood that would normally be flowing? Does the blood stay somewhere almost like a storage?\n\nIt just sits in the veins and arteries without moving." ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_vein_thrombosis" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "duqz0rq" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "Not particularly. You could have terminal cancer, or be one day away from having a fatal stroke, and look perfectly fine. Or you could be genetically quite ugly yet actually quite healthy. Or you could look like you're slim from being healthy when you're actually anorexic but hiding it well." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cmori42" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Also, if we don't learn how to live in space or successfully travel to other planets then our race is headed for extinction because at some point in the future some big rock is going to come hurtling out of the darkness... and that'll be that. \n\nWe've currently got all our eggs in one basket and that needs to change. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fb1qa8a" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "If you have a bunch of sound sources, some of which are constructively interfering and some which are destructively interfering, you aren't going to hear the destructively interfering ones. You do hear constructive interference.\n\nSound waves vibrate very quickly. The chances that randomly all the sounds interfering are going to sum to zero for a long period of time without deliberate effort is practically nil." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cld4ck7", "cld4f6m", "cld6z99", "cld92t1" ], "score": [ 5, 13, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Generate a number based on an algorithm that depends on something the user has no control over, then follow the rest of the program using that number as an input.\n\nA random number generator algorithm will produce a predictable result if the input is known, but you can make the \"input\" the computer's internal clock or some other variable that the user can't see or control.", "The random function in C basically follows this algorithm:\n\n > To get the next random number, multiply the last random number by something, add a number to it, and then take the last few digits.\n\nIf the first number every time is the same, the rest of the sequence will be the same. To overcome this, we seed this function i.e. provide it a random starting point usually by setting the initial number to the system time (in integer format).\n\n", "Basically the make a call to a \"random\" function which provides a number which should be random. \n\nFunctions exist to generate different kids of random numbers. We can ask for a random number in a range. We can ask for fractional random numbers (0.376 for example).\n\nIn reality the numbers are pseudorandom which means there is a pattern, this patterns is just really long and slightly hard to guess.\n An algorithm determines this pattern. These algorithms take a \"seed\" value, and generate random numbers using this seed. If the same seed is used, you get the exact same sequence of random numbers.\n\nThis means if you don't provide a seed, you will get the exact sequence of random numbers always, which is bad. A good seed value is the current time, because it constantly changes. This provides the illusion of different random values between program runs.", "Generally, what you're talking about is Pseudorandom number generation. Strictly speaking, computers cannot \"generate\" random numbers, as you can probably intuitively understand. There are ways to get \"True Random\" values from a computer system, if it's properly equipped, but current Pseudorandom algorithms do a pretty damn good job of generating something \"random.\"\n\n\n\nPseudorandom generation is often considered a branch of cryptography, which may sound a little strange, but stems from the fact that the goals of making a good pseudorandom algorithm and a good encryption algorithm are very similar and mostly overlap. In fact, one of the easiest ways to make a decent PRNG is to just feed the output of each round of encryption back in as a new input.\n\nIn cryptography, the criteria required to call a number generating algorithm \"pseudorandom\" are as follows.\n\n* No particular output is any more likely to appear than any other\n\n* Given a sequence of generated numbers, it is computationally infeasible to determine what any future numbers will be.\n\n* Given a sequence of generated numbers, it is computationally infeasible to determine what any previous numbers have been, or what the initial seed was.\n\nCompare this with a list of criteria for a good encryption algorithm.\n\n* No particular piece (text character, byte, word, etc.) of the output is more likely to occur than any other, even when the input does not meet this condition (for example, \"E\" is the most-often-used letter in English)\n\n* Given a particular ciphertext (encrypted data), it should be computationally infeasible to determine the original plaintext (unencrypted data) or any other plaintext/encryption key pair that produces the same ciphertext.\n\n* Given a particular set of ciphertexts, it should be computationally infeasible to determine the encryption key.\n\nThese are just a few criteria, but you should be able to see the similarities.\n\n\n\nAs for the actual algorithm, almost all encryptions are based on two basic operations, Substitution and Transposition, which are repeated in alternating fashion some number of times, with slight differences in each iteration. For PRNG's all that's needed is some initial \"seed\" which starts out the sequence. The most common seed is just the current system time.\n\nSubstitution is exactly what it sounds like: for every \"character\" there is a particular different character that is swapped in instead. Usually, the substitutions are pre-defined as part of the algorithm, and are called S-Boxes. \n\nTransposition involves just rearranging the characters in some pre-defined fashion.\n\n\n\n\"True Random\" number generation is actually pretty simple. All it involves is finding some non-computational source of randomness, turning it into a value, and then using this value as the seed for a PRNG. Doing this, rather than just using the value directly ensures that all the \"pseudorandom\" criteria still apply to the value. Oddly enough, many \"random\" processes in the real world don't actually meet \"pseudorandom\" criteria.\n\nSome real-world \"True Random\" sources include microvariations in air pressure, measured by a very sensitive barometer, or microvariations in voltages, measured by highly-sensitive meters. For the latter example, some military and high-security PC's actually include small chips that do exactly this, right on the motherboard.\n\nArticle detailing the specific algorithm. _URL_0_" ] }

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[ [], [], [], [ "http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/random/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cncnjt0" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I'm no expert, but through the power of deduction, I presume that the \"online\" number determines how many people are viewing that particular subreddit at that particular instance. \n\nAs to why there are only a fraction of the total subscribed people online at a given time is because \n\n1. Not everyone who is subscribed to a particular subreddit is on that subreddit all the time. \n\n2. Not everyone with a reddit account is online browsing reddit all the time due to time zone differences and the fact that they might have something better to do. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d2i89xm", "d2i8irw", "d2i8t6r", "d2ijrxr" ], "score": [ 2, 71, 6, 2 ], "text": [ "we are programmed to eat as much as we can process. fat is good because you dont know when your next meal will be.\n\nAtleast thats how it worked not that long ago (and still does in some places)", " > Why are they still hungry, I mean the suggested intake is met.\n\nIf you're in the wild, and you live by catching and eating a squirrel or a racoon or what have you, well, you don't know that you're going to catch and eat a squirrel tomorrow. Maybe they'll all evade you. Maybe you won't find one. So you starve to death.\n\nWell, that sucks, that group dies out. But this other group, it eats whatever it can catch. And the stuff it doesn't need now, it transforms into a form of stored energy. Now, when you don't get any squirrels, you burn some of that stored energy and don't *die* which is great. That group prospers.\n\nEventually, they invent candy. Well that candy sets off all the 'Eat whatever you can catch!\" receptors, so you want to eat a lot of it. Unfortunately, some humans can catch a *lot* more candy bars than they can squirrels, and with a lot less work. The result is a *lot* of stored energy. \n\n\"Too much of a good thing\" becomes a bad thing, but the body has no evolved response to it, because it isn't historically true. ", "There are a few different reasons. One is conditioning. Mentally, if you have always eaten when you find yourself feeling anything but full, the moment you have that \"not full\" feeling, you are going to get the feeling of hunger. That is something you can see in kids that ask for snacks a lot after being allowed to graze constantly, they simply aren't used to not feeling satiated.\n\nAnother reason could be vagus nerve sensitivity. The vagus nerve, when stimulated, sends signals to the brain to tell you that you are full. In some people it is less sensitive, and those people are more prone to overeating, because they feel hungry more often, and for a longer period of time while eating.\n\nYet another reason in some people could be insulin sensitivity. After years of eating high carb diets, your body starts to become desensitized to insulin. Insulin is what shuttles the sugars from your blood into the muscles and organs (or fat storage) after consuming carbs. As you become more resistant to it your brain sends signals of hunger to get you to spike your blood sugar so in turn the pancreas can produce more insulin. You can actually increase sensitivity to insulin by doing scheduled fasts. 16-18 hour daily fasts, with a sudden blood sugar spike to break will, over time lead to less hunger during the day and more productive use of insulin.\n\nThere are likely more reasons, but those are the three I am familiar with. The 1st and 3rd I have first hand experience with. I have family that have been mentally taught to feel satiated at all times, so when they are made to go without food they feel more hunger than a regular person, and I have done a cut using daily fasting. After about 5 days you no longer feel hungry during the day, except for the hour or so leading up to the meal you use to break the fast. It really sucks for that first 5 days, but you get used to it rapidly, and the food inside the eating window is highly satisfying.", "One reason I haven't seen mentioned yet - sleep deprivation. If you're not well-rested, it fucks with your leptin and ghrelin levels. These are the hormones that control your appetite. I normally have a healthy appetite but everytime I pull an all-nighter, I end up binging like crazy on shit (and calorie-dense) food all evening. Sometimes to the point where I'm pretty much falling asleep while eating but would still rather stay up 10 minutes longer and eat more food than finally go to sleep. _URL_1_ & _URL_0_" ] }

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[ [], [], [], [ "http://www.lookgreat-loseweight-savemoney.com/images/sleepchart425.jpg", "http://www.hcgdiet.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/lack_of_sleep_blog_visual.png" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "conxn4v", "conxnuz", "conybwp", "conycbp", "conyw9p", "conzrmb" ], "score": [ 5, 6, 4, 3, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Because they aren't that good. You can't use metal utensils on them. They don't heat evenly like cast iron does.", "For the same reason we have automatic and manual transmission in cars. Automatic is nice for easy, everyday use by the common person, but if you want to make your car dance, you need to use a manual transmission.\n\nThere's a lot more options and versatility in your basic iron skillet and an artificial coating would ruin that.", "Because cast iron heats up evenly. Non-stick pans and the like only heat up where the heat touches the pan, while cast iron spreads the heat out. The results is an even cooking surface temperature wise. ", "I used to use non- stick pans... they aren't as good as they claim, IMO. Once I started using cast iron and steel pans I haven't looked back.", "I remember how good my grandma's fried potatoes were, and it took me a while to figure out that the modern non-stick pan meant that it was imposible to make them golden brown and make them slightly crispy. I bought a stainless steel pan and seasoned it with peanut oil at a high temperature and now I have a pan that works and is basically non stick. \n\nNow that I've tried stainless steel, I won't go back to non stick. ", "Nonstick coatings cannot sustain high temperatures or acidic ingredients for extended periods of time (like a slow cook tomato sauce). They are also not going to stand up to the frequent use in a commercial kitchen (they really don't even work that well for the avid home cook).\n\nTo be honest, for anyone considering getting a nonstick pan, I would recommend only buying one or two for eggs and crepes, and that's about it. Don't use them for anything else, and don't buy an entire cookware set of them. That's what I did years ago, and I'm regretting it as the coating degrades and I have to retire the pans (or risk feeding my family toxins, which is a no-go.)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e7lqekp", "e7m1wbl" ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text": [ "It is filled with a gas which can be ionized readily. That means the electrons can be easily knocked away from the atoms temporarily. A wire runs down the middle and is insulated from the metal surrounding tube. Several hundred volts is applied to the wire. If a high energy gamma ray, x ray, electron or alpha particle enters the tube it triggers an avalanche of ionized gas atoms which briefly lower the resistance of the tube. A single particle can cause a billion atoms to be ionized. The high voltage dips and that is fed through a DC blocking capacitor to a meter and headset.", "The radiation \"particle\" be it alpha, beta or gamma photon, enters a gas chamber. It interacts with an atom of the gas causing an electron to get stripped off the atom. There's a center wire through the chamber. A high voltage differential is set in the chamber which causes the free electrons created to move towards the center wire and the positively charged ions to move towards the outer wall.\n\nDue to the high voltage the electrons move very quickly, causing more interactions and more ionizations along the way, creating a cascade or avalanche of electrons moving towards the center wire. When the electrons reach the wire they surge through it creating an electric pulse which is registered as one radiation event detected. Each even is registered as the familiar click you hear.\n\nThen the detector gas goes through a very brief resetting period where the ions created collect some electrons to go back to neutral charge and are ready to accept a new radiation \"particle\".\n\nBecause the voltage is so high, a radiation particle with barely enough energy to ionize will cause the same electron cascade as a very high energy particle. So the detector is unable to distinguish energy levels which is an important factor needed to determine it's effect on tissues, i.e. dose rates. Therefore it is only useful for determining the presence of radiation and approximate amount of radiation. It cannot tell you what kind of radiation or its energy level.\n\nThough with different probe styles you can determine type of radiation using different shielding methods.\n\nLower voltage detectors such as the ion chamber, the amount of ions created is determined by the energy of the radiation particle. So it is capable of determining does rates.\n\nSource: me, I'm a radiation protection instrument coordinator, I maintain about 100+ different instruments that utilize the Geiger-Mueller detector" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d9f6qj3" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The cold air dries your lips taking all the moisture out of them. That is what causes them to crack and sometimes those cracks cause cuts. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "flp8kfl", "flp8lpq" ], "score": [ 5, 5 ], "text": [ "Short answer: because a lot of website developers don’t take the time to test them in Firefox. \n\nLonger answer: Every browser has its own quirks. There are standards for how HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and so on are *supposed* to work but no one follows them exactly. So when you develop a website, you have to specifically account for the quirks of each browser individually. This takes time, knowledge, and resources, and those are often in short supply in a lot of development environments; so the team makes decisions about which browsers they’ll support until it’s “good enough” and an acceptably small number of users will experience issues.\n\nTypically this is made (for existing sites) by looking at the browsers their users currently use and making sure those are covered, ignoring anything below a particular percentage of the user base. For new web properties they’ll generally make some assumptions based on global or regional browser trends and then adjust once they have data on their own user base.", "For starters you might be having problems with some firefox addon misbehaving. Try running firefox on safe mode. Close all active firefox windows and while holding the shift key click on the firefox icon, you will be given a choice to run in safe mode, which means vanilla firefox, and see if the same sites keep having problems.\n\nWhile you haven't mentioned examples of sites that you are having problems with it is a fact that some google owned sites are made to deliberately perform worse on browsers other than chrome.\n\nChrome is an excellent browser but they have been doing some shady things to try to push the competition away. If you want specific examples I would suggest watching this video from the youtube channel TechAltar.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [], [ "https://youtu.be/ELCq63652ig" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cnpna8p", "cnpnadx", "cnpndmu" ], "score": [ 5, 2, 6 ], "text": [ "* So they don't have to pay taxes on or report their winnings\n\n* So there is no max bet\n\n* So they can place bets using things besides money (cars, drugs, people)\n\n* So they can use stolen money\n\n* Added thrill due to it being illegal\n\netc", "Makes it more interesting when you know you could get your legs broke. The higher the stakes the higher the adrenaline surge. ", "Other reasons besides those listed. \n\nYou gamble daily and don't want to drive 50 miles to place a bet. Also you can't place bets over the phone. You have to go in person. \n\nYour bookie has better odds. \n\nAnd the biggest reason of all when talking about \"placing bets with bookies\" is you are generally referring to sports betting. Currently you can only sports bet in one state, Nevada. So for the other 49 states, that's why.\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dogaa57", "dogb77s" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "E=mc^2. C is 300,000,000. E is in joules. it takes 4k ish joules raise a kg of water by 1 degree.\n\nif m = .001kg, then E = 90,000,000,000 joules. one kiloton nuclear bomb is about 4,184,000,000,000 joules (one ton of tnt is 4,184,000,000)\n\nThen the same again for the antimatter, so 180,000,000,000 joules total.\n\nEDIT: math is hard okay", "Because a nuclear bomb isn't 100% efficient. It doesn't convert all of the mass of the nuclear pit to energy, only a small fraction of it. The rest of the pit is blown apart and scattered about. An antimatter blast would be 100% efficient since anywhere that the antimatter touches matter would be an annihilation reaction." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d81dxcp", "d81e8pk", "d81iwsj", "d81ogsv", "d81qoqc" ], "score": [ 37, 8, 2, 8, 6 ], "text": [ "If you understand baseball, you can think of a cricket match as one long inning. There are 11 players per side and 2 must be out there at a time for the hitting team. Once the fielding team records 10 outs or a designated number of pitches (bowls, in groups called overs) is reached, they switch. Since the ball is in play no matter what direction it is hit, the defense is much more spread out than in baseball. Any hit that reaches the boundary of the field is worth 4, any that does so on the fly is worth six. Any other ball in play, the two players from the hitting team can run back and forth between the two wickets, which function like bases. Every one is worth 1 more run. Outs are achieved by hitting the wicket with a pitch, catching a fly ball or hitting a wicket while the batsman approaching it hasn't reached it. \n\nSo, for the high scoring, you have a wide bat, a huge field with no foul areas, only 2 extra defenders vs baseball, 10 outs to work with and you effectively get a run for every base. ", " > I just don't get how scores can get so high\n\nIn test cricket (international games played at the highest level), a team's innings lasts until all the players are out. That usually takes a couple of days. At the end of one day's play the game is effectively paused, and play resumes the next day.\n\nSo given that it's a game where people can be playing for the best part of a working week, it's not that surprising to see teams get scores of 300 and above in test cricket.", "The basic thing that is happening is that there are two bits of wood in the middle called wickets. One team is spread all around the pitch (they are the fielders) and has one players who is at one wicket (called the bowler). The other team has one person at each wicket with a bat (they are the batters ) wrist the rest wait inside somewhere. The bowler has to throw the ball at the wickets (if the wickets are hit the batter is out) and the batter has to hit it away. Once the ball is hit, the fielders must try to hit the wickets with the ball (by running out to the ball and throwing it to each other until it is close enough to be thrown at the wickets) whist the batters run between the wickets (each run between then is a point). If the ball his the stumps whilst the bared are between them, the batters are out and new ones come in until all the batters have been. Then the teams swap over and the team the most points wins.\n\nAdditional rules:\n-if the a fielder catches the ball without it bouncing then the batter is out\n-if the batter hits the ball past a curtain boundary without it bouncing he gets six points and if it bounces he gets four points\n-The referee gets a final say in everything and is called the umpire\n\nPlease comment if I have mist anything out", "/u/notgarysmulyan has given a decent explanation, but I want to add a few things, and I will be focusing on how scores get so high, not explaining the rules.\n\nOne of the important things to remember about cricket is that there are 3 formats of the game: twenty-twenty (T20), one-day internationals (ODIs) and Test cricket. Each has its own character and strategies. I don't know which one you have been watching, so I will explain all 3.\n\nSo in T20s, each team's innings is 120 pitches long (the 120 pitches, or balls as they are called in cricket, are grouped in groups of 6, called an over), and each batsman bats until they are out, or all 120 balls have been bowled. If 10 batsmen are out, the innings ends. With each pitch being a chance for the batting team to score between 0 and 6 runs, the scores are typically between 140 and 190 runs (between 7 and 8.5 runs per over). The highest score for a team is 263 runs(20 overs completed), lowest is 74 (all batsmen out).\n\nIn ODIs, each team has 50 overs (300 balls) to bat (batsmen bat until out or all 50 overs bowled). Typical scores for the team are between 280 and 340 (5.6 to 6.8 runs per over) The highest score is 443 (50 overs completed), the lowest 35 (all batsmen out).\n\nNow in Test cricket, the is no limit on the amount of overs a team can bat. They bat until all players are out or they decide they have scored enough runs. It is difficult to give a typical score for an innings of Test cricket (also note that each team has 2 innings in Test cricket), but they usually score 2.5 - 4 runs per over. The highest score for a single innings is 952 runs (the team decided to stop batting after 271 overs), the lowest is 26 runs (all the batsmen were out).\n\nFeel free to ask me more if you don't understand, or join us at /r/cricket (the people there are extremely willing to explain cricket)\n", "You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.\n\nWhen a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "crxnf5p" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It would be less effective. Part of the way it changes the temperature involves mixing air from the vent with the ambient temperature of the room. Constrict the air, it mixes slower, and your room doesn't get warm/cool as fast. If you have a window, or your walls aren't well insulated, then you'll get some heat exchange to the outside through there, so the fact that your climate system doesn't work as fast will be more noticeable." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "eb3e4gq", "eb3f563" ], "score": [ 4, 2 ], "text": [ "The U.S. Government is hundreds of thousands of people in every state, city and town. Short of a total annihilation of almost the entire population of the country, the U.S. Government will still be operational in some capacity. \n\nIn the case of an apocalyptic event, each community would organize to form some semblance of government (good or bad). ", "There is a US Presidential line of succession. So if the US President is death or can't do it's duty, there is in theory 18 other person that can replace him. \n\nIf everybody in that line of succession die, then there is no rules. Will the government survive and in what form will depend on the survivor. \n\nSome high military officer will probably issue order to do whatever they can to fight the disaster and keep the civilian safe.\n\nWhatever congress member alive might try to form some kind of government or give their support to someone to lead the country. They would remain symbol of the democracy, so they could bring public support).\n\nMost likely the State Governors will use the National Guard and police department under them to protect their states.\n\nMayors of cities will do the same with their police department.\n\nNow, in the middle of that, there will probably have people trying to usurp the position of other since the rule of law will kind of be broken. \n\nWho would win in all of those? Who know. Maybe some will decide to work together, other might not." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cs8ojj9", "cs8pcl0" ], "score": [ 5, 3 ], "text": [ "Put Simply - Because your brain isn't a computer\n\nThe \"organic computer\" metaphor is really a bad metaphor for the human brain. Our memory isn't stored like a computers, so we can't do something like iterate every single word we know... but we can also hold a conversation which is something computer struggle to do well.", "Because we remember words by meaning and context, not in an ordered list. And if we look at it evolutionary, being able to use words to communicate is beneficial. Being able to list all the words you know is not." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "co67pd1" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Space. Big screen, camera, microphone, ear speaker, light sensor, notification led. Some phones do it (HTC one) but others just put it on the back because it still works that way too. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cfdgzsx" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "[this image](_URL_0_) might clear things up!\n\nbasically, past a certain point somewhere down your throat, your nose and throat are connected. when you snort a drink out through your nose, what's happened is you've gotten that drink almost all the way to the back of your throat and then something happened (a cough, a laugh, a hiccup, or something else) to make it go out your nose instead of out your mouth." ] }

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[ [ "http://i.imgur.com/QI1SkJT.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cs3nvo9", "cs3ocjx" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Google save and remembers all your searches.\n\nThey also pay the websites you surf for space to put ads on. \n\nTwitch then pays Google to put their ads whenever someone recently searched for keywords( TV, Netflix, Archer, Cord cutting,NBC, Subscription) that mean you could be interested in their product. \n\nGoogle automatically changes the ad on the side according to what you typed recently.\n\nGoogle about vacation a couple times and head back to that same page and see what happens.", "Funny story: I used to run a small forum about home improvement. One of my members complained that it is unresponsible and uncalled for that my forum is showing porn ad's because his wife is browsing the site too.\n\n\n\nJust told him that those are flex ad's based on his behaviour on the internet.\n\n\n\nNever got a response :(" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "exr72fi", "exr79oq", "exv1ohx" ], "score": [ 10, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "It has more to do with who has the rights to the recordings (aka “the masters”), which are often separate from the songwriting copyright and the publishing rights. \n\nIt depends on what relationship the artist has with their label; for major label artists, the label often pays for the recordings and therefore usually owns the rights to them thereafter. Sometimes though, the artist owns the rights to the recordings and licenses them to a label. This was not the case with Taylor Swift’s first few records, it seems. \n\nWhen the artist doesn’t own their masters, whoever does own them can do whatever they want with them, like re-release them and repackage them, and the artist might not get royalties from sales anymore. Bands like Ween, Presidents of the United States of America and Soul Coughing (as well as others; those are just off the top of my head) have all had “best of” compilations of their old songs released without their input. \n\nSometimes a band wants to re-release an old album but the recordings are owned by someone else, who won’t hand them over or charges too much for the licensing or selling them back outright. So the band decides to re-record them so they own *those* recordings and release that. This has happened with Chixdiggit, the Subhumans and Suicidal Tendencies. Devo has been known to re-record old songs of theirs just for use in commercials (like when “Whip It” was changed to “Swiff It” for a Swiffer commercial) so they can collect as much royalties as possible.", "Depends on who owns the composition and who owns the recording. If I write a song and own the rights to it, but somehow get it recorded for a company who only owns the rights to that one recording, I could theoretically remake the song independently and make money off of the new recording. I don’t know what record company would opt to only own the rights to the recording, unless the artist had a lot of power. Typically the company will force the artist to give up rights to all their songs and only after a few decades (I think) could that person try to get the rights to their song back.", "* When an artist like Taylor Swift makes an album for a record company, they typically own the song, and they own the recording of the song, which are two different things. \n* This usually happens because artists like her don't initially have the money to record, master, promote, and distribute a song all on their own.\n* However Taylor is loaded now.\n* She can easily pay to make a recording of a song and then stick it on Spotify or whatever platform she wants.\n* The record company still owns the right to song, and she'll have to pay them a fee in order for her to sell copies of it, but she owns the rights to the new *recording* of the song. \n* US Law, by the way, allows anyone who wants to, to re-record a song, even without the owner's permission. The only catch is that they MUST pay the copyright owner of the song the proper licensing fees for it." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dmwwo2j", "dmwwqfb", "dmwx1ne" ], "score": [ 3, 3, 3 ], "text": [ "you can get keyless locks for your house too. but the majority of people still use basic locks. cars are the same, basic models don't have keyless start, only keyless entry.", "I suppose because it's easy, secure and works. If you try to break into someones house who uses a standard modern day lock, key, door, and security system, you're gonna have to make a lot of noise. Picking modern locks isn't as easy as it used to be.", "Locks and keys are used to restrict access to an area. There aren't a whole lot of places that most people need to restrict. Basically their home and vehicle. Vehicles have begun to migrate more and more to keyless, but most homes don't have power running to their door that would allow similar technology for their home, and you would have to have a backup for when power is out. Many of us still need keys for other things such as mailboxes and workplaces. Although for a workplace with many employees, it's easier to have electronic swipe keys that can be individually added and removed as employees rotate in and out." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "exi3e3e" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "Your eye hurts when it is directly touched or there is sharp pressure on it. Your eye is protected by a layer of liquid to stop things from touching it. \n\nA contact lens covers a large area so it sits on the liquid not directly on your eye. If your eye dries out, contact lenses hurt. And if a contact lens goes back into your socket so it is pressed into your eye it hurts\n\nAn eyelash is thin so it goes through the liquid to your eyeball" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cezx2ad", "cezxhp8", "cf0512e" ], "score": [ 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Probably makes it easier to clean. Just speculating, though.", "It's because using different sizes of mouthpiece can make getting different pitch ranges easier. Large mouthpieces are easier to get low notes, while smaller ones tend to make high notes. \nThe sanitation is also a good point - unlike most instruments you're pretty much actively spitting into it. Having your own mouthpiece makes it less of a health issue when swapping instruments. \nIt also makes them fit into the cases more easily/makes the cases easier to make smaller. ", "Mouthpieces are a lot like shoes. Every person has a size they fit in or a style they prefer. They also have different styles for different activities. If you are going to run a race you want some athletic kicks rather than ballroom dress shoes.\n\nMouthpieces are the same way. If I am playing lead in a jazz band I am going to want to use a mouthpiece that gives me that piercing brassy sound. On the other end if I am playing for a symphony orchestra I will want a deep mellow tone to blend into the strings and support them. If you look at the rim around a mouthpiece they will say something like Bach 3c or Schilke 14a4a. This is like saying you wear a Nike size 12. Slight changes in these dimensions can have huge effects on how the horn will sound as well as how easy/hard it is to play in upper or lower registers. On a more practical point they also make plastic mouthpieces. They are typically used when playing outside in very cold weather such as football games or parades. They sound no where near as good as a regular mouthpiece but putting a frozen metal plate to your lips is so not worth perfection. Hope that helps clear things up a bit.\n\nSource: Have played Trumpet for the last 20 years of my life." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fiy3vd7", "fiy3wx3", "fiy40bv", "fiy5qdx" ], "score": [ 7, 10, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Try eating mutton, venison, or elk. There's a different taste than beef. That's the \"gamey\" flavor. Some people live it and others don't care for it.", "Gamey is a flavor that is most commonly associated with wild (not farm raised) meat. It tends to be very strong and almost metallic due to the higher iron content of wild game - they are actually out there doing work to survive rather than sitting around fattening up like farmed meat.\n\nIt isn't a good or bad thing - I happen to like game and enjoy gamier cuts - but it is a different flavor profile.", "It's kind of hard to explain without you actually being able to taste it, but wild game has a different/distinct flavor due the difference in diet\n\nDomestic animals are all fed pretty much the same thing (hay, grains, etc) so we get used to how that tastes. Wild game eats whatever they have access to, and as the saying goes \"You are what you eat\". Meat actually tastes different based on what the animal eats, so since the diet of wild game isn't controlled their meat has a different flavor than farmed meat which we use the general term \"gamey\" to describe", "Gamey meat has a little bit of a stronger, tangier flavor than the richer, more mellow flavor that we're used to from farm-raised animals. If you think about the difference between lamb or venison compared to beef, or duck compared to chicken, you might be able to place the flavor. It's mostly a matter of species and diet - some species have a naturally gamey flavor, and animals that are freely eating in the wild will have a gamier flavor than farm-raised animals that are mostly eating grains.\n\nThere's also quite a bit of variance within each species - a few years ago my wife and I hosted our families together for Thanksgiving for the first time, and I spent some extra money on a nice heritage turkey instead of a typical grocery store bird. Figured I'd make things special.\n\nI didn't realize that the heritage animals (along with having slightly smaller breasts than mass-farmed turkey) have a more distinct, gamier flavor than their cousins, due to their different diet and genetics. Especially in the dark meat, but even the white meat had a stronger, distinct flavor, whereas a lot of the white meat that we're used to from chicken and turkey is mild and savory, without a lot of super-distinctive flavors. Most of us enjoyed the more unique dinner, but my father-in-law wasn't a fan of the gamey taste, so I felt bad. It definitely comes down to personal preference." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cskjh26", "cskjh3u", "cskjjcr", "cskk1cs" ], "score": [ 3, 4, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "The basic chord structure is the relationship between the 1st and the 5th (G and D, using your example). A power chord plays the next octave of that root note (so GDG). The 3rd (the B) is what gives the chord it's sex (major or minor). So these three are the basics of establishing a standard chord (which I'm sure you know). A fourth or fifth key(s) is/are used to accent that chord.\n\nNow with a guitar, to strum a power chord, you essentially cut out all the accents and play just the notes that build the foundation of a chord (with the higher octave). However, when strumming, finger placement doesn't always favor being able to stay in that triad arrangement. So the basic chord finger formations (using an open D) take this into account and are based on structuring notes that don't use any accents and play the chord as 'cleanly' as possible. In the case of G, it becomes GBDGBG. This way you're only playing octaves of the same three notes (since muting any would be a difficult hand position). The second G reinforces the root as does the second B (reinforces the sex of the chord, in this case Major).\n\nYou could put an extra finger on that last B at the third fret, making it a C and giving the chord a new accent but it no longer becomes a 'clean' or 'pure' triad chord.\n\nTL;DR - it's to allow basic, comfortable finger placement while playing and reinforcing the notes that establish a basic triad :)\n\n", "More than three notes don't need to be played. For playing a G major playing G, B and D is absolutetely enough to determine, that you are playing a G major. \n\nOne reason why you are usually playing 3 more notes on the guitar is, that it is pretty easy to play this way. You just have to grab the 3 notes and then you can strum the chord very easily. \nAnother reason why you would want to do this, is to make the chord sound more \"full\". By adding the same notes, but in a different octave or in a different position on the fretboard adds a lot of different harmonics to the sound, thus giving a wider sound.\n\nIn Summary:\nIt is not because of theoretical reasons, but simply because of playability on one hand and sounding on the other hand.", "Sounds like you're getting a little *too* hung up on the theory. Music is as much about feel as anything.\n\nThe easiest way to demonstrate is by playing fifth chords, which if you're playing electric guitar, you'll be using a lot of. A fifth is 1-5-8, which is two notes, but three pitches (1 and 8 are the same note, just an octave apart). Try playing 1-5, then 1-5-8, and see if you can hear the difference.\n\nIt may take a few months or years of playing before you can perceive a difference, but there IS one, and you'll find that the three-note chord sounds slightly fuller and louder. The more notes, the bigger the sound, which affects the feel. You'll find that happy-sounding pieces tend to use more notes in their chords, while sad pieces use fewer.\n\nI'll use a metal example, since that's what I'm most familiar with: black metal bands like [Emperor](_URL_1_) use five, six, or even seven note chords, which makes the music sound very loud and full. Thrash metal bands like [Iced Earth](_URL_0_) tend to use one or two note chords, which has the effect of making it sound cleaner and more pronounced.\n\nThere are even more subtle differences. The physics of a guitar mean that even the exact same note played on different strings can differ slightly - called timbre. Experienced musicians take all these factors into account when deciding what to play.", "Thanks for the help everyone. Actually has aided my understanding a lot more. Yes, I get hung up on the theory sometimes, but I truly believe that it's always beneficial to learn why you're doing something before you do it. But don't worry, I'm going to spend the next few days learning as many chords as I can and switch between them and just generally have fun with it all. " ] }

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[ [], [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqewBHgfd6A", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XNsZ-BAXgw" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ewaix56", "ewajqhy", "ewbwp4r" ], "score": [ 4, 4, 5 ], "text": [ "Most of it is international activity, and the law enforcement in the jurisdiction of the criminals have little interest or resources to combat it.", "It's also extremely expensive and difficult to investigate. Often times the numbers are routed through many different cell towers and what not.", "Let's say an American police organization traces a scam attempt, and discovers that it is coming from an internet cafe in Nigeria. What then? They don't have jurisdiction in Nigeria. The Nigerian police are under-resourced and their government is systemically corrupt. And even if the Nigerian police DID arrest a scammer, that just means his family goes hungry and they have a new problem to solve. \n\nSo what are the American police supposed to do about it? The reality is that the internet has created whole new problems that we don't yet know how to solve." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c9b8oag", "c9badw6" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Talked to a landfill worker recently, they take all the compost and dump it in a different pile due to the buying of fertilizer by farmers (Rural Wisconsin FTW)\n\nAs for other landfills, I'm assuming bacteria that eat away at paper and food quickly wouldn't eat away at plastics and stone/metal products, if at all.", "In Metro Vancouver, food waste is now collected in separate bins, and then shipped to processing plants for re-use as fuel (for garbage trucks) and compost. But I don't think putting food waste in a landfill will make everything else decompose faster. People put everything in the trash, so there would be plastics, metals, stone, ceramic, etc. and those don't decompose." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c7lulnn", "c7lup6z", "c7lvj02", "c7lw6wh", "c7lwy4g", "c7lwzrp" ], "score": [ 8, 62, 7, 2, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "The government needs more money than a flat tax could provide without crippling the vast majority of citizens. Therefore the rich who can endure a higher tax rate get taxed higher. ", "Because it wouldn't actually be fairer.\n\n20% of your income when you make 20k is a big deal. Sure, it's \"only\" 4k, but you can feed a person for months on that much. In contrast, 20% of your income when you make 500k isn't a big deal at all; it may cost you 100k, but 400k is still enough money to buy basically anything you'd want.\n\nSo if you accept that poor people should be taxed less (which you must, if you think that percentage of income is a reasonable thing to tax), there's no reason to have everyone pay the *same* percentage.", "Its called a \"progressive tax\", where the tax rate increases as the tax base increases. It tends to appeal to the average person’s sense of fairness while still getting as much money as the government can to defray the expenses of government operations.\n\nIf, for example, we tax everyone the same flat tax rate, it would be difficult to come up with a decent amount that everyone can afford. A dollar is worth much more to someone with a lower income than a billionaire. If we make it so that everyone can afford the flat tax rate, then there won't be enough money to run the government. If we make it too high, then many people would not be able to afford the tax. \n\nSo basically, in a progressive tax, people are generally taxed what they can theoretically afford. People with similar incomes are placed in what's called \"tax brackets\", where they are taxed proportionately to their income. The poorest of the poor are usually exempt; the middle class are taxed moderately, and; the richest are taxed with a high tax rate.\n\nI should also add that the progressive tax system is not just done in the US. Many other countries follow this system, such as China, Japan, Australia, Philippines, and New Zealand.\n\n\nedit: some typos", "Essentially, the thought is that some people can afford to pay more than others. A man who could be homeless if he caught a flu can't afford to pay much at all in taxes, while a man who earns millions has significantly more that he can spare for such matters.", "The government also has a lot of control by varying taxes. They want people to own homes so there is a mortgage deduction. They want people to give to charity so you can deduct charity deductions. They want to encourage long term investments so those are taxed lower.\n\nA flat tax takes that all away. Not shocking libertarians like a flat tax, eh?", "Because that would be a highly regressive system. Practically, you can afford to pay 20% of 100,000 a year...trying paying 20% of 10,000 or even 20,000." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "deb9h65", "deb9l2y", "deb9ql1" ], "score": [ 2, 7, 6 ], "text": [ "No, this should be on trees.\n\nScales in the beginning compared one weight to another. Scales that gave a \"reading\" are fairly new (last few centuries I think).\n\nI guess I'd like a more complete answer two, what was the first uniform weight that was used for calibrating.", "You use a [balance scale](_URL_0_). A spring scale's measurement depends on how the weight of the measured item affects the components of the scale. A balance scale just lets you know if the two pans have equal weight on them, which is not dependent on the components of the scale and so it requires no calibration other than checking that empty pans balance. \nRemember that mass measurements are ultimately only comparison multipliers. There's [a particular ingot of platinum/iridium alloy in France which is defined as being 1 kg exactly](_URL_1_). All other things are compared as being X times heavier or lighter than that particular object (yes, Imperial-users, yours too. The lb is defined using the IPK as reference).", "At some point, you just pick an object which defines your unit of weight and calibrate against that. Locally, that could be a particular rock which your village agrees is how much a bag of grain should weigh. Then you ask the blacksmith to make lumps of metal which weigh the same as the rock, and use those to calibrate other scales. As you start to trade with towns further away, you find that their rock weighs a different amount and you find it more convenient to adopt their unit so that they'll buy your grain.\n\nIn principle the kilogram is the weight of a litre of water. But the official definition comes down to a village rock. There's a lump of metal in Paris which weighs one kilogram by definition, and various copies around the world which are periodically checked against the original." ] }

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[ [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weighing_scale#/media/File:200_-_gram_balance_scales.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram#International_prototype_kilogram" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cbbfzkq" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "A lot of artists, especially fellow DJs and producers, release packs which are basically all the ingredients just separated for remixes. [Here's a popular example where Skrillex and Damian Marley did it for a contest](_URL_0_).\n\nTwo reasons that this happens are royalties (commercially used remixes pay the original artist for their use) and inevitability (if a song is interesting enough, someone out there is bound to want to remix it)." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.clubglow.com/dj-news/skrillex-damian-marley-make-it-bun-dem-remix-comp/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cuf8uh4", "cuf9hlc" ], "score": [ 8, 4 ], "text": [ "They are not.\n\nYou're thinking of one very specific organ which functions as a convenient way to remove liquid from your body at high speed. You've got two systems in your body that need to do that; why have separate end-points when you can quite easily just use one? \n\nNow, this didn't evolve in humans. It happened many, many, many millions of years before humans, and in much, much simpler organisms. The evolutionary advantage was, probably, simplicity and efficiency. ", "That only applies to males, and there's actually two tubes that feed into the penis; one for semen and one for urine. The sex organ itself is only responsible for getting the waste out. It's a delivery system, essentially.\n\nIn females, the sex organs are the vagina, clitoris, etc. Women have a separate opening for urination that has absolutely nothing to do with sex. The only reason it's mistaken for a sex organ is because they're all under labial folds, but that'd be like saying your brain and your sinuses both do thinking because they're both in your head." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d2q22n8" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Imagine that your brain is a four-way intersection. There's a general speed limit, and the cars incoming are your senses. Now since they're in a street, they're going by the speed limit, and the brain can keep it all in order. Now let's say that there's a fast car coming down the street, this car is the sense of \"hearing\", it comes to a fast sudden stop and causes a problem in the intersection, the brain has to find a way to solve this, and has a sudden overload of information. So other senses, including sight, have a sudden impulse of shutting down. You shut down sight in the presence of bright lights by closing your eyes by instinct, so that's how the brain reacts to the overload. \n \nThis also explains why we can concentrate easily when in complete silence versus when there's a ruckus. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ctvx77j", "ctvx83t", "ctvx9lz", "ctw5u25" ], "score": [ 8, 3, 11, 7 ], "text": [ "People in the US are tired of what is perceived as constant, over-the-top political correctness, and politicians that refuse to answer questions. Trump represents himself as the antithesis of both, and people are attracted to that.\n\nFear not; he will self-destruct at some point, and I honestly believe that deep down he doesn't want to be President anyway. This is all just vainglory for his ego. The actual day-to-day job of being President would be too intrusive for him to put up with.", "As an American, I don't know if I *can* explain it. There's a leak between politics, the \"reality show/shit show\" nature of politics, and entertainment television. It's been a long time (if ever, really) since politics was considered separate from celebrity worship, especially those that are clearly unqualified. He's got money and a big mouth, and people are responding to the caricature. I doubt think he'd pan out in the long run, but the more attention people pay to his nonsense, the more entertaining it is. \n\nThere have been other celebrities go for political offices, even under crazy platforms (Hunter S Thompson, Kinky Friedman), those that have gotten elected (Clint Eastwood, Ronald Reagan, Sonny Bono). Why wouldn't he at least try?", "It is how the American presidential process works. We are still a *long* way from the election, and we have only had the first real political event two days ago (first debate). For this reason the person with the biggest name recognition is always the front runner.\n\nSure there are big political names on the Republican election like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, but almost every single person in American knows Donald Trump. For this reason he gets very high marks in the polls because casual voters do not really know who is running yet, so when polled they say a name they recognize. Thus Donald Trump is leading the polls. He will not win and his lead will diminish as other people running for the Republican nomination get more recognized.\n\nAs an example at this point in the election in 2008, Hillary Clinton was the walk away winner of the Democratic nomination because everyone knew her, and only people that really watched politics knew who Barack Obama was. ", "Since the 1990s, the Republican party has been moving sharply towards the far-right-nutjob end of the spectrum.\n\nFirst we had the neocons, typified by Cheney, Rumsfeld, that crowd. And I think we all know how well THAT worked out for the world.\n\nThen the Koch brothers slipped into graveyards at night and stole body parts from every ultra-right-wing whackjob group they could find, stitched them together in their spooky mountaintop castle, then had Igor Rove Throw. The. Switch!!! and the Tea Party was born. The teabaggers were created to be a berserker for the Republican party, an \"independent group\" that could smash up the political landscape, yet still leave the GOP with plausible deniability. The propaganda department of the Republican party, Faux News, cheered as teabggers showed up to political rallies armed with guns and ran political ads with rifle cross-hairs plastered over the faces of candidates. Because, you know, yay democracy!\n\nHowever, the Kochs had obviously never seen a 1950s monster movie, so they didn't know what always happens next. The teabaggers broke free and became so destructive that even the Kochs themselves later disavowed all involvement with them.\n\nBut by then, the poison had spread. Crazy was the new normal. And out of that bubbling, toxic pool, a rare and delicate flower blossomed: Candidate Donald Trump. The Donald can get away with--nay, be CHEERED for--spouting the hateful, crazy-ass bullshit he does because an alarming percentage of conservatives have drunk the Kool-Aid, they genuinely believe that opposing voices are an existential threat to the very concept of civilization.\n\nEither that, or his candidacy is an elaborate, satirical performance art piece. One of those two things.\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c7fuxo1", "c7fv1gv", "c7fvl2b", "c7fwpbx", "c7fx8az", "c7fydfz", "c7fyvq2", "c7g088b", "c7g2m0w" ], "score": [ 6, 7, 7, 5, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Not all species naturally go extinct. Also we are the reason some animals are going extinct not because of their lack of adaptation but because we as humans are changing their environment.", "Let me reword the question a bit. I'm not doing this to make fun of your question- it is something that deserves to be thought about- but to try to make you consider it from a different perspective:\n\n\"Why is it important to try to keep people from dying if everyone dies eventually anyway?\"\n\nWhen I think about this question, I think about the uniqueness of each individual person. I realize that my experiences in life are made up of interactions with different people who all contribute to making me who I am. I realize that the people who grow my food; the people who make my clothing and electronics; the people who I talk to on the train and at work and in the park; all make my life immeasurably better than it would be without them.\n\nEach species can be regarded in like fashion. The insects which pollinate our crops; the birds flying by; the corn and the cotton and the wheat and the flowers; each makes my life better than it would have been. Even stinging wasps and rattlesnakes play parts in our lives where it might be hard to understand why we should want to keep them, but we would be poorer without them.", "whats the point of hospitals if we are all going to die anyway", "I think its a legitimate question.\n\nAll species go extinct eventually, but at this moment in history more species are going extinct faster than the normal rate of extinction. We have had several mass extinctions (think the end of the dinosaurs) but each of them has had a big shocking natural cause, like an asteroid hitting earth, or an ice age, etc.\n\nThis mass extinction is being caused by us. Humans. So, many people feel like if we are causing it, we have a responsibility to stop causing it. We humans like to think of ourselves as being good, and being responsible for a mass extinction just doesn't sit well with that idea.", "We find loads of organic compounds in nature that can be used to do hilariously useful things like medicines, far more than we find by engineering our own compounds from scratch. It's an investment in what we may find in the future. Also, hopefully in the future we'll have a catalog of all species ever and be able to reconstruct them with a computer record of their DNA, and then futz with them a bit. Gonna be a bit harder to engineer your flying tiger with the temperament of a golden retriever if you don't have any tigers!", "I have two answers: 1) because it is moral to protect life when possible and 2) because more species makes the world a safer place for humans.\n\n1)\nThere are at least two distinct reasons humans could have for keeping species from going extinct. The first reason is if you believe that life has its own value apart from how useful it is to you. Many people choose to believe that other humans have a right to exist and be allowed to thrive. For many people this belief exists even if you have never met the person, don't even speak their language, and might never know what it is like to live their life. This is because our own experience makes us believe that when we see other people laugh, smile, and cry that they are experiencing joy, happiness, or pain just like we do. If we agree that other people have a right to existence and thriving what about other species? It depends on what you think is worth respecting. If all you care about is intelligence we will probably only guard the rights of some of the smartest animals like chimps, gorillas, elephants, and dolphins. However this view is a problem if you want to respect the rights of certain humans that are less intelligent. Do people in comas, people with mental handicaps, and babies deserve the right to live and prosper to whatever extent they can as much as a super-intelligent person? Does the most intelligent person alive get to make their own rules and ignore the interests of an average person? If your instinct is no then we have The way you ask your question assumes that humans have a right to exist and thrive, but other species might not. I will argue that being alive is what gives us the right to live and thrive, and not just being human. Being a human gives us human rights, but being alive gives us the right of all living things: the right to attempt to thrive to the best of our capabilities. \n\nLet’s agree humans have the right to live. Does it make sense to deny other species this right? Maybe humans have rights because we experience pleasure and pain, and it is wrong to cause pain. Many animals experience pleasure, pain, and other emotions in a similar way to humans. This is why we think it is bad to hurt cats, monkeys, and elephants and why it is good to let them eat. At the same time cats, monkeys, and elephants don’t need all the same things to thrive in their lives that humans need. We need to be able survive in human society which includes non-cat skills like reading, managing money, holding a job, and having a conversation. Humans need these skills to thrive, and cats don’t. Access to education and the internet are human rights, but not cat rights. Living and being free of pain are human rights but also cat rights.\nMaybe you now agree humans and smart animals have the right to live and thrive, but what about something like a tree? Trees can’t walk, communicate, or think. They probably don’t feel pain in the same way you or I feel pain.\n\nYou might think it is obvious that a tree doesn’t have even the basic right to life. But if we only give rights to things that can walk, talk, think and feel pain then we can’t grant rights to humans without legs, or who can’t talk, or who have brain injuries, or who can’t feel pain. We don’t want to live in a world like this, which means we respect the right to life and thriving independent of any one human trait. Therefore we should extend the same basic right to life to other species. This does not mean we can never kill another living thing. In fact it makes sense to kill a tree if doing so let more people live and thrive. We have to do this when we build a hospital that will save lives. The important thing is to do everything in our power to minimize the impact we have on other living things, and to try to preserve their lives when possible. The most basic way to do this is to create a planet where we don’t selfishly destroy habitats and food sources for species when we don’t have to. \n\n2)\nA different reason to keep other species from extinction is because humans need other species to survive. All species are connected to other species, either because one eats the other, or because they help each other out. If certain the honeybee dies then many types of flowers will also die. If a predator that kills a parasite that kills honeybees dies then suddenly honeybees die and flowers die. Ecosystems are complex and many species depend on each other, and humans are no different. One more example: if we let certain types of corn die because they produce less corn per plant than the best variety and then a nasty virus that is really good at killing just one kind of corn comes along, all of a sudden there is no more corn anywhere in the world! It is important to have lots of similar kinds of species around so that if something bad happens to a certain kind of bee or a certain kind of corn there are still many bees and corn plants alive to rebuild from.\n\n", "Extinction can be a symptom of an unbalanced ecosystem. You might not thing it a big deal if Abernathy's Crested Woodlark goes extinct, but if its primary diet is wood beetles, and its extinction causes their populations to explode and destroy forests, resulting in fires, erosion, mudslides and desertification, yeah, that's kind of a big deal.\n\nThe problem is, it is very hard to know what the impact will be when a special is removed from the ecosystem.", "People want to counteract the disproportionate effect humans have had on the extinction of species compared to other animals. Humans can affect the ecosystem much more rapidly than it can react in some circumstances. we are often trying to prevent a chain reaction of events that could lead to a worse ecological change such as the extinction of something we actually use.\n\nSoe people just think pandas are cuddly and whales are fun to look at.", "To make us feel better about being the cause =(" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c3a29wv", "c3a3fc7", "c3a29wv", "c3a3fc7" ], "score": [ 6, 4, 6, 4 ], "text": [ "10 seconds on google\n\nCapacators (Breakdown voltage) is also affected by pressure, humidity and temperature", "Put a computer in a vacuum chamber. It dies quickly. It's worse than turning off all the cooling fans.\n\nSo short answer: low-density air has very little conductive/convective cooling capability. Metal heat-sink fins stop working.", "10 seconds on google\n\nCapacators (Breakdown voltage) is also affected by pressure, humidity and temperature", "Put a computer in a vacuum chamber. It dies quickly. It's worse than turning off all the cooling fans.\n\nSo short answer: low-density air has very little conductive/convective cooling capability. Metal heat-sink fins stop working." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cszsgfj", "cszsvrs" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "This is from back in the old days when people used china cups and saucers, rather than mugs. The china ones typically held ~6oz. The switch to mugs begain in the 1970s, IIRC. I guess rather than suddenly tell people OH, you're not getting as many \"cups\" out of this 1lb can as you used to, they just stayed with the original 6oz \"serving\".", "I always assumed that it had to do with the size of one of those small china cups used in formal dining.\n\nThen I remembered that there is an ISO standard for making a cup of tea, and wondered if there was one for coffee.\n\nThere isn't, but a standard cup of tea is 6 and 2/3 oz." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "djhgr0q" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Intoxication has a huge mental aspect. Your feelings about a certain beverage or your emotional state can definitely have effects on the experience of drinking. Most concrete, measurable, non-subjective differences in physiological effects of different alcohols come from their concentration and rate of absorption into the bloodstream, but this can obviously be altered by things like whether or not the alcohol is taken with food or on an empty stomach. So basically, most of the science says that a 1 oz shot of tequila has the same amount and active ingredient (ethanol) as a 12 oz beer and they will produce roughly the same effects. Studies have not been able to find evidence that whiskey increases anger for people in general, but if you, specifically, expect whiskey to make you angry, odds are pretty good that it will, at least enough for you to convince yourself through confirmation bias." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cyn24sc" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "Slowly. \n\nEating food fast is one of the primary causes of overeating. We don't feel full seconds after we take a bite, it takes a few minutes to register. Eating fast is also a primary cause of choking. The unchewed food can also cause stomach irritation and constipation." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dsbg7jl", "dsbh84q", "dsbhizd", "dsbj6kq", "dsbkzah" ], "score": [ 10, 93, 27, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Because it's full of blood. Same reason you can't smell chlorine when you're underwater in a swimming pool. ", "You cannot get air by the nose at they time so the blood smell stays far from the receptors. Try breathing by your nose at that time and it will start to smell. \n\nThis got me to think. Boogers don't have a scent ? ", "Human blood has very little smell to it, even someone else's in a test tube when your own nose isn't bleeding. I've handled blood samples from the Emergency Room that had the distinct smell alcohol in them, but ordinary blood samples have little scent to them at all.\n\nSource, former hospital blood banker.", "Blood usually doesn’t smell until it’s been exposed to air for a while, so when it’s still in your nose not exposed to air it doesn’t have that smell yet. ", "In order for you to detect a scent, a chemical molecule has to come into contact with the sensory receptors in the nose. The chemicals ultimately have to be able to be absorbed into the receptor cell membranes, and they can be airborne or already dissolved in liquid when they meet the receptors. These receptors are located in a specific part of the nasal cavity, very high up. So, if the blood is coming from an area of the nasal cavity that does not allow it to come into contact with these receptors, you don’t detect the scent. If the blood or any other substance becomes dispersed and meets the receptors, you would then be able to detect the scent. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dkx03mi", "dkx0nvs", "dkx0uj2", "dkx1e1h", "dkx1jz3", "dkx30q7", "dkx3iwd", "dkx44a7", "dkx4cg0", "dkx50pe", "dkx58uv", "dkx5el5", "dkx7o6f", "dkx7x75", "dkx80u1", "dkx8fy1", "dkx8qho", "dkx9k7d", "dkx9kj6", "dkx9sry", "dkxa613", "dkxcbph", "dkxdc2o", "dkxdnfb", "dkxe1lk", "dkxein1", "dkxh7mg", "dkxhl53", "dkxi1sx", "dkxl1o1", "dkxlcgh", "dkxqn4v", "dkxsts4", "dkxvgzl", "dkxx63t" ], "score": [ 73, 2039, 3, 2228, 190, 16, 2, 79, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 13, 2, 790, 2, 2, 3, 5, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Think of your attention like a spotlight on a stage. There are other things going on on the stage, but you're only focusing on the spotlight. You're still aware and actively watching the whole show and dance, but your brain is focusing its attention on the lead actor/dancer because they are in the direct spotlight. \n\nEdit:\n\nSo you're still actively reading but your attention is elsewhere. You're watching the show on the stage but your spotlight is elsewhere. ", "I assume you're talking about the \"keep reading but your mind wanders off\" effect. \n\n1) When you're reading something, your brain is connecting content of your memory in a new or less frequently used way (there is also neurological basis for this, called Hebb's Rule: Neurons that are activated as a set are more likely to fire again if another neuron of that set is active). \n\n2) For this to happen you need to be focused on the topic you're trying to read: You should think about the content you're reading, and \"do something with it\" in your mind (e.g., picture a scene, or try to summarize it internally). These are processes associated (among others) with working memory, and help the connection forming in 1). \n\n3) Now imagine if instead of thinking about the content, your working memory is occupied with other thoughts, daydreams etc.: There are no connections being made in your knowledge base, because you're thinking about other stuff. You may read a page, but its content are never processed in a meaningful way. \n\nIt's been a while since I studied up on neuroscience, and therefore I apologise for any mistakes and oversimplifications. ", "Focus/Attention \nWe call it multitasking, but in reality it is quick-switching between tasks. Try to look at the pictures where you need to find differences and at the same time listen to some fast hip-hop song and try to get all the lyrics and think about them. You brain will go nuts, because it can't do 2 tasks that both need focus and attention. \nBut your brain adapt to switch quickly between different tasks once you do it for a while(let go one thing, concentrate on another for a minute, then get back to previous one). When you first try to watch movies with subtitles, e.g. you are learning a language, you brain would also go insane. It has to concentrate on what it hears and what it does see - picture + text. Focus on 3 different things is impossible for it.", "I would also like to add that (what I have personally experienced) sometimes it is not just the mind wandering off like most people here are explaining it, but it can also be that the brain has so much to do by focusing on the letters and words themselves that there is no more room for comprehending what you have just read. \n\nFigured out this was my problem for a very long time. Solution was: Get prescription glasses.\n\nI had a very hard time reading various texts or better comprehending what I have just read until I got my first pair of glasses at the age of 20.", "As tends to be the case for most ELI5s related to the central nervous system, mind, and cognition especially:\n\n1. The underlying physiological processes responsible for this particular brain function aren't well understood, meaning that there is no solid answer supported by rigorous science.\n2. While many people may have intuitive-sounding beliefs about why their brain acts the way it does, [this is a known flaw in human reasoning](_URL_0_). Empirical neuroscience is essentially the only reliable source on the subject, and it has come up empty so far.\n\ntl;dr- we don't know the answer as to why you can \"read on autopilot\" without absorbing the meaning of the text. Every answer here is composed of pure speculation.", "There are several good answers here. I would add this gross simplification:\n\nOur capacity to recognize words lives in one (well, two, possibly more) part of our brains. Our ability to maintain concentration resides in a different place(s) in our brains. Our ability to encode things into memory resides in a different part of our brains. \n\nIf you can read, your brain will probably automatically sort the letters into words. But if you don't also engage concentration while you read, it will never be encoded into memory. Even if you do both of those things, if you don't have either 1) a previous cognitive framework for sorting the information or 2) some emotional valence (ie., it's too boring to care about) your brain won't be able to functionally sort it into your memory. So there are a lot of points of failure where if your brain isn't coordinating with itself, you can spend hours reading and hardly remember a thing.", "Pretend your brain is a computer with a rather junky single core CPU. When you're reading your brain is doing two tasks. The first is to have your eyes scan line to line and page to page. The second is to collect the words together and make them into coherent thoughts.\n\nThe first task, scanning, uses very little processing power and can be done in the background with almost no though. The second task, understanding, uses a lot of processing power. \n\nNow pretend your brain computer is busy thinking about what you want to have for dinner, trying to remember something, or listening to someone talking to you. You run out of processing power and the task of collecting and understanding words crashes. \n\nThe task of flicking your eyes to scan is still running in the background because it's so simple.", "Currently a student studying at University, found a simple [but not easy] way to combat this effect when reading large volumes of books for research...\n\nEvery 2-5 pages, close the book and attempt to \"recall\" the general concept of what you've read, from memory.\nThis is often referred to as **generation** by some psychologists, it **forces your brain to stay focused** as it's **chemically/physically working** to recall the information you've just read.\n\nYou'll find that it'll take you longer to read a book, but after 1 read through (cover to cover) you'll be able to recall upto 50% more of what you've read than someone who hasn't deployed this technique.\n\nMy reason for sharing this \"hidden secret\" of studying is I wish I knew about it when I was younger (sitting my A-Levels) as opposed to discovering it mid-way through my Degree. I could've saved myself so many hours, and attained such higher grades.\n\nEdits: Grammar meht.", "There's a research on this and really interesting effect on how you can actually indirectly turn off the auto pilot by changing the font (unconventional but still legible) of the reading material. \n\nThe sheer annoyance and the unexpected change in different lines, paragraphs, and/or pages will cause the brain to be more alert to the dynamics than just breezing through with static brain waves.\n\nI do not remember exactly where to link, but it has been associated with the research about the efficiency of book learning. \n\n ", "A good way to look at this is that your brain is not just one brain. It is many brains. Sometimes, this discussion is about the left and the right brain, and while there are differences between the two, science also tells us that there are many smaller parts in each half. They all work at the same time, like a well-practiced orchestra, and you don't even know what the violins and the horns of your brain are doing when they're at work. If you'd like to read more about it, you could pick up a text book on cognitive psychology (which I would use when teaching classes on these topics), or you could read Minsky's \"Society of the Mind\", a classic in A.I. These are, however, not written for five-year-olds.\n\nAlso, keep in mind that there is not just \"reading\" or \"reading but not paying attention\". You can read something and pay a little attention, or much attention, and deeply work through what you're reading. The deeper you read something, the more you will understand is and build lasting memories that you can use later on. But of course it will take much more time. Speed reading has been shown to work much less well than careful reading.", "At any particular moment, your awareness knows of a great many things in a room (the sound of a refrigerator, the contact of your butt on a chair) that remain in the background, but which can be brought to the foreground of attention in an instant. When you are reading but your mind wanders, your attention shifts to a thought, and the reading fades into the background. Awareness still hazily holds the experience of reading, but doesn't engage the content of it, just as our critical mind doesn't grasp onto the sound of the fridge or the distant sound of traffic unless it's brought to the forefront.", "It's more of an attention aspect. While your eyes are moving and technically you are sensing the letters, words, etc that are in front of you, your focus is elsewhere. This may be in the form of mental images or other such thoughts. These then take priority. Because focus is a limited resource, the actual thoughts you're processing are registered.\n\nIt's not so much of a neurobiological process strictly but more of a melding of that with cognitive processes/psychology.\n\nAll the responses here that claim a strict anatomical explanation are missing it by a mile.\n\nTl;Dr your attention is a limited resource (focus, working memory) so whatever in your head occupies your thoughts and registers despite what physical letters/words are in front of you", "This is a bit of a loose explanation, based on what I learned from a book on neuroscience and (The Master and His Emissary by Ian Mcgilchrist) and Jiddu Krishnamurti.\n\nIt has to do with the way you are attending to what you are reading. When we experience something new (e.g when we learn a language), we use a context wide, non-explicit, present moment form of awareness (there is significant evidence that this is usually a function of the right hemisphere). This type of awareness is also our means for understanding metaphor, and is the aim of meditation.\nAfter we have acquired a significant amount of experience with something, we generate a system of ideas and images about it (which are fundamentally not the thing itself, but are useful to us in understanding it) which guide our behaviour towards it. This type of awareness is more generalised, explicit and non-present (as in abstract thinking), and is generally a function of the left hemisphere. In reality, we are using a combination of both 'types' of awareness at any given moment, so it is not so cut and dry.\n\nIf you attend to what you are reading with a 'right hemisphere type' of attention, you are attending to the meaning (which is implicit and metaphorical, as is language) of what is written. When you attend with a 'left hemisphere type' of attention, you pick up the words individually but do not interpret what is written as a whole which results in you getting to the end of a paragraph and then thinking 'what did I just read?'.", "\nYour brain, when your in a state where you can't focus on that Berennstein Bears book, shows similar active to activity when your supposedly not thinking of anything. If you place your finger on your forehead, you are pointing to you frontal lobe, in the middle of this area is associated with deliberately thinking and also nearby your ears in the hippocampus, where your memories are encoded. \n\nHave you ever tried to recount the amount of thoughts in your mind when your distracted? Your mind has a capacity for thoughts and one idea is that your mind is geared continually fill this capacity with thoughts. Therefore, you can't focus on the words because your mind is under-used or because you see little use in continuing to read. Reading about those bears is a demanding task. Your ability to process words on a page requires concentration and takes up your brains' full capacity. This means that you probably find this particular story un-entertaining and that you could be using your time doing something more interesting or important. Often, your brain takes control and makes you think about more valuable thoughts.\n\nIf you have trouble reading and losing focus, take a step back and think about how important this particular story is in comparison to all the other things you have going on.\n", "I'm not sure what I can provide neurologically to answer your question, but I definitely know of some psychology stuff that applies. I threw in some extra biochem+physiology stuff after the numbered items.\nNeuroscience is a smushed together version of psychology, biochemistry , and physiology so I think this actually might address everything you're looking for. \n\n\nThere are a few concepts to help out here. \n1) *Cognitive load* - We all have a set amount of cognitive power before we have to recharge and go to sleep or take a break. That's important because it underlies the need for our brain to take shortcuts in order to preserve cognitive capacity. The human brain has actually evolved to be really good at taking shortcuts (and some of them can lead us to bad conclusions -- heuristics are an example. An example of a heuristic is the availability heuristic. If you see violence on the TV all the time, you might come to the conclusion that that violent crime is on the rise in the US. This is not supported by facts though; it's just a result of your exposure to the violence on TV which is not representative of the true state of affairs). \n\nInterestingly, due to the expensive learning principle, the more effort it takes to learn something the more likely you are to remember it. But I guess you've got to put that effort in first. \nSource: _URL_10_ \n\nAttitude toward a subject can influence how much effort how approachable something is for you too in addition to how much you retain. \n_URL_1_ & _URL_7_\n\n2) *Broadbent's Model of Selective Attention and Triesman's Attenuation Model* - It was postulated by Broadbent that in an early stage of processing stimuli we have a filter put in to evaluate the importance of stimuli of all sorts. This filter is there to help us reduce cognitive load. Triesman didn't think that that filter happened early on in processing, but he did want to acknowledge he ability to block out other stimuli to focus on one that's important to us. He was inspired to explain the Cocktail Effect which is where you can be talking to someone else at a party, hear your name and turn toward whoever is saying your name. There are also visual correlates to this phenomenon. Source: _URL_9_ & _URL_2_ \n\n3) *Interest and Retention of Information* - interestingly it has been found that attention isn't affected by interest or interesting things. But retention is. A positive correlation between interest and retention was observed. Humans are built to focus on the novel or interesting. It's a way for ancient humans to have not felt like they had to stay in one place forever despite dwindling resources -- we have the propensity to explore and expand. That makes us adaptable in many environments. We can also remember freaky new stuff in our new environments so we can keep surviving (maybe a new animal in a new environment is deadly to us -- uh-oh! Way better to have remembered that easily). \nSource: _URL_5_\n_URL_3_ & _URL_11_\n\nAs far as people drinking and not paying as much attention as another poster mentioned...this is because frontal lobe (executive functioning) activity is lowered with the release of GABA (an inhibitory neurotransmitter) as a result of alcohol use (alcohol is a drug remember). Stimuli hit your optic tract and thalamus first and then go to your frontal lobe. Alcohol mucks up your balance/motor skills and probably vision a little bit. I wouldn't be surprised if because you're not processing physical input as well due to the GABA inhibitory effects that the signals that hit your parietal lobe (responsible for attention and focus+processing of visual stimuli) aren't so great and the signals from the frontal lobe don't do as well when they're communicated to the hippocampus which helps in learning and memory. I also wouldn't be surprised if you got people to take benzodiazepines or another depressant and saw similar effects. \n\nFatigue can lower the control that the frontal lobe exhibits too. Ever been slap happy from lack of sleep? Well, there you go. \n\n\"There are at least 5 metabolic causes of fatigue, a decrease in the phosphocreatine level in muscle, proton accumulation in muscle, depletion of the glycogen store in muscle, hypoglycaemia and an increase in the plasma concentration ratio of free tryptophan/branched-chain amino acids.\"\nSource: _URL_8_\n\nI know that phosphocreatine is necessary in muscle to help phosphorylate the kinases that eventually tack on an ATP on myosin heads. Those myosin heads, along with troponin, respond to an influx of Ca2+ into the muscle and that's how you move those muscles. In the process ATP is hydrolysis to ADP and energy is harvested from this conversion. The phosphocreatine shuttle is in the mitochondria even though phosphocreatine comes from the liver and arrives via blood to muscle cells. Phosphocreatine -- important stuff. \n\nI bet that tryptophan and branched chain amino acids are important for some reasons I'll list. Tryptophan is useful for various enzyme pocket stabilizations due to its polar nature and hydrogen bonding capabilities (Nitrogens). If there's an amino acid you'd like to have for some good reactions it's tryptophan. Tryptophan also is converted to 5-hydroxytryptophan which is then directly converted to seratonin. Gut serotonin has been shown to help regulate metabolism Source: _URL_6_ \n\nTryptophan also has some hydrophobic parts which are nice for passing cell membranes (cell membranes have a phosphate head attached to squiggly tails made of triglycerides which are hydrophobic and \"like dissolves like\") It's been used to help deliver drugs to rats with Alzheimer's so it can actually weasel its way across the blood brain barrier with some efficacy Source: _URL_0_ The BBB is a tough hack (a good thing because your brain is kiiiinda important! Additionally, antibodies are too big to pass through the blood brain barrier. All your brain can do is produce an inflammatory response and swell up which is sort of bad if you've got limited elbow room (read: your skull). It can swell so much that it bruises itself! That's why an infection in the brain is extra no bueno. \n\nBranched chain amino acids participate as intermediates in certain metabolic processes; they're also used to stabilize proteins involved in metabolic regulation Source:_URL_4_\n\nThis is speculative but I think I might be onto something here. I would have to look more into the mechanism of action to confirm which I'd love to do if anybody requests it!!\n\nHypoglycemia is low blood sugar which translates to lower glucose in the blood and glucose is everybody's favorite way to get energy by generating ATP through glycolysis, the Citric acid cycle which is then finally followed by electron chain transport. \n\nI'm studying psychology for the MCAT and don't have a degree or further knowledge -- feel free to add on or correct me. ", "I've seen a lot of various explanations, and that's good, because there are a lot of possible causes for this. The one I find must relevant, however, is the new(er) study concerning toxin buildup and fatigue.\n\nA more detailed explanation can be found [in this NIH article](_URL_0_).\n\n > Sleep is important for storing memories. It also has a restorative function. Lack of sleep impairs reasoning, problem-solving, and attention to detail, among other effects.\n\nObviously, fatigue causes numerous problems with our brain. Anyone who has ever been exhausted has experienced this. More specifically, when cells use a great deal of energy they create waste. One of the waste products the brain produces during periods of activity is called beta-amyloid, a toxic protein. The buildup of this protein is linked to Alzheimer's disease.\n\nWhen we sleep, the brain uses a separate channel around blood vessels called the *glymphatic system* to flush beta-amyloid and other toxins out of the brain. During heavy use, the brain actually swells a little bit. The swelling restricts flow, and thus prevents the glymphatic system from working well while we are awake.\n\nThis is linked to why people seem to be sharper and more focused early in the day and after naps.", "I was actually just reading a book on this yesterday!\n\nThere's so much stuff going on around you that if you were to actually consciously receive all of the data your brain takes in from all five senses it would overload and you'd have a killer headache. In order to mitigate this the brain has something called the human attentional system which makes sure that you pay attention to all the stuff you need to know without looking at every single thing.\n\nThe attentional system has four parts: You've got your two modes of consciousness, which are mind-wandering mode and central executive mode, you've got your attentional filter, which is responsible for deciding what you get to passively pay attention to and what you get to ignore, and you've got your attentional switch, which is what changes your brain in between the two modes of consciousness.\n\nYour mind-wandering mode is your brain's default mode, and it's where you are when you're reading a book without getting anything from it. It's a stream-of-consciousness type deal, where neural networks and the thoughts they create connect with each other almost randomly, linked by small similarities that bridge thoughts together. Daydreaming and REM sleep are examples where your brain is almost completely in mind-wandering mode. This is your default mode because when you don't need to be paying attention to anything your brain tries to conserve its energy; *just like other parts of your body your brain runs on glucose, and when it runs low it gets tired, and you feel it.* That's why it's physically exhausting to take a four-hour exam; focusing takes effort and energy.\n\nYou central executive mode is what is popularly considered to be your consciousness: it's the part of your essence that pays direct attention to no more than four or five things at a time and in much more detail than any of the thoughts your mind-wandering mode spawns and connects. When you focus on something you bring it to the forefront of your central executive mind. This can be both voluntary and involuntary. An example of an involuntary focusing is when you hear a really loud noise that *your attentional filter has not come to expect as part of your natural environment*. It's impossible for you to not think about the sound and/or it's source. That's just the way we were built so we'd run away from scary animal sounds. Voluntary focus is literally when you try to focus on something: reading that book, trying to flip a water bottle perfectly, or reading an unnecessarily long Reddit post.\n\nYour brain tries to conserve energy by staying in its mind-wandering mode whenever its central executive mode is not needed.\n It manages this by\n\nA) using its attentional filter, which decides what activates the attentional switch and what doesn't (i.e. what grabs your attention). \n\nB) Delegating tasks to your mind-wandering mode, so that if something is familiar enough *you will do it in your sleep!* Well not really, but both sleep and these delegated tasks are managed by the same mode.\n\nYour attentional filter works by detecting change. The longer a stimulus is active or the more familiar you are with it in general the less likely it is to grab your attention. If you're in a building right now think about the sound of the air conditioning unit, or the location of your tongue, or what your left middle finger is touching right now, or the fact that your brain will always delegate breathing and blinking to your mind-wandering mode unless you specifically think about it! These are all stimuli or processes that are either very familiar to you or have been present in your current environment for a long time. If it hasn't killed you in the past half hour it's probably not going to kill you now, so why bother giving it attention? Your attentional filter lets through alien or unexpected stimuli so you can decide whether those things will kill you or not.\n\nNow to actually answer your question!\n\nThe longer you read a book the longer it remains a part of your environment. Therefore as time goes on your attentional filter will passively block out the book, which means your focus will need to be kept entirely by the central executive mind. This takes effort. Your brain wants to minimize effort, so it looks for ways to make this easier. You are probably a reader extraordinaire, so your brain decides to delegate the reading to your mind-wandering mode. That way you can read with minimal effort and think about something else at the same time. Unfortunately your mind-wandering mode is not very good at processing non-random information, so you just end up reading the words while not actually interpreting them while thinking about something else. So yes, it is due to a lack of focus.\n\nIf you have any more questions please ask me! I really like this topic and have the book right on my desk, so I can probably help you out. \n\nSpeaking of books, if you want a non-butchered explanation of this I recommend you read *An Organized Mind* by Daniel J. Levitin, specifically chapter two. But read the whole thing too because it's really cool.\n\n\ntl;dr: you lose focus\n\nEdit: yes, that's the book I was reading", "\nThere is a chemical in your brain that regulated focus. It is a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine. This is one of the common deficincies of ADHD. If your brain lacks norepinephrine, or is not using it effectively, you will have to read things over and over to understand them. You can naturally boost your brain's norepinephrine by eating foods high in protein, specifically phenylalanine and l-tyrosine, or by taking a supliment for l-tyrosine. ", "An explanation of how we read may help: Reading well requires both fluency (knowing how to pronounce/sound out words without stumbling or skipping important ones) and comprehension (understanding and attending to what the words mean). \n\nMost adults are \"expert readers\" meaning they have no problem with fluency. Comprehension, however, still requires effort, because you have to use information from previous sentences as context for the current sentence, etc. In order to have a coherent picture of what you have read by the end of the text, you must have avoided becoming distracted throughout the text, and put forth enough effort to understand the text that you actively updated your mental picture of what the text means as you were reading it. \n\nSo it's quite possible to read fluently without comprehending, which is the explanation for why we can read a paragraph but not understand it. ", "There is such a thing as [hyperlexia](_URL_0_). Where someone just reads amazingly but comprehends nothing. Individuals with Autism sometimes have this. I used to work in speech therapy and I worked with a boy who would read a book to me out loud perfectly. All of his neurological resources were devoted to decoding and pronouncing the words and even reading with emotion and feeling. \n\nAnd then I would ask him a simple question like 'what's the book about' and he would give me a blank stare and then try to read me the title of the book. As u/vincethatsall said there may be a case of competing resources where the brain is devoting all of it's attention and focus on the task of decoding the words that it doesn't have any resources left to make meaning of the text. ", "I'm a researcher who focuses on reading. One of many, many, in the US and across the world. Beyond the attention wandering everyone is discussing here, there is a HUGE difference between reading the words (called decoding) and understanding/comprehending what you're reading (called reading comprehension).\n\nMany K-12 students can decode just fine--AKA--sound out the words and read them aloud. But the mental process of comprehending includes skills like predicting, making inferences, comparing/contrasting, understanding the sequence of events, visualizing, etc. If your mind is wandering OR you're a weak comprehender, that is why you don't understand the material even though you can read all of the words. (Also, a lack of relevant background knowledge about the topic you're reading and a lack of vocabulary knowledge related to the topic can influence comprehension....but that's a whole other ELI5.)\n\nSooooo, all that to explain why even proficient adult readers will get to the end of the page and realize they don't remember shit about what they read.\n", "I'm a neuroscientist who studies reading and the brain. The ELI5 answer is there's no single part of your brain that reads; it's actually divided among a bunch of different brain regions that are interconnected, but each of these regions needs to be engaged for reading to be successful. It's a bit like a band, each member of the band has to play in sync for what comes out to sound like music.\n\nYour brain has two general pathways for reading, both connected to early visual processing regions in the occipital lobe. The ventral pathway recognizes visual things and pairs that up with meaning. The dorsal pathway pairs up visual letters with the sounds you have in your head (what \"CAT\" sounds like, k-ah-t) and the articulations you use to actually speak these out loud. And everything is coordinated using a more general attentional system that helps to direct everything. \n\nIf your attentional system is being taxed by other things (say, you're unhappy about something you just read on Reddit, or you're tired from being up all night on Reddit) it's more difficult to keep your attention directed toward the task at hand. The result is you might only be engaging the initial brain regions engaged in reading (say, your visual system) but in a way that's disconnected from that ventral stream that is actually doing the understanding.", "I think it can be also a lack of knowledge on the field you are reading. If you read quantum mechanics you probably won't comprehend nothing as you lack basic knowledge on the field.\nAlso the short term memory in your brain is the one in charge of processing info. The shorter your short term memory is the less time you have to link words and ideas together. It is usually a 7 seconds time spam. \nIf it takes you 7 or less second to read a specific sentence you can understand it, if it takes you 15 second to read that same sentence you may finish the last word of it and won't be able to recall the first ones so you could not link all the words to get the idea or ideas conveyed on the phrase.\nThat's why children have a lot of difficulties understading readings when they don't read fluently.\n\nSource: I am a primary school teacher in Spain, I have also studied some psychology courses at University, where you learn about the brain and learning processes. Anyway, I might be wrong, I accept critics.", "I struggle with this and it affects my life and career. Is there a way to improve your comprehension? Btw I'm a 47 yo woman. I've read that it can be related to hormones. ", "I'm really late to the party, but I'm a psychologist that frequently assesses individuals for dyslexia. There is actually a ton going on with reading (it's amazing to think we can actually read once you know what goes into it).\n\nSo at the most basic levels, reading consists of the brain recognizing symbols (letters) and mapping those symbols to specific sounds. At higher levels, the brain recognizes whole words and retrieves them straight from memory. Meaning comes in at an even higher level, where the brain retrieves definitions for individual words and also identifies meaning from phrases or word combinations, such as \"in the middle of the street\".\n\nWe've been able to identify a lot of the individual components of reading, especially since individuals have breakdowns in various areas. Some people can read words with very high accuracy but can't comprehend anything. Others struggle to read a lot of the individual words but can cobble together decent comprehension based on context clues and such.\n\nBut anyway, this is kind of where working memory comes into play. As you are reading, the brain has to continue identifying and retrieving word meaning, but also needs to hold previous information in mind long enough to form an idea. So you've got this simultaneous sort of processing going on where you are reading new words, but still holding on to the meaning of the words you just read 3 seconds ago so that you can form it into a coherent piece of information.\n\nThe process is mentally taxing and can be interrupted at any of the steps involved really. Comprehension tends to require some level of focus and individuals can become exhausted if reading for too long, especially without stopping to consolidate ideas and reflect on meaning.\n\nSo school reading programs focus first on mastery of basic skills (phonics/sight-word recognition) and reading fluency. The easier you can correctly identify the words and their meanings, the more processing can be spent on comprehension. Also, this is why teachers will stop after a section and discuss ideas with the students, to try to commit main ideas/info to long-term memory and reinforce previously learned info.\n\nSo to directly address the OP - I think it can come down to a lack of focus, mental fatigue, issues with individual components of reading, and also interruptions in working memory/executive functions.", "This happens to me often. When I read novels my mind often stops to visualize what I've read or maybe just thinks about a completely separate memory in my head but also keeps \"fake reading\" and I don't notice it for a few seconds and have to go back and re read the page again. It's very annoying so I don't read very often even if I wish I liked reading.", "In some it can be due to a visual processing disorder known as Meares irlen syndrome. The brain struggles to focus on words when they are printed black on white. It's because the eyes can't process it correctly. It isn't an eye problem per se, the eyes see it fine they just struggle to translate it so to speak. I have it. I didn't even know. I always got headaches reading (which sucked because I loved and still love reading), I often lost my place, it was harder to focus and reading aloud was just impossible. Funny thing was was that I was a great reader and was moved up a few years in reading as a kid. So I did okay despite it. \n\nWe found out by chance when I dropped off some paperwork at the disability advisors office in college for my brother (dyslexic) and asked about maths difficulties. Did a complete assessment and we found out I had it. It's easily managed. :) You just cover overlays over paper (basically translucent plastic sheets tinted in a colour) or the page on your book (they're just a smidgen bigger than A 4 but I just cut one of them in half to use in regular sized books) which reduces the contrast. You can use any colour and most people find different colors helpful. I use pale blue and lilac and my adoptive mum finds peach more helpful. \n\nI didn't even know how much I was actually struggling until I started using them. It won't show up on eye tests or any type of brain scan or anything as your eyes see it fine. It just can't process it properly. \n\nI hope that's helpful! They say anything up to 90% of people have some type of visual processing problem because our eyes were never originally designed to see black against white in nature. Apart from zebras of course. But you get the point. :P\n\nEdit: changed a word because predictive text was being an ass. ", "Same thing as reading a word you do not know the meaning... you read it, understand how it is build enough to pronounce it or to say it in your head but that's it. To comprehend the meaning you need to make more links because sometimes the context is needed or etc. So you could say that reading a sequence of word and understanding its meaning is 2 different things that most of the time you do at the same time. ", "It's a combination of lack of focus and how memory works.\n\nI was taught that memory is divided into three categories: Short-Term Memory, Long-Term Memory, and Working Memory. \n\nShort-Term Memory lasts approximately 4-7 seconds, Long-Term Memory is everything you remember beyond 7 seconds (whether it was an hour ago or 15 years ago it's all in long-term storage), and Working Memory consists of memories being processed from short-term to long-term memory (this is how you can have long conversations without forgetting what the subject is).\n\nELI5 Version:\nI like to think of Short-Term memory as a person quickly writing down information on sticky notes (just enough space for a few pieces of information) and placing it on a conveyor belt. The Working Memory is the person who takes all of the useful information off the conveyor belt and passes it along to the Long-Term Memory, who stores everything as detailed essays on a 100TB hard drive. Anything not taken off the conveyor belt goes straight to the incinerator.\n\nSo when we have these moments where we \"zone out\" our Short-Term Memory is still functioning and we're able to do things in the here and now, but our Working-Memory kind of fell asleep on the job and let all of that information be discarded, so none of it was stored in our Long-Term Memory.\n\nThat's why we're able to do things like reading and driving and not remember what we just did. We only need our Short-Term Memory to read a few words or react to a stop light, but we don't remember what we just read or how we got home because our Working Memory never passed that information along to our Long-Term Memory.\n\nAs to why we can't daydream and use our Working Memory at the same time, I don't know for sure but I suspect it's because those two functions are controlled by the same part of the brain. Whatever region helps with processing memories is the same region that allows us to have a \"mind's eye\" and it simply can't do both at the same time.", "It seems that most of the answers here seem to miss the point of the question. The neurological basis is that there are different regions in the brain that handles different tasks. \n\nSo for your example (reading, i.e. recognizing text characters), the visual information is sent along the visual pathway to the back of your brain, the occipital lobe. From there, it is sent to other areas, e.g. Wernicke's area in the temporal lobe for processing. At this point, you recognize the characters and recognize the words you are looking at. \n\nWhat happens then is extremely complex and I don't think we understand entirely (certainly goes over my head). If you don't \"comprehend\" the sentence (i.e. it doesn't make sense to you), that is likely an area in the frontal lobe (the part that handles logic and other higher order thoughts) such as the prefrontal cortex that is failing to process the information. The frontal lobe also communicates to areas that handle memories, such as the hippocampus. So if there is no memory of whatever you are reading, and your frontal lobe is unable to associate the sentence with any known meanings, then you fail to comprehend it. Full disclosure, this is certainly dumbed down to a point of being inaccurate, that's the trouble with simplifying things we don't entirely understand. \n\n", "Personally I can't read a book without this happening many many times. Every book I read I basically read the entire book 2 to 3 times. I read a bit and I will pick up on something and my mind wanders off thinking about that while continuing to read, but not taking it in. Once I realize this I have to go back and re-read and see where I left off. \n\nI personally believe that it's an autopilot type of scenario. \n\nFor those not aware... autopilot engages when you do a repetitive task over and over and it gets to be very tedious. This is very helpful with working certain jobs as it makes the day go by very quickly. However it can be disastrous when your routine changes. Say you for the last year or so have driven the same route to work, but one time there is a \"small\" change you bring your small child with you, and you go into autopilot and completely forget they are there. \n\nI have found for me at least, the only way to not get into autopilot is to be more offensive in driving and not defensive. Or to be very aware and or not do the same thing over and over. Like make little changes. Also if you are ever in the autopilot mode the only way it ends for me is if something changes and or a new decision needs to be made that is outside of the norm. For instance a road closure, a backed up line, or another driver does something unexpected. ", "This is a problem a lot of ADHD people have. They can read whole passages out loud to someone and after they can't awnser a single question about what they read. this is called dyslexia of understanding Some neurologists say its a problem with thier working memory. Basicly it goes in one ear and out the other with out rattling around in the middle.\n\n", "I've read your post like three times but my mind keeps wandering off. What are you asking again?", "This is why i dont read much. I cant remember what ive read after i have been reading for a while. Its the same when i watch tv sometimes. I can just watch tv without remembering any of it", "I have this problem all the time, I started to seek advice and found out that I have dyslexia, my issue is that I have what is called a weak working memory which is why the words I read do not get processed correctly so it is almost as if I'm reading the text but at the end of it I can't tell you anything about what I have just read." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3389492/", "http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1985-10765-001", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect", "https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201006/what-does-novelty-mean%3famp", "http://jn.nutrition.org/content/136/1/207S.full.pdf", "http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1988-31694-001", "https://secure.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/action/getSharedSiteSession?redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gastrojournal.org%2Farticle%2FS0016-5085%2815%2900714-3%2Ffulltext&rc=0&code=ygast-site", "https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/how-beliefs-shape-effort-and-learning.html", "https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article-abstract/48/3/477/297753", "https://www.simplypsychology.org/attention-models.html", "https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/cognitive-load-theory", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03004430.2015.1013950" ], [ "https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-sleep-clears-brain" ], [], [], [], [ "https://csld.org/hyperlexia" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e0zl4on" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Into ice cubes? The ridges on the ice cube tray are supposed to limit the connection between ice cubes to a small sliver of ice. Bending the tray (which is made of flexible material for exactly this reason) puts a lot of stress on that thin area os a focal point. This breaks the ice into cubes.\n\nIs that what you meant?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cselzay" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "It's due to the polarizing filters in the screen interacting with the polarizing filters that make up the 3d glasses' lenses. Polarization is a property of light involving the way the wave oscillates. Being able to block light of certain polarization is useful in many situations, as it lets you control what \"parts\" of light get transmitted through the polarizing filter.\n\nIn 3D glasses, it can be used to block certain light from reaching your eye, causing each eye to receive a different image, creating the 3D effect. \n\nIn LCD screens, it is used to block certain amounts of light to produce different brightnesses." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "czaotss", "czat0ka", "czaxih1" ], "score": [ 4, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "because it's all about being able to reproduce the entire vocal range of pitches. guys can do the higher pitches easier than girls can do the lower pitches. ", "Women were barred in performing any types of music for the church until fairly recently. It's just tradition, at this point. Plus, men are able to sing at lower vocal ranges than women can. ", "Tradition is the biggest part, starting back when women weren't allowed to participate in church. If the composer wanted high notes he needed boys (then later, castrati). This also created a demand for children's (ie: boys) choirs to find and train the talented ones. Some of those groups lasted for many years until it became a tradition. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c4q0107" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "It is possible for iPhones to run Android: _URL_0_\n\nyou can not run iOS on anything other than an iPhone.\n\nFor the most part, this is due to the Android code being open source and the iOS code being closed source. \n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.pcworld.com/article/196595/how_to_install_android_on_your_iphone.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cnic28e", "cnicjz5", "cnicmq9", "cnid50x", "cnidgfm" ], "score": [ 2, 3, 3, 3, 3 ], "text": [ "Please correct me if im way out cycling here but my gut tells me that mac's have a decreased risk of getting viruses since no one is bothered to make viruses for mac's due to the strict limitations on any apple device? \n\nOn windows alot more is free to view and therefore it's easier to write viruses since you can actually access stuff you wish", "The odds of you picking up something malicious clicking around on the internet? About the same as catching a cold at a mid-winter house party playing beer pong. \n\nThey're out there. There are tons of them, for all operating systems. Windows may have more viruses, but it's mostly because it's a far more common OS, rather than the alternatives being more secure.\n\nPractice common sense, it'll knock off 90%+ of any viruses out there (don't click on random e-mails for male enlargement, hot singles in your area, Kenyans offering you $100 Million, sketchy .exe's, and so on.)\n\nBeyond that, a decent firewall/antivirus does wonders. IF you're on Windows, Windows Defender is pretty darn good. If you're willing to pay, TrendMicro and Symantec are some good solutions as well. There are options for Mac, but I honestly don't know which ones are worthwhile off hand.", " > By clicking a random link on Reddit, what are the odds of getting a virus?\n\nVery low.\n\nIn general viruses are most commonly delivered bundled with some other downloaded data. If you google 'download iTunes' and click a random result other than the official page you're likely to download something that has a virus in it.\n\nClicking links or attachments in spam email is also likely to take you somewhere that'll deliver a virus.\n\n > And then how much do Macs reduce your risk as opposed to a PC?\n\nMacs reduce the risk simply because there are less viruses written for them. Less Mac viruses are written because there are less Macs out there, as opposed to Windows.\n\nThat said, viruses do exist.\n\nIf you're careful with your Internet habits then you're unlikely to have any trouble on either Windows or Mac.", "Macs are not \"safe\", really. They are just a minority in the market of computer systems, so hackers don't bother. The whole \"macs don't get viruses\" is just marketing lies and was popularized by the ever so lovely logical fallacy of causation vs correlation. As for the reddit thing, mods make sure that doesn't happen too much. Just be careful.", "Long story short, you get a virus by allowing it to spread to your computer.\n\nBy that, I do not mean that clicking a button the wrong way is an authorization. I mean when you computer asks you explicitly 'this program is requiring authorization to perform actions that should only be allowed to trusted programs. Should it be allowed?' and you answer 'yes' despite having no reason to trust the program, then you purposely allowed a virus to install itself.\n\nWindows used to allow everything without asking questions, but it doesn't anymore. However, the users were already trained to fetch programs from the Internet without wondering whether it is a good idea, and got added functionality from this practice. When Windows started to ask \"should I allow this?\" users took it as a game to click 'yes' as fast as possible, since they won't renounce the established practice.\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c423xna", "c424ay7" ], "score": [ 9, 3 ], "text": [ "It's rather everyone *hopes* that it's not. Since Google revolutionised the startup concept with ad revenue, everyone is under the impression that everything's viable if they somehow incorporate ads into their business model.\n\nLet's hope it's not another bubble (because that would be devastating) bu frankly, the similarities are too striking to ignore. Back then, everyone and their mother founded a startup, named it \"e-something\" or \"i-something\" and got capital. Today, it's a random quirky sounding name (e.g. yelp, twitter, instagram, foursquare), surviving on venture capital and eventually going public with the hope that they'll eventually start being profitable.\n\nCall me a pessimist, but I'm afraid this is a disaster waiting to happen.", "The bubble in the late 90's was with a technology, the internet, that a lot of people just really didn't understand yet. \n\nThis time, most people understand it, what works and what doesn't, and what people expect. \n\nBut yeah, probably another bubble anyway. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cujtb3l" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "First of all, you can't be in a train going the speed of light. That's against the laws of physics. You can only be in a train going some speed *below* the speed of light. So let's say that you're going 99% the speed of light.\n\nWhen you fire the gun, the bullet will appear to you to be travel at its normal speed away from you. But anyone standing next to the train tracks will see the difference in speed between you and the bullet as being much smaller. But they'll also see your watch as ticking slower, because your time will be slower from their perspective. So they can see that the bullet looks like it's traveling faster for you than for them, because they'll see your time as being slower than theirs.\n\nRelativity is weird." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "csm6gla", "csm6hjp", "csm7hdw" ], "score": [ 5, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "It's actually pretty hard to beat a machine since many of the features in a standard US $100 note are pretty difficult to copy without really expensive components. ", "Obviously they have security measures to scan the bills and check they would never put out something automated that would just take anything", "Because it is a serious crime. Who wants to go to jail for $100 worth of groceries?\n\nIt would also be really easy to catch someone. The bill would turn up, they'd check the cameras that are already focused on the self service kiosks to prevent shoplifting. You might get away with it once, but a second time would be unlikely." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dxfd1t7", "dxfek7c" ], "score": [ 10, 2 ], "text": [ "Nobody wants to be the one sniffling or coughing constantly in a crowded room, but once one person breaks the silence, any other tickly throats or sniffly noses will take their opportunity to blend in with the cacophony of bodily noises.", "I played a trick on a highschool teacher like this. Got a few buddies to sniff everytime someone coughed and cough every time someone sniffed. I was a piece of shit student." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbk4gsr", "dbk4h6a", "dbk4t8n", "dbkglqo" ], "score": [ 4, 7, 20, 4 ], "text": [ "The landline phone network has sensors for this. After a long time, it will play an error sound and a recording telling you to hang up the phone. But no damage is done. You won't be able to receive calls until you hang up.", "After a few minutes they start making a really annoying and loud beeping noise. That'll pretty much keep going until you put it back on the hook. ", "Anyone else feeling REALLY old due to this question?", "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up, and then dial your operator." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cbs43v9", "cbs49tv" ], "score": [ 5, 2 ], "text": [ "\"Professional\" implies you can do it for a living.", "People get paid for professional wrestling because its sports entertainment. Armature wrestling isn't a way to make a living unless you somehow make it into the Olympics I guess lol" ] }

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